October 3, 1979 WLW - Cincinnati

The switch is on to TALK radio at WLW. There had been a "Sports Talk" show tat ran for an hour in the early evening with Phil Sampp and Bob Trumpy, but this was new for the market and for me. This is the first talk show I hosted. (produced, scheduled, engineered, screened calls, etc.) It was literally a one man band. Compared to talk radio today it was very primitive. I did everything myself including letting in-studio guests in by going down to the lobby three floors down to let them in the front door during network news at the top of the hour. (That was when I could go to the bathroom too!) I could write a book about that chapter of my career.

No 800 number for callers, no cell phones; so they had to stop at a phone booth or call from home, no board operator, no call screener, the "tape delay" was literally a bog loop of tape that ran from one Ampex 350 recorder to another, it was a busy few hours for me.

I probably shouldn't have stayed with a sports theme as it confused some, but this one was "Do people take sports too seriously?" I had a University of Cincinnati psychology professor as a guest so I had something to fall back on if nobody called in. (A real problem in talk radio back then.) But to my surprise we got calls! Because it was a 50,000 watt signal, having an audience of 38 states helped.

I'm sure a lot of people had no problem falling asleep listening to this.