 |
1400 AM
|
Listing KXIV on this Broadcast
Resume is a little "iffy" but I'm going to put it here
anyway because so many of my skills and so many of my
broadcast friends are involved that it is truly worth of
note.
First note however, despite the business card, I was
never actually employed by KXIV. I was more like a
night and weekend stalker.
My time here was intermixed with my College time at
KFCA. But, between the two of them I got an honest
start into my profession and met many peers that would
go on to become good or even great broadcasters on their
own.
First I have to mention Charlie Underwood. He's
the guy that actually got a paycheck from the place.
He worked nights and weekends when the place
was empty. I spent a lot of time with him there,
as well as others from the college and even one old High
School friend. Now, for the sake of his well
earned and amazing career, I won't tell you his real name but if
you've spent much time on the west coast you'll have
heard of The Voice,
Lee Marshall.
When I was at KINO radio, Marsh did a series of promos for me
in the KXIV production room.
KXIV was a beautiful facility and was built on 3 levels
with solid windows facing out into the plaza of the
commercial complex it was in.
The offices were upstairs.
There was a very plush, public view Announce/Talk booth
located on the entry level looking down on a sunken
public view control room where John Sage did his talk
show. The bottom floor was
completely given over to production, out of view of
anyone. It is there, for the most part, that I
spent my productive time at the station.
Just a note. Owned by Ira Lavin and
Dick
Van Dyke, KXIV
is the roman numeral equivalent of 1400, which was the
station frequency.
For much of the non prime time hours (ie: evenings and
weekends) the station was one of the early adopters of
broadcast automation. This was really something to
see for us turntable and microphone types. You
gotta click on this one to get the true picture of PART
of a standard Schaefer/Ampex automation system.
Girl was optional.
 |
This monster,
WHEN PROPERLY PROGRAMMED, gave the station true "random
select" where each tape played only one musical
selection or song and a subsonic (low frequency) tone at
the end of the selection would trigger the next event.
This would continue with four or five tapes intermixing
until the time clock of the system over-rode the music
in order to insert a station ID/time check or a
commercial. There were some "unfortunate" segues
when a clash of musical styles occurred or when the
tapes were improperly recorded so that one song would
"step on" (play on top of) the one preceding it.
Two of the decks were time recordings where an announcer
had recorded something like "it's 10:13 at KXIV, 1400,
Phoenix, Arizona." One deck held the tape for the even
minutes and one for the odd minutes. Thus, no
matter what else the machine was doing, exactly once
every minute it triggered one or the other of these
decks to roll off that time announce and cue up the next
one.
KXIV gave several of us a wonderful learning experience
even as we continued to hope that the PD, Jim Spero,
never caught on.
Good times.
|
|
|
 |
|
