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Excerpt #3 from the long-awaited book that Chuck Blore has almost finished writing ...

www.chuckblore.com

OKAY, OKAY, I WROTE THE BOOK

Whatever it is you do
However you get it done
It’s gonna be done times two
When you do it one-on-one

We drove from L.A. to Tucson in an old Packard convertible.  My father, who was an automobile mechanic, had warned me about buying this car.  He said “That car won’t even make it home.” But it did, and now it was taking us to Tucson. Almost.  I remember we were somewhere in the middle of the desert when the head lights began to grow dim and dimmer and then dimmerer and ... out.  A moment later, the car itself gave out. It was very late.  It was very dark. And the road on which we were now stalled was very narrow.   A brand new Lincoln going much too fast on that very dark and very narrow road slammed into the back of our grand old Packard.  He hit us so hard his radiator ended up in our back seat absolutely demolishing the rear half of the car.  I got a mean whack on the head and Cath cut her knee. We were okay but the driver of the Lincoln broke a couple of his ribs and he was crying.  Cath was crying too, not because of her knee but because everything behind the front seat of our car was destroyed and everything behind the front seat was just about every thing we owned.   

 Somehow or another the Highway Patrol showed up and called for a tow truck.  It took about an hour for the tow truck to get there but it took them only a minute to rip that new Lincoln right out of the back seat of our old Packard.  I asked the driver of the tow truck if he could put a quick charge on my battery, he said, “Sure, but there ain’t no way that pile of junk is gonna go nowhere.  That pile of junk is ... a pile of junk.” But he gave the battery a quick charge, promised he’d be back for us and towed the big old Lincoln away.  The Highway Patrolmen figured we’d had enough problems and we got off with a warning;  “If your car doesn’t have any lights you better not park it in the middle of a dark road in the middle of the desert.”  They left us there in the middle of the night.  

It was too damned dark to really judge the extent of the damage to our car but I was able to start it and it actually moved, even though when it did it sounded like the screeching of brakes you hear right before a terrible accident. The back rear wheel was severely twisted and the tire was shoved up against the frame of the car which was also pretty badly bent out of shape.  But the car did move.  That back tire was hung up against the frame of the car and the smoke from that burning rubber was even worse than that demoralizing screeching.  My once beautiful Packard convertible clinked down the road for a couple of miles and just pooped out. 

It was about four o’clock in the morning when I left my new wife sitting in that car with that stinking rubber and her bleeding knee.  I walked back to a service station we had passed about fifteen minutes before this disaster.  I asked for help but the most they could do was loan me a huge old sledge hammer which they suggested I could use to pound the wheel away from the body of the car.  They were right.  I could.  But with every whack of the sledge I was also ripping the gas tank away from the body of the car.  I think I started to cry when I heard that tank clank to the ground.  Luckily the fuel line from the tank to the engine somehow remained intact.  I was able to strap my belt around the pipe which feeds the gas into the tank and tie the badly battered tank to the twisted frame of the poor old Packard.  We limped  the rest of the way to Tucson so I could talk on the radio.

I explained my situation to Mr.  Wallace and asked if he could advance me fifty dollars so I could get a place to stay.   “Sorry,” he said, “We don’t have it.” 

The station doesn’t have fifty bucks. Oh my God.  What have I gotten into? 

 “But, I’m supposed to be making two hundred and fifty dollars a month.  If you don’t even have ...” 

“Payday’s in two weeks.  I’ll either be able to pay you then or we’ll be dark.” 

“We’ll be what?” 

“Dark.  Off the air.  Out of  business.”    

“Oh.” 

“You want the job, or don’tcha?” 

Radio school never covered this.  But, I didn’t have money enough to go anywhere else anyway, so I said, “Absolutely.” 

“Well, you sure don’t have much of a voice.” said Mr. Wallace, who of course had a very beautiful radio voice, having been the voice of NBC out of Chicago. 

Catherine and I moved in with her father, a wonderful man who lived in a very, very small house, much too small for a father-in-law and two newlyweds.  He loaned us a hundred dollars and we rented a small room in the back of the even smaller house next door to his.

The station made it through the two weeks.  And it wasn’t long before we were able to move into a small house large enough for the two of us.  It was about that time that we learned the two of us were about to become a the three of us with the welcome addition of our daughter Cathy Anne.  

The two weeks became five years.  Five years learning my trade, or at least, the basics  of how to succeed in radio when you don’t have much of a voice.    

Today, voice quality isn’t often an issue, but in those days radio was populated almost exclusively with pear-shaped tones emanating from mostly pear-shaped people.  I was the exception to both those things — a skinny little kid with a skinny little voice. But, as it turned out, not having much of a voice was going to be a great blessing.  I was so aware of this huge weakness  I taught myself to do funny little cartoonish voices and created a whole cast of characters to hide behind.  A lot of people have done this since and if I wasn’t the first I was certainly among the pioneers and I actually got pretty good at talking to myself. 

My program, which I called, Let’s Play Records, featured these voices a good deal of the time doing little entertainment kinds of things; mostly amusing (?) little skits introducing a record or commenting on a news event or the weather, or even little commercials which I wrote with the help of a ton of Robert Orben joke books.   I figured if I couldn’t attract an audience with a mellifluous voice I would have to give them lots of other reasons to like me better than the next guy.   

“Let’s Play Records”  became Number One in some strange audience measurement service called, Merlin Media, or something like that and I thought, “Yeah.  This is it. Anybody can play records, it’s what you do between the records that makes the difference.  Entertaining people is what it’s all about,  Give them something to smile about, give them an “affirmative emotional experience.”   I learned to love that phrase. Matter of fact, safe to say, my entire radio career and later the successes I had creating advertising were all based on those three words..                                                        

Another indelible lesson: To attract and keep an audience you offer them, as a reward for their listening, something to which they will have an affirmative emotional response.  Nothing cerebral about it.  It’s something they like without having to think about it at all ... a positive emotional reaction to whatever it is you do.  Like they say in the song ... “That’s entertainment_” 

And you don’t stray too far from the menu.  Whatever it was that got ‘em there, be certain they get it there every time.  And without having to wait for it.  Whatever it is, it has to be there for them every time, anytime, all the time.  Wow, that’s at least three indelible lessons.  

The next really important thing that happened to my career was, my wife got the flu. Those nasty little flu bugs aggravated her dormant asthma condition and that sent her to bed for several days. “Listen to me today. ” I said as I left for the station, “I’m gonna lay my whole program right in your lap, or maybe on the bed right next to you.” 

And I did.  All during my program I had this mental image of her with a thermometer in her mouth, in her bed, in her misery and everything I said was directed right to her. 

As I left the announce booth after the program, the receptionist, I remember her name was Sally,  said, “What were you doing in there?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I swear, I thought you had come out here and were talking to me.   I kept turning around to answer and I realized you were still in the booth, still on the air.  But you were talking right to me.  I even actually answered you a couple of times.   Really.   It was weird.”

When I got home, Catherine said almost exactly the same thing.  “You sounded different today.  Really, I knew  you talking right to me.  I could feel it.  I even answered you.”  

That was when I realized I had refined the difference between talking on the radio and announcing to a much more important degree.  From that moment on I never opened a microphone without talking to someone specifically.  If possible someone I liked a lot and whom I knew well enough to visualize their reaction to whatever it was that I was saying.  

 Indelible lesson number four.  Never talk to a microphone.  Talk to a person ---someone specific. Directly.  Specially.  Specifically.  One person.  On TV you can talk to the masses, on radio you talk one-on-one. One person.  And talk to them, not at them.  I keep saying that, don’t I?  It must be important.  

Talking to a person is  particularly meaningful advice when you realize that advice is coming from someone who’s radio career really got off the ground when he started talking to a cactus.

... next week, the story continues in excerpt #4 -- More from Blore! 

Excerpt #2

Wrap every dream
In self-esteem
And keep on believing in you


We arrived in Kingman to find that the radio station was nothing more than a transmitter site with a microphone, plunked down in the middle of the desert. Actually Kingman itself was little more than a construction site for Boulder Dam, which was being rebuilt into what would become Hoover Dam, plunked down in the middle of the desert.

The station owner was the publisher of the local newspaper and knew nothing about radio. Apparently he’d been assured by the radio school that any of their graduates were fully capable of running a radio station. I was barely twenty years old. I had never been in a real live radio station and other than figuring out how to turn the transmitter on and off, I didn’t have a clue as to what I should do. And I was in charge. God!

The station’s one microphone was in a little room with a big transmitter. A big hot transmitter. There was a large window immediately behind where the person talking on the microphone sat. That person, for the most part, was me. And because it was so hot, that window, for the most part, was always open. The problem with that was we were very near that damn dam construction site and there was an loud explosion every fifteen or twenty minutes. While the records were playing the explosions didn’t matter much, but when the microphone and the window were open at the same time, well, the explosions became a part of the station’s sound. We made the most of it ... we were, “Booming over Kingman.”

The station, KGAN, had one major advertiser; Frontier Airlines. Their commercials always began with the playing of an ET (Electrical Transcription) which consisted of the sound of an airplane taking off followed by an announcer voice proudly proclaiming: “There goes another Frontier Airlines flight.” One day, I opened the mike just as that little message was ending. A perfectly timed explosion came roaring in through the open window so what the audience heard was, “There goes another Frontier Airlines flight. KABLOOOOEY!!!” And there goes our advertiser.

The talent (?) on the morning show (?) was the owner who opened the station more or less at seven A.M. and read the parts of his newspaper that he was particularly proud of that morning. He normally finished somewhere between eight and nine thirty, put on a Classical Music LP of some kind and left for his real job at the newspaper. On a good day the music lasted until ten. Other days the audience was entertained by the rhythmic scratch, scratch, scratch of the LP needle until ten or thereabouts. At ten, or thereabouts, a pretty Hispanic lady named Bonita took over and played Mexican Music until noon. Then me.

From noon to two I called whatever it was I was doing, Mid-Day Melodies. Two to four, hiding behind a terrible hillbilly accent, I did a daily country and western music round-up on a program I cleverly called, The Old Corral. (Actually that wasn’t bad. Wait’ll till you hear about Music A-La-Mood.)

I called the four to six segment, The Associated Press Today, during which, doing my best Chet Huntley imitation, I read nearly everything that came in on the news machine. Then at six, I pushed my young voice down as far as it would go to host, Music for Dining. At seven, a man named Manuel took over and once again we featured a Spanish Language program. Manuel called it, Mas Musica! At ten the station signed off. I didn’t learn much about the appeal of programming consistency in Kingman

It took me about three months to figure out that I wasn’t learning much about anything and at this, the starting point in my career, learning was everything. But, you can’t learn a hellova lot when the fella in charge doesn’t know a damn thing about what he’s doing. And I didn’t. So I quit.

The part I had liked best about actually being on the air was reading the news wire so I went back to radio school to brush up on broadcast journalism. Very soon after that, the school received a request for a blossoming young talent to EmCee a live, weekly, audience participation program right here in Southern California. They offered the job to me. Wow! What an opportunity. I grabbed it.

Rick’s Academy of Kitchenatomy. That was the name of the show. Sponsored by Rick’s Appliance Store and broadcast from the second floor of The Southern California Gas Company in The San Fernando Valley. What I wasn’t told about the job was, because audience participation programs require an audience, the major part of the position was sitting in the back room of Rick’s Appliance store, surrounded by large cardboard crates full of refrigerators, calling women who lived in the area and inviting them to come to see the show. Nobody was interested. I had to make it attractive so I invented Rick’s Movie Map; the movie schedules at every theater in The Valley, free to everyone attending the program. Even with so wondrous a prize it took me over forty hours a week to convince about sixty valley housewives to come to the show, sometimes almost forty of them actually showed up. The show, basically how to cook on one of Rick’s beautiful gas ranges, was dreadful and I got cancelled after twelve weeks.

Happily there was a job opportunity in Tucson. Happily, because Tucson was in the desert which was good for the health of my young bride. Also, because her father lived there, which would turn out to be good for both of us.

The audition for the Tucson job was very much like Kingman. I talked to the station owner on the phone. Only now, I was an experienced broadcaster.

“You any good?” He asked.

“Yessir. I think so.”

“You don’t have much of a voice.”

“I like to think that I’m an entertainer”

“What do you mean? You tell jokes?”

“Uh. I could do that.”

“What else can you do?”

“I’m a good reader.”

“Well, okay. Come on.”

The owner of the station was a man by the name of Tom Wallace.

 ... next week, the story continues in excerpt #3 -- More from Blore! 

In the meantime, visit Chuck at the Chuck Blore Company, online at www.chuckblore.com and send him an e-mail at bloregroup@aol.com

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