Fun To Be Young

By Frank Absher

Looking back on a good career in the broadcast business, I’m struck by one particular irony.

When we were young and learning-by-doing, we were convinced that we knew a great deal about how things should be done. Now that I’m retired, I’m amazed at how much there still is to learn.

This, I truly believe, is what made radio so much fun, and it’s why we had really good radio back then. The tension between talent and management was a good thing.

At one of my first stations in a small market, the AM signed off at sundown, but the “good music” automated station ran until midnight. On election night, three or four of us busted balls to put together the most comprehensive election coverage that town had ever seen, and we pulled it off.

This was strictly a self-motivated thing. No one told us what to do or how to do it, but we made it work and then went out to raise a few glasses in celebration of our success. It didn’t matter that maybe five people heard it, nor did we care that the station owner was never aware of what we did. There was a real thrill in our success.

The same thing was true in Armed Forces Radio/TV. Our audience would have settled for anything we gave them, but we were motivated to be as good as anything they could hear on commercial radio back home.

We’d sit around trying to come up with new stuff to try. The military lifers who ran the place had no clue, but that didn’t matter.

As I climbed the professional ladder, controls that were in place at many larger stations precluded a lot of individual creativity, but instead of bridling at the controls, we found ways to work within the system and still challenge ourselves. At a major market news powerhouse, we were working the weekend shift and trying to cover a major flooding story with three people in the newsroom. Our major newscast won a national award for what we did, and no one knew of our staffing limitations.

I could go on, but it’s also interesting to look at the other sides to this.

There are the super-creatives who come to a big station thinking they’ll have the freedom to do whatever they want. Stations like that never existed, to my knowledge. It’s only common sense to understand that a station – any station – is more than one talented person. It’s a team, and you have to play nice together.

Everyone in every career field has had to deal with meddling management. The good managers get the best out of their people, even if that means working with each one individually. Yes, there are a lot of clueless managers, but there are also a lot of good ones who shield their staff from a lot of external battles, allowing the staff to do what they do best without adding to their burden.

So maybe the irony of the youngsters, who are so creatively fired up in their relative innocence, doing battle with “clueless” managers who are actually fighting to keep their young staff innocent, is what produces a great product. It sure seems that way as I look back over the years.

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