Memmmmorieeeees,....
Nov. 4th, 2018 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogYeah, that was our theme last week.
Tuesday night was Memories of a local event I had no recollection of but was connected in many ways to things I did recall. One of my Rochester friends with radio connections invited me to join him and his wife for a screening of a documentary about the War of the Worlds broadcast that shook the area. Not the Halloween 1938 one by Orson Welles, but the Halloween 1968 one that was run on WKBW-AM 1520 on its 30th anniversary.
Missed it by about six years. Or 13, depending on how you count.
I should explain.
Although I did not move here until the fall of 1981, and had not been west of Rochester before then (other than perhaps a vaguely-remembered daytrip to the Canadian Falls in the 60s sometime), I knew Depew. And Lackawanna. And where every one of the local nine 22-hour McDonalds restaurants were, and about Tuxedo Junction rental stores, and about Tops and Bells and dozens of other chains I would not set foot in for years, if ever.
The clue to all of that was WKBW-AM, a blowtorch of a station, originated in the 20s with call letters standing for "Well Known Bible Witness." By my time, they'd gone Top-40, with national legends Hound Dog Lorenz, Joey Reynolds and (most relevant to this week's proceedings) Jeff Kaye leading the way into a lineup of DJs who would carry their fame into many places, some of them weird or evil, over the next 40-50 years.
One of them had previously been a DJ on WPIX-FM in New York, who I first came to follow in the early to mid 70s, when first discovering NYC FM radio. His name was Jim Quinn. He was funny, and irreverent, and reached out to his listeners and took dedications all over the Tri-State Area, and did a nightly trivia contest called Stump the Audience. Then, one night in 1974, he was gone. Somehow, randomly, from my listening post on Lawn Guyland, I discovered he'd moved to KB- a 50,000 watt AM all-nighter that blasted its skywaves from Buffalo all the way up and down the eastern seaboard from Nova Scotia to Miami, Florida- until the sun came up, the signal no longer bounced, and itty-bitty standards stations like 1520 WTHE in nearby Mineola came on the air.
I stuck with his humor, his dedications, eventually his trivia game, until I went off to college in 1977- closer to Buffalo but not interested enough to keep listening. Somewhere in there, he moved back to Pittsburgh, got charged with sexual harassment, and turned into a wackier-than-Limbaugh wackadoodle, where he remained well into this decade.
Yet there he was, in the documentary of his station's multiple riffs on the War of the Worlds broadcast, leading into its 1975 version:
Also appearing, more prominently featured, and speaking at the documentary's screening, was longtime Buffalo talker Don Pesola. Oh, sorry; he hates when you use his real name. He's always gone by the on-air nom de guerre of "Sandy Beach," and despite his past as a wacky rock and roll DJ (he was even the jocks' union rep at KB in the 1970s), he has now gone over to the Dark Side and holds forth on a right-wing talk show three hours every weekday morning on KB's now-sister station, where he still continues to spout scary stories about alien invaders coming to our country to destroy our way of life. Only now, they don't put in disclaimers reminding listeners it's fiction.
Jeff Kaye, who masterminded the whole business, was gone by the time of Quinn's brief connection to the documentary- he became a Bills broadcaster (Van Miller, Stan Barron and Jeff "Fan" Kaye) and was even a longtime voice of NFL Films before his death. He was much remembered at the screening- also attended, in addition to Pesola, by its producer, another prominent voice in the production, and longtime KB morning man Danny (who "Moves Your Fanny") Neaverth. Dan was the only one I said hello to after the show was over; I remembered his show from winter mornings when KB was still able to be heard before the Mineola station went on the air, and I shared my appreciation for his role in the broadcast and the history of Buffalo radio. I kept my mouth shut about the right-wing nutjob on the panel.
All of this occurred after I'd gone to the completely wrong place. My Rochester friends had invited me weeks before, but I'd forgotten, and when Scott reminded me that morning, I assumed that a WNED documentary would be screened at their spacious studios on the waterfront. Claude the Security Guard quickly disabused me of that notion, and I discovered it was at the legendary North Park theater some 10 miles to the north:
Fortunately, I didn't miss much of the hourlong screening, coming in just as a previous WKBW-TV broadcast was depicting longtime anchor Irv Weinstein reporting on the birth of Jesus (saved from "pistol-packin Pharisees"). After it was over, Scott and Lisa stopped over to set up to record the shorter broadcast version of the documentary shown after midnight the following night, which I now also have a copy of.
I delivered the copy to Scott in Rochester on Thursday, once again getting lost after discovering that the Wegmans Next Door restaurant in Pittsford isn't the one that's next door to the Wegmans in Pittsford. That was quite nice and a lot cheaper than the white-tablecloth joint that isn't Next Door.
----
I finished with clients and Udda Things just in time to get home Thursday night for more memories: a local synagogue was memorializing a onetime member, named Bart Slepian, to honor him a week after the 20th anniversary of his murder. I'm spending increasing portions of my life at funereal experiences, but this is my first, and hopefully last, including the word "assassinated" in the program. For Bart was an obstetrician who also performed abortions, and that made him a literal target. Shot in his kitchen, in front of his boys, by a crazed "pro-lifer." Yeah, it is ironic, dontcha think?
The shul was full, with police protection, saying hello to at least one friend of mine (on the board of his memorial fund) and hearing a kickass Resistance Revolution Womens' Chorus. The speakers were kind and funny and sad. Eleanor (who was still working when it got going) had known Bart and his wife from her days installing outdoor lighting; she quite possibly was working in their yard when the murderer was casing the joint.
The following night, the temple had another memorial service scheduled- for the previous weekend's victims of a senseless mass murder at a Pittsburgh shul. One perpetrated by a madman who couldn't cope with that congregation supporting an immigrant relief project; one who was scared to their deaths by the caravan of migrants that might reach Texas by 2021. Who our president* enabled, encouraged and seemed surprised that people were blaming him for.
But some of his best friends are Jewish, so that makes it all okay.
----
I rolled from that into a fairly decent final workday on Friday, leaving me plenty of time to get one thing done yesterday: finally wrap up and pack up the laptop needin' of a fixin', and put it in a box to send back to Dell via FedEx.
Easier said than done.
I'd copied everything I needed over to this new laptop by early last week, and bought a package to handle the dreaded iTunes transfer for me, so Saturday morning was all just deleting sensitive stuff I didn't want Larry In Dell's Accounting Department getting copies of. All I needed to do was print out the FedEx shipping label they'd sent, and stick it on the box I'd kept which I'd brought the laptop home in not quite a year ago.
Or not. First, they also provided instructions saying, um, that box you kept isn't intended to actually SHIP anything in. You need to put it in a bigger box and cram 20 pounds of bubble wrap into it- OR buy a pre-bubblewrapped shipping box from FedEx.
I chose the former. Only the label wouldn't print; the link to it had expired. I called Dell. Long story short: they're assholes. Department One insisted that I could not, no way no how, get a new label until Customer Care reopened on Monday morning. Department Two (which I reached after a reading from the Book of Threats) did promise to generate one, but it might take as long as 24 hours.
It showed up 10 minutes later. And us, ready to get on the road to go to Rochester to see a friend's art show. We detoured over to the FedEx depot at the airport, and the Horse With No Name(as I finally named it) is now on its way to Red Rock. The show was lovely, the Sabres scored 9 goals, the Bills matched that point total in sucking and losing today, and it's all good.
And that's all I can remember;)
Tuesday night was Memories of a local event I had no recollection of but was connected in many ways to things I did recall. One of my Rochester friends with radio connections invited me to join him and his wife for a screening of a documentary about the War of the Worlds broadcast that shook the area. Not the Halloween 1938 one by Orson Welles, but the Halloween 1968 one that was run on WKBW-AM 1520 on its 30th anniversary.
Missed it by about six years. Or 13, depending on how you count.
I should explain.
Although I did not move here until the fall of 1981, and had not been west of Rochester before then (other than perhaps a vaguely-remembered daytrip to the Canadian Falls in the 60s sometime), I knew Depew. And Lackawanna. And where every one of the local nine 22-hour McDonalds restaurants were, and about Tuxedo Junction rental stores, and about Tops and Bells and dozens of other chains I would not set foot in for years, if ever.
The clue to all of that was WKBW-AM, a blowtorch of a station, originated in the 20s with call letters standing for "Well Known Bible Witness." By my time, they'd gone Top-40, with national legends Hound Dog Lorenz, Joey Reynolds and (most relevant to this week's proceedings) Jeff Kaye leading the way into a lineup of DJs who would carry their fame into many places, some of them weird or evil, over the next 40-50 years.
One of them had previously been a DJ on WPIX-FM in New York, who I first came to follow in the early to mid 70s, when first discovering NYC FM radio. His name was Jim Quinn. He was funny, and irreverent, and reached out to his listeners and took dedications all over the Tri-State Area, and did a nightly trivia contest called Stump the Audience. Then, one night in 1974, he was gone. Somehow, randomly, from my listening post on Lawn Guyland, I discovered he'd moved to KB- a 50,000 watt AM all-nighter that blasted its skywaves from Buffalo all the way up and down the eastern seaboard from Nova Scotia to Miami, Florida- until the sun came up, the signal no longer bounced, and itty-bitty standards stations like 1520 WTHE in nearby Mineola came on the air.
I stuck with his humor, his dedications, eventually his trivia game, until I went off to college in 1977- closer to Buffalo but not interested enough to keep listening. Somewhere in there, he moved back to Pittsburgh, got charged with sexual harassment, and turned into a wackier-than-Limbaugh wackadoodle, where he remained well into this decade.
Yet there he was, in the documentary of his station's multiple riffs on the War of the Worlds broadcast, leading into its 1975 version:
Also appearing, more prominently featured, and speaking at the documentary's screening, was longtime Buffalo talker Don Pesola. Oh, sorry; he hates when you use his real name. He's always gone by the on-air nom de guerre of "Sandy Beach," and despite his past as a wacky rock and roll DJ (he was even the jocks' union rep at KB in the 1970s), he has now gone over to the Dark Side and holds forth on a right-wing talk show three hours every weekday morning on KB's now-sister station, where he still continues to spout scary stories about alien invaders coming to our country to destroy our way of life. Only now, they don't put in disclaimers reminding listeners it's fiction.
Jeff Kaye, who masterminded the whole business, was gone by the time of Quinn's brief connection to the documentary- he became a Bills broadcaster (Van Miller, Stan Barron and Jeff "Fan" Kaye) and was even a longtime voice of NFL Films before his death. He was much remembered at the screening- also attended, in addition to Pesola, by its producer, another prominent voice in the production, and longtime KB morning man Danny (who "Moves Your Fanny") Neaverth. Dan was the only one I said hello to after the show was over; I remembered his show from winter mornings when KB was still able to be heard before the Mineola station went on the air, and I shared my appreciation for his role in the broadcast and the history of Buffalo radio. I kept my mouth shut about the right-wing nutjob on the panel.
All of this occurred after I'd gone to the completely wrong place. My Rochester friends had invited me weeks before, but I'd forgotten, and when Scott reminded me that morning, I assumed that a WNED documentary would be screened at their spacious studios on the waterfront. Claude the Security Guard quickly disabused me of that notion, and I discovered it was at the legendary North Park theater some 10 miles to the north:
Fortunately, I didn't miss much of the hourlong screening, coming in just as a previous WKBW-TV broadcast was depicting longtime anchor Irv Weinstein reporting on the birth of Jesus (saved from "pistol-packin Pharisees"). After it was over, Scott and Lisa stopped over to set up to record the shorter broadcast version of the documentary shown after midnight the following night, which I now also have a copy of.
I delivered the copy to Scott in Rochester on Thursday, once again getting lost after discovering that the Wegmans Next Door restaurant in Pittsford isn't the one that's next door to the Wegmans in Pittsford. That was quite nice and a lot cheaper than the white-tablecloth joint that isn't Next Door.
----
I finished with clients and Udda Things just in time to get home Thursday night for more memories: a local synagogue was memorializing a onetime member, named Bart Slepian, to honor him a week after the 20th anniversary of his murder. I'm spending increasing portions of my life at funereal experiences, but this is my first, and hopefully last, including the word "assassinated" in the program. For Bart was an obstetrician who also performed abortions, and that made him a literal target. Shot in his kitchen, in front of his boys, by a crazed "pro-lifer." Yeah, it is ironic, dontcha think?
The shul was full, with police protection, saying hello to at least one friend of mine (on the board of his memorial fund) and hearing a kickass Resistance Revolution Womens' Chorus. The speakers were kind and funny and sad. Eleanor (who was still working when it got going) had known Bart and his wife from her days installing outdoor lighting; she quite possibly was working in their yard when the murderer was casing the joint.
The following night, the temple had another memorial service scheduled- for the previous weekend's victims of a senseless mass murder at a Pittsburgh shul. One perpetrated by a madman who couldn't cope with that congregation supporting an immigrant relief project; one who was scared to their deaths by the caravan of migrants that might reach Texas by 2021. Who our president* enabled, encouraged and seemed surprised that people were blaming him for.
But some of his best friends are Jewish, so that makes it all okay.
----
I rolled from that into a fairly decent final workday on Friday, leaving me plenty of time to get one thing done yesterday: finally wrap up and pack up the laptop needin' of a fixin', and put it in a box to send back to Dell via FedEx.
Easier said than done.
I'd copied everything I needed over to this new laptop by early last week, and bought a package to handle the dreaded iTunes transfer for me, so Saturday morning was all just deleting sensitive stuff I didn't want Larry In Dell's Accounting Department getting copies of. All I needed to do was print out the FedEx shipping label they'd sent, and stick it on the box I'd kept which I'd brought the laptop home in not quite a year ago.
Or not. First, they also provided instructions saying, um, that box you kept isn't intended to actually SHIP anything in. You need to put it in a bigger box and cram 20 pounds of bubble wrap into it- OR buy a pre-bubblewrapped shipping box from FedEx.
I chose the former. Only the label wouldn't print; the link to it had expired. I called Dell. Long story short: they're assholes. Department One insisted that I could not, no way no how, get a new label until Customer Care reopened on Monday morning. Department Two (which I reached after a reading from the Book of Threats) did promise to generate one, but it might take as long as 24 hours.
It showed up 10 minutes later. And us, ready to get on the road to go to Rochester to see a friend's art show. We detoured over to the FedEx depot at the airport, and the Horse With No Name(as I finally named it) is now on its way to Red Rock. The show was lovely, the Sabres scored 9 goals, the Bills matched that point total in sucking and losing today, and it's all good.
And that's all I can remember;)