Re: [IRCA] small station owner in a small market

["John Callarman" <JohnCallarman@xxxxxxx>]

Thank you, Paul, for your comprehensive and quick response to my late Sunday night query. It's a shame a fellow with your drive and determination couldn't have reached employable age in the early '50s or '60s when those of us who loved broadcasting could find that love at least partially requited. If you've read my posts on the loosy-goosy work I was able to do on my first full-time radio job in Oregon, you could tell it was fun to be on the air. Same thing happened at KIXZ-940 in Amarillo, which was thoroughly dominant Top 40 station in that market 1960-61 when I part-timed there while in my junior year at West Texas State. Playlist was, of course, stacked with locally charted Top 40 (don't by the PD's instinct rather than any scientific effort) but we had leeway to use lots of optional extras, including album cuts that tickled our fancy. We could still put on Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Bud & Travis album cuts to intersperse among the other material ... and we still had walk-ins from visiting artists ... Remember one night when Glen Gray and a couple of members of the still extant Casa Loma band knocked on our door an hour or so before midnight. My favorite KIXZ story concerns the week I was fired as the PD was told to drop two jocks by expanding air shifts from four to six hours. Saturday, I got my notice not to come in ... Sunday I got a frantic phone call ... An independent New York ad agency survey of high school kids in Amarillo determined that "Johnny Callan," the airname they gave me, was the most popular jock in Amarillo and, as I've told this story too often before, it's still true that they placed the Gillette Safety Razor account on my show, which continued without a hitch that Monday night. The Callan Caper continued.

I seem to recall that the best local sales people were the ones who were willing to work on commission only. It was too easy to think you could get by on draw and difficult to determine how fast it would take someone on draw to get to where he was actually bringing in money rather than taking it all home with him. But then again it wasn't that easy to find someone who'd work on commission only!

I wonder, too, since I've been out of the industry for a quarter century, what effect the dwindling number of local retail outlets, mom and pop stores, so to speak, has had on co-op advertising and the temptation to succumb to double-billing.

With your workload, it's amazing you have time to spend with us on the list ... Go easy, though, on us geezers who remember the days when station personnel, particularly the engineers who were still around from the '30s and '40s, courted DX reports. We DX'ers didn't start to be perceived of as nuisances until sometime in the '60s, and some of us unthinkingly react negatively to that perception.

John Culver, Krum TX (That's the name KFJZ-1270 gave me when I did news there in '63.)

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