Re: Interesting Radio Depatures

["A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

On 30 May 99,  Dib9@aol.com wrote:

> Most of my departures from radio stations have been entirely voluntary and
> I have made a habit of breaking format at the end of my last shift and
> playing Jimmy Buffett's "Why Don't We Get Drunk" (and screw).  I know it's
> unprofessional but I've done it several times going back to WAYU in 1986
> so it's become sort of a tradition.  I continued the tradition when ended
> my last show at WMGX with Buffett last weekend.

Well, it doesn't count as a firing, but maybe I should tell the story of 
my last show on WMUA (not counting the airshift I did at last month's 
reunion.).

I had been doing a Sunday afternoon show, with a "middle-of-the-Road" 
format (non-rock pop music), to which I often added a lot of Allan 
Sherman, Tom Lehrer, and various other offbeat things, some of which were 
my own records, some of which I found in the station record library.  (The 
one my listeners seemed to remember best was the "Singing Dogs," actual 
dog barks recorded and arranged into familiar songs.  Their version of 
"Jingle Bells" still gets played sometimes around Christmas time.)

The annual election of officers having taken place, the station was being 
run by new people, and the program director who had explicitly agreed to 
the kind of offbeat programming I was doing was no longer in office.  One 
day, as I was doing my show, and playing an excerpt from a Howdy Doody 
record that I had, the new station manager came in.  

In a stern and angry voice, he said that the Howdy Doody bits constituted 
rock programming and weren't allowed.  He also said that it was a new rule 
(which I had never heard of) that if you bring your own records to the 
station, they would get catalogued and added to the station library.  In 
no uncertain terms, he made clear that I was not to do that kind of 
programming any more.  So I told him to find someone else to take the 
shift next week.

I finished the show, sticking to the format that he had decreed.  At the 
end, I said that this was my last show, and I wanted to leave with this 
thought.  And I played the closing theme from "Mickey Mouse Club."

Which is why, when I did my airshift last month, I ended with that same 
record.  I didn't bring the Howdy Doody record because I thought 
(erroneously, as it turned out) that the station would not be equipped to 
play a 78 RPM record.


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 A.Joseph Ross, J.D.                                 617.367.0468
 15 Court Square                             lawyer@world.std.com
 Boston, MA 02108-2503              http://world.std.com/~lawyer/
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