A Time-Honored Radio Tradition

by Frank Absher

One of the great pastimes from my days in radio was the station visit.

At first, when I was in college, the visit was the reason for travel. Going to St. Louis, Springfield or Kansas City centered around stopping in at a favorite radio station and coveting what they had.

The goal was to get into the control room where you could watch the guy on the air do his thing (Yes, it was all guys back then.)

Somehow, the equipment always seemed better, and the guys were always having fun.

It helped shape my personal goal of making it in a major market. Think how great it would be to do what they were doing and get paid huge amounts of money!

Getting to those markets involved hard work. You knew instinctively that you had to pay your dues in the small and medium markets before you could enjoy the privilege of working in a city.

So when I visited WDAF in Kansas City or KSD in St. Louis, I was able to gloss over some of the obvious cracks in the veneer – like the fact that the WDAF studios were relegated to some small rooms in the back of the building’s top floor. Instead, I just dreamed how great it would be to get decent record service without having to beg for hits.

And KSD…now that was something. The announcer just sat at a big table in the studio, and a record guy cued up the records and an engineer ran the board. When it came time for news, a newsman came into the studio and handled things. All the announcer did was sit there and, well, announce.

As I neared college graduation, I began to explore job possibilities and the rose-colored glasses stopped filtering out some of the realities. Springfield, MO would be a great place to work, I thought. But a tour of the stations was unimpressive. I saw guys who were required to wear ties while they did their shows in studios that lacked air conditioning. No one seemed happy. This wasn’t what I’d wanted.

I banged around a few markets and did my time in the military before I could really concentrate on a radio career. When I got out of the service, I hit a Catch 22 that would have made Yossarian wince.

Those four years I’d spent “serving my country” meant that no one in the medium or major markets had any interest in me because I’d been away from commercial radio too long. To succeed, they said, I’d have to go back down to the industry’s minor leagues and start over.

I didn’t want to, but the writing on the wall seemed pretty clear, and a bum national economy wasn’t helping things. One manager even told me he hired another guy instead of me because I would move on in a couple years but the other guy wasn’t that good and he’d stay on longer.

By the time I got to KMOX, I was ready for the burst of personal satisfaction that came with it. I really savored it all, and I’m sure my dues paying made it even more dear to me. I was more than happy to give tours to any radio folks who stopped in.

And that manager who hired the other guy? We’ve remained friends. Within a week of my starting on KMOX, he called to congratulate me, and to tell me that the other guy was, in fact, still at his station.

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