Radio & TV pranks.

My first job in radio was way back in 1977. I mostly did news, but sometimes filled in for DJ’s who were on vacation or sick or whatever.

Playing music was fun.

Unlike today’s heavily formatted and structured radio stations, we had a good deal of flexibility, within formatic boundaries. The music was on records, known today as “vinyl” and we played both 45 and 33 rpm records, alternating between two turntables in the studio.

That means while a record was playing on turntable 1, you cued up another record on turntable 2. All while answering the phone, checking the AP wire machine, loading the commercials into the cart machines, figuring out what you were going to say, and what you had to say, and looking at the clock and doing math in your head so you could make sure the song ended at exactly :07 seconds before the top of the hour so you could play the Legal ID and hit the network news feed.

There were two distinctly fun parts about being a DJ back then. One was trying to “hit the post”. That means talking over the intro of the song right up until the vocal starts. Today, with all the music being on a computer, you see a digital countdown clock so you know how much time you have. In the 70’s you timed the intro, memorized it, and winged it. No net.

The other fun part was seguing the records. It was an art that has been lost, also because of computers. Segues today are done automatically. When the song is loaded into a computer, it gets an EOM marker. EOM stands for End of Message or End of Media. The marker automatically fires the next audio element, making the DJ irrelevant.

When we had turntables, we were artists. Pronounced, “Ar-TEESTS.” Sometimes we crashed and burned, but sometimes it was sonic heaven.

Today, when you start a song-set of, say, three songs, you can leave the studio and get a haircut. The computer does everything. In my day, you young whippersnapper, we had to play long songs if we wanted a haircut. Stairway to Heaven, American Pie, Freebird, Do You Feel Like We Do? (Live version) came in handy when Mother Nature called.

There was also a certain amount of due diligence required if you were in the AM studio where I started, because certain people were pranksters and they cared little if they messed up your show.

For instance, they might come in to tell you something, and while they were leaning over the counter they’d slip the turntable - cued up and ready to play a 33 rpm record - into 45, and you’d start the record and it would sound like the chipmunks singing Baby Come Back.

I remember one time somebody took the audio cart that was pre-recorded with women saying, “Good afternoon, Delmarva!” and they replaced it with farting sound effects. The DJ started his record, and hit the cart to play over the musical intro of the song, and instead of a smooth, welcoming voice…listeners were treated to the sounds of a Taco Bell restroom.

The pranks weren’t just limited to the DJ’s. They pranked the news guys too. One time I was reading the news live on the air, and somebody came up with a Bic lighter and set my copy on fire. Another time, this one at WBOC-FM, our sports anchor was doing his last newscast before moving on to a new gig in Baltimore. Chris Thomas did mostly TV sports, but was responsible for one radio newscast every afternoon. He never wrote it himself, and never pre-read it.

On his last day, the news writer handed him a stack of scripts, as usual, and Chris started reading them on the air. What he didn’t realize is…the top story was photocopied on every page. He read the first story, then said, ”In other news”…and he started reading the first story again. He caught it quickly and said, “I’m sorry, we already had that story.” He flipped to the third page and started reading, only to find out it was also the same story.

He realized he’d been pranked on his last day.

One night at WBOC-TV, our anchor Bill Jones was delivering the 11pm news live in the studio when somebody slipped up beside him…just off camera…and handed him a news bulletin.

It was a real news bulletin, pulled from the AP wire just a few minutes earlier, about the prince of some tiny foreign country who had been killed in a plane crash. Bill didn’t know what the story was about. He just saw the capital letters NEWS BULLETIN, and trusted that he should skip his next scheduled story and ready this bulletin on the air.

It read something like this, “The prince of whatever obscure island was killed in a plane crash tonight.” Then it got real interesting, because the prince’s name was about 20 letters long and had no vowels and was impossible for an American to pronounce. Which was exactly the point of the prank.

Bill was reading ahead as he spoke, as good anchors do, and he saw the name coming up. Like a true professional, he said, “And his name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.” That may have been the best recovery from a practical joke I ever saw.

That happened before we got a teleprompter. After we got the prompter, the pranks continued but became more high tech.

The teleprompter, in those days, was basically a conveyor belt where you placed the typed news copy, face up. The anchor held a control in his hand that started and stopped the conveyor belt, and adjusted the speed of it, as it passed under a small camera. That camera projected the copy onto a one-way mirror mounted on the lens of the studio camera. We took turns loading the news copy onto the conveyor belt for each other.

One day I was anchoring the news at noon, minding my own business, when my colleague loading the prompter put a Playboy centerfold on the belt and disabled my remote control. Of course nobody could see it except me, but I turned beet red and had to finish the segment trying to keep a straight face.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t my worst day in the TV studio. Two embarrassing events happened that I can’t blame on anybody.

One day, during the Noon News, I was doing the weather and my throat just suddenly closed up. It felt like somebody had stabbed me in the neck, it hurt so bad. And I couldn’t speak.

I was the only person in the studio. The cameras were locked down. No prompter person. I tried clearing my throat but all I could get out was a whisper.

The director cut to a graphic of a weather map or something and I grabbed the bottle of Chloroseptic that was under the news desk on a shelf and sprayed my throat. It helped some but I finished the newscast with a voice just above a whisper. Fortunately it was towards the end of the newscast, but it was painful and embarrassing.

Finally, this classic. One Saturday night I was anchoring the 11 pm news. At about 10:50 there was a 10-second cutaway during the movie on CBS where I had to a live tease of the news at 11. Piece of cake. Three quick one-sentence headlines and an invitation to join us at 11 for details. I always memorized the headlines so I didn’t have to look down, and I could also keep an eye on the countdown clock. It was a hard out, meaning I HAD to be done in 10 seconds because we were rejoining the network.

On this night it went something like this: “Delaware lawmakers pass an important bill, the Salisbury Zoo gets a new Bear cub, and in sports…Maryland makes the N-double A-C P finals. Details at 11.”

As soon as I said NAACP I knew what I had done. Maryland had obviously made the NCAA finals. Not the NAACP finals. But there was no time to go back and fix it. I remember making a face and flipping my pen in the air as the director cut back to the movie.

A few minutes later, back in the newsroom, the hotline rang and I knew it was my news director calling. I was hoping he hadn’t seen that train wreck but the ringing phone indicated otherwise.

I answered it, expecting to be chewed out, and all I could hear was him trying to catch his breath and stop laughing. He said it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

I didn’t get fired, and thankfully it happened years before YouTube.