work
In
September 1975 I had just begun my freshman year in college when I
saw a poster announcing that WHRB, the local student-operated FM station, was looking
for people to train as announcers, engineers, journalists, programmers,
and salespeople. Not knowing much about broadcasting but having a ham
radio license, I thought it might be interesting to see what the station
had to offer. I was accepted as a candidate-trainee in the announcing and
technical departments for the fall "competition", as the station styled
its training program. In December, having completed the program, I was
elected a member of the staff. By then I was in a deep depression
triggered in part by the shock of having moved from high school in upstate
New York, where I had always lived at home, to college in a distant city.
The radio station offered company and a much needed diversion, and during
the course of the next three and a half years I invested enough time and
effort in the place to become a competent studio engineer, equipment
troubleshooter, and classical music announcer.
Having obtained my First Class Radiotelephone Operator's License, I served two years as chief engineer of WHRB and held down three announcing shifts a week during most of this period. On graduating, I found that I could either seek employment with the government using my skills in Arabic or go into radio. In September, 1979, I started work as "producer/technician" at a non-commercial station back home. My job consisted of doing weekend classical and jazz radio shows and fixing broken pieces of equipment during the week, with the occasional remote broadcast to engineer.
A year later I moved to Boston's WUNR and WBOS, becoming chief engineer in the fall of 1981. There I learned about things like audio processing and transient intermodulation distortion and how to deal with balky remote control systems, the telephone company, and the Federal Communications Commission. It was all analog technology we worked with back then: vinyl records, tape cartridges, reel-to-reel recorders, and cassette decks. Transmitters had tubes (many still do). The compact disc, which I first saw in the spring of 1982, would not come into common use at radio stations for at least two more years. As amazing as those early CD's were, I found that analog done right can sound quite as good.
I eventually moved to California, joining KDON AM and FM in Salinas as chief engineer in the spring of 1984. The AM ran a satellite-delivered mix of jazz, big bands, and popular standards, while the FM was one of the best sounding top-forty rockers in the state, not excluding Los Angeles and San Francisco. Occasionally a diverse group of people comes together to form a team that resonates with the sort of magic that makes excellence seem to come about spontaneously, effortlessly, as though God or nature simply meant it to be. Such was KDON, whose general manager needed little more than to stand back, let his people get to work, and watch the ratings climb. We owned the Central Coast.
But in December, 1985, I found myself back in Boston, having joined WCRB, then a family-owned stand-alone FM running a classical format. There I stayed for twenty-one years, as staff engineer, information systems manager, and, from March, 1998, chief engineer of what grew into a small group of stations covering Boston, Cape Cod, southern Rhode Island, and, through a satellite syndication service called the World Classical Network, listeners across the United States.
Today, I am an independent radio broadcast technical consultant based in the Boston area.
Radio has changed profoundly during the course of my career. From picking music and scheduling commercials to playing it on the air, , almost everything is done by computers. There is rarely a disc to jockey and often nobody to jockey one. It is a far cry from the labor-intensive tape-dependent radio of 1975. Between the consolidation of the industry and the proliferation of technology-driven "cookie-cutter" radio formats, I worry that American radio may lose its soul and the hearts and ears of its listeners.
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