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An e-note from Russ
Bloxom
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If Ben Laurie is coming...we'll be there. He and I go back to
old Air Force Reserve days and haven't seen him since!
Question: Does
anyone know the whereabouts of BRUCE HAYES, the popular morning drive
jock on Mighty 1190, KLIF, from the late '50s? He was my DJ idol
(Sorry Ron Chapman) when I was trying to get into radio.
Also remember listening to
Porter doing live 'JZ reports from the Waco tornado. Hearing another
of my favorites, Jerry Hahn, on KXOL interviewing the winning football
team as a "spot news" remote at Farrington Field Friday
nights was "neat" too! Wow! And, newsman (John?) Hightower
there was a trailblazer, too, showing the way for Roy Eaton and Bruce
Neal.
I was in awe as a wanna-be
at McLean Junior High. I practiced "announcing" on a used
WIRE tape recorder in my bedroom. When the wire broke, or you
wanted to make a crude edit, you simply tied the two ends together.
I started in radio when I
was 17 and a junior at Paschal High School with encouragement from
speech teacher Miriam Todd. Got on at KCLE in Cleburne in 1956,
thanks to owner George Marti, three years before moving to the
"Big City."
It might have been sooner
but Marti didn't fire me. My performance as a 17-year-old disc jockey
must have been amusing. He's still laughing from the night I
locked myself out of the station while a 45rpm of "Moonglow,
Theme From Picnic" was playing on the turntable. Alone in
the station, I had stepped outside to...look at the MOON! Unsure how
many times listeners heard the scratch of the needle at the end of the
song...cha-cha, cha-cha, cha-cha!
Back on KLIF, Bruce Hayes
had a voice like the Lone Ranger's Clayton Moore and manged to flirt
with some "Blue Radio" one-liners (raunchy for then) that
cracked me up going down the highway!
Russ Bloxon (The following text is taken from an e-mail to a friend who informed Russ of the passing of Gene Ashcraft)
Yes. Class act guy. His "on
air" name was Gene Craft. Gene & his wife doubled with Sanda
and me a few times. We got along well. Had not been in contact
for years, unfortunately. Regardless, it saddens me because such
a friend experienced an important time in our '20s together when we
were in radio. When I heard of his death, it brought back these
memories...
Gene was doing the midnight to dawn
news shift at KXOL in 1961 when I joined the station, a 24-hour top 40
music-celebrity DJ-news operation. I assumed his old shift and
he moved to 4pm to midnight slot. The new guys with little if
any news reporting experience started on the graveyard shift for all
the obvious reasons.
With a couple of years more
experience than I, Gene was helpful in me going from DJ &
"rip-n-read the news" announcer to one who specialized in
field covering the news, reporting it instantly and writing it hourly
under pressure of live radio and clock deadlines (all hopefully
accomplished without mistakes or MISSING stories!)
In the '60s, there was all this,
the job expectations and the pressure of market competition, live and
hourly, especially at a station that had on-the-scene mobile news
reporting 24 hours a day. KXOL took it seriously and I was in
awe...and scared! But, that's where I gained first experience as a
fulltime news reporter.
Under Fletcher's leadership, his
news staff, including Gene, news director Roy Eaton, assistant news
director Bruce Neal and the others, taught me how to cover, write and
report the news in the real world after previous radio jobs and
graduating from TCU with a degree in speech and minor in radio-tv-film!
KXOL had four red and white mobile
units with whip antennas, big spotlights, and a big amber revolving
bubble light on their roofs!
A red phone in the newsroom
was our "hotline," an unlisted telephone number (unlisted
phone number? Who had those then?) and we gave out the number only to
police agencies, etc, and news junkies who could talk us "news
tips" 24 hours a day. It worked and helped to be first on the air
with stories, beating the others.
SIDEBAR:
When we rushed to a spot news
event, shootings, major car wrecks, robberies, drownings, plane
crashes, murders, fires, fire deaths, dead bodies, etc., other
reporters were always there...from other radio stations, newspapers
and TV.
Bob Schieffer, now of CBS News
where's he been for 40-plus years, had worked at KXOL before my
arrival. He went on to work for the Star-Telegram. His
mentor, Phil Record, who still writes some for the paper, taught him
to always wear a hat, like police detectives still did then.
With crowds at a crime scene,
Schieffer and his hat often blended in with the investigating
detectives. Sometimes, they might not know him but assumed he
was one of them or from another official agency. The tactic
posed the opportunity of getting confidential police information, or
even better, good, straight quotes from victims or witnesses, who
talked openingly and easily while also assuming Schieffer was
anybody...but a reporter!
Back at KXOL when we did the
newscast from the live newsroom, the listener could hear the old
newswires typing away in the background. We had four machines, AP, UPI
and some independents. Also had an old military radar for
checking weather!
And, at the desk by the microphone
where we read the news, we had an electronic buzzer with two knobs
that emitted electronic signals on the air when the mike was hot. One,
a spaced sound, ding, ding, ding for bulletins only...the other signal
was faster like a machine-gun for regular news. All newscasts
were recorded for station liability protection mostly.
On the day of the Kennedy
assassination, most station staffers had gone to lunch after we had
covered Kennedy's departure from Fort Worth. I had followed the
motorcade from Hotel Texas to Carswell, doing news reports from my
unit.
Some of our other reporters were on
base so I dropped away from the motorcade at the gate, returned to the
station to do regular newscasts during the lunch period.
It was about 12:30pm. I ripped the AP bulletin off the wire,
interrupted music programming and read the report that Kennedy had
been shot. Before I started, the electronic signal, ding, ding, ding,
was unknowingly sounded 12 times before I started reading the thing.
I guess I momentarily was stunned and didn't really want to read
it...but I did. Then, I was assigned to rush to Dallas in one of our
units and I did broadcasts outside Parkland Hospital where JFK was
taken. Back in Fort Worth, I also read the bulletin about Oswald being
shot by Ruby four days later.
Other salesmen, engineers and the
station owner, Earle Fletcher UNIT 6, also had two-way mobile radios
in their personal cars. (When the deep, raspy voice UNIT 6
called into the newsroom, your heart always jumped a beat because it
was Boss Fletcher. You especially got nervous if he called in
right after you had done the "on the hour" newscast! Had you
screwed up and done something he didn't like? Was he going to fire you
by two-way radio? Fletcher had that kind of image and control!
When there was a major
disaster-type story--tornado, JFK assassination, plane crash, (several
at Carswell AFB), large fires, etc-- the UNMARKED personal cars of the
staffers could be brought into play for extensive instant air coverage
utilizing the entire news staff AND SOMETIMES even the salesmen,
engineers and yes, Fletcher, too!
No other station in Tarrant County,
including arch rival KFJZ radio and the TV stations, had that kind of
capability and technology in the '60s!
Dallas' "Mighty 1190,"
KLIF (where Ron Chapman became a name) probably did not even have that
capability although it was the regional audience leader in top 40
radio-news at the time.
At one time, our standard close on
a spot news story was..."Russ Bloxom reporting KXOL radio news,
the station that pioneered and developed on the scene news coverage in
the great Southwest!" (I still get goose bumps when I
recite it 40+ years later!)
Such on-air "billboarding"
as we called self-promotion, the gadgets, the extensive equipment
(expensive in that day), the big staff of reporters, some changing of
their names to sound better on the air, their "top-dollar"
salaries for then, classy, sharp secretaries well dressed in heels,
TWO staff radio engineers, etc., all were the brainchild and
commitment of Fletcher, a Fort Worth version of Gordon McLendon, owner
and promoter of KLIF.
Gordon was smoother and did more
air work because he had been a regular announcer in earlier years.
But, Fletcher had just as much "radio savy" for being a
successful businessman in such a highly-competitive industry.
Gene Ashcraft and I experienced all
that those years at KXOL. We learned on Fletcher's money how to be
good news reporters and clean gentlemen on the air and in public (we
had to wear white shirts, tie and coat at work.) Those red and
white mobile units were washed each time after a rain or whenever they
got dirty!
Fletcher refused to allow the
mention of any profanity on the air. Such words as "hell,
damn and butt" were off limits. Second reference to the President
in news reports was always, "Mr."
Fletcher demanded we never use the
word, "advise," but "suggest" instead when
alerting listeners to traffic problems or emergency situations.
He said, "We don't give people advice."
And, he espoused one prime adage:
"It's the goddamn little things that kill you." This was in
reference to on-air mistakes that riled listeners or created public
relations' nightmares. Fletcher's golden rule for being a success in
the radio business was: "Sell the excitement." It still
applies today in the media and entertainment industries!
In retrospect, Gene and my jobs
were a privilege, thanks to "Fletch," as we reverently
called him. Unknowingly, the 6 years of experience I gained at KXOL
and Fletcher's expectations of his employees as honest, well-groomed
professional individuals as representatives of his station would give
me the tools and credentials necessary to make my big transition from
a radio news reporter to an on-camera newscaster-field reporter in
television in 1967.
Well, you did ask if I worked with
Gene!
Russ Bloxom |