Gordon
Byrd
Before I was in radio,
I was a talk radio caller. In my misspent youth during the
70’s and early
80’s, I usually called in as some character, trying to
bend the topical conversation toward the absurd. That was a hard
thing to do back then, as talk radio took itself much more seriously
back then.
I would often call up as a redneck from
a bar on Nebraska Avenue, offering unsolicited opinions not
unlike Foghorn Leghorn or his radio ancestor, Senator Claghorn.
Another of my characters was dubbed "Jim Beam" by
one of the hosts. Beam was mainly an advocate (though not a
very effective one) for the then-controversial concept of raising
the drinking age back to 21. The 1980 election was a great
time to pull the chains of the usually portentious and often
pretentious talk hosts of the era. Sometimes I would call in
as a brittle, cartoonish version of a liberal, then turn around
and call in with a different voice as a conservative and berate
myself!
Deciding to go legit after being threatened
with arrest by Drew Hayes, I became a board operator at WFNN
and later WPLP-AM radio during the 80’s, which many consider to be Tampa Bay talk
radio’s golden age. This was the era of hosts like David
Fowler, Bob Lassiter, Tim Coles, Richard Shanks, Jack Ellery,
Dick Norman and some fellow named Webb. I worked with or around
most of these legends (the exception being, regrettably, Norman).
I even managed to wheedle my own show during some of the 80’s,
starting with the local "swap shop" show and graduating
to a general-interest show on the weekends. This was back when
even a talk station in Tampa felt it had to have someone live
and local on a Saturday night, which hasn’t been the case
since the mid-90’s or so.
I received karma from my earlier career as a crank caller as
I was often burned by various mutations of the legendary Lionel.
Oh well, I also got some dates off the phones as well, especially
Sunday nights when the astrology show was on.
New ownership came to WPLP and promptly
wrecked the station, then tried desperately to revive it with
fresh new talent. I got to know people like Jay Marvin, Tom
Bauerle, and Mark Davis, all of whom are rock-solid legends
in the business now in their respective markets , but who found
Tampa a treacherous market in which to gain a foothold (especially
at WPLP, which had been renamed WTKN and promptly disappeared
from most people’s
consciousness).
I got to wander through the smoldering
wreckage of WTKN as Program Director for three years. During
that time, the station was sold to Paxson Communications, the
company that later put the PAX TV network on the air. I was
told to gear up the station for an all-news format. Not having
a big budget to work with, I hired a lot of talented – but often very green – people,
and gave them a lot of responsibility. Since I didn’t have
a news background at that time, it was the blind leading the
blind.
But it was an energetic group and the
sparks flew when they were all on a story. The atmosphere was
a LOT like the 1990’s
TV comedy NewsRadio – I often wonder if one of their writers
had been spying on our little cubbyhole on 4th Street in St.
Pete. The whole gear-up exploded when it was exposed that we
were trying to launch a 21st-century news operation with 1990’s-era
DOS-based software. Long gaps of dead air and embarrassing pauses
as sound bites failed to play brought our momentum to a grinding
stop. Today it would be a snap.
After that fiasco, they brought in somebody
else to whip the troops into shape, and I moved on to other duties.
Eventually, they brought me back to the newsroom, where I worked
the phones aggressively and got into street reporting. From about
1992 on, I would file stories from time to time for CBS News
Radio. I continued doing that after WHNZ shut down its news operation
in 1999.
Today I split my time between the APD position at WHNZ and covering
stories of national interest. |