(Part 1)
I came to Stevens Point from Milwaukee in 1963 to work at WSPT. I visited the station, and wasn’t particularly impressed with the small operation, but after the sales manager, Dave Silverman kept calling me, I decided to come and stay for a year. I’m still here.
The late Peter Barnard was the president and general manager of the station. Listeners grew to know him for his editorials, which he called "Radiopinions." Pete’s background was in sales, and English grammar wasn’t one of his strong points. He had trouble pronouncing such words as "nuclear," which always came out "nucular," and "specific," which he invariably pronounced "pacific." After a convoluted editorial went out over the air one morning, I answered a phone call from an English teacher at P. J. Jacobs High School. By broadcasting Pete’s "Radiopinion" she complained, we were undermining all her efforts to teach students good English.
Another accusation came from the late, lovable Bea Beck, who served as principal at Kennedy Elementary School in Junction City. Each morning, we broadcast what the schools would serve for lunch, complete with sound effects - most of them uncomplimentary. That prompted Bea to call and complain that our station was impeding attempts to educate students about the value of good nutrition. We knew that students often ridiculed school lunch food, so that her call didn’t bother us much. But we mentioned it to Irv Jankowski, president of the school board at the time. He felt Bea’s concerns were overblown, and went on the air voicing the school lunch menus while we added "appropriate" sound effects. We never heard another word from Bea, the food staff, or anyone else.
Many people still remember the eight years during which they woke up to Mark West each morning. (His real name was Kent Eldert.) Mark was a friendly, deep-voiced announcer with a good sense of humor, but in many ways was very much like the Ted Baxter TV newscaster character in the "Mary Tyler Moore" show. I particularly recall one of his spoonerisms. When he was introducing the forecast one day, he said, "the weather is brought to you every time at this morning by..." His low, soothing voice made it seem fine, but still, you knew something he said wasn’t quite right.
On a commercial for Anderson’s Ace Hardware, the copywriter forgot to include a verb in one long sentence. Mark recorded the commercial just as it was written, and used his vocal range and inflection to almost make it sound tight. But after it ran for a while, I noticed the odd-sounding sentence and had it re-recorded - this time, with a verb.
I’ve lost track of Mark. But I do remember that one of his favorite jokes was, "Call me a cab." "Okay, you’re a cab."
Wes Kelly was another ultra deep-voiced announcer, and he worked at the station three different times. Kelly wasn’t his real name - it was Martin Jupp. He was a tall, thin young man who awed people when he opened his mouth and spoke. Listeners marveled at how low and soothing his voice was. He knew it and loved to pour it on. Most of us at the station found it strange that he always worked behind the microphone with his belt unfastened and his fly partially unzipped. Maybe his voice box was in his lower abdomen and needed room to expand.
One day, Kelly was reading the noon news, which included obituaries. He got through most of one, but stumbled when he came to the location of the funeral services.
He announced with confidence that services would take place at the Episcopal Church of the Insurrection. Kelly went onto positions in several large markets.
Some listeners will recall the cigar-chomping Wayne David. "David" was a pseudonym; his real last name was Paananen. Wayne was a sportscaster who also sold advertising for the station. As a hobby, he played bass in a local trio named for his wife, El Marie. Maybe because he came from sparsely settled eastern Montana, Wayne never considered punctuality important, and always was scurrying to get somewhere,
His "moment of horror" came one Saturday night while he was broadcasting a Pacelli High School football game at Wisconsin Rapids Assumption. He was sitting high in the bleachers with his remote equipment, behind some mischievous students, delivering his play-by-play in a storm. All at once, one of the students yanked some of the wires and caused the equipment to fall. Although he was still connected, Wayne thought he’d been knocked off the air and uttered a phrase that some people still remember today.
I’d been in Milwaukee for the weekend, and came into the station at 5:00 Monday morning for my news shift. A tape cartridge sat on the desk with a note saying, "Listen to this." I popped it into the cart machine, and out came Wayne’s epithet to the kids sitting in front of him, "J---- C ,I’ve seen %$@*$ in my day, but you take the cake!"
It’s bad enough to use that sort of language anywhere, but worse to broadcast it, especially during a game involving two parochial schools. The station received many phone calls and issued plenty of apologies.
One of Wayne’s on-air goofs was identifying football punter Nick Bandow as a "left handed kicker." Another time, he described a return, saying the receiver "took the ball at the 40, to the 45, to the 50, to the 55, to the 60 (yard line),"
I learned long ago never to use profanity in front of a microphone. I followed that advice - except for once, and it cost me dearly.
About 6:00 am one Sunday, I was at WIZD recording a weather forecast for that morning. I was having a particularly difficult time getting through 30 seconds’ worth of copy without flubbing - we often call that having a "thick tongue." What I didn’t realize was that the boom holding the microphone had tripped a switch that put the recording studio one the air live. As I tried over and over to make a decent recording, people listening to the station heard me repeat the forecast time and again. Finally, a listener called, and the ringing phone interrupted my recording. I uttered a naughty word. After the caller asked why we were running the same weather forecast over and over, terror gripped me and I found what had happened, but it was too late. My expletive was long gone, and there was nothing I could do to get it back!
The crowning blow came a little later that morning, when I arrived at St. Bronislava’s for the 8:00 Mass. In the gathering space. Norm Worzella and the pastor, Father Jim Logan, both laughingly confronted me to point out my indiscretion. Believe me, there’s nothing like having your pastor tell you he heard you say "s---" on the radio!
This is my chance to get back at Gary Wescott for something he did that I’ll never excuse. As many people know, Gary tends to be a no-nonsense guy in his work (that’s a good trait for someone in news and even in municipal government), but I felt he often was just a little too stiff and needed a little "loosening up" from time to time. While I was manager, Gary was the news director.
One day, Mig Figi, a Waukesha broadcaster I knew, stopped by to say "hello." He told me he’d soon be passing through town again, and wondered if there was anyone at the station on whom we could play a joke.
Mig often appeared before groups, masquerading as an old, absent-minded Viennese professor, complete with phony accent and wrinkled clothes. He said he’d dress in that garb if I could arrange for someone at the station to interview him when he returned.
This was my big chance! I told Gary I’d arranged for him to interview Dr. Heinrich Something-or-other, "a noted scientist" who was to deliver a presentation to a class at the university. Gary didn’t seem impressed, but dutifully booked the interview.
On the appointed day, Mig showed up in his out-of-date jacket (with one-inch lapels), carrying an old torn and wrinkled grocery sack. Into the studio he went for a taped interview with Gary. Although I never heard the interview, Mig usually began answering questions in a thick accent, but gradually would lose it. It was then that the interviewer realized he’d been duped.
During the interview, Mig opened his paper sack and pulled out a contraption he devised - it included a rotating wheel that moved a boxing glove up and down. Mig placed a bottle of ketchup upside down in a slot beneath the boxing glove, and rotated the handle to bang the glove down on the ketchup bottle. He explained the apparatus would get slow-moving ketchup to drip out of the bottle more quickly.
Somewhere along the line, Gary realized he’d been had. And no sooner than Mig left the studio, Gary thought he’d avoid embarrassment by erasing the tape of the interview. (I’d wanted to play it at a station Christmas party, but Gary eliminated that option.) So now I’m getting back at him for being too stiff, and not allowing a few of us to enjoy a good laugh, even if it was at his expense.
Broadcast transmitters are highly technical pieces of equipment and loaded with lots of expensive, mysterious parts. But on one occasion, a low-tech solution solved the problem.
Gary recalls the time WSPT’s transmitter shut down while chief engineer Jim Tuszka was out of town Gary found him and Jim asked him to go to the transmitter building, where he’d talk Gary through a series of diagnostics and procedures to get the transmitter back on the air. After a half-hour of fruitless attempts, Jim told Gary to hit a certain spot on the front of the transmitter with his fist. He did, but nothing happened. Then Jim told Gary to "hit it really hard," and not worry about breaking a $60,000 piece of equipment. In Gary’s words, "I reeled back and hit the front of the transmitter as hard as I could." That move freed a stuck relay, and Gary says, "The loud hum of the transmitter coming on line filled the room."
Another story involving Gary happened when he came to my office one day, saying a competitor was tape recording our newscasts, and then typing up our local news word-for-word to broadcast on his own station. Plagiarism is clearly illegal, and I saw this as an opportunity to publicly discredit a competitor. We planned to tape some of the offending newscasts, and match the stories with our news copy, and present them to the competitor. I told Gary not to say anything to the news thief, but Gary encountered the guy at a city meeting that night and told him we knew what he was up to, so the thievery stopped before we could develop good evidence. It thwarted my chance to nail the competitor. In retrospect, perhaps Gary did me a favor by keeping my temper in check, but I surely didn’t think so at the time.
Speaking of thievery, George Rogers recalls the days around 1950, when WTWT was new to the air. He says somebody from the station would rush across Third Street each day to get a copy of the Stevens Point Journal as soon as it was off the presses. An announcer then would read stories from the paper over the air for the late afternoon news broadcast.
Later, right after Gene Mueller started at the station, Gary assigned him to write a story about the county board meeting coming up that night, and jokingly circled one item - "dog claims" - with a notation that the topic was really important. Gene didn’t get the joke, and wrote and broadcast a story about the board considering dog claims. That evening, as the county board supervisors began their meeting, one went up to him and explained that the board did a lot more noteworthy things than consider dog claims. (The county provides small payments to farmers to compensate them for their small animals - chickens and the like - killed by wild dogs.)
Gary recalled a funny blooper from Liz Hannon, who worked in news at WSPT. Liz was wrapping up the noon news with a few stories about the British monarch. When it came time to sign off, Liz said "For WSPT News, I’m Queen Elizabeth." Mike Rogers, the disk jockey on duty, quickly responded, "Thank you, Your Majesty!"
Transitional words can become tiresome and meaningless, and one day, we had a meeting with the news staff about cutting the use of transitions, such as "meanwhile." (You’ll even find them considerably overused in TV today.)
Gary recalled the time when the newsperson reported two tragic stories - one after the other. The reporter tried his best not to use a "meanwhile" between them, but erred more grievously. The first story told of thousands being killed in an earthquake. The second was a report of a few hundred dying in a plane crash. After the earthquake report and before the plane crash story, listeners heard, "Turning to news of a lighter nature..."
There are numerous stories about announcers from outside the area moving to jobs at WSPT, and running across Polish and Indian names for the first time. Invariably, they muddled their way through the names, butchering them in the process. If you never saw them before, how would you pronounce "Przybylski," "Zdzieblowski" or "Wojtalewicz?" Indian names could be real bugaboos to say - I remember Phil Murphy running into "Necedah." It came out "NECK-ah-dah." Then there’s always "shah-WAH-noh" and "an-TEE-goh" to trip up the unsuspecting. Oconomowoc was another.
As you can see, many announcers don’t qualify as linguists. WSPT used to run religious programming in the Polish language on Sunday starting at 8:45. For those who don’t speak Polish, it can be difficult to determine how that language should sound.
The Polish Bible Students Association sponsored the program, and sent each week’s edition to the station on a reel of tape. Apparently, the preacher forgot to rewind the tape after he had recorded his weekly lesson, and shipped it out that way. When the time for the program approached, the WSPT announcer threaded the tape onto the machine, and played it over the air. The problem was that the tape was playing backwards, but he couldn’t tell the difference.
I suppose you could forgive a non-Polish speaking DJ for the error, but the most curious thing was that nobody called the station to complain! I think that gives you an idea of the program’s popularity.