What Color is the Old Gray Mare?

My first job in radio was Continuity Director for an AM/FM combo in Palm Springs, California.  Continuity Director was a fancy way of saying that my job was to write commercials for our clients.  My initial desire was to be a disc jockey, but the station had a need for someone to write commercials and I had a need to break into radio.  Plus, the job included two hours on the air every night on the low-power AM station, so I did get a chance to be a real live radio DJ.

The work was fun and creative and I got paid a whopping $925 a month.  The year was 1980 and I left an aerospace job in Orange County that paid me $302 per week.  Life on that salary, with a wife, toddler and another child on the way, was a struggle.  I recall being in the dog house once for using a quarter to let my two-year-old son ride the little merry-go-round in front of the supermarket.  I was informed that the 25-cents could have purchased a bag of carrots.

I came to work weekdays at four in the afternoon and got to be on the air from 10 p.m. until midnight.  Each day I would find on my desk a stack of copy orders and would begin writing commercials based upon client’s needs and/or desires.  Then, at 10 p.m. I would get to play music from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dinah Shore and Rosemary Clooney.  Luckily for me, I actually am a fan of that music from the previous generation.  And what did I care what kind of music I was playing?  I was a professional Disc Jockey!

Not a good one.  No.  Not by any stretch of the imagination.

I was being paid to be a DJ and that made me a professional, but I was very inexperienced and got to make countless mistakes at the expense of the radio station.  Luckily, I was on pretty late at night, so I didn’t offend too many people with what I thought was humor.

John Lennon

My first night on the air was December 8, 1980.  Nervous?  Understatement.  But about an hour before I was to go on the air for the first time, another DJ burst into our bullpen holding a paper ripped off the AP Wire machine.

“John Lennon’s been shot!”

I can still see the look of horror and disbelief on his face.

So, as nervous as I was—and would have been anyway—my first two hours on the air was giving updates between songs about the shooting and death of John.

My boss, as is with most small market stations, was also the morning drive DJ.  That meant he worked the most listened to shift in radio, weekday mornings from 6 to 10.  Odds were good that he didn’t stay up to hear me on my first broadcast.

He did.

The following morning my boss told me I sounded like I was breathing helium.  Not the most auspicious start to what I’d hoped was going to be my media career.

Years passed and I gained experience, paid my dues.  For those years, our sister station—an FM Pop music station—was fully automated.  It was the only contemporary music station on the FM band in the desert.  Yet, we were still being beaten by the long-time Pop station on the AM band.   So, the boss decided one day to have a live DJ for the morning drive shift on the FM station.  Where our AM station had a very tiny signal, confined mostly to the city of Palm Springs, the FM station broadcast across the entire valley.

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Within a few months, the DJ he’d selected for the job found a job in another city.  But by now the precedent had been set and the station was finally taking listeners from the competition’s AM station.  So, our boss needed to find someone else to do the morning shift on the FM station.  He selected, Bob, our Production Director, to take over that shift.  Bob hated it.  Bob hated getting up at four in the morning.  Bob hated getting up at four in the morning and going into a windowless production room that had been modified to double as the FM studio and talking happily and energetically to people he did not know.

Not much thought or care was given to the FM station in those days.  But, even as an automated station, it was bringing in many times more revenue than the AM station.  To say we were a “Mom and Pop” station would fit the bill perfectly.  The AM station was owned by a woman who inherited her millions and she wanted to own a radio station, as had her father, many years before.  From what I’d heard, she had to be talked into acquiring the FM signal and didn’t really care what music it played.  She wanted to listen to her AM station and call up the DJ and tell him which of her favorite songs to play.  Whatever they played on the FM station wasn’t a concern of hers.  Even when the FM signal started making advertising revenue, she still didn’t care about it.

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So, when Bob was getting up at four in the morning to be a morning drive DJ, at no additional salary, he didn’t even have a phone line so any listeners might be able to call him.  The ratings showed there were listeners, but he had no real-time feedback.

Each time he asked for a phone-line, he was rejected.  Finally, the Operations Manager told him to just give out the fourth line of our main business phone number.  Most businesses have a main phone number and they use that number.  When the line is busy, the calls automatically rotate to the next line, though most don’t really know the actual number of those phone lines.  So, someone knew the number of “line four” and Bob gave out that number and only answered that line.

After a year or so, my boss had decided that it was more important that I was at the station during the daytime hours to be better able to talk with sales people about their copy orders and to be able to go to personally meet with clients.  So I no longer had my ten-to-midnight shift playing Sinatra music.

During these early days, I was living in a neighboring city about 10 miles away.  At one point, I only had one working car.  So, for a few weeks or months, I took the bus to work.  Wanting to make sure I was at work on time, I usually got up and caught one of the earlier buses and that put me into the office before 7:00 a.m.  Since I wasn’t on the clock at that hour, I’d go into the production studio and drink coffee and kill time with Bob.  Bob would say something funny on the air and after he shut off the mic, I’d make some sort of retort and we’d crack each other up.

One day he just told me, I’m going to turn on the mic on that table and you just chime in whenever you want.  And thus began The Bob & Bill Show.  We basically spent each morning making each other laugh and little line four began to light up more frequently with people telling us they liked what we were doing or to request a song.

Free T-Shirts!

Bob went to the boss and told him that it felt like we were starting to get listeners and he wanted to be able to give away some prizes like T-shirts or movie passes.  The boss said, “OK.”

If you talk with Bob today, he’ll tell you that we weren’t much for planning or thinking out a contest.  So we had prizes but no bright ideas on how to give them away.  So we created The Stupid and Useless Trivia Question.  Questions were, “What are the numbers in Hwy 111?” or “What is the color with the shortest name and it has only three letters and it starts with R?”

Things were getting fun.  We felt like we were really making people laugh and helping them enjoy their mornings.

One morning we asked, “What color is The Old Gray Mare?”

We got nothing.

No one called.  We shot each other questioning looks and, following the first song, we gave the phone number of line four again and repeated our Stupid and Useless Question.

Nothing.

Yikes.  Maybe we weren’t so hot after all.  We picked up the line and there was a dial tone.  Following that song we made a slight reference to the fact that no one had won the T-shirt yet and we didn’t think the question was that hard.  We still received no calls.

Bob again picked up the line and dialed the number of line four, but the line was busy.  Well, of course the line would be busy because he was using that phone.  So, while he again asked listeners to win a T-shirt by telling us the color of The Old Gray Mare, I went out to my desk and called in to line four.  I also got a busy signal.  None of this made sense.

The song ended and we again gave the question, then we played some commercials.  After the commercials, we came back on the air and added a few movie passes to the T-shirt to sweeten the pot.  We again asked the question and waited for line four to start blinking.  And still nothing.  I think our emotions grew from exasperated to mild depression.  Hell, I guess we weren’t as funny and popular as we thought.

We found ourselves taking a break and standing out in the hallway, trying to determine what had happened and why no one was listening to us.  The boss, who had gotten up from his morning show on our sister station to grab a cup of coffee, walked past us in the hall.

“What’s up, guys?”

“Well, we don’t understand what’s happening…” We went on to explain our frustrating morning.

“Oh.  We decided to finally get you guys your own number on that line.  I wonder if Operations contacted GTE…”

His morning show partner poked his head out of their broadcast booth.

“Hey,” our boss said to him.  “Did you put in that request for the new phone line?”

“Yeah.  Only they couldn’t tell me when the switch would take place.”

Bob and I looked at him.  “Do you have any idea what the new number is?”

“Uh… yeah… I think I wrote it down…  I’ll get it to you on the next break.”

They went back to their studio and we went back to ours.  We just looked at each other as the song finished.

Do you think they could have mentioned it?!  Could have mentioned that they were even considering getting us our own number?!!

Works Better This Way

The song ended and we didn’t say anything about the contest.  We played the commercials and went back to a song.  We waited.  The Ops Manager came in and gave us the number he’d been given.  “Try this…”

Following the song, we went back on and made fun of our Ops Manager and told our listeners (?) that we had a new phone number.  We gave it and the phone line immediately lit up.  The first caller screamed “GRAY!” and we had a winner.  The line blinked continuously until we announced the winner and continued to blink for a while after.

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That would have made a tidy ending to the story, but there was still more to follow.  It was later that day that the police department contacted our station and was put through to the Operations Manager.  It turns out that while we were repeatedly giving out the number of line four, which no longer existed; the calls didn’t just reach some dead end.  They were being rerouted.  Somehow they were relayed to a little old lady somewhere else in the city.  This poor woman was suddenly inundated by phone calls where people yelled “GRAY!” at her.  She’d hang up and the phone would instantly ring again and someone else would scream at her.  She did this for close to half an hour, we were told, and then finally she asked someone why they were calling her.  They said they were calling the radio station because this is the number Bob and Bill told them to call.  Since it was her phone, she, of course, thought we were giving out her phone number.

The calls were constant so she could not call and report the problem, or what had become actual harassment, because each time she hung up the phone, it immediately rang again with ever-more-frequent and desperate callers screaming “Gray!!” at her.

Our Ops Manager told the police what had happened and they both contacted the phone company who did some technical stuff and the calls were no longer routed to the little old lady.  By that point we’d stopped using that number on the air and we never heard any more about it.  Bob and I wished we could have sent the little old lady some movie passes or some sort of gift as a way of saying sorry, but our management decided to not even try to find out who she was.  They preferred to let the police explain it to her and have her think it was the phone company’s fault.  The next day we asked how many stooges were in The Three Stooges, or something equally as stupid and got our winner right away.

And that was how I began my stint as a radio morning show host.