BMTS

By the end of basic training I was in much better shape than I had been as a civilian. Note that there are no stripes on my sleeves. Using our official USAF sewing kits, we stitched those on before arriving at our next assignment. I'm wearing a khaki uniform, known as 1505s, that we didn't wear often during basic. We had also been issued fatigues and dress blues. Note the shoes: the Air Force called them low-quarters. We also had chukka boots and combat boots.

Life was better at Basic Medical Training School at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas. As fall approached, the brutally hot Texas weather began to abate. We were also treated more like adults now that basic training was behind us.

Three things stand out in my memories of life at Sheppard. There were women -- WAFs -- in our classes. We could have a beer at the club when we were off duty. And "Star Trek" made its television debut. The latter developed quite a following as we knocked back a few Lone Stars and watched color TV -- then still a novelty -- at the club.

(Women were just beginning to enjoy true parity in assignments in the Air Force. The women in our class told us that they had planted flowers in the urinals in their World War II-era barracks.)

At BMTS the emphasis was heavy on academics. We went to classes all day long, learning advanced first aid, watching training films about military hospital duties and responsibilities, and practicing, practicing, practicing. We took each other's blood pressure. We placed tourniquets on each other's arms and legs. We gave shots to oranges. (The "feel" of sticking a needle into an orange was said to be much like the feel of piercing the skin of a real person.) We learned what to do about a sucking chest wound. (In those days, many of us smoked, and we learned that the cellophane from a cigarette pack would suffice in the field to block a sucking chest wound.) We learned how to use a pocket knife and a ballpoint pen to do an emergency tracheotomy, although we never actually practiced that for obvious reasons.

We didn't know at that point exactly what our medic specialties would be, although we did know the possibilities. Some of us might wind up working in a pharmacy or in hospital administration. Others might work in a ward, an emergency room or an operating room. A few of us would wash out of BMTS and get other assignments. But once again, we knew that our next training school would be based on our BMTS grades, and the competition was fierce. After six weeks, most of us would go on to months more of advanced training. Score high and we might get a good specialty. Score at the bottom and we'd be emptying bedpans or pushing paper. In BMTS, class grades ruled. Physical training took a back seat.

Except for one week, that is, when we set up camp in a field along a dry riverbed about an hour outside Wichita Falls and learned about being combat medics. Once again we had to run an obstacle course, a tough one: This time we ran it in four-man teams carrying loaded stretchers.

When the BMTS course ended, I was again, fortunately, near the top of my class. My next assignment would be training to be an operating room specialist at Gunter AFB. (Gunter AFB has now been subsumed into nearby Maxwell AFB.) On the day after BMTS graduation, the four of us destined for slice-and-dice school boarded a train for Montgomery, Alabama. Our orders said we were to report in four days, more than enough time for a short vacation in New Orleans. It was our first real escape from constant supervision. We rented a room in a cheap hotel, roamed the city, ate filet de truite amandine at Antoine's Restaurant, boiled shrimp and crawfish at the Court of Two Sisters, and beignets at the Café du Monde. We also drank hurricanes on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter late into the night.

It took us the better part of a day back on the train to get our heads once again into being in the military and to start thinking seriously about what life in an operating room would be like. We would discover that the reality would be far different from expectations.

Learning the rhythm

This picture was taken in a photo booth at the Base Exchange at Lackland AFB, Texas, during basic training. On the back of it, my mother wrote "July 13, 1966." That would explain the baggy fatigue shirt and the brand-new look of the hat. I had been in the Air Force for 20 whole days, and we didn't get uniforms until the beginning of the second week.

It was 6 a.m. CST -- oh-six-hundred, military time -- when we met the man who would govern our lives for the next eight weeks. He was standing on a concrete pad outside the barracks that would be our home at Lackland Air Force Base outside San Antonio, Texas. He was short, stout, fit and sharp. His uniform looked to be custom tailored. His name was Staff Sergeant Dunlop, and he was a career enlisted man. Secretly we called him Dumpy Dunlop. In retrospect, I'd have to say he was adequate for the job -- neither a tyrant nor a pussycat.

He told us he was our Drill Instructor, our DI, and that we should think of him as God.

He called us rainbow troops, because our uniforms wouldn't be issued for a week. Nevertheless, Sgt. Dunlop got us into formation for the first time, tried to teach us our left from our right, and how to space ourselves. And, yes, he talked like you'd imagine a DI would talk -- terse, authoritarian and clearly expecting absolutely no deviation from orders.

He marched us into the barracks -- it was more like a straggle than a march -- and we had our first glimpse of where we'd live. The two-story wood-frame building appeared to be about 20 years old, with linoleum floors and absolutely no decorative touches. At one end of the first floor, near the entrance, were Sgt. Dunlop's office and his sleeping quarters. Also at that end on both floors were a bathroom -- urinals, toilets with no doors to the stalls, a row of sinks and four showers. The majority of each floor was given over to a large open bay of double bunks stretching into the distance. An industrial fan in the eave of the second floor kept air circulating -- but it was outside air and this was late June in Texas. Sgt. Dunlop assigned each of us a bunk -- I got a top -- and a footlocker.

That first day is still a blur. I hadn't slept since Thursday night. We began by learning the basics of marching -- which I liked, because I just settled into the rhythm of it. We had our heads shaved. We took another physical exam. And we learned that there were three ways of approaching any task: the right way, the wrong way, and the Air Force way.

And throughout the day, it was hotter than hot. Lackland AFB is just about 200 miles from the Mexico border. By the end of basic, salt from perspiration had bleached stark white circles under the arms of my olive-drab fatigues.

Except for the constant heat, basic seemed to be bearable. I can follow rules. I can learn how to make a bed, how and who to salute, what the proper response to a verbal order is and how to address an officer who might appear in our midst. I was comfortable with the classroom work, which took up about four hours of each day. I was straight out of college: Air Force classes in military courtesy, map-reading, first aid, the chain of command, and military history were not too great a challenge.

The Air Force recruiting officer had asked me, before I signed the enlistment papers, what kind of job I might like. I told him I was good with animals, so he suggested an MOS -- a Military Occupation Specialty -- with the veterinary corp. In basic training, I pieced out that what I had said had been translated by the Air Force into "medical interest." I decided I could live with that. I also assumed that good classroom grades in basic training would help.

It was the other part of basic training that gave me pause: the physical part. I was never an athlete. I goofed off during most gym classes in high school and college (which wasn't difficult). My assumption, which proved to be true, was that goofing off wasn't going to hack it in the USAF. So I never tried that tactic. Instead, I developed a mentor. He was a boy from Tidewater, Virginia, whose last name -- interestingly -- was pronounced the same as mine, although it was spelled differently. Wayne was in excellent shape. His academic skills, not so much. He wasn't in the top half of any of our classes.

So I tutored Wayne, and he paced me in our runs and on the obstacle course. I got him through the academic parts, and he got me through the athletic parts. I will forever be grateful to Wayne. I believe he went into Air Force logistics and worked at a base in California.

Ours was a no-drama barracks for the most part. Occasionally someone would disappear because of a psychological meltdown. Once in a while, somebody would get dropped back to begin again because of miserable grades. One guy, who slept in the top bunk next to mine, got up in the middle of the night, went to the shower, turned on the water and made a feeble attempt to cut his wrist. He was shipped off before the sun rose.

But most of us made it.

The discipline was tough, although I never did anything to prompt Sgt. Dunlop to chew me a new one. And the discipline made sense to me. You had to be a high school graduate and meet certain height and weight requirements to enlist in the Air Force, but once you passed those standards, all bets were off. There was a war on -- and a troop buildup. We were in a factory that turned out airmen. Our IQs were all over the map. Our backgrounds were vastly different. Most of us had never been away from home before. Our differing cultures constantly surprised us. The discipline helped to make us the same -- and that was the goal. I could live with that.

Late in basic, Sgt. Dunlop gave us one-day passes that allowed us to leave the base. Wayne and I took a bus into San Antonio, toured the Alamo, ate some excellent Mexican food and saw a movie. (I picked "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Wayne, bless his heart, didn't object to this esoteric selection for two brand new GIs on their first one-day pass.)

I dropped about 15 pounds in basic. I'd have lost more if the food hadn't been excellent. In my four years in uniform, I never complained about the food. It was always good, and there was always a lot to eat in the mess hall.

I'd never fired a gun before, and it didn't surprise me that I didn't qualify on the M14. Weapons were new to me, but I got the hang of grenades quickly -- a good thing. I enjoyed learning about the M14, taking it apart and reassembling it, cleaning it, and the process and positions for firing it. But I wasn't good at aiming. I'd hit the target often enough but never well enough. (I made up for that a year later, when I qualified easily with a .45-caliber sidearm. Other than when I was being tested, I never carried or used a weapon in the Air Force.)

Graduation from basic training was a big deal, both for us and for the brass. Each week, there was a grand parade of new airmen on the drill field. The command structure wanted to show off what it had made of us. We wanted to look good because Dumpy Dunlop would wreak havoc if we didn't. The brass and guests watched from the grandstands. The base commander spoke.

By the end of week seven, there was no doubt in my mind that we were ready. We had bonded. We looked like a well coordinated group when we marched. We had developed an esprit de corps. We had grown into our uniforms. Most of all, our hair had begun to grow back.

Sgt. Dunlop had us assembled informally on the concrete pad outside the barracks the day before graduation. It was an unbearably hot August afternoon. Colored flags flew over the base every day to indicate what level of outdoor activity was allowed, and the flag today was black: no outside activity, not even a march to the mess hall.

"I've got your orders," Sgt. Dunlop told us, and he began to hand them out. In two days, many of us would be off to learn how to be mechanics. Others snagged administrative training. A few were assigned to special weapons classes. I was ordered to basic medical training school at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas, up near the Oklahoma border.

We looked good at graduation the next day, which was mercifully cooler. We marched past the brass in the grandstands and managed to look like we knew exactly what we were doing and how to do it. We made Dumpy Dunlop proud, and he told us so.

The next day, I boarded an Air Force blue bus for Wichita Falls.

Greetings from the president ...

My father was a big influence in my facing up to military service during the Vietnam War. That's him in his Navy uniform in June of 1943, on leave in Richmond before shipping out to the South Pacific in World War II. (Family photo)

The first half of the 1960s was a heady time for me as I pushed ahead in my radio career. But not so much for the nation. JFK's assassination had rattled the country's psyche as few things short of war can. And then there was the actual war -- the one that was escalating in Vietnam. People that I knew were being drafted, but sentiment among my generation was generally anti-war. Some young men were burning draft cards. I heard the term "draft dodger" used for the first time. Occasionally, hardhats (working class) actually battled longhairs ("hippies") in public confrontations. People in uniform were being called "baby-killers" and were often shunned. There was as yet no all-out generational conflict on the home front, but the times were ripe.

I remember hearing the radio news reports in 1964 that made it clear that Lyndon Baines Johnson was determined to widen the scale of the war. The USS Maddox, an American spy ship, was in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam on August 2 when it was attacked. Later, both the Maddox and the destroyer Turner Joy reported a second attack. The North Vietnamese insisted there was no second attack. The U.S. Naval Communication Center in the Philippines reviewed the ships' messages and questioned whether any second attack had actually occurred.

Nevertheless, LBJ rammed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through Congress: It gave him the authorization, without a formal declaration of war, to use military force in Southeast Asia. A large-scale troop buildup began immediately.

As young men in the 1960s, we were all aware that we were eligible for the draft. I had registered, as had my contemporaries, with the local Selective Service Board -- the draft board, as it was known -- when I turned 18. There were exemptions, and as a college student I was enjoying mine. I was safe as long as I was enrolled full-time. But the draft was always there in the back of my mind, and I definitely did not want to go to Vietnam.

I made it safely through 1964 and 1965, enjoying college in the morning and loving being an afternoon deejay. But in early 1966, things changed: I awakened one night with an excruciating pain in my gut. I woke my parents, and my mom gave me some sort of pain reliever and called A.I. Weinstein, our family doctor. As dawn broke, we were in the car on the way to his office on Colonial Avenue. He took a good look at me, poked my stomach, did a urine test and sent me off to Stuart Circle Hospital.

I spent two days at the hospital on nothing but clear liquids and undergoing all manner of X-rays and other tests. Still puzzled about a diagnosis, the surgeon decided to slice me open and see what was inside. What he discovered was a gall bladder with a congenitally deficient blood supply. My pain was because the dying tissue could no longer deliver stored bile, which helps digest fats: I had indigestion in a major way.

The surgeon removed the near-dead gall bladder -- the procedure is called a cholecystectomy -- and a week later I was at home healing at the rapid rate that only the young enjoy.

But ... I had to drop out of the University of Richmond for the semester. There went my draft exemption. I was no longer a full-time student. I went back to work at WMBG and waited to see what would happen. There was no draft lottery -- that wouldn't begin until 1969 -- and we didn't know how the draft board made its decisions. We only knew that some of us would be drafted, and some wouldn't.

In late April, a letter from the draft board arrived. I was to report for a physical. I went to the Federal Building downtown on the appointed date. They bused about 50 of us out to the Defense General Supply Center at Bellwood in Chesterfield County, where we all stripped to our underwear, turned our heads and coughed, had our blood pressure and temperature taken, and filled out reams of forms. Then we were individually interviewed by a physician.

There were old-wives' tales about how to not pass the physical. One way I heard a lot about was putting bars of soap in your armpits for hours on end before reporting for your physical. It was said to increase blood pressure dramatically. I don't know anybody who ever did that. Another way to avoid the draft -- a more certain way, and much more serious -- was to "check the box" on one of the forms we filled out while undergoing our physicals. "Are you a homosexual? Check yes or no." A few checked "yes," a very few. I checked "no."

My decision to lie when filling out the form was based on many factors. My father, my brother Jimmy Jr., and my Uncle Joe had all served during World War II. My brother Bobby was in the Navy during the Korean War. I admired that. I saw serving as a test of manhood, and I wanted to pass the test. I wanted to stand up and do my duty, even though the prospect frightened me deeply. I felt that I had to face that fear and deal with the reality of it, and not cop out by "checking the box."

Call me naïve. I'll disagree with you, but I won't argue the point. In other ways I really was naïve, even for the times, but the decision I made when I filled out the form was for sound reasons. I believed that then. I believe it today.

The next weeks were difficult. I got a letter saying I had passed the physical. And I waited.

"Greetings from the President of the United States," the next letter began. It went on to order me to report to the Federal Building on such-and-such a date for induction into the armed forces of the United States of America. I read the letter twice standing in the living room. Then I showed it to my parents. My mom cried. My dad looked grim.

The vast majority of those drafted in 1966 were ordered into the Army. The active-duty commitment was for two years. But I was no fool. I knew that the Army infantry gobbled up most inductees, and I knew that being in the infantry exposed you to the high odds of spending a year in the jungles of Vietnam -- completely in harm's way.

The Air Force, on the other hand, had no infantry. Those who volunteered for the Air Force had to commit to four years of active duty, but I believed that the odds of an enlisted man dying in the jungle were almost negligible. Two days after receiving my "Greetings" letter, I went back to the Federal Building and joined the Air Force. I had already passed the physical, so the process was fairly streamlined. I was ordered to report back in late June and be shipped off to learn how to march, fire an M14 rifle, and make a bed with the top blanket stretched so tight that you could bounce a quarter on it.

On June 24, 1966 -- a Friday -- I kissed my mom goodbye, shook my father's hand, and was off to take the oath at the Federal Building. When that was done, we new enlistees boarded a bus for Byrd Airport. There we caught our flight on a commercial airliner to Texas. (It was the first time I had ever flown commercial, although I had been on a joyride in a small, single-engine plane in my senior year in high school with my classmate Bill Souder, who had his pilot's license.)

On the morning of June 25, 1966, I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio to begin basic training. I was officially an Airman Basic, the lowest of the low.

I was scared, but I was determined.

A few loose ends

This is the building that once was home to WMBG, WCOD and WTVR. Now it is home only to the television station. (Don Dale photo, 2009)

In the caption to the image in my last post, I talked about the architectural destruction visited upon the old WMBG-WCOD-WTVR building a few decades ago. What was originally an award-winning Art Deco architectural gem is now a mish-mash of conflicting styles. Gone are the 1930s glass bricks; they've been replaced by plate glass. What would an architectural historian call the result? With those inappropriate and indecorous white columns, maybe the label should be Art Deco Plantation. I was out running errands this afternoon and shot this picture so you could see exactly what I mean.

And while I'm catching up on loose ends, let me say something that every blogger says sooner or later: I am finding the connections being made through this blog to be fascinating -- and heartwarming.

As I began blogging, the family responded first. I'd call my niece Terry and she'd want to know more about long-dead relatives, even the ones not on her side of the family. I was at her house for dinner the other night, and she was showing me intriguing pictures of, and diplomas earned by, family members on her mothers' side, people who are not related to me. My nephew Mike and I and his wife went for dinner a few weeks back and talked about family stories. Three hours later, still talking, we realized we were virtually the only patrons left in the restaurant.

I ran into my brother Bobby and his wife, Camilla -- along with their daughter, Annette -- at Costco a few weeks back. We talked about the blog and my mom's recipe for raisin-coffee-nut frosting. Annette and her mother reminded me that when Annette was a child and would visit us, my mom would always make cinnamon toast just for her. Annette still has fond memories of my mom's cinnamon toast.

My cousins Mary Francis and Ellie, my mother's sister's children, and I are planning to meet so that I can see additional research that Ellie has done on the Nichols family. Mary Francis e-mailed me a picture of our great-grandmother Nichols. I never knew such a picture existed before I started blogging about where I came from.

Now that I'm writing about my years working for WMBG-WCOD-WTVR, I'm hearing from old friends who worked in Richmond radio back in the day. Tom Ogburn worked at the AM station a few years after I left for the Air Force. By the time he started, Wilbur Havens had sold the stations to Roy H. Park Broadcasting, and WMBG was re-named WTVR-AM. Tom is now a TV engineer, and he has offered to put me in touch with somebody who can transfer my old WTVR-TV 2-inch videotapes to DVD. Most 2-inch videotape machines have now gone the way of the dinosaurs -- much like what's happening to VHS tapes.

My friend John Valentine, who also worked at WTVR-AM in the early 70s and, like me, longed to work for WLEE when he was a kid, founded AudioImage recording studio in Richmond about three decades ago. But he was working at WRVQ-FM in the mid-70s when Q94 took on WLEE and left WLEE in the dust. We had a long telephone conversation last night, reminiscing about radio. Q94 operated out of the same building on Church Hill that housed WRVA-AM, "the 50,000 watt voice of Virginia." The two stations' studios were adjacent. John told me he used to crank up the speakers in the Q94 studio while, just down the hall, Lou Dean was on the air with his soothing and much-loved all-night show. Lou's show appealed to, shall we say, a more sedate audience. John told me last night that he introduced himself to an audience recently as "the man who played bass for Lou Dean." John and I are getting together soon to transfer some of my old reel-to-reel tapes of the WMBG days to CD. A reel-to-reel tape machine is as hard to find as a rotary phone these days, but John has a good one at AudioImage.

I haven't talked to Lou Dean or Harvey Hudson lately, although I've run into both occasionally over the years. Lou was on the air all night at WRVA from 1957 to 1977, a long time in radio years. I remember listening to his show when I was in the Air Force in Germany in the late 1960s -- the WRVA signal was that strong. I'd be getting out of bed at dawn as he'd be beginning his nighttime broadcast six time zones away in Richmond. It was comforting to listen to a voice from back home.

WMBG might have been a thorn in WLEE's paw in the early 60s, but I have always admired Harvey Hudson as a broadcaster who combined an old-school style, a modern sensibility, and an unflagging amiability on the air. His morning WLEE broadcasts with his partner, Lud Sterling, were a staple when I was growing up. It's good to hear "Harvey Hudson's Passing Parade" from 9 to 11 a.m. on WLEE, now broadcasting not at 1480 AM but at 990 AM. And, yes, I still wish I had had the chance to work for him.

And I'm still in touch with people I worked with at American Forces Television in Germany in the late 1960s. John Wild and Chuck Minx, with whom I worked at Spangdahlem Air Base and AFTV-22, have read the blog and prompted me to remember a few stories. I'll be telling them soon. Tom Scanlin, who was the commander of Detachment 3, 7122nd Support Squadron, and was thus in charge of AFTV-22, is an e-mail correspondent these days. He stuck with the Air Force and retired as a lieutenant colonel. John and Chuck will remind me of making American TV in Germany's Eifel Mountains, and Tom will provide the details when I write about our AFTV live satellite broadcast -- the first ever there was -- of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The connections are there, and I hope more will come. The technology has changed dramatically since the 1960s, but the world seems like a smaller place. Family, old friends and colleagues are now scattered all over the globe, but they're nevertheless there to give me a hand as I revisit the past.

"Finding" the key

The WMBG-WCOD-WTVR building was still an architectural treasure in the 1960s. The expansion to accommodate TV had added to the rear of the Art Deco building at Cutshaw and Broad. The interior still paid homage to the 1930s -- from the inlaid lightning bolts and globe in the granite floor of the foyer to the period on-air lights. Much of the building's character was lost in an unfortunate redesign that added incongruous plantation touches to the exterior and an infelicitous modern look for portions of the interior.

In the years between the Kennedy assassination and 1966, when I joined the Air Force, I learned a lot about how to create radio. But I learned precious little about the business of radio. Wilbur Havens, WMBG's founder and owner, was for practical purposes an absentee landlord. His focus was on WTVR TV, where the big bucks were to be made. He rarely bothered to concern himself with what those crazy kids in the AM radio studio were doing.

We were thriving. And so was WMBG -- more so than in at least a decade. We were challenging the king of rock and roll, WLEE, and I was still jerking WLEE's chain. The battle escalated. Following the "Mrs. Harvey Hudson promos we aired -- described in the "Always the horn" post earlier this month -- Goliath girded his loins and again came after David.

And once again, WLEE made the professional extremely personal.

Radio was all a game for me in the early 1960s. The winner got the most listeners. For me, that was all it was. But it was that and more for WLEE: It was a deadly serious money-making business.

WMBG must have been a painful thorn in WLEE's paw. We spent virtually no money on equipment or promotions, and our ideas about what we wanted WMBG to sound like were a combination of pure imagination and a propensity to steal sounds and ideas we liked from stations in other big cities.

It just never occurred to me that we threatened the Richmond radio establishment, that by taking listeners from other stations, we were taking money out of their pockets.

One of WLEE's big promotions -- I think it was in late 1965 or early 1966 -- involved giving away a car. The station hid a key to the car somewhere in the city and broadcast daily clues about where it was. The clues were obscure, designed to keep the promotion alive and draw out the suspense. Havens never spent much money on promotions for us, so all we could do was watch the excitement mount and grit our teeth.

In the early 1960s -- and still today for all I know -- rock jocks had groupies. They hung around the stations because they were fascinated by radio. One of my WMBG groupies was a kid named Mike Ritchie. Mike was a skinny, blond, blue-eyed nerd. (He was also a WLEE groupie, and he enjoyed trading innocent gossip about the two stations.)

Mike dropped by the studio one Saturday morning and told me he knew where the key to the WLEE giveaway car was hidden: in a phone booth in front of the Giant Food store at Willow Lawn.

"You should go get the key and then tell everybody on your show this afternoon that you have it," he said. "You'll shock the hell out of them."

I thought that was a dandy idea, and the two of us set off for Willow Lawn. We parked in front of the grocery store and scoped out activity for a few minutes. We saw what you'd expect: a phone booth with shoppers pretty much ignoring it. I got out of the car and went to the phone booth.

At first, I didn't see any key. But as I stooped down to examine the floor carefully, I looked up, and there it was -- an envelope taped under the shelf. I started to get excited. I peeled off the tape, tore open the envelope, and pulled out the key. I opened the phone booth door ... and walked right into a gaggle of photographers and WLEE deejays -- and Mike Ritchie -- all saying, "Congratulations!"

I had been set up by a groupie. The station was broadcasting live, telling the city that "everybody listens to WLEE, even the competition."

"How does it feel to win a free car from WLEE?" one of the jocks asked me with a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. What could I say? Once again, my entire career was flashing before my eyes. "Uh ... it's great," I mumbled. I hurriedly made my way to my car -- alone -- and headed back to the WMBG studios. In the car, I switched the radio to WLEE. They were already broadcasting a promo about me winning the free car, and I heard my recorded voice saying, "It's great."

This is it, I thought. I've really blown it this time. My career as a rock jock is over. Thoughts of groupie betrayal and what was to happen to my job raced through my mind. I was alternately pissed off at Mike and afraid of what would happen next.

I knew I had to tell Havens what happened before he heard about it from somebody else. Much to my surprise, he wasn't at all upset. In fact, he didn't seem to care. His fatherly advice? "You probably shouldn't do things like that, Don."

On Monday, I got a call from WLEE asking me to stop by and take possession of my free car. It turned out to be a clunker, a 10-year-old Ford, I think. I was driving a used Corvair -- "unsafe at any speed" in consumer advocate Ralph Nader's words -- and even a used Corvair was better than the WLEE rattletrap.

"There's one more thing," I was told by WLEE's promotions manager. "We need you to record a statement about how you like your new car." I thought of one thing I could say that might salvage my dignity: "I'm happy to accept the car and even happier to give it to the Methodist Children's Home." Thus began another round of WLEE promos -- but at least, I thought, I don't look like a total jerk.

Nobody thought to question what WLEE had done. By duping me, it had duped its own audience. The station gave away a car not to a lucky listener in a fair contest, but to me in a rigged contest.

And it seems to me that the station took what was essentially an on-air battle of wits and made it intensely personal. This was the second time the station had come after my job. And because WLEE really didn't understand how free and loose the WMBG operation was, a WLEE plan to have me fired failed again.

In the aftermath, Mike Ritchie was banned from the WMBG studios, although he did express contrition for what he'd done. Some years later, he got back in touch and we'd sometimes have a beer and talk about the WMBG glory days. Mike became a highly successful copywriter for a Richmond advertising firm and later moved to the Chicago office of a top national agency. In the early 1980s he returned to Richmond. He asked me to cash a check for $20 on his Chicago bank. The check bounced, and I never saw him again.

A flash from Dallas

These two images are of the original UPI broadcast newswire report on the shooting and death of JFK. (Photos © Don Dale)

On Nov. 22, 1963, I was in the WTVR TV announce booth when word came that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

The booth was across the hall from TV master control. There was enough room for a chair and a desk, nothing else. On the desk were an intercom to master control, a video monitor, a goose-neck lamp and a notebook full of scripts for station IDs, promo tag-lines and commercials. On the wall was a Western Union clock and an "on air" light.

In 1963, WTVR TV was still broadcasting old "Amos and Andy" episodes at 1 p.m., and they inevitably ran short. My job -- before I began my afternoon show on WMBG -- was to do a brief live UPI headline newscast from the booth to round out the half hour. Then I would stay in place at 1:30 to record that evening's station IDs and promo-tags.

It was an ordinary Friday. I did the live newscast and the 1:30 live station ID. In master control, the director punched up "As the World Turns."

At about 1:35, we started recording the night's TV breaks. The light would go on. I'd say, "This is WTVR TV, the South's first television station -- Channel 6 in Richmond. It's eight o'clock." The light would go off. Except after I had recorded one break, the light didn't go off. I waited, trying not to make any noise, but the light stayed on. I looked at the monitor. An image on the screen said "CBS News Bulletin." I was curious, but the light was still on, so I sat silently in the booth.

After another 30 seconds passed, I decided that I would exit the booth as quietly as possible in case my mike was actually still live and go across the hall to see what was going on. When I opened the master control door, I heard Walter Cronkite's voice saying that President Kennedy had been shot. I was, like everyone else, stunned.

A minute or so later, I began to wonder if WMBG and WCOD had picked up on the news from the ABC network. I tore down the hallway to the WCOD control room and checked the monitor for both radio stations. Nothing but music -- light classics on WCOD, and on WMBG, deejay Bob Powell was playing Steve Lawrence's recording of "Walking Proud."

To get on the air quickly, I threw a switch on the WCOD console that gave me control of both radio stations and took a deep breath before saying, "We interrupt this program with a bulletin. President Kennedy has been seriously wounded, perhaps fatally, by a gunman in Dallas. We now join the ABC radio network for details."

The truth is, I didn't have a clue about whether ABC was broadcasting any details. But I knew that I didn't have any other information to offer, so I threw the switch and hoped. Fortunately, the radio network was just beginning its coverage.

Bob Powell came roaring out of the WMBG studio asking why the hell I had cut him off in mid-broadcast. Then he was struck dumb by the news he was hearing from ABC. Slowly, staff members from all three stations made their way to the WCOD control room. Because the station was mainly automated, it was the least-used studio in the building. But within minutes it was full of people listening silently. Some were sobbing.

Bob Powell sat down at the WCOD control board, which was still feeding to both transmitters, although he knew his job would be limited to identifying the two stations on the hour and half-hour. I went back to TV master control to see what CBS was doing. That's where I was when Walter Cronkite, still in shirtsleeves, took off his glasses and said that President Kennedy had died in Parkland Hospital just after 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, 1:30 p.m. Central time in Dallas.

I walked back to the wire room to see how UPI had handled the story. I later learned that Merriman Smith, the UPI reporter in the president's Dallas motorcade, had grabbed the press car's only mobile telephone and fed the story to UPI headquarters in Chicago. He refused to give up the phone, and UPI scored a clear beat over AP. There it all was on the teletype machine in our offices: from "Flash -- Kennedy seriously wounded" at 12:38 p.m. Central Standard Time to "Flash -- President dead" at 1:35 p.m. CST. Nobody had bothered to tear the copy, since we were sticking with the networks, so I gathered it all up in one complete roll and took it home. That's where the images above come from. That roll contains the first draft of the history of the JFK assassination.

We didn't know it then, but it would be Tuesday morning before the three stations would broadcast anything resembling normal programming. WTVR TV news director Bruce Miller and his small staff would occasionally interrupt CBS coverage to broadcast short reports of local reaction and cancellations. But the networks mobilized for 24-hour coverage -- live reports from Dallas on LBJ taking the oath of office on Air Force One at Love Field, Dan Rather's live reports from Parkland Hospital, details of Lee Harvey Oswald's arrest in a suburban Dallas movie theater, JFK's casket being loaded onto Air Force One at Love Field, Jackie Kennedy in a blood-stained pink suit on the tarmac, the plane's journey back to D.C., LBJ's terse -- but apparently deeply felt -- speech on arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, the awkward unloading of JFK's casket from the plane, and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

I spent almost every waking hour at the station Friday and Saturday. There wasn't much for me to do, but I wanted to be there. I was riveted by the coverage. I was a journalism major, and I was fascinated by the technical and professional details of the coverage of the biggest story of my lifetime. I had just turned 21 years old.

When I finally headed home late Friday night, it was chilly and misty in Richmond. The streets were as deserted as they are on Christmas morning. Businesses, restaurants, movie theaters -- they had all closed. But churches were open, and worshippers attended services or just gathered to pray. At Boulevard and Broad, the big People's drug store was open, but the parking lot was empty. When I got home, my parents were watching Walter Cronkite, who had found time to put on a coat and tie. I remember wondering when he'd done that.

Saturday, I spent most of the day at the station. There was little traffic. Many businesses remained closed. In the WCOD studio -- and this struck me as sheer silliness -- one executive kept asking staffers what music WCOD should play when network coverage ended. It wouldn't end for another 48 hours, but he wanted to be ready. It's odd, sometimes, what the mind will focus on in times of emotional upheaval.

On Saturday night, I stopped by my fraternity house, Phi Delta Theta, at the University of Richmond. All of the fraternity brothers were watching Cronkite. Details of the JFK lying in state and the funeral were beginning to emerge. Officials said they expected enormous crowds in D.C. on Sunday. Several of my fraternity brothers and I organized a trip to Washington. We wanted to see the president's casket and pay our respects.

Dressed in coat and tie, we drove to D.C. Sunday morning and luckily found a parking spot near the Mall. At 9 a.m., we joined a line that stretched many blocks into the Capitol. It moved at a somber pace, and we began to speculate that it might be dark before we made it into the Rotunda.

Someone in line ahead of us had a transistor radio, and we could hear continuing coverage of the assassination and its aftermath. Just past noon, we heard reports that Oswald had been shot in Dallas. The tenor of the crowd changed. Some were frightened at hearing about still another violent murder in Dallas. Some began to cry. We were all shocked. The line seemed to stop moving. By about 4 p.m., it became clear to me and my fraternity brothers that we would not likely get anywhere near the Rotunda until late that night, so we decided to give up and go back to Richmond.

It was quiet in the car as we drove south, and that's when the enormity of what was happening stopped being just a news story for me and began to be personal. It was the first time I allowed myself to feel my own reactions, and I was devastated. The whole world, it seemed, had changed completely.

Back at the fraternity house Sunday night, we watched TV as people passed by Kennedy's coffin and Cronkite provided updates on plans for Monday's funeral. Jackie Kennedy had decided that JFK would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and she wanted an eternal flame.

On Monday, I watched the funeral at the Phi Delt house. The image of John-John saluting on the steps of the church sticks in my mind. Another unforgettable image was the long-lens camera-shot from a hillside in Arlington as the funeral cortege made its way slowly across the Potomac with the Lincoln Memorial in the background. We watched as Jackie Kennedy lit the eternal flame with a taper and JFK's brothers, Robert and Teddy, symbolically did the same.

And then it was over.

It would be 40 years before I visited JFK's grave at Arlington. My friend Walter's mother was being buried beside Walter's father in Arlington Cemetery. Frank Foery, the man who taught me to appreciate a manhattan, had been a retired Army lieutenant colonel, a veteran of World War II.

I arrived early, and while I was waiting, I walked over to see the Kennedy grave and the eternal flame. It's a peaceful site. The grave itself is on a slight hill with a beautiful view of Washington across the river. Nearby are quotations from President Kennedy's inaugural address, including the one we know so well: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." The grave marker is a spare marble tablet. It reads:

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
1917-1963

Always, the horn

(Family photo, circa 1964)

As I mentioned in the previous post, the bicycle horn went everywhere with me in the early 1960s, even to the State Fair of Virginia for a live broadcast. I still have that horn, tucked away in a box in the attic. It wasn't so much that I loved that horn, or that I identified with it, as much as it was that it was just there. I found it in one of the studios early on in my days at WMBG, decided to try using it on the air, and it just stuck. I used it to punctuate jokes and comedy bits.

Our State Fair setup was simple: two turntables, headphones and a microphone. Fairgoers liked to stop by and chat, and I even signed a few autographs. One of the people I met at the fair was Mrs. Harvey Hudson. She told me she enjoyed my show. I asked her if I could have her phone number.

This Mrs. Harvey Hudson was not related to THE Harvey Hudson, who ran WLEE (our biggest competition in rock radio) and presided over the station's highly succesful morning drive-time show. I think her husband was a fireman. THE Harvey Hudson was not, at the time, married, if I recall correctly.

But there was a germ of an idea sprouting. That's why I wanted Mrs. Harvey Hudson's phone number.

I called her the next week and asked her if she'd come to the WMBG Studio on Broad Street. She asked why, and I told her. She laughed out loud and agreed to come in.

I wrote a short script for her that I knew would really get into THE Harvey Hudson's craw: "Hi. I'm Mrs. Harvey Hudson, and when my husband is at work, I always listen to WMBG. They're just great!"

The next day, we started playing Mrs. Harvey Hudson's recording on the air -- in heavy rotation. Screams of anguish -- and later, revenge -- could be heard from Horsepen and Broad, where WLEE's studios were. To rub more salt into the wound, I tracked down more wives whose husbands had the same names as well-known WLEE jocks. I found them in the phone book. More cries of "foul" ensued.

And that is why THE Harvey Hudson tried to screw my career as a rock jock, as I noted in an earlier post. [See "Safety First," Sept. 09]

I had -- and still have -- great respect for THE Harvey Hudson. He is a legend in tales of the heyday of AM radio in Richmond. His career continues today. I often catch his weekly broadcast on Saturday mornings. People still enjoy listening to a Richmond man who started in broadcasting when I was too young to walk.

Timing is everything

(1965 photo by Chuck Hite)

I have been lucky in my career path. Good timing has been everything.

I started work at WCOD FM in the early 1960s, when few people owned radios capable of receiving an FM signal. I think there was a total of one FM radio in my family's house.

WCOD FM was in many ways a plaything then for Wilbur Havens, who owned an auto-parts store before he got his start in radio. What was to be his broadcasting empire began in 1926 when he built an early Richmond radio station, WMBG AM. The call letters stood for "wires, magnetos, batteries and generators." The station grew to be a success. World War II put a halt to broadcast engineering development, but in 1947, Havens started WCOD FM, which was among the first FM stations in Richmond. Nobody had an FM radio, but Havens was a pioneer

A year later, Havens made the decision that was to make him a millionaire many times over. He began broadcasting television pictures on WTVR TV on April 22, 1948. His was the first television station south of Washington, D.C., and for decades the on-the-hour ID billed it as "the South's first television station." By the early 1960s, it was a roaringly popular CBS network affiliate. WMBG, however, was stuck in the past, and WCOD's future was still ahead of it.

In those days, Havens was making money hand over fist -- almost exclusively because of the popularity of WTVR. My part-time job at WCOD had me doing FM station breaks and local-live commercials during baseball games. I had been a rock-jock at two other dinky radio stations in Richmond, but I saw the job at WCOD -- the letters stood for "Capital of the Old Dominion" -- as a foot in the door at a respectable radio-TV operation.

At WCOD, the relationship between me and the station's old-guard announcers was just about what you'd expect. They saw me as a kid still wet behind the ears. (I was a college sophomore majoring in journalism at the University of Richmond.) I saw them as old fogies who still dressed up to sit in front of a radio microphone and broadcast to my father's generation. They presided over a morning music show designed to awaken you gently, light classic and romantic favorites in the afternoon and evening, and a solid block of ABC network news and features from 5 to 6:30 p.m. There was still a half-hour organist interlude each evening, broadcast live.

The stations had an amazingly extensive record library -- it filled much of the basement of the building -- and a full-time music librarian who spent her days selecting recordings to be played by the stodgy announcers. (She was unfailingly helpful to me.) Fully half of the collection was 78-rpm recordings. The remainder consisted of LP albums.

WMBG and WCOD (which was experimenting with early automation) did radio as it was done in the 1940s, and the ratings for both stations were in the tank. The hot radio station in town was WLEE. It played nothing but rock and roll music, all day long. It was wildly successful in its appeal to an emerging demographic: War Babies and Baby Boomers.

(What I sometimes neglected to appreciate in those days was that the people I worked with had built radio and TV in Richmond. They were the first generation of broadcasters and engineers, and I learned a lot from them without knowing it.)

The program director for the two radio stations was a distinguished gentleman named Frank Wilson. He wore a coat and tie to work every day, and he had an office with a door and a secretary. Nothing had changed at either station since 1948, so his days were not full of pressing decisions. I had been lobbying him quietly and gently to add a rock-and-roll show to one of the stations, preferably WMBG AM, since an FM radio was a rarity in most homes or cars. I wasn't getting anywhere.

Then the penny dropped for Havens.

He must have been sitting in his paneled corner office, the one with the glass-brick wall fronting Broad Street, when his attention wandered from his money machine, WTVR TV, and settled on his money-losing property, WMBG.

"Let's try to beef up our AM station again. Rock and roll -- I don't like it or understand it, but I hear you can make money with it on the radio. We've got that kid -- what's his name? -- Dale, who used to be a rock-and-roll deejay before he came to work for us. Let's give him the afternoon show."

That conversation happened only in my own head, but Frank Wilson called me into his office one day and told me to start a rock-and-roll show on WMBG AM every afternoon from 3 to 7. Gone, just like that, were the light afternoon show, the organ interlude and the network news blocks. Drive time on WMBG, with its 5,000 watts of power, was all mine. I was also, probably, giving Wilson an ulcer.

It wasn't my talent that got me my own rock show on WMBG. It was timing. And rock and roll.

WMBG gave me nothing for support but my imagination, a Magnecorder tape recorder, two turntables, a couple of Spotmaster cartridge machines (you can see one behind me in the previous entry) for playing commercials, and a free hand.

Within weeks, I was working like crazy to make us sound like WLEE, the city's only rock-and-roll powerhouse. (So much for my imagination.) Then I discovered that ABC fed its New York affiliate's afternoon rock show on the line when the radio network itself was down, just to keep the line open. I became a secret fan of WABC's Big Dan Ingram and was soon copying what the really big boys were doing in Manhattan. (Again, so much for my imagination.)

The time was ripe, and I was an oh-so-willing participant.

The next ratings book showed that WMBG had moved halfway up from the bottom. Within 9 months, we were neck-and-neck with WLEE. We were a hit. Havens made me WMBG's music director. A few months later, Frank Wilson left as program director, and I took on his responsibilities too. Havens gave the go-ahead to go all-rock all-the-time on WMBG.

I'll give them credit: Several of the old guard announcers tried to switch their styles and morph into rock jocks. It didn't work, and they left the station fairly quickly. Their departures left me, a sophomore in college, with my own rock-and-roll station, my own drive-time rock show, and the power to create an on-air sound. I was hiring jocks my age -- late teens, early 20s -- to fill the schedule. My teenage dream was a reality.

I was too young to know what I was really doing -- and gave no thought whatsoever to commercial radio as a money-making enterprise. I was in it because it was more fun than anybody ought to have with their clothes on.

Unfettered authority led to some weird programming on occasion.

Pat Chenault -- a descendant of the man who founded the Coca-Cola franchise in eastern North Carolina and a shrewd businesswoman herself -- was a WMBG account executive. She talked a local Kawasaki motorcycle dealer into giving me a 125cc bike to ride and sold them a contract for live Kawasaki commercials on my show. For a while, it sounded like Kawasaki owned me.

When it snowed in late 1962, I took a microphone with a long cord out to Broad Street and broadcast my show in the snow. The fun of doing that lasted about 20 minutes.

Pat Chenault sold a live broadcast of the Tobacco Festival parade one year. That was exciting, until I found myself sitting on the roof of the White Tower at Lombardy and Broad in the cold describing a parade on the radio. That broadcast wasn't so great.

She dreamt up and sold a series called "Teen Time." It featured two-minute reports on my show from area high schools. The sponsor was the local Coca-Cola franchise. Nobody gave any thought in advance to who or how the weekly series was to be produced. She and I wound up spending way too many hours recruiting high school volunteers, going over their copy, coaching them on how to be broadcasters, and recording and editing their segments. It was a time-suck, but it helped build the audience.

(I made a couple of friends among that group that are important to me still. Walter Foery, my boon travelling companion even today and whom I mentioned in an earlier post, is prime among them.)

Our only problem was that Havens wasn't giving us any support money. He paid paltry salaries, and there was no money for equipment upgrades, a jingle package, consultants or external promotion. He did have a few contracts trading TV and radio commercials for taxicab cards, bus cards and billboards, so the faces of WMBG's new jocks began showing up all over the city.

We were young and in love with what we were doing, so we spent hours of our own time after hours creating production elements to enhance the station's new, contemporary personality. We stole "stingers" (up-tempo musical tags) from the ends of Frank Sinatra hits to dress up on-air promotions. We cannibalized an upbeat 1940s recording of "By the Sea" to produce our on-air beach forecasts (thank goodness for that extensive music library in the basement). We used the Magnecorder to produce rudimentary echo effects. And I found a toy bicycle horn somewhere that I used to punctuate my afternoon show. We were enthusiastic, the audience could hear that we were, and the ratings kept on climbing. Within a year, the station coughed up the money for a second-rate jingle package, half of which we rejected for being our fathers' sound. The rest were pretty good, and another production element began to fill our shows. We were overproduced and too talky by today's standards, but we offered a rock-radio alternative that the audience wanted.

(That extensive music library, which went back to 1930, was much later moved to the WMBG transmitter site at Staples Mill and Broad. The librarian left. The collection was destroyed when the station leveled the transmitter building and sold the property. What a loss that was.)

Even WTVR TV began sounding younger. That's because Havens always had his radio employees double as TV booth announcers -- for station ID work, promotional tags and local commercials. There were no more mature, resonant voices saying "You're watching WTVR TV, the South's first television station" or "Stay tuned for 'I love Lucy.'" Those voices had gone elsewhere. Instead, the audience for the Cronkite news or the ever-popular "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres" heard some kid's voice, mine among them. I'd spend an hour a day in the announce booth recording every station ID and promotion to be heard on TV that evening.

The radio station's engineers, all veterans of the early days, were particularly annoyed by us rock jocks. They hated the fact that we would crank up the studio speakers to appreciate that Phil Spector Wall of Sound on "He's a Rebel." The engineers put some sort of volume-limiting device in the speakers themselves. One of the jocks figured out how to disable it, and the engineers lost that battle. They admonished us for pushing the on-air music volume into the red on the VU meter. We made an effort to hold it down, but it was never enough to satisfy. Eventually, these respected pioneers in Richmond radio engineering simply gave up and let us have our way. Perhaps Havens told them to back off because WMBG was making money again.

The British Invasion was just around the corner. And we were ready. Then came the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963, and I learned a lot about what would become my long-term profession: news. More on that in the next blog post.