Raising more ghosts

I was rummaging through a stack of cassettes a few days ago and discovered one that had no label on the case, and I didn’t recognize it, so I pulled it out—to find that it was a tape of a radio station air-check I’d done back in 1976, when I was filling in one morning at the station in my home town.

One of my after-school jobs in high school was working as an afternoon/weekend disk jockey at “KCOM, THE VOICE OF THE AGRIPLEX, FIFTEEN-FIFTY ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF YOUR DIAL IN COMANCHE, TEXAS”— and during my first couple of years in college, I’d occasionally pull a shift to help out when I was home for a weekend visit.  That’s what this tape was:  parts of the first three hours of the morning show on Saturday, August 14, 1976, at the end of my college freshman year. I did the sign-on, the Early Bird Weather, the farm market report, the “Who-Died News” (so nicknamed because the local news always—always—started off with the obituaries, followed by the list of the previous day’s admissions and discharges from area hospitals, and only after those Essential Pieces of Information were done did we get down to anything that might really be called “news”), the humidity report (which is important in a farming community during haying season), and “Hotline,” which was an on-the-air bulletin board where people called in to announce Stuph they wanted to buy or sell, yard sales, work-wanted, help-wanted, lost pets . . . everything you’d normally put up a flyer to announce, but spread across the air of Comanche County instead.

The Who-Died News that day led with one funeral and one graveside-services announcement, followed by a short piece about the jury call in the case of somebody being tried for stabbing a local pharmacist to death during a robbery (which is what I would have led with, had I run the news department), an interview with the game warden about some people who’d been arrested for peddling illegal water hyacinth cuttings, announcements of a church singing, a revival, and a family reunion, and a long interview of some Army personnel who were in town practicing for the following Saturday’s air show.  The news sponsors were one of the local agricultural-supply companies, the Western Auto store, and a local bakery and drive-in (touting their malted milks made with “that old-fashioned powdered malt and real ice cream”).  Other ads that morning ranged from the local Ford tractor dealer to the Chevrolet dealership (bragging how used Camaros hold their resale value well) to the Chamber of Commerce plugging their Bicentennial oral history, fabric stores, both banks, the town department store, feed and seed, groceries, furniture, and the circuit-riding hog buyer.

“Hotline” for-sale calls for that day included a two-bedroom house (reduced to $22,500), a fourteen-foot aluminum fishing boat, a wringer washer, baby chicks, a Jersey milch cow, roof trusses, cantaloupes (the previous four items all for sale by the same woman), two yard sales, a pair of sewing machines, a raft of quart Mason jars, a refrigerator, somebody wanting to hire out to haul hay, somebody else wanting to sell Sudan-grass hay “in the field,” and then more for-sale calls: telephone poles, oiled cedar fence posts, and a bicycle.  All in all, it was an ordinary Saturday morning.

The technical quality isn’t that good; twenty-five years of aging hasn’t improved the tape’s condition any, the recording has a nasty sixty-cycle hum throughout, and in some places electronic interference wipes out parts of the recording with clatters and squeals. Still, I can clearly hear and understand almost everything on it, which is something, and the information to be had from it (what businesses were around, what the local news was that day, etc.) is definitely a piece of history by now, so I dubbed it from the tape to my computer, cleaned up the worst noise and interference, edited out the records played and the network newscast because (1) they’re copyrighted and (2) they don’t have any local interest, then burned a copy of the air check to CD and gave it to the public library for their local history collection.