A Head Full of Ideas that were Driving Me Insane....

Two nights. Two memories. One very good. One very bad.

I will forever associate my daily newspaper days with the constant clickity-clacking sound of a teletype machine. (No idea what this sounds like? Go here and download the thing, or click this.) Our newsroom had two, next to each other in a little corner alcove, one always ready to switch to if the other jammed or ran out of the huge industrial rolls of newsprint which put out its vital world news content.

Thar war no Intrawebs in 1978, which is when this story begins, so one of the benefits of staying up past midnight most nights was we got the news and the ballscores and the juicy gossip off those newswires long before anyone else on campus. I was a late bloomer as a newswriter and didn't join the paper until my sophomore year. On my first night going up those stairs, the editors gave us "compets" the tour, including of the alcove with the teletype machines. They mentioned that the machines had a loud bell which would go off in the event of stop-the-presses breaking news, but not to worry, that never happened.

It happened that night.

For that night was Sunday, September 17, 1978, and President Carter had just brokered the landmark Egypt-Israeli peace accord. We were busier than usual that night and we learned an awful lot about the news business.

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For the next two-plus years, I evolved from a slackadasical trainee into a pretty decent, even respected, reporter and editor. By my senior fall, I was the one doing the training of the new kids coming up those stairs. I also worked on the side as the local part-time correspondent for the (then three) Syracuse newspapers. I'd seen it all, or mostly all, but in all that time, that bell had never gone off again. Not for Bucky Dent, not for Iran, not for Reagan's stunning election victory.

Not until twenty-five years ago tonight.

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We were a tough and cynical bunch. We went after the local DA with a story about him beating his wife. We had a prominent sign in the newsroom saying "Never believe a rumor until it's officially denied." I came close to a reprimand for putting a caption on a photo of a fire at the Ag College poultry barn that read "Chicken Fry."

But when the bell rang for the sudden and tragic death of John Lennon? We cried. We hugged. We screamed for the loss of a voice which had brought us through our childhoods, gone away for awhile, and only recently come back with a renewed strength and, yes, Imagine-ation.

And then we went back to work writing it all down.

I can't remember what I wrote, or even if I did. It was a Monday night; Sundays were my usual night to copy-edit, but I might have had something else in the paper that night and if I did anything, it was likely CE'ing someone else's reaction piece. But I'll never forget where I was, nor the new and blacker meaning of the ringing of that bell.

The battle wages on between righteous indignation over a corporate takeover and sheer joy over an outpouring of good material. Allow me to take both sides of this one.

The frequency at the end of the Western NY FM dial, 107.7, has been a weird and wonderful one for all my years here. I first became aware of it in the early 80s when its lonely transmitter in Wyoming County (population: 3,276- 800 of them cows) got hitched to a studio somewhere in my now-hometown of Williamsville and became WUWU. Yep, pronounced "woo-woo." Over came a band of rather radical jocks who'd been fighting corporate radio takeovers (which at the time they knew nothing about compared to what we have now), including a morning guy who called himself Justin Case and a rather bizarre free-form nighttime show called "Oil of Dog." You couldn't take much of it at a time but it was great fun in small doses.

The station was actually owned by a Williamsville dentist who the staff referred to as "Dr. Teeth." Battles over programming reached the point once where Dr. T locked the jocks out of the studio- who promptly drove to Wethersfield to broadcast from the transmitter until the police came to arrest them for trespassing.

Formats changed over the years, varying wildly but usually I liked what I heard. Plus the transmitter was close enough to Rochester that I could hear them there, too. In the late 80s, they were "The Wave"- very jazz and new agey. They even sponsored a Steps Ahead concert we attended in downtown Rochester- unheard of for a Buffalo media outlet. They then went country for most of the 90s (even had their studios then in the building my Buffalo office was originally based in), but late in the decade, Adelphia Communications bought the station and made it all-sports.

And here begins the other voice in my head. I've listened to various sports talk programs- from "the Fan" in New York to a nightly hourlong one in Rochester- almost since the genre was invented. For years I was a semiregular caller to the latter, winning more than my share of trivia prizes (typically pairs of baseball tickets and once, yes Mel THAT game, a pair to see the Bills).

Buffalo's versions have generally been louder and more overly opinionated than is my liking, so Adelphia's experiment worked beautifully. They brought in the backup from the Rochester show for their afternoon drive, put one of their tv sports net guys on in the morning, and generally raised the bar of discussion. Until the Rigas boys joined the corporate criminal perp walk, Adelphia wound up in Chapter 11, and 107.7 wound up on the auction block.

It was the biggest unkept secret in town that Entercom Communications, one of the half dozen behemoths controlling 90-plus percent of the American airwaves and owner of the only other sports talk outlet in Buffalo, had eyes on this auction solely to put its sports talk competition out of business. It bid, and then overbid, a staggering amount of money to do just that. For about two weeks, all this once-proud station did was simulcast the crap on the AM dial.

But now this.

A formatless format- Clear Channel does something like it on one of its Rochester outlets, but this programmer has done SOOOOO much better of a job. No jocks, no hype, so far no commercials, but ye gods and little fishes the stuff they are playing! Nothing new, strictly speaking, but the gamut from late 60s to early 90s is amazingly wide and even more amazingly deep. Yellow Snow by Frank Zappa would surprise me- but hearing them play his classic "Joe's Garage" shocked me. Mercedes Benz by Janis Joplin. Indigo Girls following Del Amitri and coming on before a deep track from Pete Townshend's "Empty Glass." And this simply wonderful old chestnut by John Prine:

And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile
It don't cost very much, but it lasts a long while
Won't you please tell the man I didn't kill anyone
No I'm just tryin' to have me some fun

So I guess my emotions are mixed. But to update one of the station IDs from the Dr. Teeth days:

Lock it in. And rip the knob off. 107.7. The Lake.