Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle

Blasting With Boyles

Where Did You Grow Up?

I Think It’s Going To Be Denver

Lately when I’m asked where did I grow up, I respond with: I think it’s going to be Denver. Last month I wrote about when I was a kid listening to radio and the influences that Top 40 radio had on all of us in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

So, when I’m always asked, “How did you get into this business?” I generally reply, “I don’t know, because my parents were married.”

Truth be known, I was going to Metropolitan State College, studying hard, actually wanting to teach on a college level and was working part-time in a warehouse, when a classmate of mine told me that the AAA Auto Club on Colorado Blvd. was looking to hire an assistant for their radio traffic reporter. He told me the hours were early in the morning and later in the afternoon. I later found out that’s called morning and afternoon drive, which shows you how much I really knew about radio at the time.

I went that afternoon and for the first time met a man who was about to become one of those lifelong friends — Dan Hopkins — who just recently retired as Governor Bill Owens’ press secretary. (How come everyone I got into radio with is either dead, in an institution or retired?) My hair was down to my shoulders, I had John Lennon glasses and a full beard. Dan thought I’d be a perfect fit for the job if only I’d get a haircut. As Danny often tells the story, I asked him if he had a pair of scissors and I got my haircut right there on the spot, and started the next day as the assistant to the Mr. Announcer Person traffic reporter. Who by the way, for the first two months thought I was a communist hippie (which I was) and wouldn’t talk to me.

When people asked me what I did, I told them I counted cars. Then I figured out that there were people in airplanes over the city doing the same thing with a lot more accuracy. Dick Dillon at KIMN, Art Newman on KOA and Don Martin on KHOW (whose voice you can still hear on the Tom Shane jewelry commercials saying, “Now you have a friend in the diamond business”) were the airplane pilot traffic reporters.

Hopkins knew enough about radio to know that those reports came at certain times of the hour. Now I know that as a format called a clock in the radio business. Hopkins and I got a radio out of a wrecked car and set the buttons to the different radio stations and when the air traffic reports were aired on the other station I would poach (steal) the real traffic reporter’s traffic reports. By this time I think Dan had hired or fired (or they quit) three or four Mr. Big Voice Announcer Persons and so finally I told Dan that I could be the on air guy as well as steal the traffic reports from the other radio stations, save them a bundle of money and then I could become the traffic reporter.

My first on air morning was the morning after my daughter was born and because of that I never call her Shannon, I always call her Lucky. A few months after that, I’m moving along in grad school, dead broke and now a father, and the late Jack Merker was then the Program Director of the Big KAAT of the Rockies which was a 50,000 watt daytime only radio station that was on the floor below the Playboy Club in the old Radisson Hotel. I was doing traffic reports for Jack and he told me that although I had a very weird voice I was smart and funny and he was looking for a weekend disc jockey. He asked me to come down to the studios of KAAT Radio. I walked in, and back in those days, there were at least four turntables, stacked up cart machines and a control board that you could not stretch your arms out and touch end to end. It was all knobs, slides, pods, bells and whistles. I had never been in a radio station before and it looked like the control deck of the Starship Enterprise.

I watched Jack for a couple of hours and he told me to come back the next day when he sat me in the on air seat while he used what was then called the jump mic (the second microphone) and acted as the disc jockey while I tried to run the controls with him coaching. We played MOR (middle of the road) music format. After doing that for about four hours, Jack abruptly stood up, looked at me and said, “Ok, give me half an hour of radio” and walked out of the studio.

I immediately stood up and threw up in the trash can, and did possibly the worst 30 minutes of radio in Denver’s storied radio history. Jack walked back in afterward, the shift was over and in what became my true radio lifestyle, we went to the bar. Jack told me that I needed a lot of work but I wasn’t bad and he wanted me to come back all next week at night and sit in the production room and play radio. No one could hear it but I was to pretend that I was doing a radio show to get ready for my debut the next Saturday for what’s called now a “board shift” for I’m sure under $5 an hour.

I remember the first Saturday that I was alone in that control room probably playing Engelbert Humperdinck or the Sandpipers. I heard a little voice in my head and it said, “Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.” When I walked out after that shift I no longer wanted to teach. I wanted to do radio.

Peter

Peter Boyles is a nationally acclaimed radio host who can be heard Monday through Friday on 630 KHOW 5 to 9 a.m. He has a monthly column in the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle. Visit Peter’s blog and comment on his column, or let him know anything else that’s on your mind, by going to the Chronicle Web site at www.glendalecherrycreek.com.