My Short Career as a Radio Announcer: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 8)
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My Short Career as a Radio Announcer: Twilight Musings Autobiography
Elton Higgs
The year between my graduation from high school (May, 1956) and my matriculation a year later at Abilene Christian College was a meaningful transition from living at home to establishing my independence and my responsibility for making my own living. I had a full-time job during that year with a small radio station in Stamford, TX as announcer, disc jockey, engineer, and house cleaner. I learned a lot on this job, and it developed vocal skills that have been valuable to me all my life. It came to an end, however, in May of 1957 to leave a possible career in radio and spend the summer selling Bibles in Ohio. In the terms of the table game Careers, I made minimal cash as a salesman and gained no fame during that summer, but I garnered a lot of experience cards.
My opportunity at the radio station came because of my sister-in-law Lucille’s contacts with the owner of the station, David Ratliff, a state senator, probably because she had placed some ads on his station for the jewelry and appliance store that she and my brother, Otho, owned. Shortly after my graduation, she asked me, “Would you like to work at a radio station?” I said “Sure,” and she arranged for me to go to Stamford and try out. The manager and sole employee of station KDWT, Phil Keener, had me read a script, and he offered me the job on the spot, on a trial basis. With the promise of a steady income, I rented a room at the house of an elderly couple who were members of the Church of Christ in Stamford, where I had already attended several times, and I quickly made it my new home congregation. I was allowed to take the family car, a big, old Packard, since my father had developed lung cancer and was no longer able to get about.
Phil Keener sold ads for the station during the times I was operating it. I don’t remember that I had a consistent schedule, but at one time or another I worked all times of the day, from opening (must have been 6 or 7 a.m.) to the end of the day (perhaps 7 or 8 p.m.). I also had to work some Saturdays and Sundays. I had to learn the basics of turning on the broadcasting equipment, manipulating the controls, and closing down at the end of the day. We were connected to the ABC radio network, and sometimes I would have to switch from home broadcasting to the network, mainly for national newscasts. Phil would write out the log and I would do what was called for. We played popular music from records that were sent to us as promotion discs. I had an hour of music each day (punctuated by commercials) on a program that I called “Cactus Caravan.” It consisted of all kinds of music, from country and western to folk and pop songs. I remember liking and playing songs by the Everly Brothers, among others.
My “patter” between songs almost got me fired one time. As I finished one of these interludes, the phone rang and it was the owner, Senator Ratliffe. He was not pleased, and all he said was, “Higgs, more music and less talk,” but that was enough to curb my personal contributions to the program. Another mistake was even more serious. It took place one evening when daylight saving time had just come into play, and unfortunately for me, it was also during a political campaign. At 6 p.m., we usually had a network program, but this evening a special ad was to be run, and I had to decide whether to run the network program at the regular time and delay the ad, or give priority to the ad. I had not been told that the ad was a political promotion and that it had been advertised to be heard at the scheduled time. I opted for the regularly scheduled network program, much to the dismay of Mr. Ratliffe and the people who had purchased the ad time. As soon as the ad failed to be heard at the scheduled time, Mr. Ratliffe called quite upset. He said, “You know, if I can’t satisfy the angry customer, I’ll have to fire you.” He settled the matter with the customer by offering to run the ad several times, along with announcements to promote it. I suspect the ad-taker got more listeners that way than he would have originally, but my job was on the line. I survived and made it up with Mr. Ratliffe. When I came to the end of my employment with him, he tried to persuade me not to go on to something else, but to continue in a radio career.
My tenure at the radio station was during the time of the Cold War and the notoriety of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist Senate hearings terrorized anybody who had had the slightest association with the Communist Party. I was a political neophyte and understood little of what was in the news those days, but I remember one of commentator Paul Harvey’s newscasts during my stint at KDWT (he came on at noon every day) in which he spoke warmly of Sen. McCarthy. I think it must have been occasioned by McCarthy’s death in 1957, a few years after he had been censured by his Senate colleagues for his unethical conduct. I don’t remember the details of Harvey’s comments, but I remember the gist of it was that in spite of his conduct he was a patriot. Harvey was a political and social conservative, so it’s not surprising that he should have sympathized with anti-communism in general, but he was generally not strongly partisan in his comments, rather concentrating on human interest items in the news. So it didn’t occur to me until some years later, when I became more aware of the political currents in the news, to question why Harvey felt compelled to speak approvingly of the discredited McCarthy. I’m not even sure why those particular comments in one of Harvey’s many broadcasts stuck in my mind, but they did.
Two other incidents during my stay at KDWT are worth noting. The first was a result of my neglecting to put away some records I had been going through. Phil must have asked me several times to do that chore, but I just kept putting it off. Phil came from a military background, and one day when I came in, he barked at me, “You’ve got ten minutes to get those records stored!” I never again left records lying on the table. One of the job’s fringe benefits, by the way, was that I got to take home some classical music records that had come to the station and were not going to be used in our programming.
The other incident was the outcome of a little listener response contest that Phil set up to see which of us received the most listener “votes” during our separate programs. The loser was to push the other one around the town square in a wheel barrow. Somehow I won the contest, and during my last week with the station, Phil delivered on his penalty, and I got a very public ride around the square, with Phil telling whoever we met, “I said I’d do it!”
Parallel with my radio station activities was my association with the Orient St. Church of Christ in Stamford, which happened to be across the street from the house of the Sosebies where I had a room. I quickly became active in the work of that church and was especially involved in the youth activities. The youth group was led by a warm-hearted man named Joe Benson and his wife, Flo. Joe would regularly meet with the young people, often in his house out in the country. I remember the breeze on our faces as we rode in his pickup from town out to his home, where we would have games, refreshments, and sometimes a Bible lesson. Those were delightful times in church fellowship and service.
Because I was a bit older than the rest of the youth group and was familiar with Scripture, I was put in charge of their weekly Bible class at the church. That deepened my connection with them, and I developed warm friendships with them, being both their leader and their companion. I also led singing regularly, making a special effort to coordinate my selection of songs with the sermon theme when possible and always providing links between the songs by appropriate Bible readings. There was a “Gospel Meeting,” as we called it, a week of trying to reach out to the community through having a guest speaker every night. One of these was conducted by a professor of Bible from Abilene Christian College, forty miles away. I consulted with him, and he gave me his sermon topics for the week so that I could connect the songs with his subjects. He told me afterward that he had never had such close coordination with the song leader for a Gospel Meeting. I got to know Brother Tony Ash better during the years I spent on my undergraduate work at A.C.C.
I took a fancy to one of the girls in the youth group, Pat Massey. She seemed somewhat pleased with my attentions to her, and I sometimes took her home from youth group meetings. We would carry on lengthy conversations sitting in my car outside her house, though I think I talked a lot more than she did. After a couple of times like this, her mother came out to the car and made it clear that she was not comfortable with this situation, even though she didn’t accuse me of trying to “make out” with Pat. I think she was worried about how the neighbors would react. However, Pat was the first girl I had ever kissed—“a mere peck” as I wrote in my diary. However, there was a complication: she had a boyfriend in the army named Gerald. She wrote him regularly and told me about her friendship with him, and noted that he was not a Christian. I expressed concern with his unsound spiritual condition and took it on myself to send him a Bible. After receiving it he wrote back that he already had a Bible, thank you, and made clear that he did not need spiritual instruction, especially from a guy who was probably a rival for his girlfriend’s affections. I ask for your indulgence to remember that I was only a naively idealistic youth of 19 at the time.
During this year I developed a very close friendship with Fred Selby, who was a member of the youth group at the Orient St. church. He was a little younger than I and was still a senior in high school. His mother lived in a farm house halfway between Stamford and Rule, where my parents still lived and my brother had his appliance store. I would often visit Fred and his family on my way back and forth between Stamford and Rule. His mother, Veda Selby, was an exceedingly warm and hospitable lady, and she became a sort of second mother to me. Indeed, I say with some discomfort, I felt more emotional attachment to her, and more admiration, than for my own mother. Veda’s husband had been a drunkard and had forsaken the family, but she and her children managed to keep and work the farm. And then Fred’s older brother, David, developed leukemia and eventually died during Fred’s freshman year in college. Veda was a strong, nurturing mother through all of this, and still had hugs and cookies for guests to her home.
Toward the end of the year that I worked at the radio station, Carl Reed, a friend of Fred’s, set out to recruit the two of us to spend the upcoming summer selling Bibles and Bible study aids for the Southwestern Company of Nashville, TN. It sounded both adventurous and idealistic, and Fred and I accepted his offer for us to be on his sales team. When I announced my plans and gave my notice to the radio station, both the owner and the manager tried to persuade me to stick with the station and build a career in radio. Mr. Ratliffe opined that I would regret giving up the opportunity to build on my experience and relinquishing the relative security that a regular job afforded me. I refused to be dissuaded and soon left Stamford for Mt. Vernon, Ohio, where I spent two and a half months finding out that I was not a good door-to-door salesman. More of that in the next installment.
Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)
