While the ultimate would always be play by play announcer for my hometown Montreal Expos,
from my early teens, working in radio was the goal. I could imitate the local DJ’s so well that I would open the phone book and select victims to try it out on. Mimicking the latest radio station contest with that overblown AM hit station disc jockey vibe.
“Is this the house of (fill in the blank), If you had answered your phone with the phrase that
payed, you would have won $1000!” and I hung up.
I had to be a radio announcer because the school thing really wasn’t going anywhere. I managed to get through elementary school but high school was proving to be a tougher task.
Not that I didn’t have the brain to do it, conversely, according to all my teachers, I was the classic underachiever. I just didn’t work at it and as high school rolled along I spent more time away from school than in it. Each year I promised myself that I would work harder but each year I got lazy and fell behind. The task of catching up felt daunting and I let it go.
Eventually they called my mom in and asked her to remove me voluntarily since the class clown
wasn’t only not doing his own work but he was preventing others from doing theirs. I thought I was funny. So did other students. But teachers apparently did not. In my last year of high school and with very few credits towards my high school diploma there was genuine worry about my direction. At age 17 I had already convinced my mom that the direction was going to be the world of radio.
All good Jewish boys have Bar Mitzvahs at age 13, the step of entering into manhood. Gifts are given and very often the gift is cash. While some of my classmates rung up quite a tune on their Bar Mitzvah cash registers, I collected a meager sum of just over 1,000 dollars. To the bank it went and there it stayed until I read an advertisement two years later for a radio course. At age 15, The National Institute of Broadcasting beckoned.
I wanted the money to go towards broadcasting but my mother’s two sisters warned her that we would just be throwing the money away. There was no doubt in my mind what I wanted to do with my life and surely mother felt a sorely needed commitment from me to something – anything – that might be a step in the right direction. She went ahead and gave the okay.
The course itself wasn’t that much of a helper but it took place at one of Montreal’s top radio
stations. I got an opportunity to watch some real pros at work, to use first class recording equipment and watch much older hopeful classmates who surely were going nowhere in this business. Despite knowing next to nothing and being just 15, I was years ahead of the rest of that sad group, who had indeed thrown their money away.
When Mom died two years later, just weeks after being summoned to remove me from school,
I had all the incentive I needed to prove to her memory that she had made the right decision and that we hadn’t thrown away our money. I just wasn’t in a rush to get there.
The next four years were a blur. I had plenty to get out of my system and I did just that. It was a weird combination however, in that the partying never started until the ballgames were over. Friends would head out in the early evening and I would join them after either listening to, watching or attending the latest Expos game. Sometimes I would just make it a doubleheader if I could find an east coast team playing a game on the west coast.
Home made scorecards in hand and the Red Sox, Pirates or Orioles on the air through the crackling out of town radio signals. Who knew that VCR’s would allow the crazy baseball scorekeepers a real life away from the game in the future, but for now it was all live and it took a lot of time and attention.
I also traveled.
I went to Israel, Denmark and Sweden in a six month sojourn while celebrating my 19th birthday along the way. You could take the boy out of the country but you couldn’t take baseball out of the boy. I brought my glove along with me to Israel. I used to throw a ball against the wall and make up live games by myself while calling the play by play. I was quite the sight for Israeli youngsters who wondered what the hell I was doing.
Did I leave Montreal in November and come home in April?
Yes I did, I could smell baseball thousands of miles away. So gripping was the pull of Opening Day that I left Copenhagen before another part of me really wanted to. I’m a big music fan and the great J.J. Cale was appearing the following week. But, alas, even J.J. Cale was no match for Steve Rogers. So home is where I went.
I worked as a busboy, bartender, accounting clerk, waiter, fruit picker, shelf stocker and gravedigger. I read voraciously, finally taking in all those books you couldn’t make me read while I was in high school. I strengthened my vocabulary (previously built on song lyrics) and at 21, decided the time had come to get serious.
The province of Quebec not only has the largest French population outside of France,
it also has an education system all its own, not to mention strict rules governing the protection of the majority language. There were and are rules that would shock most Americans (And many unenlightened Canadians) concerning some of the restrictions on English speaking residents.
The school system included an extra layer between high school and College called CEGEP.
It was there that one could enroll to continue education whether there had been a successful
completion at the previous level or not. John Abbott College also had radio courses in their creative arts program and a working campus radio station. I used the first semester to prove to myself that should I actually need to get an education to make a life for myself, that I was capable. I also needed to become a part of the campus radio station and a radio course wouldn’t hurt. Well, as Meatloaf sang, two out of three ain’t bad. It turned out there was no room left in the radio courses. The second semester would give me an inkling as to the power struggle that goes on day in and day out in this business, even inside a radio station that didn’t pay any of it’s participants.
It would also be my last college semester.
Early on I enjoyed the music format at the college station, or lack of one. You could play whatever you liked. Could there be a better way for college age students to hear stuff they might never have heard before ? But the soon-to-be successful station manager was preparing for real radio and his replacement decided to institute a new music policy: You would now play what he wanted you to play. This was a radio station that pretty much played out of speakers on two campuses, what could possibly have been dumber ? This would not be my last argument with radio authority and would not be the last one I would lose.
Refusing to go along with the edicts of the new regime, I was asked to vacate the premises.
Nice start to a radio career, perhaps we would not use him as a reference. But, I was not to be off air for long and soon for the first time I would actually get paid.
The former college station manager had indeed started his professional radio career. He had sent auditions tapes to the four corners of our great land and was hired quite quickly, but
there were many places he applied that wanted his talented, inexperienced cheap labour and
since he was already gainfully employed, he called a friend. I sent a tape and before you can say the Montreal Expos had their most exciting team ever in the summer of 1979, I was on my way to tiny Newcastle, New Brunswick. With a population of about 5,000 though if you counted the entire listening audience you were probably talking to 22,0000 people or so.
Thank you Steve Anthony.
My best friend Dan Michailiuk knew radio was where I wanted to end up. He had left home for the Canadian air force some four years earlier and I called to let him know where I had ended up. I left a number and waited for his call. When the receptionist answered the phone with a hearty “Good morning CFAN radio” it’s safe to say that he was in a minor state of shock that all it took to get a hold of me was a local call. Dan was on the air force base in Chatham, Newcastles’ sister city. And it was there that we both suffered through the rise and fall of that 1979 Expos group. Happy for the occasional broadcasting crumb, a rare Canadian national telecast, perhaps an NBC game of the week or maybe even a late night strained crackling radio broadcast.
That brash Expos contingent lost out in the National League to the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh
Pirates. Beaten on the last day of the season by Steve Carlton, whose unhittable slider racked up the strikeouts and put the Expos’ hitters and season to sleep. It would start a streak of heartbreaking late season disappointments that few fans have had to deal with in so short a period of time.
It was just after arriving in Newcastle when I endured the first of many bad timing instances in
trying to become a baseball announcer while being forced to listen to some inferior talent try
their hand at something I was much better suited for. The town of Chatham was presenting the Canadian Senior Baseball Championships and the games would be presented on the radio by, well, there was only one radio station in town. The job of play by play would fall on the stations’ news director. It was clear the man had little feel for play by play and he knew about baseball what I knew about French in the 10th grade. As my teacher aptly put it “I could write what I knew in the upper corner of a postage stamp…in felt marker.”
If I had just arrived a month or two earlier, things might have been different. I tried begging. But I had no professional radio experience at the time and they couldn’t have known how I would do. As it turned out, I couldn’t have been worse.
By the following summer the news director had moved on. In fact, so had every other on air employee. So it goes at small town radio stations. In less than a year I had become host of the early evening, afternoon drive and mid-morning shows. With just months experience I was the morning man while also taking on all available sportscasts at no extra cost to my employer.
I had, however, received a raise for my now lofty position. My annual salary had jumped from a sad $7200 to a still sad $7800, but it was like getting an education. Sort of like my college years in a trade school. Besides, I was having the time of my life. I was, of course, well on my way. It was just going to take some time.
As host of the only morning show in town, came serious responsibility. The radio station actually went off the air just after one in the morning and it was the job of the morning man
to turn it back on at five the next morning. If you were late, so was a good portion of the town with all those radio alarms NOT going off. I had already slept in twice and the riot act was read. if it happened again there would be serious consequences. So when I awoke later that week at six o’clock, I was in a sweat. I splashed some water on my face, threw some clothes on and charged out into the street. Ready for a mad dash it suddenly hit me that those kids playing in the street meant that I had taken an afternoon nap. it was six in the evening and I still had a job.
I had learned all I could there and it was time to move on and I left the $7800 a year salary
behind.
I had been putting together a new audition tape and had run into Jim, a former CFAN Newcastle employee who had moved on to the larger New Brunswick market of Moncton.
He mentioned that there was an opening and I gave him a tape to take back with him. I had quit the job in Newcastle and went to live with a friend in Sydney, Nova Scotia. How I longed to be in Montreal as the Expos this time battled the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League East, but I knew if I went home I would feel like a failure. This radio thing needed a next stop. I called Jim who said he was trying to get the right people to listen to my audition tape.
As it turned out, it stayed in the glove compartment of his car for six weeks. They eventually hired me and I was the new overnight announcer at Country 104 in Moncton. And boy was the $8400 a year salary a welcome change. Nothing like eleven dollars and fifty four cents more every week to cheer a lad up. It was an interesting stop indeed since Montreal is easily the largest market in North America without a country station. I didn’t really know much of the stuff but I would come to like it quite a bit.
I’m open to all music. I like all kinds of rock, R & B, reggae, some rap and hip hop but this new country gig opened me up to thousands of new songs. I started out as most do by taking on the overnight shift. This one ran from midnight to six four days a week and inexplicably Saturday from 6 AM to noon. Who thought that one up? Surely not anyone who had worked it and tried in vain to fall asleep every Friday night.
Marty Kingston was the lone sportscaster for the sister stations that included hit radio CKCW.
He also did play by play for the New Brunswick Hawks of the American Hockey League. When he went out of town with the team on a road trip, the sports duties were turned over to the news department. I think it’s safe to say that not one of them could pronounce the name of Toronto Argonauts kicker Zenon Andrusyshyn.
Let’s face it, someone who doesn’t know his stuff is not likely to fool a single sports fan.
Sports fans aren’t impressed with most of the folks who are supposed to know what they’re
talking about. The sportscasts for the morning shows started just as my shift ended but after awhile I couldn’t listen to them when Marty was out of town. I begged to a higher order to allow me to handle the duties and finally News Director Roy Geldart relented and to him I will always be grateful. While I offered my services free of charge to save every sports fan in the area the pain I had endured by tuning in, they offered another fifteen bucks a shift and I jumped at it.
Not long after, the 1980 Expos once again lost on the season’s final weekend after entering the final series at home tied with Philadelphia. They dropped the first game and the start of Saturday afternoon’s affair dragged on through the rain. Yes Saturday, my day shift after a week of overnights and no sleep on Friday.
After the Friday loss the Expos needed to stay alive, ready to send rookie phenom Bill
Gullickson to the mound to win it on Sunday. With two outs in the 9th inniing, the Expos enjoyed a 4-3 lead. Woody Fryman made a good pitch to Bob Boone but the Phillies’ catcher fought it off and dumped the game tying single into short centerfield. Expos fans know the rest of the story in heartbreak number two – Mike Schmidt’s 11th inning 2-run homer off
Stan Bahnsen.
Once again there would be no Expos’ post season. And while that meant no potential World Series, I was able to keep these as a sad reminder of what might have been:
As you move up the radio ladder in market size it takes longer to move up in shifts. Overnights turned to evenings and I would fill in for whomever was on vacation. Finally, after two years in Moncton, I was moved into a top spot and would be busy as a bee. I was the afternoon drive announcer now while also handling a good portion of the radio station’s commercial content and sports when necessary. On those days I started at 5:35 AM and talked right on through until 6 PM.
As I watched from a distance, baseball in Montreal was to take it’s first big steps towards a premature death the following season.
Chapter 1 – To be continued
Yes up next is Blue Monday and how I didn’t and then did come home
