Having Fun on Talk Radio
Now, Jerry Dean Pate was almost as crazy as I was! He was doing a late morning talk show on WIS Radio. WIS was not a talk station, but we did have a talk show that ran for a couple of hours on weekdays. Bill Benton was the original host of the show, but he, along with Gene McKay, Dave Wright, John Carroll, and a few others, bought an FM station and left us.
Bill’s show was strait-laced, talking about events in town with some politics mixed in. But Jerry was an old-school record-playing maniac who wanted to shake things up a little. He came up with a cockamamie idea for a show segment he called “Talent Time USA,” where audience members could call in and demonstrate their talent. But the hitch was that Jerry was looking for visual talents, those that you had to see, not hear over the radio.
Jerry felt that he needed a ringer or two to set the idea up, so he recruited Phyllis, his fiancée at the time, and she dialed in from her kitchen over the phone onto the show to demonstrate her rock collection. When asked what she had, Phyllis said that she had a huge rock collection and proceeded to dump her rocks onto the kitchen table next to the receiver on her phone. I don’t know what she was using, but it sounded like a minor avalanche. As the sound of rolling stones tumbled out on the radio, she would say, “Here’s a pretty pink one,” or “Here is a shiny green one!”
I was sitting at my desk, in front of the transmitter, looking at Jerry through the glass door into the control room, and we were both breaking up, barely able to control ourselves. But the idea was still not clear to the audience as to what he wanted: talents that could be seen and not heard. There was a momentary lull.
That was when I dialed the control room on the local line and waved frantically at Jerry to put me on the air. Probably against his better judgment, he relented, punched me up on the air, and asked, “Who is this on the phone?” I replied in my best Walter Brennan old man’s voice that I was “The Old Salt!” Jerry gave me “the look” as he said, “What is your talent?” “Semaphore” was my response, and I proceeded to wave a work rag over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Swish, Swish (pause) Swish!” When he recovered, he asked, “What did that say?” and my response (in the old man’s voice) was “God Bless Ameri-cer!” We both lost it then, and he cut the phone off and played his next commercial. That did it, he started getting callers who were watching grass grow or paint dry, and the like. The bit was hilarious.
A couple of weeks later we tried again and again “The Old Salt” made an encore appearance. This time it was naval light signals using a metal index card holder box.
Both Jerry and I are aviation enthusiasts, and Jerry came up with a great idea: doing a remote Time to Talk show from an airplane. We put the Marti unit in the back seat of a Bonanza V35 single-engine retractable gear private plane that was owned by a friend of mine out at Columbia Metropolitan Airport. We taped the antenna to the inside of the right rear window and plugged it into the cigarette lighter for power after checking that the current the Marti needed did not exceed the current rating of the cigarette lighter. By this time, the Time to Talk show was in the early evening, starting around sundown. I felt that we should get someone else to fly the plane, so I could concentrate on operating the Marti and coordinating with the station via the self-contained battery-powered two-way radio.
We were smart enough to test out this arrangement during daylight, and our pilot flew us all around Columbia, and we were able to broadcast back to the station with not even a slight bit of interference. But as fate would have it, we weren’t smart enough.
The show started with us taxiing out to Runway 29 from the parking area at Eagle Aviation, with Jerry telling the audience what we were going to do that evening. As we started our takeoff roll to the west, Jerry told the audience that we would be back right after these commercials, and the board operator started the commercial break. We had just lifted off, and our pilot retracted the landing gear when I noticed a small puff of smoke coming out from under the switches on the instrument panel.
Now, a fire in the air of an airplane is nothing to fool with, so I shouted the standard warning “Fire in the cockpit!” Our excellent pilot executed a tight right-hand 180-degree turn to line up with the downwind leg of the landing pattern to Runway 29 and issued a Mayday to the tower. The tower in turn cleared us to land on any runway and rang the emergency bell for the crew at the fire station, who in turn rolled out their big yellow fire truck. I told the station over the two-way radio all that I knew was that we had an in-flight emergency and were returning to the airport. I turned the Marti off as well as a precaution. Our pilot selected the runway we had just taken off from, Runway 29, and executed a perfect short approach to the concrete surface of the runway. He was so good that we were able to take the first high-speed taxiway from the runway and make a beeline for the tarmac a few dozen feet away. The fire crew met us there and quickly discovered that the 20-year-old master switch on the airplane had overheated and started smoking.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that that 20-year-old master switch was not up to snuff for the load we were placing on it, despite being initially rated for it. Why did it not fail during our test earlier? We did not turn on the anti-collision running lights during the test during the day, but did when it was darker.
Jerry rushed back to the station while our news director filled in on the air for him. When he got back on the air from the station, his first caller was his fiancée, Phyllis, telling him never to do that to her again. We had forgotten to notify the station that we were all ok.
Just in case you were wondering what happened to that Bonanza, the old master switch was replaced with a brand-new factory part, and I flew it down to St. Augustine and Jacksonville in actual instrument conditions.
I was born in a great Radio Town; Jacksonville Florida. So it was only natural that I joined WUSC (AM at the time) in my first semester 1963. I went on to a career in commercial radio and television in Columbia, WCOS AM & FM, WIS-TV, WIS Radio, SCETV and PBS. I'm retired now, giving back since 2010 to the station that started my career, WUSC-FM. If you did the math you will know that I celebrated the 60th anniversary of my first radio show ever in November 2023.