Listeners: love 'em or disinfect 'em ...

Those of you who have had the honor and privilege of rubbing shoulders with listeners at various station events may contribute to the MB thread that will be linked below.  I imagine it will be an enlightening experience for many readers...

Without defining the era or releasing the call letters, this actually happened at events set up by a St. Louis radio station:

Over a period of time, the station did a lot of remotes and personal appearances, sending personalities to locations where they'd come in contact with listeners.  The goal was to bring traffic to retail locations where their salespeople could turn the listeners into customers.

Almost always, the listeners showed up for the free hotdogs and t-shirts and nothing more. Remotes were such a bust...

One Monday, following a weekend remote, the station's Promotions Director was still mightily creeped out by a small group of listeners who had descended on her "show" the previous Saturday.

"WARTS!" she yelled.  "These people all had WARTS, all over their faces and arms, huge freakin' WARTS!  They were...the Wart People!"

It couldn't have been that bad, we reasoned with her, but she ranted on, saying she'd never do another remote.  Things worked out, she returned to service and I eventually wound up in the remote talent rotation.

Sure enough, they showed up at my first remote.  A whole herd of them, God love 'em.  Mother and Father and kids, all warted-out from head to toe.  Not just a few warts, but Elephant Man sized warts.  These were seriously disfigured people, but they were our fans and core listeners and they quoted us chapter and verse and whatcha gonna do about that?

You couldn't help but be put off by all this disfigurement.  It was one of those I-can't-look-away things, like a highway disaster.  I didn't want to seem put-offish, but I kept my polite distance and let someone else serve them hot dogs.

We learned over the years how to accomodate their presence at remotes they always attended and how to gently keep them away from clients and other listeners but they always showed up and they never got rid of their warts. And they always got free hot dogs and t-shirts.

But, wait:  there's more!

Some years later, during a reunion of the old guard at that station, I sat, with drink in hand, as our former Promotions Director told me the rest of the story.

"I sat with them on a retaining wall at a car dealer once," she said.

"I was closer to them than I had ever been," she said.

"That was when I noticed they had crabs (body lice) crawling all over them!"

Good God.  Thanks for letting us know, now, ten years later.

Lesson learned.  Touch a listener, pay the price.  I am SO glad that I had someone else hand the Wart People their hot dogs.

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