CHAPTER 6 Broadcasting
Memories, Part 3: Radio During My College Years
by Paul Pakusch
While I was a senior in high school, a family friend gave me
the birthday gift of several nights spent in his dorm room at SUNY
Geneseo. I was looking for a college to
attend and he thought it would be a nice way for me to experience college
life. He also included meal coupons in
the package deal so I could eat.
I spent many hours of that time on campus at the college
radio stations, WGBC-AM and WGSU-FM, chatting with other Communications
students and learning how college radio worked.
WGBC was a carrier current station, meaning it used a building’s
electrical system as an antenna. There were small transmitters in each of the
dorm buildings, broadcasting at 640 AM.
It could only be picked up on radio receivers within or very close to
the building, much like WiFi is today.
WGSU was and still is a licensed FM station that broadcasts to the local
community at 89.3.
It was a no brainer for me to choose SUNY Geneseo. It was affordable, it was close by, and it
had the communications program that I wanted.
Since I didn’t have a car yet, it was also conveniently on the Trailways
bus route.
My mom, family friend Ruth and sisters gave me the
complimentary first ride to campus. I
was to share my dorm room with two other freshman; we were the first to
arrive. After checking into my room, my
mom noticed that there were some knobs missing from the dresser that I chose as
my own. She unscrewed a couple of them
from one of the other dressers to put on mine, leaving the other two dressers
with knobs missing. We were out of the
room when my other two roommates, Vinnie and David, arrived. Apparently
Vinnie’s family did the same thing. Later on, when I met them, David told me he
had been the last one to arrive. He
said, “Funny thing we noticed. When I got
here, the dresser I got didn’t have any knobs on it.”
After my family left, I wasted no time heading up to the
Blake B building, where the two radio stations were located. WGBC was on the top floor and WGSU was down
in the basement. I met the student
managers of the stations. Neither was
offering any DJ slots for new students yet, so I had to wait for auditions
before I could start.
If you read my chapter about WGMC, you’ll recall that I had
speech impediments due to my hearing loss. I never liked the way I sounded
during my high school years. Starting in
college radio, I still had some issues to overcome, but it was at WGBC and WGSU
that I honed my radio announcing skills.
I was also able to get speech therapy, which if memory serves correctly,
came in 1980. There were two older girls
who did the therapy for me. They were
both seniors in the speech pathology program.
I was one of the cases in their student teaching programs. They would analyze my speech patterns and
come back at the next session with methods to help me overcome my
impediments. They had a teacher who
would listen in on the sessions to monitor my progress and evaluate their work
with me. It was an actual course for me
as well since I got college credit for it.
It didn’t take long for me to get past the required
auditions for DJ slots at the two campus stations, and I kept them for every
single semester of my college years. In
addition to shifts that played the standard formats of both stations, I was
also offered a rock and roll oldies show on WGSU, which I hosted for a couple
years. I continued doing newscasts as
well.
I held director and management positions at both
stations. At WGSU, I was Production
Director during my junior year, and at WGBC, I was Station Manager for my senior
year. A number of my campus colleagues
moved on to careers in radio and TV.
Quite a few ended up in the Rochester market; others moved on to other
parts of the country.
I did get involved with the campus TV station, GSTV, but it
was more of a footnote compared to campus radio. I did some news anchoring and studio camera
my first couple of years.
My college classes were all about radio and TV. There were the required core classes, of
course, but the ones that excited me were Radio Production, TV Production,
Radio & TV Writing, Newspaper Writing, Public Speaking, Fiction Writing,
Poetry Writing and similar courses. Many
people graduate from college with a degree that they never use; I’m happy I’ve
been able to benefit at times in my life from most of the courses that I took
in college.
In my sophomore year, I got a job as a DJ at the Statesmen
Bar. It could have happened sooner, but
Leona’s policy was not to hire freshmen.
Tony and Leona Battaglia were the owners of the Statesmen. I heard that Tony was the first person to get
a liquor license in Geneseo after Prohibition ended. I started going to the Statesmen soon after
starting college in the Fall of 1979. Leona told me she believed freshmen
should get settled in schoolwork their first year, so I would have to wait a
year before becoming employed at the Statesmen.
In the meantime, she waived my admission fee every time I went there. As soon as my sophomore year started, she
hired me as a DJ.
A disco floor had
been built in the back room, complete with mirror balls, flashing colored
lights, and a DJ booth. This was where I
developed some of the dance moves I have today; some of it was by copying other
people I saw dancing and some of it was from improvising my own moves. When I
hear certain disco songs today, my mind goes back to the Statesmen and I can
vividly picture being on the dance floor.
Among my favorites, still today, are “Heart of Glass,” “Shake Your Body
Down to the Ground,” “Born to Be Alive,” “Rapper’s Delight,” “Bad Girls,”
“MacArthur Park,” and “Ring My Bell,” which always got Leona on the dance floor
with her finger cymbals.
DJ’ing at the Statesmen was pretty easy. All I had to do was play the regular
favorites and include new songs. It
wasn’t all disco; we had new songs from the Urban Cowboy soundtrack, Bruce
Springsteen’s “River” album, and some New Wave tracks. We were supposed to push
the drink specials from time to time. Every night ended with Donna Summers’
“Last Dance.” We were to never play it
until the night was over.
My DJ job at the Statesmen lasted only for the Fall semester
of 1980. I quit because I had also
started a weekend job at WPXY over the summer.
Leona was not happy about my leaving; she had expected me to stay the
full year. I told her my career goal was
in radio and that I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to work at a radio
station. She lost her chance with me by
not hiring me as a freshman, the year before.
The problem I ran into was that my weekend shifts at WPXY started at
6:00 AM. I finished at the Statesmen at
1:00 the night before. It meant getting
a few hours of sleep and then getting up early enough to drive from Geneseo to
be at my job in Rochester by 6:00. Leona
asked me if I could recommend anyone else; I recommended my friend, Sharon, and she was hired.
My job at WPXY over the summer of 1980 began as a full-time
automation operator. It was part of the
AM-FM combo originally at WROC-TV. The company that owned the TV station had
sold the radio stations. By 1980,
WROC-AM was an all-talk station with the call letters WPXN. It was being moved out of the historic
building on Humboldt Street and into office space at the Chamber of Commerce
building on St. Paul Street in downtown Rochester. The automation system, similar to the one I
had operated at WEZO, was in the TV transmitter building on Pinnacle Hill.
The automation was set up in the future sales manager’s
office while the rest of the space was being renovated into offices and radio
studios. As was the case at WEZO, my job
was to change the reels of music, keep the commercials up to date in the cart
carousels, and make sure the weather forecasts and news broadcasts got recorded
and ready for playback. As the studios
were being completed, the automation equipment was moved into its new home, and
new radio equipment was installed in the other studios.
When summer ended and I went back to college, I changed my
hours to weekend mornings. WPXN was
changing, too. They started doing away
with talk radio and changed the format to a mellow music type of format, which
added to my duties. In addition to
overseeing the automation for WPXY, I would now be running the board manually
for WPXN. The music was provided on
reels of tape, just like WPXY, but nothing was automated. We still provided regular news updates live
from the news booth and we carried Rochester Red Wing baseball games, which I
engineered during my shifts.
By the summer of 1981, I was dating Mary. We came up with an arrangement for me to live at her house in Saugerties, NY, during summer vacation, so I quit my job at WPXN-WPXY. I had worked there a full year.
I needed to support myself while I was in Saugerties. I got a job working five overnights a week at
the Malden Thruway rest stop as a cleaner and dishwasher. I also got a job working weekend overnights
at WJJB-WHPN in Hyde Park, NY. This
became the job I had where I never met my boss.
I had sent resumes to various radio stations near
Saugerties, hoping to continue my radio career for the summer. A program director, I don’t remember his
name, called me one day and, based on my previous automation experience, hired
me over the phone to work weekend overnights.
I was to work something like 12:00 midnight to 7:00 or 8:00 in the
morning. Training consisted of my
showing up at 11:30 the first night so the previous operator could show me the
ropes for a half hour. So, I’d babysit
WJJB-FM for the overnight hours. Then at
6:00, I’d sign on WHPN-AM and run religious programs until the end of my
shift. I never saw anyone except the
operators before and after me. After a
few weekends of this, my schedule at the Thruway stop changed and the radio hours
became a conflict. I had to choose the
job that was earning more money for me, so I called up the program director and
told him I had no choice but to quit.
That was it. I never met my boss.
After returning to school in the Fall of 1981, I once again
obtained employment in radio. This time,
a former colleague from WNYR-WEZO, Nelson Guyette, had become program director
of the legendary WSAY in Rochester and he hired me for weekend board
shifts. WSAY was no longer owned by
Gordon Brown, who had passed away a couple years earlier. The new owner was Lou Dickie, and he had
changed the format to an adult contemporary station. The legendary team of Jack Slattery and
George Haefner had been hired away from WHAM for the morning program.
My weekend shifts were 12:00 midnight Saturday to 9:00
Sunday morning, 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM Sunday, and 10:00 PM Sunday to 5:30 Monday
morning. Then I’d curl up in a sleeping
bag in one of the offices for a couple hours of sleep before going to Geneseo
for my classes. Mary was with me on a
lot of those Sunday overnights so we could drive to school together.
While I was employed at WSAY, the format and call letters
changed to all-talk WRTK. In June of
1982, I was hired for a full-time summer position in the control room and
studio of WROC Channel 8. The start of
my career in television will be the subject of my next chapter.
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