Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Motorcycles with Stone Bridge / Studio Setup at KOBS

Many times we'd be at a restaurant, and while the others were in conversation after eating I'd get up with the Bigger Cahoona and traipse the streets nearby looking for things to capture.  There certainly wasn't any lack of subjects, and it was fun just being off by myself.

I was going to do something about the motorcycles at the bottom of this frame, but decided that they enhanced the image instead of detracting from it...
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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
The board was equally interesting...built entirely from scratch and laid out on a plywood table in the familiar U-shape of most radio station studios of the time.  Thing is, the plywood was only 5/8-inch thick or so, and when a record was going the DJ had to be very careful not to bump it and make the song skip.  The pots (large round turn-dials) and on-air switches were very simple, with a switch below each pot that toggled to the left for cueing and right for on-air.  The two turntables were to the right, and two reel-to-reel tape machines for playing PSAs and commercials were on the left, with a homemade peg-board of sorts above them for storage of the reels.  KOBS operated on such a shoe-string budget that Kobs either could not afford or would not buy cart machines, which were used in every other radio station in the market at the time.

Speaking of shoe-string budget - Kobs didn't have any teletype machines for news, either.  On the way to the station, it was the morning DJ's responsibility to buy several newspapers which served as the sole source of news form KOBS.  We bought the Houston Post (which I favored over the Chronicle), the Beaumont Enterprise, and the Orange Leader.  During the first hour while the songs were playing we would cut the stories we thought were interesting and read them at the top of each hour - first international, then national, then state, and finally local news, in that order.  Figure this - we were just kids at the time, mere teenagers, and functioned as news directors, editors, and on-air broadcasters for every newscast we did during our shift.  As long as we didn't do anything real goofy everything was okay with Kobs.

And the music setup was interesting, also.  Mr. and Mrs. Kobs (and, supposedly, their 8-year-old daughter the music director) held a tight reign on the songs we played, partly because they were Puritan-caliber religious fanatics.  In actuality Mrs. Kobs did most of the actual music directing, and at the beginning of our shift we would see on a shelf in the back of the studio our music for the day; a stack of about 20 albums, with 50 or 60 45's sitting on top.  The hot top-40 hits of the day were always kept in a separate stack on the board for every DJ to play in semi-rotation.  It was always a suspenseful moment to see what music you were allowed to play during your shift.

There was a lone phone (745-2222) on the console to the left of the board.  It was the old rotary type.  Being in the studio with a live mic on at times, it didn't ring - Kobs rigged a light in front of it that resembled one of those old gumball machines they used to have on top of police cars (only much smaller), which blinked whenever a call came in.  Oddly, we were not allowed to give the phone number out on the air, but anybody could look up the number and call in a request.

The station itself was located way on the outskirts of town - a 7.5-mile bicycle ride for me - in the sticks of the land Kobs had bought.  As stated in yesterday's post, the road that turned into the station was named Kobs Korner, which was paved and straight for a short distance, at the end of which was a gate held in place with some wire.  Beyond the gate the road turned into a curving, rutted shell-top (which can be seen on Google Maps), and when it rained real hard the entire thing would be under water, which for me was tricky to negotiate on my bike in the dark whenever I had either the morning shift or closed down at night.  I used a flashlight, or the moonlight when I didn't think to bring one, to identify the roadway by seeing where the tall grass came up on either side.  The utter peace and solitude of the place, though, was a great salve to my soul during the turbulent teen-age years.

It was truly an amazing place and an incredible adventure to work for KOBS.  And as it so happens, Jason Blalock and I both got a job there within a week of each other.  Pictured below are a couple I took of during our days there with an old Instamatic.



Yours Truly at the board, in my white leisure suit no less (sans jacket):

The music stack:

The throne.  I used to play long songs to get the job done properly in here - "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John, at 6:50, was a favorite.