Do you ever get discouraged on your job? Does it seem that despite your best efforts success eludes you? I found myself in such a situation at my second radio home. Just a few months prior to getting this job I had resigned from my first broadcast station leaving to pursue major market radio. I launched out not knowing for sure if I would land a DJ gig at all. Gospel 90 had offered me transfer to their 50,000 watt sister in Atlanta. Determined to make it on my own I, at age 20, turned down a sure thing and a 100 mile daily commute for something closer to home in suburbia. Had I made a bad move?
I was at this new home on 1520 AM only four months when the news came down that the charismatic church that owned WSPZ was selling the facility. Budget crunched owners lost interest in the station shortly after their pastor (also station general manager) unexpectedly resigned. He championed our little station; with him gone the gloves were off. The deacons now had free reign to unload the little thousand watt daytimer that signed my paychecks. Key staff dropped like flies and I became program director having jumped two pay grades in short order. For all intent and purposes I was my own boss with a skeleton crew on a shoestring budget. We made the best of the circumstances with decent content and better than average talent making a little money by adding high school sports coverage with both local and national sponsors.
The owners wanted $750,000 for the station and wound up settling for $70,000 three years later having kept us paid without fail. The whole crew, although discouraged, must have been surprised the station didn't go dark; to the owners' credit we were never laid off or asked to take pay cuts. Today's aircheck is my final morning show on April 20, 1990, for the church owned 1520 AM which ceased broadcast operations 4 O'clock that afternoon. Listen as I almost reveal the transition which was kept mum until it was legal later that day. 20 years have obscured details of officially passing the torch to the new owner. Such as it is, the recording remains.
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