[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
There are a few adventures associated with my time at KTRM. One that comes to mind is the day I shorted out the newsroom. I had a friend at high school, an Iranian named Javid Jalali, who loved classical music. KIEL was a sister station that operated out of the same old converted house, featuring classical music. It operated automatically, playing big reel-to-reel tapes that had all of the music and most of the announcements on a big machine just outside the studio doors at KTRM. Well, I got the idea that I could just take one of those reel-to-reel tapes and dub it onto another given to me by Javid. Since I didn't want to disturb anything in the production studio I decided to make the dub in the newsroom before my show started at midnight.
I discovered that one of the reel-to-reel machines in the newsroom was unplugged, so I crawled under the board and attempted to plug it in among the maze of wires already there. Don't know technically what happened, but the plug obviously touched something it shouldn't have because the next thing I heard was a loud bang that sounded like it was just outside of the house. Then when I got out from under the board I found out that nothing in the newsroom had any electricity. Fortunately the damage was confined to that small place and we didn't get knocked off the air. Marty Adelman was on KTRM before me, and made the appropriate calls to get the newsroom back up and running before the morning local newscasts were scheduled to start.
The KIEL setup. This contraption played all the necessary music and announcements from reel-to-reel and cart machines automatically; all you had to do was keep up with what was plugged in and cued. The KTRM studio was through a door just on the other side, and the door to the production room was on the near side, immediately to the right of where I'm taking the picture.
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