Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #12 / Henry LaRocca at KTRM

This one ticks more boxes - orange and black color combo, of something through something, framed with neat stuff, and a lantern to boot...
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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
Henry LaRocca was also a very interesting character.  He and I actually became pretty close as friends, to the point of double-dating and visiting each other's homes.  His father was a plumber, and Henry was officially on the payroll and worked to help whenever he could.  But his first love was radio, and boy was he good on the air...he had an excellent, deep voice for radio and possessed a quick wit that entertained his listeners and helped to develop quite a following.

Henry also was a good guy at heart, but didn't have many real friends (I didn't either my junior year in high school, being new to Beaumont and BCP) so we spent a lot of time together.  It's interesting that later on our shows went head-to-head in competition with each other, after I moved to KLVI, and our friendship waned after that.  But I'll always remember my association with him as a positive thing, and wish him the best in whatever he's done with his life.


Henry LaRocca - just a teenager like myself

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #11 / Jim Lago at KTRM

This ticks all the boxes - good reflection, colors against black background, contrast with subject, and basketball to boot...
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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
I cannot think about KTRM without thinking about Jim Lago.  Jim was good on the air, but definitely had a few rough edges.  At heart he was a good man, however, and I learned a life lesson from him later on, during the summer of 1977 when I was at Channel 6.  Jim was hired on as weekend weather guy, and during one weathercast I was behind camera three as usual.  When the director cut to my camera it was trained on Jim, who started to talk when the red light came on.  Thing was, nobody heard anything!  Over the headphones the director was in minor panic mode, asking me what was going on.  I noticed on the camera's monitor that Jim wasn't mic'd up.  Seeing this, I stepped out from behind the camera, made a gesture that he wasn't wearing his microphone, and instantly he ad-libbed a sentence or two (not that anybody could hear it) while, right one the air during the weathercast, he stepped behind the weatherboard, slung a lavaliere around his neck, and carried on.

In a few minutes, when the cast was over and we'd cut to commercial, Jim headed straight for me, patted me on the back and thanked me for bailing him out.  There had been friction from our days at KTRM, but immediately all of the animosity from the past evaporated!  It was an incredibly good feeling.  Later in life, when I cared about reading such things, the Bible passage came to my attention that says, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." (I Peter 4:8, NIV)

In another aside, more than 30 years later I was in Corpus Christi for a conference of some sort.  One day while there I turned on the radio in the car, and who comes out of the speaker but Jim Lago!  This time he was hosting a local conservative talk show.  Though this was more than 30 years later he still sounded the same, but obviously had mellowed out a lot.  And some of the things he said led me to believe that he may have even turned to Christ in the meantime.  If that's the case then I'll look very much forward to seeing him later on...


Jim Lago

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #10 / Interesting Characters

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
One thing I enjoyed about working for a bigger station in a bigger market was the people that crossed your path.  They were more interesting...out there in the sticks at KOBS, no one crossed your path except the next guy on the air and the Kobs family.

One night I was on in the middle of my shift and was by myself at KTRM.  Suddenly this guy walks into the studio with some records in his hand.  He was a country artist trying to get some airplay for his recordings whenever he could - this was the days before streaming, Spotify, etc. when getting your song on the radio was the best way to promote your material or be heard by someone that could give you your big break in the business.  So this guy wanted me to play his music right then and there, but I had the presence of mind to say no, telling him to leave me a copy so that I could give it to the music director.  He was disappointed, but thanked me and walked out without getting nasty about it.

Another time I got a phone call about 3:30 a.m. or so on the hot line from a Jody Powell.  Now the hot line was an unlisted number that very few people knew about.  He wanted to talk to Keven Brennan, our news director.  After a short and pleasant conversation about where Kevin might be (asleep) I pressed him for details so that I could leave him a message.  That's when he revealed that he was President Carter's press secretary, obviously catching on to the fact that I had no idea, even after hearing the name.  I was impressed, but asked myself after hanging up, "Don't these people sleep?"  Kevin came in around 5:00 to prepare his news, and when I gave him the message he seemed to be neither surprised nor excited.

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #9 / Marty's Surprise

The wife and I occasionally watch American Pickers, a pretty good show about a couple of guys roaming the countryside looking for old and beat up stuff to buy and then sell.  It's amazing how they'll pick something up that looks way past its prime - even rusty and falling apart - and see a diamond in the rough.

This oversized coffee cup reminds me of that concept.  There's a certain beauty in things that are old and beat up, way past their prime, but still standing tall and proud.  There's a bit of nostalgia offered as well.

This pic also turned into one of my favorite Found Edges effects in Photoshop, which will be posted tomorrow...
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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 09/05]
Marty Adelman - mentioned a couple of days ago - was by far my favorite guy there at KTRM.  He was a short, ugly fellow but very nice and easy to get along with.  And good on the air, too.  We continued to work together after leaving KTRM, as he took a part-time booth announcing job later at Channel 6 when I was there.

One night Marty was doing his show before I came on, and there was a problem with the network feed.  Whenever it cut out on him, Marty had to get on the air lickety split to cover for the dead air.  Well, on this particular night he had his girlfriend at the station with him, and was cut from network just as his girl decide to crawl under the board and squeeze his knee.  It was hilarious to see him in that emergency mode trying to sound professional while fighting both his laughter and that woman.  But somehow he pulled it off.


My friend Marty

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #8 / POOF Goes the Newsroom

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[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.

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #7 / Move to KTRM

Sometimes the signage was on the move...

This guy made easy money, as all he did was slowly wend his way through the crowds in the Youth Shopping District.

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
My time at KOBS was indeed a wonderful experience, full of memories and pride in where I worked.  But it was time to move on; due to an alignment of unfortunate circumstances it became more and more painful to make that drive to my old hometown of Orange.  So I used the reel-to-reel machines in the studio to make some air checks, and applied at KTRM in Beaumont, a country music AM station.

Now these were the days when KTRM occupied an old white one-story house on some property adjacent to Parkdale Mall.  The living room was partitioned to make rooms for a reception desk and office space, and the bedrooms were converted into a transmitter room, the broadcast and production studios, and a newsroom.  Seeing real modern broadcast equipment and being around real professional broadcasters in a much larger city made me feel like I'd hit the big time.

The reason I got hired there was because their part-time weekend guy, Ray Gedaley, had given his notice and they needed someone to take his place to work the midnight-to-six shift on weekends.  I had befriended Henry LaRocca at Beaumont-Charlton Pollard High School and he helped me get a foot in the door.  Also there at that time were Kevin Brennan in news, Robert "X" Brown, Gary Powers as program director, and a midnight-to-six guy that was the music director.  Jim Lago also worked there, and Marty Adelman.

I was trained by Ray Gedaley and Gary Powers, and must admit was more than a little intimidated by the technology and much higher level of professionalism.  There were cart machines that utilized primary, secondary and tertiary lighted cues; timing of songs and announcements had to be exact, down to the second, to hit the network news just right; answering more than one phone line for a much broader audience; monitoring a hot line for VIP's and emergency broadcasts, etc. etc.  Also I had to learn a whole new genre of music, changing from Top 40 to Country (mostly classic).  Later on I would learn to handle the board for remote broadcasts and sports games, and would occasionally substitute for an absentee.  All of this was quite a change and a giant step up from what I'd experienced at KOBS.

Yours truly operating the board at KTRM.  As can be compared with this post, the equipment was professional - not homemade like at KOBS.  Note the carts to my left, something that was beyond what Mr. Kobs was willing to pay for on his shoestring budget.

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #6 / An Afterword re Mr. Kobs

This was in the Ximending Youth Shopping District.  Very trendy, with signage to match:

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
The experiences I had at KOBS remain pivotal in my formative years of growing up in Orange.  Long after leaving the business I would occasionally drive by the place to just look and remember those days with nostalgia, and in doing so noted with a tinge of sadness the inevitability of change and the end of all things as we know them.  Just a year into college I saw that the Kobs' had built a new house on their property just outside the fenced-in acreage on which the station sat.  It was right around the time that he sold the station to a company that changed the call letters to KZOM and turned it into a professional outfit.  Suppose that was inevitable, and I'll bet Kobs got a pretty penny for the rights to the frequency.  I even was so bold one day as to knock on the door of the old station; the KZOM DJ greeted me and generously showed me around.  The basic layout and furnishings were the same but of course the homemade transmitter and board engineered by their genius inventor were long gone.

Even until recently I've occasionally had dreams of being back in that spare studio working the board and crafting my own show...maybe subconsciously wondering if I still have what it takes to duplicate the energy of my youthful endeavors.

But something that happened very recently took me by surprise.  I was with my brother Mike just a couple of years ago, in 2018, and we were on our way from a visit to Mom's grave in Orange driving back to Beaumont.  On the way we decided to stop by the old station site to have a look.  We arrived at the end of the paved section of Kobs Korner and saw someone on a small front-loader clearing some brush and maintaining the property immediately surrounding the small building that housed the station, which was still there.

Turns out the guy doing the work owned the property now, as KZOM had moved to new and more accessible digs. This fellow knew the history of the place going back to the '70's since he'd grown up in one of the houses nearby.  He filled us in on what happened in the intervening years.  He described how the tower had finally been knocked down and dismantled.  The old studio building now served as a junk shed, but the same old steps were there on which Mrs. Kobs placed the key for my return so many years ago.  These things were interesting to us, but when I asked about the Kobs family and what became of them he revealed that Mrs. Kobs had passed away a dozen years before, but Mr. Kobs, now in his 90's, was STILL ALIVE, active, living in the same house he'd built in the late '70's, and puttering about town in an old Cadillac!  His daughter, the music director, was living there taking care of him.

As we were leaving I saw Kobs' house and fleetingly wondered if I should stop and say hi.  But the thought was quickly quelled.  I'd worked for him when I was 16, and now I was 60 years old.  Does this guy really want to be haunted by one of his old DJ's from the past...why give the old man a heart attack?  So we drove on, secure that the place had served its purpose in its time for all of us, and it's best to just move on...

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #5 / Air Checks

[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
Sometimes while at KOBS I would have Brent Holland record parts of my show on his 8-track system at home.  We did this twice; once earlier on and again during my last day on the air (the second time around).  That last day I brought in my own music - borrowed from my brother Allan's collection - and created a special show for the last hour.  I don't know what happened to the first tape, but the second one was later converted to cassette tape, then, decades later, onto a CD.

Recently - in 2016 - this old CD re-surfaced and I decided to listen to this show in the car on the way to church with the wife.  Though proud that I'd had these experiences, and my times as a DJ often provided fodder for stories around the dinner table, after so many years I was shocked at what I sounded like and what actually made it out over the air.  I determined that my kids would never, ever listen to this, and destroyed the CD immediately after returning home.  Must've been in a bad mood.

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #4 / Creepy Listener

[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
As mentioned in yesterday's post, my parents got a divorce and my dad moved to Beaumont to start his new family...this would have been around 1975.  Before moving to Beaumont to join him myself, my little brother and I continued to live with Mom.  During this void my mom rented out one of our bedrooms to help make ends meet.  The first renter was a guy named Maurice, a young fellow probably in his early 20's.

I didn't take much time to get to know him, but this Maurice became a fan of the show, and would occasionally mention that he heard me do this or that on the air.  Nothing really unusual, until one day he told me that he listened to my entire 8-hour shift - every minute, without even going to the bathroom.  WOW...it really, really gave me the creeps that someone would do that, so from then on I avoided contact with him on even the most casual basis.  Don't know what eventually became of him, but wish him well nonetheless...

Taiwan - Taipei Street Scenes, Signage #3 / Defection and Return

Saw an opportunity here, so applied glowing edges to the foot:

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 05/09]
I took sort of a leave of absence once during my tenure at KOBS.  My parents had gotten a divorce, and my father remarried and moved to Beaumont.  I made the decision to move to Beaumont with him and his new family, and decided to quit radio work so that I wouldn't have to drive to Orange all the time and create stress for the family.  I took a job at Market Basket on Calder, but hated it.  After a few months there I told Dad of my misery and he let me call Kobs to see if something was open.

Now KOBS was a rock-bottom, barely-alive station that, as mentioned in earlier posts, was built from scratch from the ground up.  It is doubtful that sales came at all close to covering expenses.  And in spite of the fact that it was an FM station it didn't even broadcast in stereo because it would have cost so much more to build and operate.  So Kobs hired rock-bottom talent as well - in other words, those with no experience at all such as myself who would work for minimum wage.  Anyone who was worth anything as an announcer considered the place just a launching pad to bigger and better markets, and a lot of jocks in the Beaumont-Port Arthur stations got their start there (again, including myself).  This created a sort of revolving door, and left Kobs in the lurch sometimes for DJ announcers.  In fact, the length of the shifts we had to work reflected this; if there was no shortage of announcers we worked four-hour shows like the other stations...when the DJ's were pulling 8-hour shifts you knew someone quit and new-hires weren't yet hired to take their place.  When things got desperate Kobs himself worked as a DJ using the air name "Chuck Hubert".

Well, I'd been listening in, and hearing Kobs do his show gave me confidence that I'd have no trouble coming back into the fold.  I called the station and his wife answered.  Mrs. Kobs and I never got along well, but when she heard my request she actually sounded excited, and told me to come in to sign on the following day...the key would, literally, be under the mat.  The next morning I drove there from Beaumont, got the key from under the mat and signed on as if no time had passed at all.  They arrived at their usual business hours and said they were glad to see me.