Category Archives: Personal History

Survey of radio newsrooms (1988)

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A big part of my job during my early days at Learfield was affiate relations. Periodically, I would survey the stations to learn more about how they used our news and sports. Here’s a snapshot from 1988.

  • 2/3 of stations had a full-time news person (I’ll bet it’s not 1/3 today)
  • I was insensitive or stupid or both in asking about sex. It was a different time.
  • Almost half had a wire service?! Amazing. Can’t be more than 10% now.
  • “Cassette recorders” – Ah, my favorite. A world before digital recording.

Back in those pre-web days, we also did a newsletter each month. One page, front and back. I typed it on a typewriter, made copies and put them in the mail. Example: Missourinet newsletter – Jan87

The whole process now seems … quaint. Typewriters and envelopes, once a month. But there was a simplicity that seems appealing in retrospect.

There is no 26 Year Pin

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Today marks the beginning of my 27th year at Learfield, the company I work for. There’s not much to say that I haven’t shared here already. On my drive to the Coffee Zone, I made a mental list of those who have been with the company longer: Clyde, Clarice, Joyce, Roger, Greg, Charlie, Bob… that’s about it.

The nature of our business has changed a good bit but the culture is –remarkably– still pretty much intact. No small feat, given that we now have hundreds of employees in offices scattered throughout the company. But our senior managers make a real effort at sharing the best of who we are as a company with new employees.

So this is one of those “If you’re happy and you know it, grab your ass!” posts. And if pushed to finish with a bit of wisdom, it might be that the company you work for and the people you work with are as important as the work you are doing.

The Log Cabin

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“The Log Cabin was famous for its barbecue sandwiches and curb-service beer. You simply pulled into the pot-holed parking lot surrounding the tiny building… tooted your horn… and a waitress could come out to the car and take your order. If it was dark enough or the waitress was in a good mood… it was possible to buy a beer before reaching legal drinking age. I have no idea what kind of license allowed them to do business this way.”
Wow. This is a rare find, indeed. I have never seen a photo of the Log Cabin. I’m not sure how someone got this one without getting a serious ass kicking. The Log Cabin parking lot was dark! If the Log Cabin fry cooks didn’t invent curly fries, they perfected them. [Photo courtesy of Dennis Dean]

The president and my First Lady

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Earlier this year, Barb attended an event for President Obama in St. Louis. I’m pretty sure you only got a hug if you wrote a check but it’s still a nice picture.

I’m not thrilled with everything our president has done (or not done) but if I were, someone else would be pissed, so…

I wish him well.

“Miss Perry, take a letter, please”

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One of my mother’s many talents was shorthand transcription. A skill she used during her early working career. In those ancient times, people would dictate a memo or a letter and mom would write it down using something called Gregg shorthand.

I assume she took her “steno pad” back to her desk where she’d roll some typing paper and carbon sheets into the old manual typewriter and bang out a few copies which, I assume, got marked up with corrections, and she’d do it again.

I was reminded of this painful process recently when I heard Barb dictating a memo on her iPhone using Dragon Dictation. I’m just not sure how it gets much easier (but it will).

In a few years we’ll look at our huge 3-ring binders and drawers full of paper and shake our heads in wonder. But some folks just have to hold the paper in their hands. The numbers/words are just less real if not printed. One wonders of the iPad and similar future devices (digital paper) will change this.

One of my next projects is to convert the few remaining paper artifacts in my desk to PDF. I think I can get pretty close to paperless in my work life. I’m close.

Speaking of paperless…

I’m nearly finished with my first ebook. It was a very good experience. My beloved paper books will undoubetedly go the way of my vinyl LPs. Alas.

Nothing on my mind

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I’ve been reading about and practicing meditation for a couple of years with the goal of a quiet mind, free from thoughts, for half an hour.

(If you’re an experienced practitioner of meditation, please don’t write to tell me what I’m doing wrong. I will stipulate that.)

I don’t know at what age we have our first thoughts. But once they start, they don’t stop, except when we’re asleep. (Do we think when we’re asleep? Are dreams thoughts?)

Most of us believe we “choose” our thoughts. I can think about a banana… and then switch to a porcupine. If that’s true, it would seem to follow we can choose NOT to think. I have no idea if that is, in fact, possible. But maybe we can reduce the number and “volume” of our thoughts. Sort of like the relative quiet that comes after turning off a blaring television.

Why bother, one might ask. Well, it is restful and pleasant and might have health benefits (But let’s not go there.) I’m also curious about what I might “hear” if I can tune out all of the static.

Back in my radio days, one of the “sign-on” procedures involved warming up the station transmitter. Once it was ready, you punched a button that turned on the carrier (wave). Then I’d walk back into the control room, open the mic, and read the sign-on announcment.

If a listener had their radio tuned to our frequency (830), they would hear a low hum for those few seconds before I began talking.

That’s the “almost silence” I’m shooting for. Who know what signal might be hidden by the noise of our daily thoughts?

UPS has their iPad game face ON

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Just had a visit from Jake Green. Jake is the manager of the local UPS office and, although today is his day off, he drove out to our house to verify someone at this address had ordered an iPad.

UPS had been calling my office number and got no answer. So Jake was just checking. Seems UPS has an elaborate security protocol for iPad deliveries. A few mistakenly got on trucks for delivery and frantic calls went out to drivers instructing them NOT to deliver.

The Jefferson City UPS office is delivering 20 iPads today. Mine is on a truck with 14 others. UPS is taking this as seriously as Apple. Very impressive.

I don’t own a suit

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I bought my first suits in 1971. A gray one and and brown one, both in a nice polyester blend. I was getting ready to start my ill-fated career as a U. S. Postal Inspector and the suits were exactly what you’d expect a fed to wear.

A year later I was a small town radio guy and the suits were traded for Hawaiian shirts and Levis. It was a dozen years before I again needed a suit. All the managers at Learfield wore suits in 1984. Even when calling on an affiliate radio station in Tarkio, MO.

Over the next 15 years or so, I accumulated about a dozen suits that you’d have to examine closely to tell one from the other. They’ve been hanging in my closet since I tunneled out of the executive suite and into cyberspace several years ago.

Today I loaded them up and took them to the local Goodwill. And it felt great. Oh, I’ll probably need a suit again some day (can you rent a suit?) But for now, it’s business casual on the dressy end and Hawaiian shirts and Levis the rest of the time.

“My head is in the cloud”

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Dave Pell (“Tweetage Wasteland”) describes a condition in which more of us are finding ourselves:

“My phone tells me numbers, Facebook reminds me of birthdays, my nav system gives me directions, Google tells me how to spell, my bookmarks remind me of what I’ve read, my inbox tells me who I’m having a conversation with – my mind has been distributed across several devices and services.

My head is in the cloud.

Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster stream.”

Yeah, I think about that, too. But I’m not sure I would have remembered all of that stuff without the cloud and my connections to it.

On a somewhat related note… my Facebook “cancellation” takes effect on Sunday. I canceled my account a few weeks ago. FB gave me the option of “deactivation” but I said, no,  please delete my account. Seems FB makes you wait a few weeks, in hopes you will come to your senses.

I wouldn’t normally give such a decision a second thought but Facebook has become The Place (for the time being) and I should probably be there. But I’m not. And don’t expect to be. But I’ve come up with a rationalization:

We have a finite amount of time and attention. It’s impossible to be in every social space. Assuming that everyone on the planet is –or soon will be– on Facebook, taking a pass will protect the little attention I have left.

ShowMeGaming.com (3 years later)

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Three years ago I helped my friend LeAnn McCarthy set up a blog to help with her communications efforts as Public Information Officer for the Missouri Gaming Commission.

Last week I sat down with LeAnn to see how the blog was working out. She talked about her target audience(s); content; response (internal and external) and other social media tools.

AUDIO: 10 min MP3