WBCA Podcasts
City Talk with Ken Meyer (Chuck Crouse)
(upbeat music) - WBCA radio is proud to present CityTalk, where fascinating conversation is alive and well. With your host, Boston radio veteran, Ken Meyer. - Hello, once again everybody, it's Ken Meyer. Welcome to CityTalk. Our guest tonight is a man who, when I met him, was certainly at the top of his profession. He was a top state house reporter for WEI Radio, and one of the better news makers in Boston, and he got to fulfill two dreams I never had. One was to work for a radio station that broadcast baseball, and the other was to own a radio station. And it is the inimitable Krauss, if you might speak. - Hi Kenny, how are you doing out there in Pennsylvania? - I'm fine, I'm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, lovely town, and I'm sitting right here in my wife's office, which is kind of a museum, and world headquarters, and stuff like that, so I'm in great shape. - Well, I know in conversations that I've had with you previously that you, as far as I was concerned, had a dream job when you were fairly young, and that was to work for the station that broadcast Cleveland Indians baseball, and run the board, as they say, and play the spots. And you were only 17 years old, did you grow up in Cleveland, or how did you get there? - I will take us to it, and hope I don't take too long. You and I both have a common interest in old time radio. In my case, I was born in 1940, so I was listening to the real thing. You know, I was crawling around the room, listening to Benny Goodman and Edward R. Murrow, and so on. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and during the war years, people moved around a lot when they could find a place, and by 1948, I was eight years old, and we were living in Pensock in New Jersey, which is directly across the river from Philadelphia. And it was kind of an idyllic situation. I fit in well, I got along with the other kids. You know, if I could have lived there forever, I would have sunk into happy mediocrity, but my father got a job in Cleveland, so we moved, and we took up residence in the suburb of Cleveland called Rocky River, and that was a terrible fit. The other kids and I, we just weren't on the same level. So to get, you know, satisfaction and a feeling of involvement, I had to look beyond the school to working with adults. And I discovered radio when I was 15, and I would take the bus to downtown Cleveland, to visit various of the radio stations. And one of them had some very friendly disc jockeys, most of whom became mentors. And I was answering phones for the online disc jockey, and oh, for instance, the very first day I worked for him, this guy over the bad case of acne and greasy hair came in and needed to use the telephone. It was Johnny Cash. He was promoting the song, "I Walk the Line." His first hit had been "Ring of Fire." So anyway, he was, you know, little known. And the thing about working for a station like that, number one station in town, lots of people showed up, and the people in the station were very successful people. So I was learning by watching, and watching people mostly didn't make mistakes. You did it right. In time, I was hired as a studio engineer. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, and I was hired into a full-time job, which meant that I was going some days, 16 hours a day, didn't get much sleep, my grades, two bad grades, but as you point out, had lots of great assignments. One of them was to run network master control for the Cleveland Indians baseball network. The station, W-E-R-E, there was some common ownership interest between the radio station and the baseball team. And we had a network of something like 51 stations extending from Indiana into Pennsylvania and Western New York. And if I understand Kenny, you were listening to a station just east of Buffalo. - Right, Niagara Falls, W-H-L-D, as a matter of fact. - Yes, you're right. - So there was a guy sitting in the radio station at W-H-L-D, and the network showed up on his control board. And if we did everything right for him, then it went out over his air the way it should. And what these people didn't know, there was this 17-year-old kid sitting in the network master control. Now, if you wanna really feel important, and if it's 1957, get a job like that. All the, I should point out that the Indians broadcasts were sponsored by Carling's Black Label Beer. And they had a very catchy advertising jingle, Mabel, Black Label. And everything that we did, other than the actual game from the ballpark, was on big 16-inch vinyl transcriptions. So my job was to sit there with a big control board and three turntables, and follow the timing to the second. And after every element who in the announcer would give the cutaway, that's what's a Cleveland Indians baseball network, the guy at W-H-L-D, would cut off the network feed and play his own local commercial. And this went on for two and a half hours. And at the moment when the game began, if it was an afternoon game, it was 1.55 p.m., whatever we were carrying before them, there was one second of silence, and I released the, they were called the ETs, the transcription with the Carling's jingle. And Carling's had produced a very stirring march. They must have had a 50-piece orchestra. And it was like you were starting it when you released the disc. And I just had, wow, there's people from West Virginia to Indiana hearing this. And if I was doing it right there here, he got all at the very same time. So the interesting thing that nobody knew, or I guess hardly anybody knew, is that the two broadcasters, the two play-by-play men, aged each other. They were named Jimmy Dudley and Bob Neal. And they were both experienced people who knew what they were doing, but they just didn't get along. So much so that the engineer who was at the ballpark with them had to sit between them. They wouldn't talk to each other. And they could be very petty. The station had had to print up the score sheets for them, basic ball-broadcasters, have a score sheets with a representation of the ball diamond and all kinds of places where you're right down who was on base and all of this stuff to keep track of it. And the engineer would carry two pads of these forms. And the difference is one of them up at the top said Jimmy Dudley's score sheet. The other said Bob Neal's score sheet. That was a difference. But he had to give the right guy the right thing because they would somehow feel that they were not being respected. There were other things that I got to do and I will pass on a couple of them. One is, well, I got to work with some of the major disjockeys at the time and people would, you know, recording artists would come in and visit them without appointments. And one day when I was 18, I was running the board for a man named Bill Randall who was absolutely top of the business. And Bobbie Darren came in to be interviewed. Bobbie was 23 and he was promoting Splish Splash. Oh my gosh. Yes. Yeah. So Randall had his own microphone and the guest, in this case, Bobbie Darren, had his microphone and I was sitting in my little control board running all this stuff. And the door opened and in came Frankie Avalon who had not scheduled an appearance. So here were these two up and coming recording artists. And I'm 18 and just graduated from high school and I'm watching them and I discover that these guys were nervous as could be. They were, you know, each wanted to get more attention. Each wanted, you know, his records to get played. And so these guys, all the little girls around the country listening to their songs had no idea that they were nervous as hell in this radio studio. And it taught me that not everybody you see, who seems like a big shot, really peels that way and that was a useful thing to learn. So, you know, this would happen fairly often. The disc jockey who also owned a piece of the radio station and he was fairly arrogant was there one day when the general manager came in. The general manager did not own any of the radio station but he, of course, had a very responsible job and they were scheduling a remote broadcast to run all week long from a major sponsor. Bill Randall hated doing remotes for a good reason but he hated doing it. And so here's the general manager saying to nominally, one of his employees, please show up at the remote. I know you hate him, please come. And Randall said, well, I'll think about it. What that meant, he was not going to come but he wasn't going to press it right then. And I remember thinking, this isn't the way these things are supposed to happen. And I felt bad for the general manager. He was a tough guy but it felt bad for him because he was being humiliated in front of one of his junior employees. Me. I found from that another time said, it's really tough being general manager of a radio station and this guy was just knew it very well. I wanted to tell you, let's see, the world's worst remote. Everybody who's been on radio a while has a remote from hell story. Remote in case nobody knows it. It's a broadcast from someplace other than the radio station and it would be transmitted to the radio station over telephone lines. We didn't have computers or digital or anything. So there was a big discount store and they had a range in all day remote from their store and the big attraction was the guest would be Fats Domino. Fats Domino for everybody remembers really played piano. He put a lot of effort into it. He just banged away. Well, what the store had done is they had had some risers stacked up in the middle of the store to create a stage. And on the stage, there were several tables. One for the announcer, one for the engineer, me and a piano. So, we were hampered by one thing. Fats Domino had a contractual relationship. Excuse me. That it said that he could not play piano live. I mean, he had to, you know, if you're going to play something about Fats Domino, it was going to be one of his records. So, you know, the district, he was playing other people's records. No big deal. So, a Fats Domino is there and he gets introduced and he goes over to the piano and I dropped the needle into a Fats Domino record. And suddenly, all hell breaks loose because Fats Domino was banging away at this piano, which is on this stage, which is not the most solid thing in the world. And the needle bounced out of the groove and bounced out again and bounced out again. And the whole record was done in, you know, like 30 seconds. Meanwhile, the real Fats Domino is still playing the song. And the people in the store were not aware of what was going on, they were hearing the real thing. The people listening on the radio station were saying, "What?" So eventually, I ended up having to switch to the live microphone there because there wasn't any record going anymore. It had been, you know, a pound stuff at the end. So, I violated copyright, didn't mean to, but I was not feeling very much in control of things and I got that as one of my remotes from hell. A little story. One of my jobs was to accompany the lady who interviewed celebrities. And she had been in Cleveland Radio for many, many years. She was 50 or so. And she didn't carry her tape recorder around with it. The engineer did it for her. So one Saturday morning, she and I and my bag full of microphones showed up at the hotel where Bob Hope was staying. Bob Hope it happens also a part owner of W.E.R.E. Bob Hope had grown up in Cleveland. And so he was doing a lot of stuff before he became famous in the '30s. As a matter of fact, he was about 50 years old. And the interview lady was about 50 years old. He had gotten to bed pretty late and he was in his pajamas in his big bed. And they got to chatting and I was setting up the microphones and so on. And I started paying attention to the chatting and it became evident to me that at some point in the distant past they had been very good friends. So I just played my little tape recorder and said nothing about it. But you learned that people have realized and they're not necessarily evident to those around them. Go ahead. - With things like that happening, was it hard to leave that station and did you go right from there to Boston? - No, and I didn't mind leaving the station because in those days there was a thing called the Universal Military Training Act and every male 18 or overhead to register for the draft. The draft was two years of being in the army and there were ways to avoid it which we're mostly signing up for reserve units. And so I signed up with the Air Force Reserve there's six months of active duty and then months and weekends. And I was able to pick when I would go in. So after a year and a half at WERI, I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve, went off there. I will tell you this, basic training is really, really nasty. And I recommend it for anybody. They call it the confidence set training. And ultimately that's true. You get dumped in the mud and you get this and you learn that you could handle things that you didn't think you could handle. So when you get done basic training, it's sort of like you become a man, my son. It wasn't fun, but looking at it back, I would recommend it for anybody and I doubt that anybody will follow what I'm suggesting. Came back from the Air Force six months and worked for a little station for a couple of months and then off to Ohio State, where I was an English major. I didn't have much in the way of money to go on because I took a form home from my father to fill out for a student aid and my father was a difficult person. And the form, after all, they're asking whether they should give the student money, which means to students' family. And one of the questions was, "What's your income?" And my father resented that question. "I'm not gonna go telling them how much I make." And that was that. And so I did not qualify for student aid. I had put money in the bank while I was working for WBRE. I went for three years, ran out of money and I had to leave college. At one point I was working, I was writing news for the university's radio station. I was announcing for their TV station, General 34 Columbus. And I was also trying to sell advertising for a little radio station in Columbus. So finally, I said, "Look, I'm gonna go out in the world." And went to work for a station, a series of jobs. Let's see, I want to skip ahead. When I was 23, I was hired by a classical music station in Cleveland, they're called WCLV, it still has those call letters. I just barely qualified to be an announcer there. They had a, what I wanted to say, I'm trying to think of the word. They had one sheet of paper with a whole slew of foreign words. And they give you this and you could read it over and read it over and then you could sit down and record it. And if you could get through that thing, you said, "Okay, you're hired." Well, being a classical music announcer really requires more than just be able to, you know, pronounce I like understand. And so although I was hired, I was just, you know, quite, I had a friend who worked for NBC News and he came over to visit. And I showed him that audition sheet and he looked at us as, "I could never do this." Well, that's true because classical radio is a very specialized kind of radio. So the station owner had known another guy who was an excellent classical announcer, but he was off in the army. So when that guy finished his spell in the army, I was given a severance check and said, "Good luck." And that guy went to the station and stayed there for 40 years. And, you know, it was widely respected in Cleveland. So I hunted around and I found a job in Fort Wayne and Deanna. And that was a wonderful setting. I fit in very well, I could do the job. I could pronounce the words. I was news director, but every now and then, I would do a talk show or I would do a disjockey show. And Fort Wayne was big enough that there were things going on. There is this little parenthetical. That part of Indiana back in the '20s was hotbed with the Ku Klux Klan. And that way of thinking still existed in Fort Wayne in the mid 1960s. And I found that, you know, uncomfortable. But within that, I liked the job. They liked me, we got along fine. And they didn't pay very well. So after about three years, I said to the program director, "I'm going to start looking for a job to, you know, improve my..." He said fine, fine, you know, I understand. And I ended up being hired by a top 40 station in Hartford, paid me more money. This was the summer of love, 1967. And top 40 radio stations intended to be pretty... Well, kind of bizarre. But I was there for a year and a half. Which in top 40 radio, that's been there for a long time. So I went to a station in New Haven. Unfortunately, I came down with hepatitis from shellfish out along Ireland Sound. So on the strength of being in the hospital for 13 days, they fired me for excessive absenteeism. And after I finished in the hospital, I came home, didn't have much else to do. So with three friends, we drove to this rock concert that was about to be held just over the line in New York. And I think they were called it Woodstock. Well, we had a VW, so we bust. So we slept in it. But of course, as you know, from all the pictures and movies and everything, an awful lot of people at hitchhiked up from New York or wherever, and they were out there in the mud. It was... But if you have a nice little VW bus to sleep in, it's a whole different story. So back from Woodstock, and I still had to find a job, and there was a talk station in Hartford. Not a terribly powerful one, but, you know, it was nice in that we were not required to sell our point of view. We were just moderators. And since I was by nature, you know, more a journalist, I liked the idea of just, you know, moderating. It was a time of Vietnam, and so you had a lot of political division, like a small scale version of today. And so people, you'd get people who would, you know, get very upset with this. And again, we weren't selling any point of view. We were just, you know, moderating. We'd get people sending us unsigned letters calling us communists. And one night, I went out to my car, which was in an otherwise empty parking lot. And there was a note under my windshield wiper that said, "We know where you live." Well, that made me feel comfortable. But the, on the air, we're going five hours a day, talking to people on the phone, with no one screening the calls. And that meant when the phone lit up, you picked it up, it was on the air. And you had no idea who you were getting. Well, we learned how to listen very carefully to the first couple of seconds to whether the caller was legit. And if we determined that the caller was gonna pull a number on us, we'd just punch off and go to the next caller. So it was okay. - In the interest of time, though, Chuck. - Yeah. - Because I know there's a story that you wanna tell when I was an EEI when you were, but talk about how you got to EEI and some of your work at the State House. Like for example, if you had, and you can, can or can't, don't wanna mention their names, if you had what we would call an unimpeachable source, that you could go to for a story and say, "Hey, is this really true that so-and-so is doing such and such?" How did you get to Boston? - All right, there's only a small gap between where I was and where you're talking about. Anyway, after the telephone talk station, I worked for a couple of other, and I found myself in '73, not having a regular job. I was freelancing or stringing for WCBS in New York, which was great. I was living in Manchester, Connecticut, and whenever I had a story from Connecticut, I would phone it into WCBS and you'd be heard throughout the known universe. One morning while I was in Manchester, phone rang at 6 a.m., and I climbed out of bed, and I went to the phone, and there was WCBS. Did you know about the big storm overnight? No, but I'll check it out. He says, "Okay, good. "You do that, and have you do a live shot at 715? "Good." So I sat there and called all around and got the story, wrote it up, called them around 7-11. Okay, I'm ready to go, and they said fine, we'll put you on right after the sports. At that moment, I realized that I was sitting there in my kitchen, totally unclothed. About to talk to 250,000 people. It's radio, right? Nobody-- - Exactly. - But I knew. So that was one of the things I did before I went regularly to WCBS. Once I became a street reporter for WCBS, they got all kinds of assignments. Meet was very expensive, beef was expensive, and so some civic organization had a demonstration for the folks in the South Bronx about how you can eat course meat and be well nourished. So I went up there with my recorder, and they said, "Now, here, be a good sport." And so that's how I had my taste of course meat. Most of the work was within the burrow Manhattan, but sometimes the outer burrows. One Sunday, there had been a memorial service at a fairly small black church in distant Brooklyn. And I went there, and I covered it. I recorded the people talking, and I went out to phone it back to the station in Manhattan, and the ordinary phones around. It was that kind of part of Brooklyn. So I went into the church again, and I said, "Can I use your phone?" And they said, "Yeah, we have one right here." And the elders were sitting there counting out the offering. All right, dollar here, dollar there, that's what I'm saying. And I sat on the floor, underneath that table, wrote my story, prepared it, called WCBS, fed it to them, and I'm doing all this stuff, while the people off above my head are counting out the money. They, of course, for hearing me do what, and it was not the most comfortable thing I've ever done. But it allowed me to come to the attention of the folks at CBS. And CBS was in the process of converting all its talk stations to all news stations. WCBS was the first that had been converted. Next one on the line was their talk station in Boston. WEEI had been a talk station for 10 years. So they made the change, and I was offered a job as a reporter. One day, as I was taking the team from the Prudential Center over to Park Street, in those days, the MBTA's trolleys in the subway were very, very crowded. And the operators were very surly, or nasty, or whatever term you wanna use. And I was up near the front of the trolley, and it stopped. And the guy in front of me wanted to get off the trolley and he was using a crutch to get around. So he wasn't getting through the crowd of people very quickly. And the motorman was very nasty to him. And there was another guy in this scrum of people, a black man who said to the motorman, "Come on, give him a break, he's on a crutch." And the motorman looked at him and said, "Shut up, you black [bleep]." And I'm standing there and I couldn't believe what I heard. So we got to Park Street, and I told the motorman, "I'm a reporter for WEEI, and what I saw just now is totally unacceptable." I wanted to know that I'm going to report this to the MBTA, and I'm also going to report it as a news story. And what he didn't know is we had a brand new general manager, a black man. So in back to the station, told him about it, and he said, "Sure, you can put that on there." So I told the story, complete with the offending language, and the motorman got two days off. I would have thought he'd have been fired two days off. But it told me that I could tell the truth boldly, you know, if it was true and if it was relevant to the listeners. In time, I got moved over to the State House. I didn't really want to go. I had reported from the Connecticut State House, and I, you know, several years before. I knew the way it was done, and I told the guy, "Oh, come on, I'm too young to retire." I said, "No, please go over to the State House." They were replacing somebody else, it was very lazy. And so I got to work with some very fine people, not necessarily well from WEEI. One of the finest people that I worked for, WEEI, I'm sorry, next to, was Darryl Gould of WVZ. I think most people remember Darryl. Oh, yeah, it's nice, man. I knew him very well. Excellent sense of humor. He had a severe case of diabetes, and he had a kidney transplant, and it didn't take. So he had a second kidney transplant. He had lost a side of one eye. The other eye wasn't working any too well. But, you know, WEEI got along very well. And unfortunately, he, well, he outlived his wife. He and his wife had kind of assumed that Darryl would die first, and then she would get along. But she developed some fast form of cancer and died, and so there's Darryl by himself. Well, he fell in love with one of the nurses he had been served, and they were fine. But I think he lived to a bee about 52, and he should have lived much longer. There were other fine people that I worked with. There was a young guy, about 18, was going to Emerson College, and he kind of set up a little headquarters in a corner of the broadcasters room. His name was Steve Brown. And he and his wife, Melanie, were, well, they weren't married yet, his girlfriend and Mary, were very social people, and they would have a little get-togethers in their apartment, and he got to be very well-known, very well-liked. And I am not surprised that Steve has gone on to become, you know, just an outstanding reporter for WBUR, just charming people. I wanted to back up a little bit. Really, before I was assigned to the State House, I was sort of a general reporter anchor. And in January 30th, as 1978, I was home, it was my day off, and there was this huge snowstorm. And like all good reporters, I felt left out. Yeah, I missed all the fun. However, one week later, there was a bigger snowstorm, and that was the blizzard. And I had come to work that afternoon, and I ended up working something like 28 hours, and it just, you know, wiped out the power, the electrical power to the prudential. Fortunately, CBS had installed a standby generator. It didn't provide all the electricity we wanted, but it allowed us to stay on the air. The clock system wasn't working, so we were running the whole radio station. By a wristwatch that belonged to one of the writers. We weren't able to do any of our regular programming. And so we had two people on the air hour after hour. The anchor would do about the first, you know, 15 minutes of what passed for news, and then it was my turn to be the storm desk. And as the hour has passed, the storm desk got more and more and more. And we, a lot of other radio stations were off the air. So we rounded up people to give us reports on what was happening. One of them was Governor Dukakis. He listened to our station anyway. So here it was four in the morning, and there's Governor Dukakis telling, you know, what he had just, you know, been told by, you know, his people. And it was a perfect example of what radio can be, and particularly what all news radio can be. Eventually we got our full power back. The roads were, you know, belly button deep in snow. And the door opened from the elevator, from the stairs, I will. We were on the 44th floor. And who should walk in, but Jim Pansulo, some people remember him, some won't, but Jim Pansulo had had two heart attacks. And he lived somewhere around Quincy. And in the middle of all this, Jim Pansulo, trooper that he was, made his way to the Prudential Tower, and he climbed 44 flights of stairs. Slowly, but he did. And, you know, he spent a little while catching his breath. But, I mean, that is, you know, devotion above and beyond. And he showed it later on in this time at the EI, he specialized in medical things and also in religious matters. But I will always remember Jim Pansulo showing up like that. I remember Jim very well. He used to do colors, as a matter of fact, with Johnny Most on Celtics broadcasts at WHDH. And I got to know him when I was lucky enough to be EDI. And just a, just a prince of a gentleman. And I agree with everything you say about him. I have a Johnny Most story. I have a Johnny Most story. After we had, we were owned by the Celtics organization. And Johnny had been hired to come and do basketball on EDI. He had, of course, done so on BZ for a long time. And Johnny Most had a real rush before us like this. And they were showing him around our newsroom, which was big and laid out very nice. And so Johnny wanted to be helpful. So, I'll go into the interviews with your disc jockeys. Like I said, we don't have any disc jockeys. Okay, well, I'll do interviews with your talk show hosts. Hey, we don't have any talk shows. Well, what do you do? News, all news. From Johnny. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of. It was nice to meet him. Yeah, Johnny. Johnny was a character. There's a story that I have told repeatedly on this broadcast. I was in the station one day. And Gary Lapierre came into the office and he said, "Hey, you better send somebody upstairs to accounting." Because Johnny's up there and he's very upset. He's using his 10 seconds to go voice. And I just thought that was rather a unique Johnny Most story. Now, in the time we have left. Yes. I know one thing you wanted to talk about was an event that both you and I were kind of involved in. With the Lone Ranger. And also, if you can, take a couple of minutes and talk about, we only have about 10 minutes left. But after you, after you, I know you want to talk about that and I'm very flattered. But also talk about what it's like to leave an own radio station. Okay. The first thing that you wanted to, to cover was. Clayton Moore. Oh, yes, yes, yes. All right. This is when we had moved the station from the Prudential Tower over to the Schraff Center. And we had just a wonderful studio and newsroom setup. And you had a studio where you hosted the old time radio show. And Fred Foy, who had been the announcer and narrator for the Lone Ranger broadcast years before, would stop in every now and then you're fairly friendly. And you learned that the actor who played the Lone Ranger on television, Clayton Moore, lived some other place, but he, you know, he gets a phone number. So that evening, and I'm sitting over in the news section, getting ready for, you know, a new guest. And so here's Fred Foy sitting in the studio with you reciting the opening to the Lone Ranger shows, you know, fiery horse for the speed of light to little room. And at that point, Clayton Moore pops in, you know, I owe silver. And it just your chills went down my spine because I was observing recreated what I used to listen to when I was eight years old. And at this point, I was more like 40. So you had, you had some great ideas and this, that, that was one of them. Um, I want to, I want to talk for a moment about, um, what do I want to say empathy. Reporters are sometimes thought to be, you know, cold hearted. Um, in 1980, John Paul the second, the Pope came to visit Boston. And, and he was taking a long motorcade from Logan airport to the common where he. Conducted a mass. And the station got me a ride on the camera truck, which ran just ahead of his pope mobile. They were getting great pictures and I was describing all of the things we were doing. And there was a point on Mass Ave, where there had been commercial business in the past, most of them had been torn down. And that part of Mass Ave was, was very desolate. And we're coming up. And here was this little nun. Probably retired. Had probably spent her entire life in the service of her church. And there's the pope. Coming toward her and she's just standing there with. A rosary in her hands and just trying to think what is going through her head. I don't know. We zoomed on past. I didn't report it on the radio, but it just, you know, went to me. And, you know, here, years and years later, I remember them. We're going to talk about owning a station. Practically, everybody who works in radio at some point wants to own a radio station. I was certainly one of them. The Celtics converted W.E.I. from all news to all sports and we were all let go. So it was 1992. I freelanced for ABC News for a good part of that year. But I was also a shopping around for a station to buy. I found one in a town called Kane in northwestern Pennsylvania. Small town, 5,000 people in the snow belt in the cold belt. The first time and the last that I ever had to tell people in the morning that it was minus 45 degrees. We, you know, past papers and we created a corporation that owned the radio station. And we moved into this little town. Pretty town. And one of the things we learned right from the beginning is nobody wanted to know anything about all the things we had done in Boston and New York and so on and so on. Their eyes would glaze over. So for 14 years, we were just sort of the mystery pair because nobody wanted to know. And, oh, Jenny were two hours. She also did the letters to Santa Claus and Jenny has a very recognizable laugh. And she would giggle her chortle or whatever on the letters to Santa broadcast. One day she was in a grocery store and she was, you know, going through the aisles. And there's no one else in the aisle where she was. About there was somebody on the next aisle over. And for some reason she'd get your left. And the person way over there said, hi, Jenny. You can't really get away from from a distinctive laugh. You discover that is more than just fun. I had done a poor job of budgeting. And at the end of our first year there. Our accountant. Good man. Maybe the best fire we had. I pointed out to Jenny that we were this far from. Insolvency and she persuaded me and we sat down at two in the morning. Redoing all these things. And I went into work in the morning and I cut my pay and I cut their pay. And we, you know, got rid of our employee health insurance. And a whole bunch of other things. And we, we stayed on the air. But I used to say that. In a small company, you need an entrepreneur. To own it and to pessimist to keep the books. Jenny was the pessimist and she kept us on the air. There are things about being in that little town that was very difficult. Very, very cold, very snowy. And there weren't. It was a logging and, and oil drilling place. You didn't get many people like Boston. And so you, you could be lonely. And if he wanted to do any serious shopping, it was 90 miles to Erie, 90 miles to Buffalo and something like that to Pittsburgh. So the cost of living was low because it wasn't much to buy. In time, we, we reached time to retire. And we found somebody who bought the radio station and the folks gave us a wonderful send off dinner. And people from various churches and governmental and this and that all had this dinner for us. And after they got done saying, you know, that we were good guys. I got up and instead of just saying, thank you. I said, well, I'm going to tell you something. Like all people, I have dreams. One of the most common dreams I have is walking around in the world naked or just in my underwear. This happened a lot. And I thought about it and thought, you know, I'll bet what that is. Is some part of me. Doubting that I was really up to it and that people were seeing me as a, you know, kind of a fraud, but they tolerate me. And I told, told this group and what I wanted to say is I've just done that for you. Well, I'll tell you, you're, you're a real good guy. I wish I could have worked for you at that radio station. I wouldn't have paid you very much. Well, I'd have made it somehow. But I'm sure we could sit here for hours and tell stories and good ones. And you've told many and you're just a good guy to know and a pleasure to have as a friend. And I really appreciate you taking some time to sit down and share some of your insights and some of your thrills. You're a remarkable career and you're to be commended for what you have done. Thank you, Kenny. I hope we have another reunion so that I can see you again. I hope so. I really do. I hope we do. I, they were a great group of people and it was a real pleasure to get to know them. So again, I want to thank you for being a guest with us on city talk. And good night, ladies and gentlemen, that will do it for this edition. And we'll see you next week when our guest will be Tom Kennedy. Former DJ here in Boston, both worked at WBC and WHDH. And I'm sure we'll have some great stories as well. So I hope you'll join us then. Good night, everybody. Thanks for listening to another great conversation with Ken Meyer and friends. You can contact Ken by email. He addresses KJ Meyer7@gmail.com. That's KJ-M-E-Y-E-R7@gmail.com. Tune in next time for more conversation with Ken Meyer on City Talk. [MUSIC PLAYING]