I have an important announcement...We have found Jerry Doll!

Thanks to the Lake Land College website, I finally caught up with an old friend.

Jerry Doll had the arduous task of training me to be on the radio. I can remember the first night that he "showed me the ropes" around the station. I asked him "What time do we close?" He said (in a slightly condescending tone) "It's radio. We don't close...we sign off."

I am so glad we found him. Jerry has posted a message and I know you will enjoy his memories of WLBH.


jadman said...

Thanks for getting in touch with me Paul!

Like others have mentioned, this site has brought back a flood of memories. Most of them completely laughable. The day before I got the email from Paul, letting me know about this website, I was reminiscing with some co-workers about my days at "The Giant." They had a hard time believing some of the stories. The stench of dead mice and rotting emergency food in the freezer, emblazoned with a giant red "E" from the stroke of Jim's mighty pen, typing copy with my gloves on in the winter, and getting a nasty note on my desk after accidently throwing away a paper clip (those things cost money, you know) are just a few things that come to mind.

Anyway, thinking about my relatively short 5 1/2 years there, I could come up with a thousand stories, as can everyone who shared the experience. Here are couple of my favorites.

Staff Meetings:Those of you lucky enough to work the day shift, may have had the pleasure of attending one of JRL's Monday Morning Staff Meetings. They generally consisted of everyone standing around the lobby listening to Ray expound upon his not so exciting weekend attending some rotary event or how that damn hospital out there was going to be the ruination of society as we know it. My favorite comment came right after the announcement that a new radio station, known as WCBH had signed on the air. The Livesay's were convinced that they had chosen those specific call letters "to ride on our coat tails of success." Yes, I'm sure WCBH was trying to steal away our highly coveted "Organ Moods" and "Jazz on Records" fan base to listen to this new phenomenon in music - something called "rock and roll." These meetings all ended the same way. We went around the room and were allowed to speak. But no one dared to say anything. Those that did were quickly shut down. To this day, these were the most uncomfortable meetings I've been a part of...and I've been in a lot of meetings since.

Easter Morning:I used to have the Sunday morning shift for awhile. That meant you ran AM and FM by yourself until someone else got there at noon. It's sad when the highlight of the day was guessing how many used cigarette butts Pete George (Yes Paul, he's dead) would dig out of the ashtrays and re-smoke. Yuk.

Anyway, on one fine Easter morning, we were running several church cantatas and special services back to back. Some were live, some were tape delayed. Mr. Livesay had brought in one of his fine 99 cent cassette tapes on which he had recorded his church's Easter cantata. I already had everything patched and ready to throw the tape in at the last minute. In his never ending attention to quality and detail (hmmm) he decided to check my patch work, pulling cords from here to there and telling me I had done it all wrong and he had 46 years of broadcast experience and how us young kids didn't know a damn thing. Well, it came time to roll tape...and you guessed it...no audio! I scrambled frantically to repatch and got it working within 30 seconds. Of course he was standing in the control room the whole time yelling at me. He said I should have checked and double checked and now we just look unprofessional! I wasn't sure how we could look any more unprofessional than we already did, but he was the legend. The poor quality of the recording was enough to sink us to the depths of unprofessionalism. It would have been doing the listening audience a favor if it had never aired. After some more yelling, he left the building - or so I thought.

About 20 minutes later, he came storming in the back door. I felt sure I was going to get another chewing for something. As he got closer, I noticed his hands were completely black. His shirt was smeared with dirt and grease. He came into the studio and announced he'd had a G. Damn flat tire on his car. I quietly put my broken headphones back on, turned toward the board, and smiled from ear-to-ear. Coincidence or curse? You decide.

Some other names from the past that I didn't see on other posts:
Sharon Rodgers
Penny Dietrich
Roy King
Roger Newlin
Dave King -I think that was his name. Berg and I got to train him. Uhmm, it was interesting. He only lasted two nights. I'm not sure if that means we were really bad trainers or not. He really, really, liked Berg. ;-)
Roger Swan (creator of the first Mattoon Country Jamboree program wheel)
Brian Porter (involved in a love triangle with the receptionist, a gun, and an angry husband)
Jeff Helsing (Engineer before big Jim McLane)
Kim (Rardin) Brookins (My best friend in radio and at LLC)

Well, that's enough for now. I could write for hours about that place. Thanks for the free therapy session, Paul!

Jadman


Sharon was from Tuscola? She and KLW did all those afternoon remotes. Right?

I actually trained at McDonald's with Roger Newlin when I was still 15 (before I found out that food service would not be in my future). True story. He used to sweat so much, I would see it dripping from his nose into the french fry vat. That's not a pretty memory!

I can't wait to read more!

PC

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Mattoon, Illinois 

We are Mattoon....

I found this the other day as I was surfing the web. I don't know who Will Leitch is personally, and I can't document all his facts, but I thought you might enjoy the read...


Reflections on MattoonAccording to the Columbia Encyclopedia, this is the city of Mattoon: Mattoon (KEY), city (1990 pop. 18,441), Coles co., E central Ill.; inc. 1859. ItBy Will Leitch Jan 1, 2003According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, this is the city of Mattoon: Mattoon (KEY) , city (1990 pop. 18,441), Coles co., E central Ill.; inc. 1859. It is a processing, rail, and industrial center for a farming region. Among its manufactures are road-building equipment, paper and brass products, and springs. Nearby are many oil wells, a fish hatchery, and Paradise Lake. The farm and grave of Abraham Lincoln's father and stepmother are southeast of the city.

All I ever wanted to do was leave Mattoon, which is odd, considering now that I'm gone, I'm pretty much obsessed with the place. Any friend of mine, whether I met them in college, or in Los Angeles, or in New York … they've all heard all about Mattoon. It's a fun joke to them too; Will's a dumb hick, ha ha, went to public high school, ho ho, had prom in the gymnasium, hee hee. And I play off of it, let it remain the butt of wisecracks. It's easier that way.

My favorite piece of Mattoon trivia: We were once mentioned in a Jeopardy question, not one of those wimpy $100 jobs either. It was in the Potpourri category, double Jeopardy, $800, back when double Jeopardy didn't have absurdly high dollar amounts.

Many people believe New York is the center of this doughy roll's universe, but, in fact, rural Mattoon, Illinois is its national capital.

Folks, we're talking about the bagel (though that's the only time I've heard it referred to as a "doughy roll"). Mattoon is the bagel capital of the world. This might seem curious, since, well, no one in Mattoon eats bagels, and I don't think we've had a Jewish family since the turn of the 19th Century. But in 1990, Lender's Bagels, a huge conglomerate now owned by the Kraft company, decided to move their central production facility from somewhere-I-don't-know-where (OK, maybe I should have done some research) to Mattoon. It provided us with about 1,000 new jobs, but more importantly, it placed Mattoon as the city that produced more bagels per day than any other in America.

The response was immediate, and overwhelming. Murray Lender himself came to town and made the announcement, and the mayor - who, in her time away from the office, was a cashier at the Mister Donut shop right off Charleston Avenue - proclaimed that August afternoon as Official Bagel Day in Mattoon. From then on, every August, Mattoon has hosted Bagelfest, a three-day celebration of the city's leading industry.

It was the type of festival Charles Kuralt would have brought his camera crew to capture a slice of Americana, if anyone at CBS knew where Mattoon was. Non-stop excitement. On Friday, the carnival set up on the main drag, Broadway Avenue. There was a mini-Ferris wheel, a ridiculously dangerous Tilt-a-Whirl and a dunking booth where you could drench local celebrities (high school principal, sports columnist, guy who runs the bar over at the Eagles club). My sister once entered the Little Miss Bagelfest contest, where eight-year-old Jon Benet wannabes paraded around in sashes and had their self-esteem properly trounced.

I was not immune to the fun. This, natch, was the biggest weekend every year, the only time we could ever claim a tourist attraction. Every Bagelfest Saturday, I would awake at 6 a.m. and enter the Ride Around Mattoon For a Bagel contest, a 25-mile bike ride beyond the city limits. Halfway through, you were rewarded with a bagel. At the end, they gave you a bagel. Then you went downtown, where you got free bagels.

There was also the Bagel Buggy Contest, in which you constructed some sort of vehicle that was supposed to look like a bagel - or at least conjure the spirit of the bagel - and race it against other fervid competitors. My father and I determined we were going to win this darned thing one year, so we headed to the garage to build the perfect bagel buggy. My dad swiped an old miniature satellite dish and painted it blinding white; I grabbed an old inner tube and made it brown, the international color for Bagel. My dad slapped some wheels on it, and whammo, we had a bagel buggy. We went downtown, and I sat in the contraption while my dad pushed. We lost, though, because some cheaters who worked for the city just painted a bike brown and rode it past us. Jerks.

But Mattoon is not just Bagelfest; that is just our shining public face. Mattoon is tradition, history, complacency. We have one high school, aptly titled Mattoon High School. We have about 15 churches, all Christian, only one crazy enough to be Catholic, a religion seen as dangerous and rebellious by most of the Protestant town.

We have two drive-through liquor stores. We have a lake, Lake Mattoon, the only place I've ever been skinny-dipping, occupying the so-envious slot as the lone single guy with three couples. We have a big park, Peterson Park, where the high school baseball team and local American Legion team plays. Every Christmas the park district lights it up, spending half the county budget, and teenagers sneak over there to make out once the lights are shut off.

We have a police department, fire stations, a hospital we share with county rival Charleston. We have a Hardee's, a McDonald's, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, an Arby's and a Burger King, but not a chain Burger King. We have the original Burger King, established before the Whopper was ever even imagined; because of this, no Burger King chains can be within 30 miles of city limits. I'd never been inside a Burger King until college.

We have a bar where I can find half of my graduating class on any given weeknight. We have a house cleaning service called "Rent-A-Wife." We have three houses that are rumored to be haunted. We have a crazy old lady who spray paints curses about her ex-husband on her front door. We have three trailer parks. We often are hit by tornadoes. A tornado wiped out my parent's favorite Mexican restaurant a couple of years ago. We have three Mexican restaurants. We have one Chinese restaurant, though none of the people who work there are Chinese; one might be Korean. Mattoon never seems to have noticed the difference.

We have a newspaper publisher who has been in charge for 30 years. We have a school board that once fired my scholastic bowl coach because he was gay. We have a section of town littered with crosses, "each one representing a baby killed by its mother." We are Mattoon. We are every town, and we are only ourselves.



This article was printed on www.thesimon.com. Keep those cards and letters coming. We're up to 600 hits on this little blog.

Until next time....

...two miles north of Mattoon.  

Broadcast Legend