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Thursday, April 19, 2018

Autobiography Chapter 6 - Broadcasting Part 3: Radio During My College Years

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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