It was another one of those hot, muggy Summer mornings that found me on the air at WCAT 1390, navigating through the Sunday morning programming which featured the First Unitarian Church live services, a recorded segment of “Through The Bible” with Pastor Jim Willis and then back to music.

Pastor Jim Willis was a wonderful man. He and his wife lived in the parsonage on the common in Royalston (Mass) and he was a powerful preacher at the Royalston church. I can’t remember which denomination it was at this point, but I was a member and enjoyed it. Pastor Willis was also a local musician and played in a band – trombone, I think he played. It was a wonderful program that he recorded himself every week, a 15 minute message that the station aired and got to count it as “public service” programming, along with the church service.

After the church services, the recorded religous programming and other miscellaneous PSA-type stuff, I got to play disc jockey again. This was in the days before 24/7 religious programming, and it was typical to hear the Word of God and ten minutes later be playing an Elton John song or something. News was very full-service – 4 or 5 national stories from the Associated Press teletype machine in a little broom closet on the other side of the sales office, State news off the aforementioned printer, and some local stories, if anything happened of interest that I could write up from my calls to state and local police and fire departments. There were two spot breaks in this 6 minute newscast which ran at both the top and bottom of the hour, separating the news, sports and weather segments. Weather was so much more detailed. Wind speed/direction, dewpoint and the barometer reading given after the actual 3 day forecast in addition to temperature. Then a jingle into music.

Our leader… slavedriver, as then owner Dick Partridge would jokingly refer to himself in an email to me a couple of years ago, he dictated that we were NOT a big top 40 station, and we were not to play two and three spots in a row, but rather, he wanted to hear one commercial between each record. This theory was that his advertisers didnt want to hear their ads buried in a long commercial break because they (the advertisers) thought the listeners would tune out.

So, we’d play music until 1:05 PM, exactly. At that time, we would join the Campbell Sports Network via dedicated phone line to the flagship station of the Boston Red Sox, 1510 WITS, at least on days where there was a day game or unless there was a rain out.

This is how it was at the first station I worked at. The approximate date: August 1982. Somewhat typical of small market radio at the time. The format, the mix of Oldies and recurrent songs.. it really doesn’t matter at this point because in retrospect, what mattered most was that WCAT, and most small stations of that time, existed to turn a small profit and serve their community. The owner was a man who just loved radio. He had been on the air in the 1960s at WNEW Eleven-Three-Oh, and had been the national voice of Lucky Strikes cigarettes in the late 50s and 60s. He wasn’t a corporate bean counter, but rather someone who loved being on the microphone, and for whom the world of station ownership was a dream come true.

And that’s perhaps the biggest difference between radio today and that of my youth: Those who ran the show loved radio, and everything that came with it… the love of putting together a good sounding station, the community involvement, even the awe of knowing that an RF signal was leaving the antenna and arriving in the receiver of some radio, tens or even hundreds of miles away.. to be decoded, rectified and converted to an electrical signal driving a cardboard speaker which turned all the electrical whiz-bang stuff into audio that someone enjoyed listening to – and that some DJ in a studio was putting together all by himself with his own voice and hands starting the various players of these audio pieces.

You know, thinking back, its amazing that we radio folks put together radio shows with both hands busy, ears listening for cues while eyes were reading copy on an open mic, with no practice… and all done flawlessly, in one take! We were so busy during an airshift, we barely had time to run down the hall to go to the facilities! Tell me this didn’t take talent! And if you’re under the age of 30, you probably don’t realize that the airchecks of this stuff you hear here were recordings of people on the air playing music and putting all that audio candy together without the benefit of computers. It seems odd today… but back then, that’s how it was done. Everywhere. We EARNED our low pay. And now, when the average show consists of pushing a button on a touch-screen once or twice every 20 minutes and reading from a liner card, we wonder why there are very few live DJ’s anymore?