Excerpt #11 from the long-awaited book that Chuck Blore has almost finished writing ...

www.chuckblore.com

OKAY, OKAY, I WROTE THE BOOK

Down in the West Texas town of El Paso ...

... there lived a little radio station called kelp, when you spelled it out it was
K.E.L.P and in order to jazz up the legal IDs, which were then required at least once an hour, we would just kinda keep spilling the spelling out until it was K.E.L.P,A.S.O.. The PD before me, thought this was hot, probably the only station in the country which could fulfill legal requirements, (legal call letter plus city of origin) just by adding three letters. I thought it was okay so I kept it but I let him go. He went all the way to a sales job at KELP TV which was way down at the other end of the hall. While he was obviously upset ... sales consultant, or whatever they called it then, I think it was mostly “I’m in sales.” didn’t have anywhere near the panache of “Director of Programming.” He was upset for about two weeks until a second glance at his first paycheck convinced him that he too had made a wise decision. Screw panache.

The GM of both the radio and TV stations, Herb Golombeck, was much more in tune with the radio. The TV had a weird geography problem. First of all the TV tower was on the city dump, it was literally “the pits.” The simple act of changing one of the warning lights was a really stinking job although there were always the weirdoes who loved to slosh through the slop to climb the tower. The real problem was that in spite of engineering reports to the contrary, garbage was not a good conductor and the signal barely made it to the bottom of the hill which divides the city. Luckily, the dump was on the Mexico side of the divide so the station always had an adequate supply of advertising from Juarez Nightspots.

The radio station signal, with its 920 dial position, had no such problems. KELP AM blanketed the city with no problems and the station had a 35% share of audience. The other seven stations in El Paso at that time, 3 of which were Spanish language as I recall, divided the remaining listeners.

Because I was mesmerized I had memorized the collection of McLendon memos and programming notes which was referred to as the Policy Book. In my first meeting with Mr. Golombeck we had agreed that in spite of the nice share kelp enjoyed, what was on the air was a long, long way from the McLendon visions in the book

Herb agreed to let me implement the policies on two conditions, the first was that I would have to do it with absolutely no budget and secondly, if the station lost even a fraction of a share point, the deal was off. Great.

I spent that afternoon itemizing the monitoring notations from my yellow pad which pertained directly to the staff. Then, I wrote kind of a lengthy companion piece which described how each of the notated items should be handled according to the “Policy Book.” I “mimeod”... ( for those of you who may not be familiar with the mimeograph duplicating machines, think of it as a copier with a huge handle. One complete turn of the handle gave you one complete copy of the mimeo page you had typed up and locked onto the machine. As a ‘bonus’ you could always count on ten purple fingers and thumbs from the ink/slop which oozed out of the mimeo form.)... I mimeoed the notated items and handed them out the next morning in our first staff meeting, the staff being four jox, a newsman and the mobile news reporter. They read the notes and I read in every one of their faces, “Not me.”

I reviewed the notations one by one and introduced them to the idealized version of how each of those things should be handled according to Gordon’s policy book. The “Not me” looks turned to wide eyed “Wow.” The staff at this McLendon station had never seen the policy book and they, like me, were unrestrained in their enthusiasm to try each and every thing we talked about.

It was mostly about shutting up and cleaning up. Shutting up was easy to explain: If what you say doesn’t matter to the overall entertainment or information quality of your show, don’t say it. If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter!

Cleaning up was also easy to explain. But cleaning the clutter which had collected, mostly out of neglect, not caring, or not knowing was a different deal. I preferred the ‘not knowing’ interpretation mostly because one of the not knowers was me. I knew what that inviolable policy book said but I had no idea how to put it into any kind of action.

Neglect: The guys we had on the air were all pretty good but they were not talking to anyone specifically. The things they were saying were all kind of random, generalized adlibs which were as appropriate (?) at, say 9:30 AM, as they might have been at 9:30 PM. Neglecting the specific audience available at that particular time. Neglecting to relate what you are doing and saying to that particular group of people. Generalizing is sloppy radio.

Not caring: Not preparing what you are going to do and say ahead of time. Not bothering to prepare compelling, entertaining material specifically designed to establish a consistent connection with the people you want most to reach. Not caring about that consistent connection is a waste of both time and talent.

The ‘Not Knowing’ part was probably the biggest problem for me at the time because, as I suggested a moment ago, I was still so new at all of this that even though I knew what the book said, I simply didn’t know what it meant. I think I’d better re-state that ... I knew what it said, I simply didn’t know that I knew what it meant. The bottom line was and is, successful programming is that which elicits a positive emotional response rather than a cerebral one. The truth is not in what you think is right but in what you feel is right. Trust yourself.

We put all of these things into some kind of embryonic effect almost at once.
And you could hear the difference almost at once. Ratings were taken in El Paso only once every six months and, believe this or not, the first audience measurement taken after these McLendon-ish ‘secrets’ were put into effect had a averaged over 50% with a high of, I swear this is true, a high of 72%.

I should explain what I believe triggered that 72% share. A flying saucer scare.

I was on the air from 9 to noon. A fellow by the name of Ted Payne was doing news. He came into the announce booth to tell me there were three people in the lobby from the nearby air-force base. Ted wanted to put them on his very next newscast but thought what they had to say was so unbelievable he wanted to clear it with me first. He brought them in, three non-commissioned officers with something very odd in common. They all had a very serious sunburn on one side of their faces. They told me that the night before they had been driving in the desert with the top down on their car. Three flying objects suddenly appeared in the sky and hovered over them for a brief moment while shining incredibly bright beams of light down at them. All the cars’ electrical units failed. The engine stopped, the lights went out, the radio quit. Then, the flying objects were gone. In a moment the radio popped on as did the lights on the car. They started the car again with no problem. They went back to the base to report the incident and were dismissed. No such thing had happened. They were obviously all drunk
They said they woke up this morning with proof, the horrendous sunburn which they attributed to the light they had been bathed in for that brief moment the night before. Once again they were dismissed by the Air Force authorities so they decided to come to the station to tell their story.

I, of course, jumped at it. I went on the air with the men who repeated their story. One of them said he felt the flying objects were still around us, spying on us. When I said that maybe they were trying to contact us all three of them agreed that was a strong possibility. I said, okay, let’s give them a frequency on which to contact us. I knew that every radio station had sidebands, or something like that, and I told the audience that from this moment on we were making our sidebands available to the unidentified flying objects. I produced a kind of a Twilight Zone sounding invitation in three languages. Our receptionist spoke Spanish, our engineering department, a fellow named Otto spoke pretty good German and Tom Payne voiced this invitation offering the visitors the use of our frequency for any message to Earth. We will get it to the proper authorities. Then there was a minutes worth or static, which represented the open sidebands we were making available to our friends from space. We broadcast it every hour. And every hour, we could tell by our phones and the hordes of people suddenly visiting the City Dump that we had a hit on our hands. Now .... how to stretch it out without stretching the truth ... too much.
 

(...to be continued)