The Dick Gibson Show Read Online Free PDF Page A

twenty-five dollars a week to start and jumped him to thirty dollars at the end of three months. Had he taken such a job, however, he would never have been allowed the liberties he took on the small stations. He was grateful for the temptation, but threw it into the pot with all the rest of the sacrifices he had made—more bread cast upon the waters, further frog years.
    So he continued, for a while anyway, as an itinerant, a circuit rider, his colleagues still those same graduates of the radio schools, actual fairies many of them, but fairies of a lower order: penniless, pained fellows who strove for taste and a sense of the finer as they strove to stretch their range and improve their diction.
    SOME DEMO’S; FURTHER FAMOUS FIRSTS:
     
    “Dick Gibson, KWGG, Conrad, California. This next number is ‘Dick’s Demo,’ Demonstration Record number twenty-seven, and goes out to all the guys ’n’ gals in the industry who hire and fire. This is a take. Take! I am calling you—ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh.
    “I tell you about the time I worked the newsroom at KROP, Roper, Nebraska? The apprenticeship was on me and I wasn’t Dick Gibson yet. I was Marshall Maine, KROP, The Voice of Wheat. Some place that was. The ad I answered in Broadcasting said it reached listeners in three states. And so it did. We saturated two counties in northeast Nebraska, and leaped across the Missouri River to the Dell Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Whoever happened to be tuned in along a small rough stretch of Route 33 in western Iowa could also catch us.
    “But let me tell you about those two counties. Sylvia Credenza County and Louis Credenza, Senior County. The whole area consisted of eight enormous farms owned by these eight brothers. The Credenza brothers: Louis III, Jim, Felix, Poke, Charley, George, Bill and Lee. That part of the state had been gerrymandered long before, and every two years each county sent a brother to the statehouse in Lincoln. They took turns. I was there during the reign of Charley and Bill.
    “The station was a family hobby, sort of a Credenza hookup. Like a party line. They built it in 1935 when reception was still bad in the area and they had nothing else to listen to. Later, when Sioux City, about sixty miles off, put up KSUX, a 5000-watter, reception improved, but the boys had gotten so used to having their own station that they decided to continue it. The funny thing is, none of the brothers enjoyed speaking on the radio themselves. They became self-conscious and would cough and sputter and stammer helplessly whenever, during those biennial political campaigns they put on for each other—brother ran against brother, though only two brothers were nominated from each county and, for all I know, only Credenzas were registered to vote—one of them had to make a speech. So, though they listened constantly to their own station—they had radios mounted on all their tractors and each barn—they never performed on it except during one of those queer campaigns. (I was around during one of them. Lee was running against Jim in Sylvia Credenza County, and Felix was up against George in Louis Credenza, Senior County. It was something, hearing those speeches, each Credenza urging his three constituent Credenza brothers—one the incumbent— to get out and vote. It didn’t make any difference, they said, who they voted for. The important thing was that they exercise their ballot.)
    “A staff ran the station for them from the beginning. When I was there there were two engineers, two transmitter men and two announcers. We all spelled each other and took turns sleeping in the same bunk beds out at the transmitter shack.
    “Surprisingly, we did almost as many commercials as a normal station. With their two votes in the Nebraska legislature, the Credenzas carried a lot of weight with important firms around the state and could always pressure a little business out of them. They even prided themselves on the good job they did