The Weather Channel Has Lost Its Focus

The Weather Channel has been doomed since NBC bought into it several years ago and changed it from a place where you could get instant, up-to-date weather forecasts around the clock, 24-7-365, to just another cable channel filled with horrid reality shows and has-been TV personalities.

 

I’ve made this observation before and I’ll make it again: the Weather Channel has lost its focus.

 

If you tuned in to get the forecast yesterday, like I did, you couldn’t escape seeing the message delivered by Jim Cantore (a true weather geek and formidable weather personality, unlike Al Roker, an old-school TV personality) intoning in dire terms that DirecTV is, in essence, going to be responsible for countless deaths because – the way Jim spun it – DirecTV refuses to carry the Weather Channel.

 

After all, these meteorologists at the Weather Channel are serious scientists, and they’re in the business of saving lives.  That is, unless they happen to be running one of those horrid reality shows they’ve loaded onto the daily schedule.

 

The deal between the Weather Channel and DirecTV expired at one minute past midnight Tuesday, and the Weather Channel was ready with the Jim Cantore announcement, which ran seemingly every 8 minutes.  The business end of the Weather Channel was busy sending out news escapes calling the move by DirecTV “reckless”, and saying the move “will have an impact on….national safety and the preparedness fabric of our country”.

 

Serious stuff, this weather business.  Except, of course, like yesterday morning, when my wife and I tuned in the Weather Channel, and they were doing a LONG segment on how to cook a nutritious breakfast. (I’m not kidding.)

 

See what I mean about loss of focus?

 

Here’s the thing: this is not just an argument about how much money The Weather Channel wants from DirecTV to carry their programming, like the recent local spat between WISC-TV Channel 3 and Charter Cable about what the fee would be set at.  Or the one between Channel 3 and DishNet a few months before that.  That’s just business, and contract renewals can involve heavy-duty give-and-take; and, often, threats.

 

Apparently, more and more weather geeks – like me – have made their feelings clear about the loss of focus at the Weather Channel.  When the contract between the Weather Channel and DirecTV came to an end, DirecTV kicked the Weather Channel to the curb and put its own meteorological service, a new thing called Weather Nation, in place of the Weather Channel.  One DirecTV executive (Dan York, whose title is “Chief Content Officer”) said “Most consumers don’t want to watch a weather information channel with a forecast of a 40% chance of reality TV”.

 

Yup.  That’s me, all right.  You can keep “Weather In Space”, “Prospectors”, “Coast Guard Alaska”, “Breaking Ice”, “Freaks of Nature”, “Highway Through Hell” and all those other  Weather Channel reality shows….and you can put “Wake Up With Al” on that list. Al Roker is the LAST person I want to wake up with.

 

 

All this extraneous stuff they do would be like ESPN suddenly deciding to do shows about sewing or first-time home buyers.

 

DirecTV went on to say that they’ve heard loud and clear from their customers that they do NOT want to see reality shows when they tune in for the weather, and – Lord of mercy – they think the Weather Channel’s policy of giving names to storms is STOOPID!!!!!!

 

There is hope for humanity.

 

I’ve discovered I’m far from alone in despising the gimmicking-up of weather.  Whatever finally happens….whether the folks at DirecTV decide to get out of the weather business and come to terms with the Weather Channel again; or whether the Weather Channel wakes up with Al one morning and decides to resist the crap foisted on it by the NBC-Universal people and get back to the business of doing live forecasts 24-7-365, one thing is certain: the people – at least, some of them – subscribers to DirecTV - have been given an alternative, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing.

 

I’ll be watching eagerly to see how this plays out.

An Ode to Rosie - Our Favorite Family Car

I think a lot of families have a particular car in which many fond memories reside, and in our case that car is a 1994 Colt Vista Wagon that my wife and kids dubbed “Rosie”. Rosie’s full name was “Rosebud”, mainly because of her rose-red color. That’s Rosie above, in a 2003 photo. She’s sitting in front of the house of our friends Tom and Mary. Nine years old but still looking like new!

 

My wife bought Rosie brand new from a Madison dealer (Russ Darrow) when we had just started dating. The decision was between Rosie, with her practicality and fuel economy and room for two kids and a dog, and a bright green, sporty, Chrysler Neon on display at the same dealership. Rosie won, and she stayed in our family from that day in 1994 until the day she died, in 2009. 15+ years of solid service.

 

Both kids learned to drive on Rosie. By the time our son was old enough to start learning to drive, in 1999, Rosie had already delivered five years of maintenance-free service, and her tiny 4-cylinder engine started up every time and purred like a kitten. At that time, I was driving a huge Cadillac ElDorado Touring Coupe with a Northstar V-8 that delivered 300 horsepower, and although our son campaigned heavily to “just take it for a cruise” after he got his license, he was restricted to driving Rosie. I know what it’s like to be 16 years old and have 300 horsepower at your command, and, well…..suffice it to say the only time our son got to drive the big black Caddy was one very late night around the turn of the century when my judgment was impaired.

 

It happened during a period of time when my radio compadre Sly was still in his drinking days. We’d had Sly over for dinner one Saturday night, and it was just one of those nights when everybody had a bit too much to drink. Some time after the midnight hour, while our son and several of his pals had a sleep-over going on in the lower level of the house playing video games and such, it became apparent that none of the “adults” were in any shape to drive.  I can’t recall whether Sly had driven the big Mercury sedan I called his “FBI Car” – because it looked like an FBI-issue sedan with heavily-tinted windows and a big V-8 – or if it was his big-ass classic Buick Roadmaster.

 

Anyway, the course of action decided upon was to have one of our son’s pals drive Sly home in his car, while our son and the rest of his pals would follow Sly home, and then bring the driver back after Sly’s car was safely parked at Sly’s west-side home.  In a moment of weakness, I allowed them to take the big Caddy, and stories of that night still abound among our son and his friends.  I never wanted to know the specifics.

 

As both kids went off to college at the UW, Rosie remained in the family, parked in the driveway. When my wife went to get a new car in 2002, the amount they offered us for a trade-in on Rosie was, I thought, insulting, so we decided to keep Rosie and “deal on the invoice” as the car folks used to say.  I gave Rosie plenty of loving attention, after all the years of service she’d given in family trips to Chicago and Hortonville, hauling brush to the dumpsite, getting groceries, and then becoming “the kids’ car” that sat in the driveway, off to the side, so my wife and I could get in and out of the garage without moving Rosie every time.

 

 

No matter what we asked of Rosie, she delivered. Even when she was just sitting and waiting to be driven.

Her low horsepower, front wheel drive, and narrow tires were perfect for battling heavy snow, and there were many snowy mornings over the years 2002- 2006 that I left the Caddy (and its sucessors) in the garage and took Rosie to work at 2:45 AM, long before the county plows went to work on the Beltline. We replaced a water pump and timing belt at some point; replaced the exhaust system; had ignition work done; but other than that, Rosie cost us little but gas, oil, and insurance.

 

After our daughter graduated from the UW, we gave Rosie to her. Our son did not like Rosie, and when we offered her to him, he said he would just sell her or trade her in – a concept we couldn’t live with. He wound up buying a nice 2000 Chevy Impala, which he still drives!

 

Rosie left home and went to live with our daughter in 2006. She got our daughter safely to and from work at Meriter Hospital, and then at UW Hospital for many years, and transported her to and from the nice apartment she and her BFF Breanna rented in McFarland. But then one warm spring day in 2009, our daughter called and said Rosie was not behaving well. I said “bring her over and we’ll take a look at her”. The test-drive was terrifying – at any speed above about 30 miles an hour, Rosie wobbled like a drunk and was very hard to steer.  I had a mechanic look at her, and the diagnosis was fatal: cost of repair would far exceed the value of the vehicle, to the point where it was time to put Rosie to sleep. Ball joints, tie rods, struts – a long list of things which had to be replaced. She had pretty serious body cancer by then; the air conditioner had given out quite a while ago; the tires were in need of replacement; add it all up, and it was a death sentence.  At that time, Rosie had about 161,000 hard-earned miles on the odometer.

 

So, the next day, driving on “surface streets only”, my daughter brought Rosie home for one last time; we drove Rosie to the huge Zimbrick dealership just off the Beltline, and picked out a nice, safe, low-miles Buick Regal to replace Rosie, and as part of the deal, the guys at Zimbrick said they would “dispose” of Rosie.

 

Rosie is gone, but will never be forgotten.  She was a good girl!

Ice Bowl II ???

I have been to the coldest game ever played at Lambeau Field – the famous Ice Bowl on 12/31/67 – and the hottest game ever played at Lambeau Field – the re-dedication of the stadium after renovation, on 9/7/03.  So I speak to this coming Sunday’s game with some authority on the matter.

Lots of Packers fans claim they were at the Ice Bowl, when the Packers defeated the Cowboys in a playoff game on New Year’s Eve in 1967, but I was really there.  Section 9, Row 58. Me, my mom and dad, and Grandpa Morrissey.

More on that, later.

As of the time this is being written Thursday noon, there are still about 5,500 tickets unsold for Sunday’s playoff game with the 49ers. It’s a big topic on talk radio, and sports radio is abuzz with speculation about the possibility of a TV blackout of the game. On Dan Patrick’s radio show, he said a Green Bay businessman is standing by to purchase any unsold tickets at the deadline, so the game won’t be blacked out in the Green Bay and Milwaukee TV markets.

Patrick says he was at the coldest game in NFL history, which some say was the AFC Championship game played at Riverfront Stadium between the Bengals and the Chargers on January 10^th, 1982. He was in the press box, freezing his butt off, as the air temperature was 9 below and the wind chill was 59 below.

That was one cold, cold game.  Some argue the Ice Bowl was the coldest game in NFL history, because the air temperature was 13 below, 4 degrees colder than it was in Cincinnati in ’82. But the wind chill at the Ice Bowl was calculated at 46 below, 13 degrees “warmer” than the famous Cincy game.

If the temperature Sunday is colder than one below zero, Sunday’s game will go down as the second-coldest at Lambeau field. Right now the #2 slot is held by the playoff game against the Giants on January 20^th, 2008, when the temperature was 1 below and the wind chill was 23 below.

I remember the Ice Bowl clearly, even though it was 46 years ago. I was 18 at the time, and was a college student home in Hortonville for the winter break. My dad had four season tickets for the Packers, and I went with him, my mom, and my Grandpa Morrissey to all the home games during the “glory years”. I remember listening to WHBY-AM (Appleton), and all the talk that Sunday morning on the station was about the frigid temperature and its impact on the big game. Everyone knew the Cowboys were staying at the Midway Motor Lodge in Appleton, where it was just as cold as it was in Green Bay, and Packers fans said this was decidedly a great home-field advantage for the Pack, playing against the warm-weather Dallas Cowboys.

We bundled up in snowmobile boots, heavy layers of clothes, scarves, and hats, with hand-warmers and several flasks of brandy as “anti-freeze”. Grandpa Morrissey drove from his home in Oshkosh to Hortonville and then we all got into my dad’s car and made the half-hour trip to Lambeau Field. We parked about a half-mile from the stadium in what used to be a huge open field and made the trek in.

At halftime, my mom couldn’t stand the cold any more, and she left the stadium to go back to the car and warm up. But my dad and grandpa and I toughed it out, and we were rewarded. The famous Bart Starr quarterback keeper that went over Jerry Kramer’s block on Jethro Pugh was at our end of the stadium, right below us, and we saw it perfectly.  Out seats were just to the right of the top of the scoreboard in the photo above.  In 1967, the Lambeau Field grandstand was 60 rows tall, and our seats in row 58 were two rows from the very top of the stadium, right in the teeth of the wind. I clearly recall that my feet were the coldest part of my body, even though we were sitting facing the wind. That concrete was COLD and it soaked right through my Canadian Sorel snowmobile boots!

After the game, we walked back to the car and then headed for a tavern in Black Creek, where we traditionally met up with a lot of folks after the game, for a brewski and a burger, to rehash the game, and warm up. The heater in my dad’s brand new ’67 Ford Country Squire wagon was good, but when it’s that cold, you need to keep your heavy clothes on inside the car.

At the Ice Bowl, the vendors at the stadium ran out of coffee and hot chocolate before half-time. Suffice it to say tap beer was not a big seller.  At the re-dedication game on September 7^th of 2003, the mercury soared well into the 90’s, and the vendors ran out of bottled water some time early in the 3^rd quarter. With the oppressive heat and humidity at that game, again, tap beer was not a big seller. Toni and I had purchased a package deal for that game, which included round trip transportation in a luxury bus from Pier 37 in Monona to Lambeau Field, a tailgate lunch at Brett Favre’s restaurant a block or so from the stadium, and tickets to the game. The package also included free “beverages” on the bus, and we didn’t have a beer on the way home until after all the bottled water was gone.

The talk shows are speculating about why the tickets for the 49ers game on Sunday didn’t sell out immediately, and everybody has their pet theories.  Season ticket holders were apathetic because the team didn’t have that good a year, with Rodgers injured and unable to play until the Bears game last week; people don’t want to sit in weather that cold that late in the day; you name it.

But HiDef TV has got to be another factor, along with the way NFL games are televised these days.  Back in the days of the Ice Bowl, you were more likely than not to see the game in black and white rather than in color, and there were maybe 5 or 6 camera angles available to the director.  Instant replay was just coming into use on the telecasts. Slow-motion or stop-action replay was still decades away.

Now, there are 25 to 30 different camera shots available to the person directing the telecast; there’s sky-cam or its equivalent, overhead shots, isolation shots on all the key players, slow-mo, super-slow-mo, and stop-motion shots available from at least four angles on every play. The whole TV game experience is vastly different from 1967.

So, Sunday afternoon, I’ll have a beverage standing by next to my giant recliner chair in the media room of the Morrissey compound, snacks of all sorts, and we’ll be watching the game in Hi Def on a 66-inch screen with a 500-watt surround sound system. It will be about 68 degrees in the room, with a fire crackling in the fireplace, and I will be able to stop, pause, or rewind the action any time I want with my DVR.

Call me a fair-weather fan, but that scenario is much more appealing to me than freezing my butt off at Lambeau Field.  I wouldn’t trade my Ice Bowl experience for anything, but those days are gone for me.

Adventures on the Beltline

I saw it coming a split-second before it hit – a chunk of ice, about twice the size of my fist – and it made a huge noise when it hit my windshield and did the damage you can see in the photo above. I’ve lived in Madison long enough to know that when you’re on the Beltline near the Channel 15 tower in winter, you need to be aware that you could be attacked by chunks of ice falling off the tower and guy wires. And, sure enough, when we were on the eastbound Beltline at that spot at around 1:30 Friday afternoon, we got hit.

A lot of my friends say we’re lucky it didn’t sail right through the windshield and either kill us outright or cause me to lose control of my venerable road-warrior SUV and get into a multi-car wreck.

A year or so ago, they had to close the Beltline for about three hours when Channel 15’s tower and guy wires were shedding ice like crazy. The circumstances yesterday were similar to what happened back then: lots of moisture in the air, condensing and freezing onto the tower and guy wires; a nice sunny day with a moderate southerly wind, which blows the falling ice right onto the Beltline.

My daughter and I had gone to see Anchorman 2 (don’t bother; it’s one of the worse movies either of us have ever seen, dishonoring the original movie which was pretty funny) and then to lunch on the far west side. As we were coming home, right across from the Channel 15 studios, the chunk of ice hit and made enough noise to scare the wits out of my daughter, who let out a hundred-decibel yell. When I explained what had happened, I said “take a picture of the windshield”- and that’s the image you see above.

When we got home, I called Channel 15 to see if they were aware of what was going on, and they said Madison police and the State Patrol were in their parking lot “monitoring” the situation, ready to close the Beltline again if it got really bad.  Then I called to make an appointment to get a new windshield, and discovered that it’s essentially a monopoly now. I called a company which I thought was a local outfit, wound up on hold, and when the guy finally answered and I went through the song and dance with him, he told me the earliest they could come would be Tuesday.

Not good enough.

I called another company which I thought was local, and got the same message as the first outfit I called, and got put on hold. I hung up.  I called a third company (these were all local, Madison phone numbers) and went through the rigmarole again, assuming that there’s just one giant glass company which operates under different names. The order-taker asked my zip code (53713) and asked “do you live in Madison, Fitchburg, or……ah……Ma-na-no?” I said “where are you, that you have no clue on how to pronounce Monona?” and he said “Phoenix”.

After some wrangling about my insistence that Tuesday was just not acceptable, the deal was done and set for 2 o’clock this (Saturday) afternoon.

I posted the picture above on Facebook and I’m still getting comments from friends, reminding me how lucky I am! My lawyer said “be sure to file a claim against Channel 15” (thanks, Counsellor….) and several other friends from my days in broadcasting commented on the irony of ME getting hit by ice off a broadcast tower. One messaged me and said it was broadcasting’s “revenge” on me for winning a settlement from my former local employer after I was fired several years ago. My tuba-playing friend Tom from western Iowa, after saying he was glad my daughter and I were OK, asked if I had to change my shorts when I got home! (darn near) 

Eric Franke, my friend and anchor at WISC-TV News 3, posted lightheartedly “I blame it on John Stofflet” – his counterpart at Channel 15. Stofflet replied that he was on vacation, hence blameless, and then was kind enough to say “glad you’re OK, Tim”. I replied saying I was blaming it on Charlie Shortino (Channel 15’s main weather guru).

Gerrit Marshall, a tech wizard (engineer) at Channel 3, posted that he was glad we were OK, and went on to say that on his first day of work at WISC-TV in December of 1981, the Channel 3 tower shed a chunk of ice that took out the windshield of his car in the parking lot!

I also got a private message from my friend Tara, a former news colleague at MidWest who was an anchor at Channel 27 before that, saying she was glad we were OK, and telling me her dad – who is my insurance agent – was up in Minneapolis for the weekend visiting with Tara, her husband Kenny Jay (who’s with CBS radio in the Twin Cities), and their kids, and offering to have her dad call me right away. I thanked her for the offer but said it’s just a busted windshield, nothing that required taking time away from the grandkids!

So, in a few hours, I’ll go get a new windshield put in, and then the REAL fun – dealing with all the administrative paperwork about who winds up paying for it – will be the way I’ll start the New Year.

 When my daughter gets back to New York in a few days, she’ll be able to tell her friends about her great adventure on the Beltline. And we’ll have another tale to tell at future family gatherings.

At least we’re here to tell the story – which could have had a much different ending – about our adventure on the Beltline.

We All Wanted To Be Larry Lujack

It wasn’t Larry Lujack’s voice, although he had a great one for radio and he knew how to use it. I always thought the best voice on Chicago rock radio was Joel Sebastian. And, as far as voices go, Oklahoma-born John Doremus, who was on WMAQ in Chicago at the same time guys like Lujack, Sebastian, Bob Sirott, Gary Gears, Bill Bailey, and Steve Lundy were on WLS or WCFL, probably made more money with his voice than any of those famous rock-jocks.

It was what Larry Lujack did (said) on the radio that made me, and thousands of other guys like me, want to be like Larry.  Which is exactly what he counseled against, always telling the people he trained “be yourself”.

We wanted to have a sidekick like Little Snotnose Tommy (Edwards). We wanted to do Animal Stories. We wanted to read the Crank Letter of the Day (which later became the Clunk Letter of the Day) on a radio show like Uncle Lar did; we wanted to do Cheap Trashy Show-Biz News.  We loved that he would break format and just do whatever the hell he wanted to do. We wanted to work at a station so big that we had our own engineer, just like Spacey Dave engineered Larry’s show.

In college in the late 60’s, all the Radio-TV students had their own tape recorders (long before little portable tape recorders were available) and we made aircheck tapes of the big-time Chicago jocks. We studied the way Larry was so unlike the other talk-a-mile-a-minute rock jocks and how he used the dramatic pause – in an era where any unmodulated carrier (“dead air”) was considered a mortal sin. We listened to how the engineers processed his voice – how much reverb was added, what kind of equalization might be in the audio chain – we talked in class, in hallways, and over beers, about those big-time Chicago rock jocks.

But Larry was the king, the icon, the center of the young radio student’s universe.

I still have WLS and WCFL airchecks from those days.  You can still hear Lujack and all the legendary Chicago rock-jocks on YouTube and blogs and tribute sites all over the internet. My favorite tape from that era  is “Larry Lujack’s Farewell To Rock and Roll”, when WCFL changed format from Top 40 to beautiful music, and, as Uncle Lar said, “I’m needed here. I’m not going anywhere.” (Until a few days later when his contract with WCFL was bought out and he was back across town rockin’ away.)

I met Larry for the first time at some radio confab in Chicago, where he was one of the panelists on some discussion of where radio was headed. A few years later I went to a book-signing event in Chicago when Larry’s book “SuperJock” came out, bought a copy for me (which I still have, and stupidly never had him autograph) and a copy for my parents, which I did have him inscribe. He wrote “Your son is in a worthless dead-end occupation. With regret, Larry Lujack”.  Classic cynical Lujack! I hope mom still has that book somewhere.

When I opened Facebook this morning and saw so many of my broadcasting friends with links to stories of Larry’s passing (at age 73, of esophageal cancer), I paused a long moment and thought back to those days when so many of my friends and I were just beginning our radio careers, and how much time we spent talking about whatever Lujack did on the air that day.

What a wonderful time in my life – with great memories.  Rest in peace, Uncle Lar.

(Editor’s note: many people know my on-air persona as that of a news anchor. My first decade or so in radio was as a DJ (“air personality” as we called ourselves back then), and while Larry Lujack was always an inspiration, I owe my real mentors, the late Dr. Robert Snyder and my good friend Jerry Burke for really showing me the way. Jerry went from being a premiere DJ in the Fox Valley to a distinguished career as a TV news anchor and reporter. I could not have had a better path to follow than Jerry’s when I transitioned to news broadcasting.)

Old Late-Night Radio

A Facebook post I saw this morning opened the door to memory lane, and the hits just came flooding down the lane. My tuba-playing friend Tom played at the Ames (Iowa) Tuba Christmas Saturday afternoon and then had a combo gig on e-bass after that; as he headed for home in Lake City he posted that he was doing his customary thing on the way home – listening to the oldies station in Des Moines.

Now, Tom didn’t identify the station by call sign or frequency – I could have asked him – but to me, when you say oldies and Des Moines in the same sentence, you’re talking about 93.3 KIOA-FM.  This powerhouse station – radiating 82-thousand watts off an 1100 foot tower – is what broadcasters call a “C-1” station, a high-power FM that blasts a signal for miles and miles, covering a dozen or more counties.

KIOA-FM has been through more format changes than I can remember, but since the early 80’s has pretty much owned the oldies franchise in the center of Iowa.

When I was a young broadcaster, travelling with polka bands on weekend gigs, AM radio was king. FM was just beginning to come of age, and because FM transmission is essentially line-of-sight, you had to be relatively close to the tower to pick up an FM signal. It doesn’t travel farther at night, like AM signals do, skipping on the atmosphere. A 50,000 watt AM signal on the lower half of the AM band can pretty much cover half the nation at night; but even a C-1 high-power FM signal only covers a couple hundred miles at best.

In the mid-60’s to mid-70’s, travelling with John Check’s band, after the band had finished playing, packing up, and was finally rolling toward home, it was usually around 2AM. And the radio stations of choice for late-night homeward bound listening on the Check band were either WTMJ-AM  620 in Milwaukee or WHAM-AM 1180 in Rochester, New York. Those two stations played jazz late at night on weekends, and that’s what the guys in the band wanted to hear.

The guy who held forth on WTMJ-AM was John Grams, seen above interviewing Louis Armstrong, early in Grams’ career as a DJ on the station he started out with, WHBL-AM in Sheboygan.  His show on WTMJ was called “Grams on Jazz” and he played everything from Satchmo to the latest jazz hot off the presses from Blue Note, Arista, Columbia, and the other major labels who were still doing jazz releases back then. And Grams was an authority. He knew jazz inside out and backwards, and always said a few really relevant things about the songs he selected to play on his jazz show.

Here’s a shot of Grams in the massive old WTMJ-AM library (circa 1977) selecting the records he’d be playing on his show that night.

The other late-night weekend jazz DJ we loved to listen to was Harry Abraham, broadcasting his jazz show on WHAM-AM 1180 out of Rochester, NY. Because of the way AM signals are affected by atmospheric conditions, sometimes WHAM would come powering off the shore of Lake Ontario in upstate New York to blanket the nation all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and it would come in clear as a bell in Wisconsin.

Here’s a shot of Harry Abraham (love that late 60's 'fro!), who, like John Grams, knew a great deal about jazz and the musicians who made it, and shared his knowledge in succinct “intros and extros” between the jazz records. Both Grams and Abraham knew darn well they were talking to a lot of musicians travelling home from gigs, and they treated their audience with respect, never “talking down” or trying to sound too academic. It was clear they loved the music and loved sharing it, as so many musicians do.  When 1180 wouldn’t come in clear enough, you could count on hearing 620 anywhere in Wisconsin in the small hours of the morning.

As time moved forward into the later 70’s, FM radio was starting to come into its own, and more and more high-powered AM radio stations changed to a format that didn’t involve a lot of music. I was still working with the Check band until ’76 or so, and usually rode to and from gigs with three other guys my age (late 20’s) in the band: Dave Hoopman, Dick Wehner, and Don Hale – our designated driver. We frequently listened to the old WFMR-FM on the way home from gigs, if we were anywhere near the Milwaukee area.

Here’s a shot of Ron Cuzner, who did an overnight jazz program on weekends called “The Dark Side” on WFMR-FM. The call letters stood for “Wisconsin’s Fin Music Radio”, and the station played classical music all day and evening, and after midnight, Cuzner took over with “The Dark Side” and played jazz. He loved the new, roaring, powerful big-band jazz that was popular at the time – Manhattan Wildlife Refuge, Quincy Jones’ big-band stuff, Don Ellis, Maynard, stuff like that.

We would crank those tunes up all the way in Don Hale’s car, and just dig it. Cuzner had the most unusual voice and delivery; it was all very “other-world”. He didn’t call the city of license of the station “Milwaukee”; he called it “Henry’s City” (for then-mayor Henry Maier). And he left a LOT of dramatic pauses between records.  He’d play a real high-powered track from the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis big band, and when it ended, he’d leave about 15 seconds of dead air, and then say something like “It’s a quarter to three with 53 degrees in Henry’s City; music from the Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin big band is straight ahead on WFMR-FM 96.5 in Henry’s City. This is The Dark Side; I’m Ron Cuzner.”

Those were the days; young and foolish, riding home with friends and great jazz, played by some memorable personalities on radio stations that pretty much don’t even exist any more.

But the trip down memory lane made them just as vivid as if it had been only last night.

Don't Be So Hard On The Kids

The title of this post is a comment my friend Doug made in response to one of my Facebook posts last night. The last few days I’ve been snarky about the children doing weekend weather on a couple of the local TV stations (not the station Doug works for), and Saturday morning I posted that one of the local dweebs had just said the wind chill factor was “minus 25 below zero” (which, in English, is said “25 below zero”). The post got a few dozen “likes” and engendered a string of comments, many of them from current or former nooz people, about the dearth of experience of many of the young folks doing nooz, weather, and sports on the local TV stations.

One of the TV kids last night said the temperature was headed down to “negative five”.  I don’t know where he was raised – presumably in some climate where the temperature never got below zero – but where I come from, in the Fox Valley, we say “five below”. I’m pretty confident you’ll never hear a native ‘sconnie say “negative five” or “minus five” in conversation.  In true ‘sconnie dialect, you’re more likely to hear someone say “oh for the cry-yi I goes to the kitchen window and looks at the big thermometer the old man’s got nailed up to the garage wall and it says it’s twenny below zero”!!!!!

Doug, who is an experienced and talented TV photographer, said I was lucky they didn’t have Facebook back when I was on the radio.  And then he made the “don’t be so hard on the kids” comment.

It often comes as a shock to Doug, and lots of other media people around here, when they find out I’m still very much “on the radio”. My reports for the Wisconsin News Connection (owned and operated by Public News Service) are heard pretty much daily on several dozen radio stations in the Fox Valley, Eau Claire, Rhinelander, and lots of other small burgs around the state – just not in Madison or Milwaukee.

Every one of my reports – which are one-minute and two-minute “voiced” news stories – is subject to a level of editorial review which would shock most electronic media news people. Every word I write is examined by one of four hard-nosed editors before my script is approved for recording and distribution.

Years ago, when I anchored news on several of the local radio stations, I was also the “coach” who reviewed the writing and reporting skills of the rest of the news staff. I’m confident any one of them will tell you our weekly coaching sessions were pretty thorough. And, to their credit, my bosses made sure my work was reviewed by a coach. “Somebody’s got to coach the coaches”, the senior board members would say.

For WTDY, my coach was nationally-famous radio consultant Holland Cooke, who is the premiere news/talk consultant in the industry. He would listen to my newscasts at random times (online) and make critiques, and about once a month, at his in-market visit, he would critique my work.  For Q-106, my coach was Tommy Kramer, who works for another big national consulting company, Audience Development Group. Tommy’s a Texas boy who knows his way around a good country newscast, and like a good Texan, he’s cordial and polite, but he does not mince words.

One time, one of the news staffers I was coaching said I was being a little too tough. I said “you want to see my latest critique?” and pulled it out of a desk drawer. As he read it, his jaw dropped farther and farther, until he finished, and looked up at me, and said “holy cow…that IS tough”. I said “and you’ll notice at the top that this report is copied to each member of the board of directors”.

I was tough on the “kids” because I wanted them to be better writers, reporters, and anchors.  My coaches were – and now, my editors are - tough on me for exactly the same reasons.

So, Doug, let me ask you this: is your work reviewed? Is every piece you shoot reviewed by a coach, peer, or manager? Does someone edit every news script that’s written in your newsroom? Does someone spend at least one full hour a week working one-on-one with your writers, reporters, anchors, producers, to coach them, sharpen their skills, develop their talent, and – heaven forbid – help them correct their mistakes?

Didn’t think so.

So, I’ll take a snarky facebook comment any day, rather than a withering glance from Holland Cooke or Tommy Kramer.  

Copied to the board, by the way.