As a veteran of early 1960's radio, I sometimes find myself amazed at the current state of radio operations. Of course, I haven't actually been inside a radio station for decades, but judging by what I glimpse in magazine articles or on TV, modern operations are fully computerized - sometimes even automated - and in many cases programmed from remote sources.
Quite a contrast to the days when America was populated by thousands of small radio stations, many of them one-man
operations for long stretches of the day. I worked at a couple of those, and even the larger of the two was still small potatoes. I'm sure our listeners in those days would have been surprised to know what was sometimes going on behind the scenes.
A good example would be our news operation, which consisted mostly of the DJ reading obituaries from the local newspaper. I do remember that we had a news teletype machine for a while after I started, but it disappeared. This was a period of extreme belt-tightening for the station (which might have been why I was hired, considering my low wages) and the owner decided that local folks weren't interested enough in news for him to pay the fees.
We also used the newspaper to get the weather forecast, although we did add on the current temperature — but that created another problem. Our studio was a converted room with soundproofing covering the windows, except for a small opening through which we could see a thermometer mounted outside. Unfortunately it was often in the sun, and we reported temperatures much higher than they should be. How did we know that? Because we discovered we could see the real temperature on the bank sign across the street. It was a problem that kind of solved itself though, because we started ignoring our own and using the one from the bank.
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