Radio show, radio show ...

Local radio has become virtually non-existent in my area, and I imagine it’s becoming more so across the country, especially in non-urban areas like mine, as more and more of the nation’s media owners become aware that it’s way cheaper to get radio programming out of a box in Arizona than it is to have actual local flavor on the radio. I can think of maybe one commercial radio station in my immediate area where you can turn on the radio at 9 in the evening and hear the voice of someone who’s physically in the radio station you’re listening to.

The first one of those “canned” stations that I remember hearing was WFLQ out of French Lick, back when it started in the early 1980s; the only way I knew it was canned was the fact that they’d only mention the station name in a bumper coming out of commercial. I don’t remember anything else about it other than the DJ one day talking about how odd it was that there has never been a president named Mike or Michael.

In the late afternoons, if I’m near a radio, I’ll listen to WAMW out of Washington just to have a local voice talking to me, in spite of the oldies. WWBL is canned by that point in the day (they are live and local from 5am till roughly 3 or 4 in the afternoon during the weekdays and are all canned during the weekends.)

Radio was actually my first career choice once I was old enough to determine what I wanted to do with my life. (When I was 5, I wanted to be Tom Wills, but that didn’t pan out, as Tom Wills already existed at WAVE-TV in Louisville. Still does!) I shadowed at the old WKMD in Loogootee one day in 6th grade, and at what was then rock station WRTB in Washington in 8th grade, and was just fascinated at the concept of broadcasting - sitting in a studio, talking to thousands, delivering breaking news to the community, broadcasting the local team's basketball games, warning the local populace about an impending blizzard ... it just all seemed so exciting! And to spin some records on top of it? What a sweet deal!

(As it turns out, I had a face made for radio, but not the voice for it; my voice is the diametric opposite of the smooth baritone that many of today's professional disk jockeys have ... many of my phone conversations with strangers have the phrase "please stop calling me 'ma'am'" interjected exasperatedly at some point within.)

WRTB was all local in those days, and since you don’t know what you got till it’s gone (a song they played often when it was a hit), it was very comforting in retrospect. Being a pillar of the community, they agreed to let me and the Captain shadow them for half a day, and we got to sit in on the "Mitch in the Morning" show. Later, Mike Grant, who is now with WTHI-TV in Terre Haute, called in to tape a news report for airplay later in the morning, but didn't realize that a couple of junior high schoolers were in the auxiliary studio with Mitch. He stumbled over a couple of words and dropped an F-bomb, and Captain and I were sure that the radio profession was the coolest thing in the world.

Anyway, WRTB's rock format eventually gave way to the Real Country format that is now found at that point on the dial, on WWBL, and as I said earlier, they drastically cut back on their local staff. As for Captain and myself, he DJ'd up at Franklin College for awhile, then at the community radio station in Bloomington, while I DJ'd at my dorm radio station in Foster Quad at IU and then was pretty much out of radio by that point. Both of us know how to use a radio now, but that's about the extent of our involvement with that magical musical box.