Living On Air (3 page)

It was fun hearing those different words coming out of those familiar deep baritones. The longer they played, the more boisterous they got. If you won, you had a drink. If you lost, you had a drink. If it was a draw, everybody had a drink. Basically the game was an excuse to drink and be loud and if a fight broke out in the middle, that was okay too because at the heart of it, the game was all for fun.

Other times there were party nights at our house, when my parents had their friends over to play cards. There was always music blaring out of our big console stereo, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, every great singer with an Italian last name. The men wore nice suits with ties, the women were in dresses, stockings, and high heels, with their hair done up at the beauty parlor. I would sit at the top of the steps of our two-story home, listening to them talk, all night. I especially liked it when one of the men brought his accordion along. From the opening note, everybody danced, including my mom and dad. There might be 20 people doing some sort of an Italian conga line in our living room. At some point in the evening, the guy would always play the “Tarantella,” an old Italian folk dance, and everybody clapped along. Couples linked arms, they would swing one another around in a circle until they collapsed, exhausted at the end of the song. For me, it was another beautiful opera played out right before my eyes and ears.

My parents loved sharing their home, their food, their laughter with all of their friends and family. My dad worked hard his whole life and got the greatest joy out of the simplest pleasures, a slow sip of wine, a puff on his beloved cigar, taking care of his family. Sunnyside Avenue is the place where I hold most of my childhood memories. Hank endlessly pitched me a baseball in the backyard. Dad took a catnap every afternoon on the living room floor with his head propped up on the first step of the stairs. It
sure looked uncomfortable to me but he slept like a baby. When I misbehaved, Mom chased me up those same stairs with a wooden spoon in her hand, threatening to “sit on me” if she caught me. She weighed about 100 pounds. Even if she did sit on me, I don’t think I would have noticed.

The house on Sunnyside Avenue is where I lived when I went on that field trip in fourth grade and discovered the wonderful world of broadcasting. That night, when I went to bed I tucked a transistor radio under my pillow so I could hear what the deejays said after dark. That was my first class in a crash course about rock and roll radio. It was the land of imagination. I couldn’t exactly touch it, but I could feel it, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. My journey was just beginning.

TOM COLLINS

In the neighborhood where I grew up, when school let out at the end of the year, no one went to summer camp. I had never even heard of camp. We played ball in the backyard, hung out at the mall, went fishing at Slade’s Pond, rode our bikes all over Oakville, and watched the Red Sox and the Yankees play baseball on TV. After meeting Jerry Wolf and seeing the inside of a radio studio, I had something new to add to the list of activities during my summer vacation. I wanted to learn all I could about radio.

I started listening to every single station I could find. Late at night, I discovered that just by turning the dial, I could tune in AM frequencies from clear across the country. It was like a magic box had opened up just for me.

In those days, most AM radio stations had to lower their power at sundown, or go off the air entirely, until sunrise the next day. It was a rule made by the Federal Communications Commission. Imagine if you had 30 flashlights, beaming different colored lights from one end of a room to the other side. They would cross over one another, muting all the colors, getting in the way of each other. Then imagine turning all of them off except for two or three. That would open up a wide, unobstructed path of clear light to make it through to the other side of the room.

Even though AM radio doesn’t broadcast in a straight line like that, it helps to visualize how I was able to listen to radio stations thousands of miles away from my home. After sunset, when the smaller stations shut down or lowered their power, the bigger clear-channel stations took over the airwaves. Instead of dozens of signals crowding the airways, now there were just a handful and they came in loud and strong. It seemed like some sort of trick and in a way it was. It even had a name. It was called “skipping.” That’s when those powerhouse monster AM’s would slide in, their signals bouncing off the ionosphere, floating across the air, through my bedroom window, into my transistor radio under my pillow.

All at once a treasure chest of legendary stations opened up to me. That was way before computers, the Internet, or satellite radio. My dad had only just bought our first color TV. Being able to eavesdrop on those stations was like listening in to my parents’ parties. I heard the big sound of Super CFL, the Voice of Labor, from Chicago, [
Click Here
] and WOWO, from Fort Wayne, Indiana. [
Click Here
] There was Detroit’s CKLW, all the way from Windsor, Ontario, Canada, the sound of Boss Radio, the Big 8. [
Click Here
] Listening to those faraway voices, I thought the most exciting job anyone could have would be to work at a radio station. And to work at one of those stations in a big city would be my dream come true.

That picture in my mind is what kept me from going crazy when school started up in September of 1969. With classes about to begin again I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time at C-O as I wanted to, anymore. I had to make other plans, find some other way to continue my independent education. If I couldn’t go to the station anymore, I figured I had to bring the station to me. So I built my own studio at home.

First, I bought a little audio mixer, a microphone and tiny
AM transmitter with less power than a walkie-talkie, all from a catalog called Lafayette Electronics. Then I found a couple of plastic turntables from Radio Shack for $10 each. I already had my own record case packed with forty-fives and I had a tape recorder I could use to play the jingles from WWCO. I even made copies of the commercials.

I picked up a piece of plywood and cut out a hole so the audio mixer knobs could stick through it, just like at the radio station. Only mine was held together with duct tape. It fit perfectly on the desk in my bedroom. But I didn’t want to be the only deejay on my station, so I dragged two of my friends into it with me.

Most every day after school we went on the air for three hours. We called ourselves 1600 WOLF Radio. Somehow it just seemed right that the call letters should honor the guy who gave me my first break, Jerry Wolf. I did the first shift from four to five p.m., then my cousin Pete Simons did the second shift while I had dinner downstairs. My buddy Bill Lombardi rounded out our big-time staff from six to seven at night. I would be sitting at the kitchen table with my mom and dad listening to WOLF on our trusty radio on top of the fridge. It was the first time ever we turned the dial away from AM 1240 to a new frequency. We were rappin’ and pumpin’ out tunes, blasting our music out of that tiny 100-milliwatt AM transmitter. You could actually hear it halfway down the block in my neighborhood. I treated it like the real thing and even made airchecks of myself so I could listen to [
Click Here
] them later. It was my first on-air radio gig and I took it seriously.

It was also the first time I tried out a new name for myself. I didn’t think anybody used his or her real name on the air,
and I had been looking around for months for something that sounded right. The most famous deejays were Cousin Brucie, Dan Ingram at WABC in New York and of course Jerry Wolf. I wanted a name that made me feel like a star. I scoured baseball rosters, TV shows, and the comics. I even picked up books from English class without being asked, something I would never have done before on my own. And then I found it, staring up at me out of the newspaper in, of all places, the obituary section. I was reborn, Thomas Collins. Only I would call myself Tom or even Tommy. I thought it was perfect. Tom Collins, yeah that works.

I still tried to get over to C-O whenever I could on the weekends. I was restless to get back to my real purpose in life, rock and roll radio. By the time summer finally rolled around again, we were deep into the beginning of a new decade, 1970, and on my first day of vacation I burst through the door of 65 Bank Street with big plans. I ended up hanging out at the station nearly every single night plus every weekend. My parents supported me all the way. I don’t know if they were relieved I found something I could actually do for a living or if they were simply as fascinated by the whole thing as I was. I just know they trusted me.

I was still too young to drive so around five in the afternoon I was back at The Mighty Oak waiting for the bus to take me to C-O, then late at night, my dad drove downtown to pick me up. I guess it was one way to keep an eye on me. Most days, my dad worked from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, but there he was, at eleven at night, puffing on his cigar, sitting in his car, listening to WWCO, waiting to drive me home from the radio station. I was a very lucky kid.

The previous summer at C-O, I was still a little star struck, seeing it all up close for the first time, getting my hands on the equipment. Building my own radio station at home gave me the confidence to keep going. It made me feel as if I really had a shot at making my dream come true. Now it was my second summer at C-O, time to show the guys what I could do. I ended up spending more time at Bank Street than many of the people who got paid to work there.

That was the summer I got to know all of the other deejays. Most of the guys were in their twenties and started working in radio right out of high school. A few had gone to college and one had served in the Army. They became a band of brothers, best friends connected by their love of radio. For some of them, WWCO would turn out to be the most fun working they would ever have, past, present, and future. In the late sixties, early seventies there were very few women on the air and C-O was definitely a boys’ club. Tim Clark, Ron Gregory, and Mike Holland in particular were the greatest guys I could ever hope to know. There were plenty of others who came and went, Pete Moss, Jim Scott, Dick Springfield, Bill Raymond, Joe Sherwood. Each one had his own style and each one shared his wisdom with me. It was a kindness I’ve never forgotten.

But out of everyone I ran into at WWCO, I had never met a guy like Mike. I actually heard about him way before we were introduced. Mike was the first person I knew of who had gone to war. He had been working at C-O when he was drafted and ended up serving two years in Vietnam. Jerry Wolf used to send him reel-to-reel tapes, an audio letter, when Mike was still in the Army. On those days I helped out at the station, I watched
Jerry put his tapes together and often wondered what that guy Mike would be like if I ever got the chance to meet him. And then I did.

65 BANK STREET

The first time I saw Mike Holland, he was just back from the Vietnam War, hunkered down on his haunches on the floor of the AM studio, eating a sandwich. In my young mind I could picture him sitting just like that in some rice paddy in Southeast Asia. It was a sobering thought. I could only imagine what his experience there had been like in the war. I figured he was lucky to be alive, and always felt that he was hellbent on making up for lost time.

His real name is Michael Bouyea, but on the radio he was Michael Emerson Holland or M.E.H. as he sometimes called himself. Mike was on the air from six to ten at night at WWCO when he was drafted. [
Click Here
] I give a lot of credit to Wally King, our station manager, for rehiring Mike when he returned. By 1970, the Vietnam War was so hated throughout much of the country that soldiers were spit on when they came back home. It was nothing like today where we try our best to honor the men and women who serve in the military. Our boss did the right thing giving Mike back his job and whenever he needed time off from work for a little rest and rehabilitation, he got it, no questions asked.

I spent a lot of time with Mike that summer. Ever since Jerry
left, I wasn’t sure where I would fit in so it was nice when I casually slipped into a routine with Mike. He seemed to like having me around. On warm nights, when his shift was over, we used to go out on the fire escape down the hall from the studio. He’d light up a cigarette and I would listen to him talk about radio. I was too timid to ask him about Vietnam. I didn’t think it was my place to pry into that part of his life. Besides, I was already uncomfortably suspended in the air, six stories above the street. I liked the easy conversation of topics I understood better. We talked about school, music, and where we both wanted to work in the future. On nights he felt like blowing off steam, we raided the music library where all the old and now unused seventy-eight rpm records were kept, took them out on the fire escape, then sent them flying across the street to the roof next door, like a Frisbee. Unfortunately for anyone down below, not all of them made it. Fortunately for me, none of them hit my dad’s car.

Sometimes I think of Mike as the devil on my shoulder, tempting me to grow up a little faster than I was ready. He was a man who had seen things I couldn’t imagine, and I was a naive, small-town teenage boy. I definitely respected and admired him, because of his past. In the future, Mike would end up with one of the best careers in radio out of all of us at C-O. Back then, I was his willing wingman. Get this: as it turns out, being a deejay is a great way to meet girls.

It was like there was a magnet, pulling women across town, over to 65 Bank Street. I remember Mike, especially, had a parade of girls coming into the studio most nights. Some of those women were not exactly the type of girl you’d take home to mother. In fact, I don’t think even their own mothers were thrilled about having these girls around. Once the office staff had gone home for the day, the groupies
started coming in. The evening’s events usually began around eight o’clock. The elevator buzzer would go off and Mike would send me down to the first floor to bring up the girls. I’d get to the lobby, open the door and there right in front of me would be one or two girls, about 20 or 22 years old, smiling at me, their lips covered in bright pink lipstick. They’d ask how old I was and I always told them my real age, 15, but next to them I felt ten years old. I tried to act cool like Mike and say something funny, but honestly I had no idea what the hell I was doing. While I was bringing the girls up the elevator, Mike had run over to the jock lounge, grabbed a couple of those green vinyl cushions off the sofa and thrown them onto the floor in the bathroom. It had taken me one full year but now I knew where the stains came from on those cushions. Mike would meet us at the elevator, take hold of the girls, and then the greatest thing in the world would happen. But I don’t mean what you’re probably thinking. As they disappeared down the hallway, to do whatever they were going to do, Mike would hand over control of the station to me.

I was in heaven. I cranked up the music to ear-splitting levels in the control room and when that first record ended I would jingle into the next song. Wow, what a thrill. Before he went into the bathroom Mike told me, “OK, Davey, I’m gonna be in the back with this chick for about three songs. You need to do a song to song and then a song to jingle to song while I’m gone.” Good God, I was running the goddamn radio station. I’d call my friends from Watertown High School and tell them to listen to this next song as it ends and when you hear the jingle and the following song, that was ME doing that. Mike would come back into the studio after the second song to say that he needed to talk before the next record to give the illusion that he was still running the show. He would say to me, “Why don’t you go in there with the girls while I talk up this record?”

“What? Uh, no no no, that’s OK,” I’d reply. My high school sexual experience was like mere training wheels compared to these two-wheelers Mike was riding For now, I would much rather play the music, please. He’d do his quick bit on the air, then head back to the bathroom for more fun.

If Mike was the devil on my shoulder, Tim Clark and Ron Gregory were more like angels. Okay, not exactly angels but they were definitely better influences on me than Mike. They reminded me a little bit of my own brother, Henry. They came over to my house a few times and even my mom liked Ron and Tim. Many years later they honored her memory when they came to her funeral on a cold January day.

Tim had started out as a DJ just like I had, coming down to the radio station at night when he was in high school, so he got a kick out of showing me the ropes and paying back the favor. Tim worked every Saturday night on the AM from seven to midnight while Ron did the exact same shift across the hall on the FM. Ron had gone to the Connecticut School of Broadcasting. After he graduated he got into his Dodge Dart and drove up and down Interstate 95, stopping at every radio station along the way, looking for a job. When he got to WWCO, he was hired for the overnight shift on the FM station, playing country music. Eventually he took over the night shift on the AM station, calling himself “The Night Owl.”

Tim and Ron were best friends, both in their early twenties. I can’t think of one without thinking of the other. But there was something more profound for me. Ron was black and Tim was white. Today it sounds silly to say this, but back then, that made a huge impression on me. There were so few African-American kids at my high school that I didn’t have any black friends. Now
here was this great guy right in front of me, Ron Gregory, who just happened to be black and I’m hanging out with him all the time. It was an early lesson for me that skin color didn’t matter. Tim and Ron both looked out for me and actually protected me from some of the stuff that went on at WWCO. The most unforgettable lesson I learned from Ron was about women.

Earlier that summer Ron had given me a warning. He said, “Listen, Davey, there are going to be all kinds of girls that want to bang you just because you’re a disc jockey. And when that happens, here’s what I want you to do.” With the hint of a smile he walked over to the door in the jock lounge and said, “When your dick gets hard because of one of these girls…take it out of your pants and stick it in this door jamb and you slam this door shut as hard as you can.” Then he burst out laughing. Ron had the greatest laugh and when he started up you couldn’t help but join in, but I got the message loud and clear: DO NOT THINK WITH YOUR DICK! Mike, on the other hand, seemed very content to have his dick lead him in and out of every willing woman in Waterbury. Most of them were really nice girls who just happened to feel the tug of that magnet pulling them down to Bank Street. Many of them ended up on the bathroom floor, lying on those green cushions from the jock lounge with their legs spread up in the air.

Out of all the women who went up and down that elevator, the one I will never forget was the girl they called Tug Boat Rosie. The first time I met her it was after ten o’clock when the buzzer went off downstairs. I followed my routine, took the elevator down, opened the front door, and tried to come up with something clever to say. Standing there in front of me was a short, thin, blond girl 18 years old, kinda cute, with a nice smile. Until
she took out her teeth. All of them. Before then, the only person I had ever seen without teeth was my 70-year-old uncle. I didn’t know what to say. I was shocked. I wasn’t thinking about what terrible thing might have happened to her or what kind of life she was living. Most of the guys didn’t care, either. I’ll never name names, but there were quite a few deejays that got the smoothest blowjob they ever had from Tug Boat Rosie.

Yes, believe it or not, deejays do have groupies and sure, lots of the guys met women and had sex at the station so I was in just the right place to pick up some pointers. Besides, I still had Tim and Ron looking out for me, not only about girls, but everything else, too. Ever since they met my parents, they took it upon themselves to protect me.

As far as the station manager Wally King knew, I was only at WWCO on Saturday afternoons, helping out by filing records. In reality, I was there nearly every night, plus all day on the weekend. Wally was a great guy, but he wasn’t so crazy about me hanging around his radio station. The sales manager, Bob Somerville, was even more of a problem. He was a real button-down guy who went by the book. Bob was so straight we used to joke that he slept in his suit. The problem was, both of them had a habit of stopping by the station unannounced. Sometimes they were just checking up on what was going on and other times, they had out-of-town visitors who wanted a tour. But most of the time, they wanted to see if there were any women in the studio. I understood that Bob, Wally, and the rest of the management team weren’t bad guys, they were just protecting their business. There were rules set up by the Federal Communications Commission and regulations that had to be followed and they weren’t going to let a bunch of crazy disc jockeys cause them to lose their license.

On many Saturday nights, whenever we heard the elevator bell ring out announcing that one of the managers had stopped by, Ron and Tim would turn to each other and say, “What are we gonna do with the kid?” To stay out of trouble, the guys had found a few places to hide me. One of them was in the broom closet. The closet only had a half door, oddly enough the top half, so the bottom was open. That meant I had to stand with my feet inside two buckets while I covered my body with mops and brooms so no one would see my legs or shoes below the bottom of the door. Once when I was in there, Bob walked right by me and I held my breath until he passed me on his way to the studio.

There were other times I hid under the turntables in the FM studio. The engineer had built a console with two large wooden boxes on either side of the deejay, and mounted on top of each one was a turntable. There was an access door in front so you could get underneath to fix anything that might go wrong. I always remember Ron being on the air on the FM at that time and he would tell me, “Okay, Davey, get in the box!” I was pretty small so I crawled inside and stayed there for 20 or 30 minutes until the coast was clear. As long as Bob wasn’t in the studio with him, Ron talked to me while the records spun on the turntables above my head and gave me a play-by-play of what was happening. The last hiding place was the fire escape, my least favorite of all. I hunkered down, rain or shine, hot or cold to wait until it was safe to come back inside, which is probably why to this day, I still don’t like looking over the edge of a building.

That’s how I spent my second summer at WWCO, taking the bus to the station, with my dad picking me up at night. Once I turned 16, my parents bought me my own car, an old Rambler Classic with “three on the tree,” a three-speed standard shift on
the steering column. When school started back up again I had a newfound freedom to go to the station whenever I wanted, without asking my dad to pick me up. Maybe that’s why he bought me the car. All during my junior year in high school I drove myself back and forth to C-O to hang out with Mike, Ron, and Tim. By now I had been at WWCO for nearly two years, working in the production room, hiding from the bosses, all the time listening, learning, and doing whatever the guys would let me do, waiting for my own break into show business. And when that opportunity came, I barely had any time to think about it.