Introduction
We are extremely fortunate in being able to read about Tom Crozier and his 65 years spent working in Australian Radio.
Thanks not only go to Tom Crozier for taking the time to write the following chapters, but also to his family, in particular his daughters Virginia Crozier and Gail Schmierer for sharing them with us. Appropriate photos have been added from various collectors to illustrate the recollections being shared.
A brief timeline:
Born November 1925
1942 2KM Kempsey
1943 2LT Lithgow
1944-48 2LM Lismore
A brief break where he thought he may pursue a religious calling in the Presbyterian Church
1949-1951 2UE Sydney as an announcer
1951-55 2LM Lismore again
1955-61 2WL Wollongong
1961-81 2UE, initially as announcer then salesman, 1968-1977 as Sales Manager, then group manager of affiliate stations (KA, MC)
1981-89 Marketing Director, Radio Marketing Bureau
1990-91 helped in setting up community station in Sutherland Shire
1992-2003 Manager, Radio 2RPH (Radio for Print Handicapped)
Thomas Francis Roy Crozier died 13th September 2010, aged 84
Thanks not only go to Tom Crozier for taking the time to write the following chapters, but also to his family, in particular his daughters Virginia Crozier and Gail Schmierer for sharing them with us. Appropriate photos have been added from various collectors to illustrate the recollections being shared.
A brief timeline:
Born November 1925
1942 2KM Kempsey
1943 2LT Lithgow
1944-48 2LM Lismore
A brief break where he thought he may pursue a religious calling in the Presbyterian Church
1949-1951 2UE Sydney as an announcer
1951-55 2LM Lismore again
1955-61 2WL Wollongong
1961-81 2UE, initially as announcer then salesman, 1968-1977 as Sales Manager, then group manager of affiliate stations (KA, MC)
1981-89 Marketing Director, Radio Marketing Bureau
1990-91 helped in setting up community station in Sutherland Shire
1992-2003 Manager, Radio 2RPH (Radio for Print Handicapped)
Thomas Francis Roy Crozier died 13th September 2010, aged 84
 Tom Crozier - Ian Grieve Postcard Collection
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Tom Crozer - Family
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Working on the Wireless - Memories of a Life spent in Radio - TOM CROZIER
Here is the News - 1925-2000
2UE, 5DN, 3UZ and 2KY begin broadcasting in 1925, the year I was born;
Sydney's first section of underground railway opens, 1926;
Mr Traegar's pedal wireless is developed for Flynn's proposed flying doctor service and Canberra's Federal Parliament opens, 1927;
Pedal wireless gets its workout as flying doctor takes to the air; Kingsford Smith succeeds in flight from America to Australia, 1928;
First airmail stamps issued; 3L0 Melbourne begins with kookaburra as signature, 1929;
First wireless telephone contact with England, 1930;
Jack Davey arrives in Australia to take it by storm, 1931;
Sydney Harbour Bridge opens; ABC established; Aeroplane Jelly song is composed, 1932;
Bodyline bowling "just not cricket"; Kingsford Smith breaks England-Australia air flight record, 1933;
Tivoli comedian Roy Rene (Mo) a flop in movies, 1934;
Qantas first international flight to Singapore: Kingsford Smith is lost in Bay of Bengal, Cane Toad introduced in Queensland, Tarzan's Grip launched, 1935;
Edward V111 quits, Hume Dam is commissioned: 1936:
Dad and Dave the radio serial starts on 2UW, first Australia-US airmail, 1937;
Qantas international flights extended to England - flight time 10 days; Prime Minister Robert Menzies
dubbed "Pig Iron Bob" by wharf workers; population reaches 6,936,000, 1938;
World War 2 begins, 1939;
Petrol rationing starts; newsprint rationed, papers smaller; 1940;
Banjo Patterson dies, Tobruk relieved HMAS Sydney lost Australia's Prime Minister John Curtin "looks to the United States", 1941;
Daylight Saving introduced (wartime measure only!); Japanese forces in New Guinea; Japanese midget subs in Sydney Harbour; General Douglas MacArthur arrives in Australia; ration books issued; Australian radio stations transmitting from 6.30am to midnight only; I get my first job in radio. 1942;
Federal Government grants franchise to certain aboriginals (those entitled to vote in their own state, members or ex-members of armed forces); Australian Broadcasting Control Board appointed; petrol rationing ends; Snowy Mountains Scheme starts; Menzies becomes Prime Minister, I move to 2UE Sydney 1949;
I marry Nancy Begg and return to Lismore 1951.
We move to 2WL Wollongong (now WAVE FM) 1955.
Back to Sydney and 2UE for 20 years, 1961.
Director Radio Marketing Bureau - part of Federation of Australian Broadcasters (now Commercial Radio Australia) 1981
Retire 1989.
Consultancy 1989 - 1992.
Involved in Community Radio (especially 2RPH) 1992 - 2003.
Fully retired, if not really pleased about it - September 2003
2UE, 5DN, 3UZ and 2KY begin broadcasting in 1925, the year I was born;
Sydney's first section of underground railway opens, 1926;
Mr Traegar's pedal wireless is developed for Flynn's proposed flying doctor service and Canberra's Federal Parliament opens, 1927;
Pedal wireless gets its workout as flying doctor takes to the air; Kingsford Smith succeeds in flight from America to Australia, 1928;
First airmail stamps issued; 3L0 Melbourne begins with kookaburra as signature, 1929;
First wireless telephone contact with England, 1930;
Jack Davey arrives in Australia to take it by storm, 1931;
Sydney Harbour Bridge opens; ABC established; Aeroplane Jelly song is composed, 1932;
Bodyline bowling "just not cricket"; Kingsford Smith breaks England-Australia air flight record, 1933;
Tivoli comedian Roy Rene (Mo) a flop in movies, 1934;
Qantas first international flight to Singapore: Kingsford Smith is lost in Bay of Bengal, Cane Toad introduced in Queensland, Tarzan's Grip launched, 1935;
Edward V111 quits, Hume Dam is commissioned: 1936:
Dad and Dave the radio serial starts on 2UW, first Australia-US airmail, 1937;
Qantas international flights extended to England - flight time 10 days; Prime Minister Robert Menzies
dubbed "Pig Iron Bob" by wharf workers; population reaches 6,936,000, 1938;
World War 2 begins, 1939;
Petrol rationing starts; newsprint rationed, papers smaller; 1940;
Banjo Patterson dies, Tobruk relieved HMAS Sydney lost Australia's Prime Minister John Curtin "looks to the United States", 1941;
Daylight Saving introduced (wartime measure only!); Japanese forces in New Guinea; Japanese midget subs in Sydney Harbour; General Douglas MacArthur arrives in Australia; ration books issued; Australian radio stations transmitting from 6.30am to midnight only; I get my first job in radio. 1942;
Federal Government grants franchise to certain aboriginals (those entitled to vote in their own state, members or ex-members of armed forces); Australian Broadcasting Control Board appointed; petrol rationing ends; Snowy Mountains Scheme starts; Menzies becomes Prime Minister, I move to 2UE Sydney 1949;
I marry Nancy Begg and return to Lismore 1951.
We move to 2WL Wollongong (now WAVE FM) 1955.
Back to Sydney and 2UE for 20 years, 1961.
Director Radio Marketing Bureau - part of Federation of Australian Broadcasters (now Commercial Radio Australia) 1981
Retire 1989.
Consultancy 1989 - 1992.
Involved in Community Radio (especially 2RPH) 1992 - 2003.
Fully retired, if not really pleased about it - September 2003
Chapter One
Commercial Broadcasting - November 1946
PHIL CHARLEY stood up to speak.
"I have here a short piece, written by Tom's sister..." he said.
Up until that time Phil and I had been good friends for forty years, just about. I figured that we would have to stay friends even after what would have to be a momentous intrusion into my past, for there would have had to have been three others involved in having this document read today. One was my colleague, Bob Logie, who'd organised this traditional gathering of radio friends and enemies on the occasion of my "retirement", the second would have been one of my daughters, Virginia, who knows about the skeletons and even the cupboards they're in, and the writer herself, Mary. And I wanted to stay friends with all of them.
Mary wrote a short story of a radio station I had invented. It was called 2WF, after Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains of NSW, because almost all radio stations were named in that way then. They took a couple of letters from the country town they served, added a "2","3","4" to represent their home state (based on old military planning zones but adopted by the states) and that was it.
My microphones were made from dad's empty Log Cabin tobacco tins, which I would liberally sprinkle with holes using a tin opener. The holes were necessary to let the sound in, of course.
These microphones were mounted in a disused fowl house at the end of our yard, where it was quiet because the bush came right up to our boundary. Radio programs originated from there whenever I wasn't at primary school. 2WF didn't have a transmitter because I wasn't aware that such a thing was needed.
Community singing was in vogue (it was the time of the Great Depression and cheap entertainment was the go). We had been to the Sydney Town Hall for a broadcast of the community singing concert one lunch-time, so I knew what was needed, having studied the conductorship of one Bryson Taylor who was a star of 2BL.
To have community singing, you had to have an audience. So Mary became that audience. Admittedly an audience of one was quite small, but one had to make do. The stage was the roof of the fowl house.
Community singing done, the conductor would jump to the ground and enter the studio to continue with a musical program, as the audience made its way round to the front gate and eventually back through the vegetable garden to the studio.
I was probably seven or eight.
The radio game was inspired by the first family radio, bought in 1932. It was an Airzone - marketed with the lines "fine Radio" and "Airzone's tone is Airzone's own". It came on the "never never" from the local grocery and hardware store, and the delivery man, Mr. Duncan, installed it for us by dint of hooking a piece of "aerial wire" to a nearby gum tree and switching the power on.
It was a cabinet model (who had even thought of a mantel radio in 1932 - personal portables were twenty five years into the future) and stood next to the fireplace in the "dining room" of our Blue Mountains home. But it could be heard quite easily as we ate our meals in the kitchen, where we always dined, the dining room itself being kept clean and tidy for the benefit of rare visitors.
You could hear programs from everywhere - a boys club concert from South Australia - a variety show from Melbourne - an old time dance from Sydney - and later, I could hear seven different episodes of "Yes, What?", a schoolroom farce, from seven different far-away locations at seven different times. And all on the same night.
This particular radio both fascinated and scared the hell out of me.
The trouble was that our set had been born with a microphonic valve. At least, I think that was the problem. Maybe it had others, but of course in its day it was what would become known in the business as a FRED - a flamin' ridiculous electronic device.
It would start off playing sweet and low, spreading its magic all through the house. Then it would emit a piercing shriek that turned my blood cold. Having achieved that, it continued to shriek until someone did something about it. That sound would send me racing out of the house, day or night - not to be coaxed back until it had stopped, either of its own accord, or by depriving it of its life force - the electric power we'd had installed some weeks before.
My mother had a cure for this terrible illness, as indeed she had a cure for everything else. The cure came in a blue glass jar and was called Vaseline. She conceived the idea that the problem was with the plug, and therefore, quite logically, dipped the plug into the Vaseline, then plugged it back in and switched the wireless back on. When this failed, as it did every time, she began to plaster the universal remedy liberally around the plug as it sat in its socket. Why nobody got electrocuted still remains one of life's deep and abiding mysteries.
There came the time when, with Vaseline dripping from the power point, the radio squealing and shrieking (now with added high pitched whistling) that the grandfather walked into the house one Sunday as we persevered with an attempt to hear the Aeroplane Jelly song from the comfort of the kitchen.
The first we knew about his arrival is that the radio stopped, then he strode into the kitchen with the words "That's enough of THAT!" He continued to have scant desire to listen to the radio for the rest of his life. Whenever he came to visit, the radio was switched off for the duration.
The faulty valve was repaired just in time for us to hear about the start of World War 2, by which time I had convinced my mother that we should have one of the new mantel radios. This one was better than the first one. It made no distressing noises, except those deliberately transmitted from the commercial stations (to which my mother had a strong and oft-repeated aversion), and it picked up the short-wave! I could hear the English broadcasts from Japan and the propaganda about the "greater South East Asia co-prosperity sphere". often read by an Australian prisoner of war.
That POW was Charles Cousins, whose pre-war "Radio Reporters" program on 2GB had kept me glued to the receiver at 6 o'clock on winter nights, speaking from so far away, and in such stilted tones. He later told the authorities he had helped to train the Japanese English-language broadcasters by placing an undue emphasis on controlling one's breathing. This had the absolutely predictable result that they couldn't control their breathing properly - so they would stop to take a breath at all the wrong places.
Even before that - by the time I was ten - I had decided that I was going to work "on the wireless".
It wasn't a popular choice. My mother wanted me to work in a bank. My father was nonplussed about radio, although he was a fan of "Dad and Dave", but wisely took the view that life would be easier if he pushed the bank line too.
If there is anyone to blame for my choice of a career, it is Bobby Bluegum. Bobby ran the children's session on 2FC at 5.30 each afternoon. He'd taken the words of an English broadcaster as his opening gambit - each afternoon after the chimes from the GPO clock, he would mellow the airwaves with "Hello ...hello...hello ..." and there'd be music, and radio plays, and birthday calls in which the lucky birthday girls and boys were advised to "follow the string from the back of the wireless" to find their present.
My mother heard that children could go to the studio and sit and watch, so one day the three of us, she, Mary and I, took the train to the city where she shopped, as usual, at Marcus Clarks, in Central Square.
Marcus Clarks used a rising sun logo with the words "Bound to Rise", but eventually the company set.
At that store, mum could put any purchase on the account and still pay it all off at five bob a week.
The shopping done by the end of the day, all the trio had to do was to catch the tram down to Market Street where 2FC was.
"I have here a short piece, written by Tom's sister..." he said.
Up until that time Phil and I had been good friends for forty years, just about. I figured that we would have to stay friends even after what would have to be a momentous intrusion into my past, for there would have had to have been three others involved in having this document read today. One was my colleague, Bob Logie, who'd organised this traditional gathering of radio friends and enemies on the occasion of my "retirement", the second would have been one of my daughters, Virginia, who knows about the skeletons and even the cupboards they're in, and the writer herself, Mary. And I wanted to stay friends with all of them.
Mary wrote a short story of a radio station I had invented. It was called 2WF, after Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains of NSW, because almost all radio stations were named in that way then. They took a couple of letters from the country town they served, added a "2","3","4" to represent their home state (based on old military planning zones but adopted by the states) and that was it.
My microphones were made from dad's empty Log Cabin tobacco tins, which I would liberally sprinkle with holes using a tin opener. The holes were necessary to let the sound in, of course.
These microphones were mounted in a disused fowl house at the end of our yard, where it was quiet because the bush came right up to our boundary. Radio programs originated from there whenever I wasn't at primary school. 2WF didn't have a transmitter because I wasn't aware that such a thing was needed.
Community singing was in vogue (it was the time of the Great Depression and cheap entertainment was the go). We had been to the Sydney Town Hall for a broadcast of the community singing concert one lunch-time, so I knew what was needed, having studied the conductorship of one Bryson Taylor who was a star of 2BL.
To have community singing, you had to have an audience. So Mary became that audience. Admittedly an audience of one was quite small, but one had to make do. The stage was the roof of the fowl house.
Community singing done, the conductor would jump to the ground and enter the studio to continue with a musical program, as the audience made its way round to the front gate and eventually back through the vegetable garden to the studio.
I was probably seven or eight.
The radio game was inspired by the first family radio, bought in 1932. It was an Airzone - marketed with the lines "fine Radio" and "Airzone's tone is Airzone's own". It came on the "never never" from the local grocery and hardware store, and the delivery man, Mr. Duncan, installed it for us by dint of hooking a piece of "aerial wire" to a nearby gum tree and switching the power on.
It was a cabinet model (who had even thought of a mantel radio in 1932 - personal portables were twenty five years into the future) and stood next to the fireplace in the "dining room" of our Blue Mountains home. But it could be heard quite easily as we ate our meals in the kitchen, where we always dined, the dining room itself being kept clean and tidy for the benefit of rare visitors.
You could hear programs from everywhere - a boys club concert from South Australia - a variety show from Melbourne - an old time dance from Sydney - and later, I could hear seven different episodes of "Yes, What?", a schoolroom farce, from seven different far-away locations at seven different times. And all on the same night.
This particular radio both fascinated and scared the hell out of me.
The trouble was that our set had been born with a microphonic valve. At least, I think that was the problem. Maybe it had others, but of course in its day it was what would become known in the business as a FRED - a flamin' ridiculous electronic device.
It would start off playing sweet and low, spreading its magic all through the house. Then it would emit a piercing shriek that turned my blood cold. Having achieved that, it continued to shriek until someone did something about it. That sound would send me racing out of the house, day or night - not to be coaxed back until it had stopped, either of its own accord, or by depriving it of its life force - the electric power we'd had installed some weeks before.
My mother had a cure for this terrible illness, as indeed she had a cure for everything else. The cure came in a blue glass jar and was called Vaseline. She conceived the idea that the problem was with the plug, and therefore, quite logically, dipped the plug into the Vaseline, then plugged it back in and switched the wireless back on. When this failed, as it did every time, she began to plaster the universal remedy liberally around the plug as it sat in its socket. Why nobody got electrocuted still remains one of life's deep and abiding mysteries.
There came the time when, with Vaseline dripping from the power point, the radio squealing and shrieking (now with added high pitched whistling) that the grandfather walked into the house one Sunday as we persevered with an attempt to hear the Aeroplane Jelly song from the comfort of the kitchen.
The first we knew about his arrival is that the radio stopped, then he strode into the kitchen with the words "That's enough of THAT!" He continued to have scant desire to listen to the radio for the rest of his life. Whenever he came to visit, the radio was switched off for the duration.
The faulty valve was repaired just in time for us to hear about the start of World War 2, by which time I had convinced my mother that we should have one of the new mantel radios. This one was better than the first one. It made no distressing noises, except those deliberately transmitted from the commercial stations (to which my mother had a strong and oft-repeated aversion), and it picked up the short-wave! I could hear the English broadcasts from Japan and the propaganda about the "greater South East Asia co-prosperity sphere". often read by an Australian prisoner of war.
That POW was Charles Cousins, whose pre-war "Radio Reporters" program on 2GB had kept me glued to the receiver at 6 o'clock on winter nights, speaking from so far away, and in such stilted tones. He later told the authorities he had helped to train the Japanese English-language broadcasters by placing an undue emphasis on controlling one's breathing. This had the absolutely predictable result that they couldn't control their breathing properly - so they would stop to take a breath at all the wrong places.
Even before that - by the time I was ten - I had decided that I was going to work "on the wireless".
It wasn't a popular choice. My mother wanted me to work in a bank. My father was nonplussed about radio, although he was a fan of "Dad and Dave", but wisely took the view that life would be easier if he pushed the bank line too.
If there is anyone to blame for my choice of a career, it is Bobby Bluegum. Bobby ran the children's session on 2FC at 5.30 each afternoon. He'd taken the words of an English broadcaster as his opening gambit - each afternoon after the chimes from the GPO clock, he would mellow the airwaves with "Hello ...hello...hello ..." and there'd be music, and radio plays, and birthday calls in which the lucky birthday girls and boys were advised to "follow the string from the back of the wireless" to find their present.
My mother heard that children could go to the studio and sit and watch, so one day the three of us, she, Mary and I, took the train to the city where she shopped, as usual, at Marcus Clarks, in Central Square.
Marcus Clarks used a rising sun logo with the words "Bound to Rise", but eventually the company set.
At that store, mum could put any purchase on the account and still pay it all off at five bob a week.
The shopping done by the end of the day, all the trio had to do was to catch the tram down to Market Street where 2FC was.
1935 - Labor Daily
There was a silver-haired fellow waiting at the lift and as we went in he greeted us with three hellos, and I knew it was HIM.
I was not at all surprised that he should meet us at the lift and take us up to the studio level, but I was disappointed to some degree because he was just an ordinary person. But there was compensation in the fact that he did have the air of a slightly bemused koala bear.
I was right, of course. Bobby Bluegum not only prepared the session and presented it, he completed the trifecta by driving a lift full of scruffy kids up to the studio so they could watch it. That was certainly doing everything!
But tragedy struck.
Suddenly, Bobby was missing from the children's session - and from the community singing concerts he also compered on 2BL.
I was lost. I was so disconsolate that my mum wrote to Peter Possum (Peter had taken over from Bobby) and he had replied - remarkably for a possum, in his own hand - that Bobby would doubtless bob up one day. He did, of course, but somewhere along the way he had changed his name to Frank Hatherley.
Years later, I almost knocked Bobby over in the crowded foyer of the State Shopping Block. He was working at 2UW, which was somewhere upstairs. I felt the need to tell him that he had inspired me to go into radio, but I didn't know how to address him. Was it "Bobby", or "Mr. Hatherley" or "Frank"? It was too hard and a mite embarrassing. I let the opportunity pass.
I'm sure, if he had guessed, he would have been glad nothing was said. After all, he might have said "that's too bad, son".
THE AEROPLANE JELLY SONG:
"I like Aeroplane Jelly
Aeroplane Jelly for me
I like it for dinner
I like it for tea
A little each day is
a good remedy...
The quality's high as the name would imply
And it's made from pure fruit that's one good reason why
I like Aeroplane Jelly
Aeroplane Jelly for me...
It came in waltz time, jazz and whatever, and rumour had it that the orchestra was the ABC Dance Band moonlighting. The singer was a small girl named Joy Adamson.
I was not at all surprised that he should meet us at the lift and take us up to the studio level, but I was disappointed to some degree because he was just an ordinary person. But there was compensation in the fact that he did have the air of a slightly bemused koala bear.
I was right, of course. Bobby Bluegum not only prepared the session and presented it, he completed the trifecta by driving a lift full of scruffy kids up to the studio so they could watch it. That was certainly doing everything!
But tragedy struck.
Suddenly, Bobby was missing from the children's session - and from the community singing concerts he also compered on 2BL.
I was lost. I was so disconsolate that my mum wrote to Peter Possum (Peter had taken over from Bobby) and he had replied - remarkably for a possum, in his own hand - that Bobby would doubtless bob up one day. He did, of course, but somewhere along the way he had changed his name to Frank Hatherley.
Years later, I almost knocked Bobby over in the crowded foyer of the State Shopping Block. He was working at 2UW, which was somewhere upstairs. I felt the need to tell him that he had inspired me to go into radio, but I didn't know how to address him. Was it "Bobby", or "Mr. Hatherley" or "Frank"? It was too hard and a mite embarrassing. I let the opportunity pass.
I'm sure, if he had guessed, he would have been glad nothing was said. After all, he might have said "that's too bad, son".
THE AEROPLANE JELLY SONG:
"I like Aeroplane Jelly
Aeroplane Jelly for me
I like it for dinner
I like it for tea
A little each day is
a good remedy...
The quality's high as the name would imply
And it's made from pure fruit that's one good reason why
I like Aeroplane Jelly
Aeroplane Jelly for me...
It came in waltz time, jazz and whatever, and rumour had it that the orchestra was the ABC Dance Band moonlighting. The singer was a small girl named Joy Adamson.
Chapter Two
Sunbeams Complimentary Slip from Cousin Marie - Ian Grieve Collection
PHIL was on to short stories now.
When Phil and I first met, at 2LM Lismore, I used to write stories in the copy department on Saturday afternoons. It was a way of filling in time before the severely rationed pubs would open around 5 o'clock (and close at 6). Phil and another mate, Dick McLaren would often come in and wait around for the same event. But Phil didn't know how my writing career began.
"Sunbeams" was the comic section in the old Sun Herald when I was at school, and it had always been my ambition to get something published in it. That didn't mean I was losing interest in the wireless - just that this was something I could do NOW, while I was just getting into my teens. Radio would have to wait until school was finished.
I first tried my hand at writing short, descriptive pieces. It must have had something to do with whatever the English teacher was pushing down our throats at Katoomba High School. These pieces were eminently unsuccessful, although no rejection slips were ever issued by Cousin Marie, who ran the editorial section. (I met her at 2UE ten years later and she didn't look at all like the line drawing of her in Sunbeams. Somehow she wasn't the slim young thing I thought she was - maybe the artist had drawn her as a child). You knew you were accepted, and that 5/- or 10/6 would be in the mail if you opened the comic on Sunday and saw your effort in print. The amount you got seemed to be directly related to the size of the piece.
The first one to make it was indeed a description, written in ten minutes in the school playground minutes after I'd noticed a bed of cloud lying in the valley below as the school train sped between Leura and Katoomba. I had never noticed before how soft and still the cloud looked, and somehow the words came easily.
When Phil and I first met, at 2LM Lismore, I used to write stories in the copy department on Saturday afternoons. It was a way of filling in time before the severely rationed pubs would open around 5 o'clock (and close at 6). Phil and another mate, Dick McLaren would often come in and wait around for the same event. But Phil didn't know how my writing career began.
"Sunbeams" was the comic section in the old Sun Herald when I was at school, and it had always been my ambition to get something published in it. That didn't mean I was losing interest in the wireless - just that this was something I could do NOW, while I was just getting into my teens. Radio would have to wait until school was finished.
I first tried my hand at writing short, descriptive pieces. It must have had something to do with whatever the English teacher was pushing down our throats at Katoomba High School. These pieces were eminently unsuccessful, although no rejection slips were ever issued by Cousin Marie, who ran the editorial section. (I met her at 2UE ten years later and she didn't look at all like the line drawing of her in Sunbeams. Somehow she wasn't the slim young thing I thought she was - maybe the artist had drawn her as a child). You knew you were accepted, and that 5/- or 10/6 would be in the mail if you opened the comic on Sunday and saw your effort in print. The amount you got seemed to be directly related to the size of the piece.
The first one to make it was indeed a description, written in ten minutes in the school playground minutes after I'd noticed a bed of cloud lying in the valley below as the school train sped between Leura and Katoomba. I had never noticed before how soft and still the cloud looked, and somehow the words came easily.
Sunbeams Envelope - Ian Grieve Collection
When the 5/- arrived in an envelope with a drawing of Ginger Meggs on the front, with Ginger saying "Please Mr Postman - take care of this - it's for my friend Tom Crozier..." I was overcome by emotion and greed for more - I thought I was on my way.
Now for stories, I thought.
I had received book of short stories at the primary school as a prize the year I left - 1938. I picked it up again - and I was suddenly lifted into a new world - mainly the incredible world of Steven Leacock, whose "Soaked in Seaweed" I could once recite almost in its entirety from memory.
This, I thought, was the kind of stuff I would like to write. It was just good fun. I had a go. I wrote three hundred words of nonsense.
Three weeks later, it was published. Not only that, but it was in the prime position where the prize was 10/6, the same price as the Mad Hatter's Hat in Alice in Wonderland..
Sure, Cousin Marie had changed the title, cut it down to Sunbeams size, and she'd changed the last line (the original probably being very much a school yard idea of humour, but I liked it better). No matter. It was there. It had my name on it, although I now wrote under the name Thomas, rather than Tom. I had decided that Thomas looked better for a writer.
There followed several of these, all credited to me and each one showing a slightly different address. The name of the house seemed to change with each publication. Did we move from house to house in Wood Street? Hardly possible. There was only one house there. This cries out for an explanation.
The reason was simple. My mother had become sick and tired of being poor. She had taken up the sciences of astrology and numerology and with her usual enthusiasm for a project, had put what little knowledge she gained into determined full-time practice.
It was my fault, of course. In 1936 or thereabouts, someone had handed me a copy of the Aspro Year Book on the way home from school. This eminent publication, now sadly gone, was an annual full of information about what the stars said must inevitably happen during the following year, the benefits of numerology, how to plant by the stars, horoscopes of the famous, and a million conflicting slogans for the product it was named for, none of which would get past today's health watchdogs.
First came numerology, where you added up any number that was more than one digit long and kept adding the result together until you got a single number. Then you could tell whether your number was "fortunate". If you wanted to check out your name in numerology, it was also simple: every letter of the alphabet had a number. You added all the numbers up.
Mum changed the name of the house in quick succession from Thornton to Allambie to Alanbie and so many others that sometimes I had to check on the house name, just in case I'd missed something. Each one, of course, was more likely to produce wealth and success and happiness than its predecessor, but always failing in some mysterious way.
Then to the stars. This became a serious business, especially since she could hear at least two experts on the subject on radio. (It was commercial radio, which she had no time for, but at least it was on two of the "better" ones, 2GB and 2UW). 2GB had a gentleman from a library which specialised in Theosophical topics. The Theosophical Society owned the 2GB licence. This library had a stack of books on astrology, many of them written half a century before. The other guru was an Egyptian gentleman who apparently materialised in the 2UW studio in full traditional garb two or three times a week. But it encouraged mum to study the art of telling her future by the stars.
So our trips to Sydney now ended up, not in the studios watching a children's session, but at the Library in the basement of 29 Bligh Street - an address I was to get to know and love many years later. At the time the building also contained 2GB and 2UE.
The way to win the lottery, according to the way my mother read the astrology books, was to buy a ticket at the time when the stars were exactly right. She would look for a propitious sign - like the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, for example. If it were to occur at 9.37 Australian Eastern Standard Time, she would take the early morning train to Sydney, ride the tram down Castlereagh Street to Barrack Street, then walk up to the Lottery Office. There she would stand on the steps until about fifteen minutes before the appointed time and before joining a queue.
There would be a great deal of shuffling and dodging, as she realised that she would get to the head of the line before the selected time. The strategy then was to turn to the person behind her and offer to change places. This working back process might happen two or three times before she got it just right - even then she lived in dread of the person ahead of her ordering several tickets at the same time to the ruination of her scientific plan..
When she got to the counter, if there were just a few seconds to wait, she would fiddle with the papers until the very instant of the conjunction, and triumphantly purchase her Ticket to Freedom.
Sadly, it never happened. I privately formed the opinion that she was not taking into account the enormous time difference between Earth and Venus.
She would have loved the no-nonsense method of buying a lottery ticket today.
The best thing that ever did occur was when mum spotted a ten pound note in the gutter as she was riding her bike. (She had bought one in her early forties to get around more easily; and especially to visit Mary who spent long periods in hospital at that time). Whether she actually did find the ten pounds, or whether she withdrew it from her sparse bank account in order to justify giving us some special gift is something I have often thought about.
If mum had some unusual ways, she also knew how to encourage me to write. While she doubted with great fervour that I would be able to do something worth while on the wireless, she had a picture in her mind of me as a writer (part time of course - the bank had top priority) and allowed me space at the end of the kitchen table. There I placed my writing pads, exercise books and other aids to the creative process, and there I slaved each evening, after homework, on the latest piece for Sunbeams - with half an ear on the Lux Radio Theatre booming out from the dining room.
I tried my hand at writing scripts for some of the shows I heard on the air. There was one program, late night for me around 9 o'clock, called "Melody Riddles". Harry Dearth, who produced the Lux Radio Theatre, handled this program (I suspect under protest). Listeners were asked to submit brief comedy scripts, in which the name of a popular song was hidden in the dialogue:-
Voice 1: We must get in touch with the old folks ...
Voice 2: At home we used to call them elderly people..
Presto! You've carefully hidden the name of a great tune of the times - "The Old Folks at Home". Clever,eh?
This was a challenge. And each week at least one of my scripts would end up on the desk of the producer in Sydney, but got no further. I never did collect a prize. It was worth as much as two good Sunbeams stories - one guinea. Forgive me if I believe that most of the scripts were written in the home of the producer or one of his minions, the way most of us suspect some Letters to the Editor are created today.
I began to write other things, too. As time went on I managed to get quite a few printed in the two Sydney afternoon newspapers - mainly in the Daily Mirror as it was then, and indeed that became a regular source of pocket money especially when I made my way into Sydney broadcasting in 1949.
But before that, there was a big event for me as my schooldays continued.
Over on a hill not far from our home (probably two or three miles away by road) a tower was being built. I was convinced it was a broadcasting tower, because I'd seen a picture of the tower of the new Sydney station, 2SM, in the authoritative publication "Wireless Weekly".
I turned out to be correct, but it took some time to prove it. There were two towers eventually, and that sorted it out for me. Then my grandfather came for a visit. As a surveyor, his interest was in finding out how high they were compared to the surrounding areas. I don't know why, and maybe he didn't either. Perhaps he was just catering to the interest of his only (at that time) grandson.
We took a walk out and asked one of the men working there what it was all about.
"It's for 2KA", he told us.
Mum was with us, and she probably felt bad about the discussion. To start with, she didn't like 2KA. It had been transmitting from further up the mountains for a couple of years, and she had become firmly convinced that one of the announcers had been talking to her one day when she heard him say. "Hope you got home OK on that bicycle, mum".
Why she tuned in at that time to hear this message was something that worried me somewhat, for 2KA was the pits. 2UE and 2KY were simply "common", but 2KA defied polite description.
I was determined that I would get to know someone at 2KA so they could tell me how I could get me a job on the wireless. After all, I had already told my school mates that was what I was going to do when I grew up, and here I was at high school and the only prospect of employment looked like being in a bank.
It was up to me to do something about it.
Meantime, there was a school holiday coming up, and I knew there was a casual job available as a telegram messenger boy. All you needed was a bicycle, and that was something I had.
It was a good job. Not as profitable as Sunbeams, where the going rate was 10/6 for a story that took half an hour to write, but steady at 10/- for about 48 hours each week.
The other messenger was Laurie. We divided the town into two halves - he took the side he lived in. 2KA was in his territory.
I had been outsmarted. I tried to negotiate with Laurie, using the undeniable fact that most of the People on my side seemed to have ice chests stacked with soft drinks, and their largesse was legendary. He countered by stressing that the cake shop was in his territory, and the owner was generous to a fault.
Checkmate!
Yet, out of all of this came what was a big event for me.
Laurie delivered a telegram to the transmitting station, was invited inside to take a look at it, and told the engineer about me and my plans to work in radio. He came back with the message that I was to drop in any afternoon the following week. (Had I been able to find him when I became Sales manager at 2UE, I would have offered him a job: his sales skill would have made him a natural).
Of course, I was immediately ready to take on the world. Here was my chance. I would soon be challenging Jack Davey (this top man was in uniform, entertaining American and Australian troops, so the opportunity was certainly there). I would be an overnight sensation - nothing could stop me.
There would be quiz shows, and top line variety shows, like the one Wilfred Thomas compered on the ABC each week, with a full orchestra (I didn't realise how apt that description was), and of course, there would be the fans and the pictures in "Wireless Weekly" and "Radio Pictorial". I would be reading the news, playing the latest records, appearing in radio plays...
The bank would have to wait. Forever, with any luck.
I didn't sleep much for the seven days before I got to 2KA, and on the day, I had to pretend that I was ill late in the afternoon, so I could get off work early and arrive at the station before sundown.
My writing stopped. Not even a "Melody Riddles" script.
Small wonder that the first visit started as a bit of a let-down.
Now for stories, I thought.
I had received book of short stories at the primary school as a prize the year I left - 1938. I picked it up again - and I was suddenly lifted into a new world - mainly the incredible world of Steven Leacock, whose "Soaked in Seaweed" I could once recite almost in its entirety from memory.
This, I thought, was the kind of stuff I would like to write. It was just good fun. I had a go. I wrote three hundred words of nonsense.
Three weeks later, it was published. Not only that, but it was in the prime position where the prize was 10/6, the same price as the Mad Hatter's Hat in Alice in Wonderland..
Sure, Cousin Marie had changed the title, cut it down to Sunbeams size, and she'd changed the last line (the original probably being very much a school yard idea of humour, but I liked it better). No matter. It was there. It had my name on it, although I now wrote under the name Thomas, rather than Tom. I had decided that Thomas looked better for a writer.
There followed several of these, all credited to me and each one showing a slightly different address. The name of the house seemed to change with each publication. Did we move from house to house in Wood Street? Hardly possible. There was only one house there. This cries out for an explanation.
The reason was simple. My mother had become sick and tired of being poor. She had taken up the sciences of astrology and numerology and with her usual enthusiasm for a project, had put what little knowledge she gained into determined full-time practice.
It was my fault, of course. In 1936 or thereabouts, someone had handed me a copy of the Aspro Year Book on the way home from school. This eminent publication, now sadly gone, was an annual full of information about what the stars said must inevitably happen during the following year, the benefits of numerology, how to plant by the stars, horoscopes of the famous, and a million conflicting slogans for the product it was named for, none of which would get past today's health watchdogs.
First came numerology, where you added up any number that was more than one digit long and kept adding the result together until you got a single number. Then you could tell whether your number was "fortunate". If you wanted to check out your name in numerology, it was also simple: every letter of the alphabet had a number. You added all the numbers up.
Mum changed the name of the house in quick succession from Thornton to Allambie to Alanbie and so many others that sometimes I had to check on the house name, just in case I'd missed something. Each one, of course, was more likely to produce wealth and success and happiness than its predecessor, but always failing in some mysterious way.
Then to the stars. This became a serious business, especially since she could hear at least two experts on the subject on radio. (It was commercial radio, which she had no time for, but at least it was on two of the "better" ones, 2GB and 2UW). 2GB had a gentleman from a library which specialised in Theosophical topics. The Theosophical Society owned the 2GB licence. This library had a stack of books on astrology, many of them written half a century before. The other guru was an Egyptian gentleman who apparently materialised in the 2UW studio in full traditional garb two or three times a week. But it encouraged mum to study the art of telling her future by the stars.
So our trips to Sydney now ended up, not in the studios watching a children's session, but at the Library in the basement of 29 Bligh Street - an address I was to get to know and love many years later. At the time the building also contained 2GB and 2UE.
The way to win the lottery, according to the way my mother read the astrology books, was to buy a ticket at the time when the stars were exactly right. She would look for a propitious sign - like the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, for example. If it were to occur at 9.37 Australian Eastern Standard Time, she would take the early morning train to Sydney, ride the tram down Castlereagh Street to Barrack Street, then walk up to the Lottery Office. There she would stand on the steps until about fifteen minutes before the appointed time and before joining a queue.
There would be a great deal of shuffling and dodging, as she realised that she would get to the head of the line before the selected time. The strategy then was to turn to the person behind her and offer to change places. This working back process might happen two or three times before she got it just right - even then she lived in dread of the person ahead of her ordering several tickets at the same time to the ruination of her scientific plan..
When she got to the counter, if there were just a few seconds to wait, she would fiddle with the papers until the very instant of the conjunction, and triumphantly purchase her Ticket to Freedom.
Sadly, it never happened. I privately formed the opinion that she was not taking into account the enormous time difference between Earth and Venus.
She would have loved the no-nonsense method of buying a lottery ticket today.
The best thing that ever did occur was when mum spotted a ten pound note in the gutter as she was riding her bike. (She had bought one in her early forties to get around more easily; and especially to visit Mary who spent long periods in hospital at that time). Whether she actually did find the ten pounds, or whether she withdrew it from her sparse bank account in order to justify giving us some special gift is something I have often thought about.
If mum had some unusual ways, she also knew how to encourage me to write. While she doubted with great fervour that I would be able to do something worth while on the wireless, she had a picture in her mind of me as a writer (part time of course - the bank had top priority) and allowed me space at the end of the kitchen table. There I placed my writing pads, exercise books and other aids to the creative process, and there I slaved each evening, after homework, on the latest piece for Sunbeams - with half an ear on the Lux Radio Theatre booming out from the dining room.
I tried my hand at writing scripts for some of the shows I heard on the air. There was one program, late night for me around 9 o'clock, called "Melody Riddles". Harry Dearth, who produced the Lux Radio Theatre, handled this program (I suspect under protest). Listeners were asked to submit brief comedy scripts, in which the name of a popular song was hidden in the dialogue:-
Voice 1: We must get in touch with the old folks ...
Voice 2: At home we used to call them elderly people..
Presto! You've carefully hidden the name of a great tune of the times - "The Old Folks at Home". Clever,eh?
This was a challenge. And each week at least one of my scripts would end up on the desk of the producer in Sydney, but got no further. I never did collect a prize. It was worth as much as two good Sunbeams stories - one guinea. Forgive me if I believe that most of the scripts were written in the home of the producer or one of his minions, the way most of us suspect some Letters to the Editor are created today.
I began to write other things, too. As time went on I managed to get quite a few printed in the two Sydney afternoon newspapers - mainly in the Daily Mirror as it was then, and indeed that became a regular source of pocket money especially when I made my way into Sydney broadcasting in 1949.
But before that, there was a big event for me as my schooldays continued.
Over on a hill not far from our home (probably two or three miles away by road) a tower was being built. I was convinced it was a broadcasting tower, because I'd seen a picture of the tower of the new Sydney station, 2SM, in the authoritative publication "Wireless Weekly".
I turned out to be correct, but it took some time to prove it. There were two towers eventually, and that sorted it out for me. Then my grandfather came for a visit. As a surveyor, his interest was in finding out how high they were compared to the surrounding areas. I don't know why, and maybe he didn't either. Perhaps he was just catering to the interest of his only (at that time) grandson.
We took a walk out and asked one of the men working there what it was all about.
"It's for 2KA", he told us.
Mum was with us, and she probably felt bad about the discussion. To start with, she didn't like 2KA. It had been transmitting from further up the mountains for a couple of years, and she had become firmly convinced that one of the announcers had been talking to her one day when she heard him say. "Hope you got home OK on that bicycle, mum".
Why she tuned in at that time to hear this message was something that worried me somewhat, for 2KA was the pits. 2UE and 2KY were simply "common", but 2KA defied polite description.
I was determined that I would get to know someone at 2KA so they could tell me how I could get me a job on the wireless. After all, I had already told my school mates that was what I was going to do when I grew up, and here I was at high school and the only prospect of employment looked like being in a bank.
It was up to me to do something about it.
Meantime, there was a school holiday coming up, and I knew there was a casual job available as a telegram messenger boy. All you needed was a bicycle, and that was something I had.
It was a good job. Not as profitable as Sunbeams, where the going rate was 10/6 for a story that took half an hour to write, but steady at 10/- for about 48 hours each week.
The other messenger was Laurie. We divided the town into two halves - he took the side he lived in. 2KA was in his territory.
I had been outsmarted. I tried to negotiate with Laurie, using the undeniable fact that most of the People on my side seemed to have ice chests stacked with soft drinks, and their largesse was legendary. He countered by stressing that the cake shop was in his territory, and the owner was generous to a fault.
Checkmate!
Yet, out of all of this came what was a big event for me.
Laurie delivered a telegram to the transmitting station, was invited inside to take a look at it, and told the engineer about me and my plans to work in radio. He came back with the message that I was to drop in any afternoon the following week. (Had I been able to find him when I became Sales manager at 2UE, I would have offered him a job: his sales skill would have made him a natural).
Of course, I was immediately ready to take on the world. Here was my chance. I would soon be challenging Jack Davey (this top man was in uniform, entertaining American and Australian troops, so the opportunity was certainly there). I would be an overnight sensation - nothing could stop me.
There would be quiz shows, and top line variety shows, like the one Wilfred Thomas compered on the ABC each week, with a full orchestra (I didn't realise how apt that description was), and of course, there would be the fans and the pictures in "Wireless Weekly" and "Radio Pictorial". I would be reading the news, playing the latest records, appearing in radio plays...
The bank would have to wait. Forever, with any luck.
I didn't sleep much for the seven days before I got to 2KA, and on the day, I had to pretend that I was ill late in the afternoon, so I could get off work early and arrive at the station before sundown.
My writing stopped. Not even a "Melody Riddles" script.
Small wonder that the first visit started as a bit of a let-down.
Chapter Three
2KA Wentworth Falls - Bruce Carty Collection
THE topic was no longer writing . Phil was now talking about the first radio station I ever really knew.
The steps up to the 2KA transmitter were old timber, with a hand rail at one side, and the prospect of those ten or twelve steps staying there much longer were fairly remote. I climbed carefully. After all, if this was to be my entry into the radio industry, I'd better be able to walk around later.
The wind blew up from the valley below, like something only an arctic explorer might have faced. But the view was fantastic - all the way down the mountains to Sydney.
The double doors were locked.
I knocked.
I couldn't help noticing that the doors needed painting. There was a hint of a dull green on them, but whether that was the last coat or the first one was hard to figure. I got the impression that maybe the whole original building had been moved in its entirety form whatever it had been a a wartime economy measure. As I got to know the company better, I knew I'd been right. Economy was the operational system.
There wasn't any answer to my first knock. It may have been a bit timid. After all, this was a big step, and I didn't want to spoil the impression by being too aggressive.
At the second knock the door was opened. A man in overalls, cigarette in a long holder, peered at me, then opened the door wide, and with a sweep of his arm, beckoned me inside.
It was almost as cold inside as it had been outside, the single-bar radiator making absolutely no contribution to the climate.
The steps up to the 2KA transmitter were old timber, with a hand rail at one side, and the prospect of those ten or twelve steps staying there much longer were fairly remote. I climbed carefully. After all, if this was to be my entry into the radio industry, I'd better be able to walk around later.
The wind blew up from the valley below, like something only an arctic explorer might have faced. But the view was fantastic - all the way down the mountains to Sydney.
The double doors were locked.
I knocked.
I couldn't help noticing that the doors needed painting. There was a hint of a dull green on them, but whether that was the last coat or the first one was hard to figure. I got the impression that maybe the whole original building had been moved in its entirety form whatever it had been a a wartime economy measure. As I got to know the company better, I knew I'd been right. Economy was the operational system.
There wasn't any answer to my first knock. It may have been a bit timid. After all, this was a big step, and I didn't want to spoil the impression by being too aggressive.
At the second knock the door was opened. A man in overalls, cigarette in a long holder, peered at me, then opened the door wide, and with a sweep of his arm, beckoned me inside.
It was almost as cold inside as it had been outside, the single-bar radiator making absolutely no contribution to the climate.
2KA Wentworth Falls Studio
- Bruce Carty Collection
Inside, there was a vast area with almost nothing in it. No floor covering except in one or two places where someone had thrown a rug down. There were too big machines standing like the sphinx in my home copy of Lands and People, and there was a pervading buzzing sound. In the centre of the room, sitting alone next to a roof support, was a small desk containing a telephone and a mysterious combination of a dial and two knobs. To my right, looking out through the widow that faced the Great Western Highway, was another desk. This one was much larger, and it had two turntables, a microphone, and a set of knobs and dials. That, I decided immediately, was the studio, even though the whole set up was simply in a corner of the transmitter building. Normally, you'd think, a studio ought to at least have four walls around it.
It didn't look like much of a place - it had absolutely no glamour about it. What had I come to?
I turned to the man who'd opened the door, who was watching my appraisal of the place with a smile. He put out his hand.
"I'm Tom Toakley", he said, "and you'll be Tom".
We got along fine from the moment I realised he was going to let me play with the
studio controls.
He explained that the station was off the air in the afternoons until 5 o'clock, and which time it started up again with a program coming from "our Sydney studio". I quickly discovered that the Sydney studio did not belong to 2KA, although they had had one in the past. The Sydney studio belonged to 2GZ, whose transmitter was at Orange in the centre of New South Wales.
The Sydney location allowed 2GZ to get a share of the lucrative commercial recording business.
Because of wartime measures, and because 2KA could not support itself with advertising, a partnership had been struck between the owners of the two stations to share programs - 2KA contributed very little at all.
At that time, I wasn't conscious that this was a fascinating arrangement. 2KA was owned by former Labor Premier and enemy of the free enterprise stalwarts Mr Jack Lang, and 2GZ was owned by the Grazier's Association - about as Country Party as you could get.
"I'll show you how you work the panel," said my new friend, "and you can play around with it for a bit".
It was exciting! My hands trembled as I tried to put a needle into the pick-up head. I learned that these pickups were different from the one on the gramophone at home. There were certain kinds of needles to be used. You had to know which of three or four kinds was appropriate - it depended on the kind of disc you were about to play. And each needle was to be used for one play only.
There were "trailers", used with acetate recordings, acetate being a soft material used in radio production studios to do a quick copy of a commercial. There were green shanks and red shanks for hardier records, and plain old steel needles for the old 78rpm records.
Pick-up needles had to be screwed in and tested to see that they were firmly in place. This was done by putting your index finger on the point of the needle and trying to
move it, a process damaging to one's fingerprints (but only on the index finger). In fact, they did say you could identify a wireless worker by the needle stabs on his or her index finger. I never conducted any research on this.
After three quarters of an hour I was playing records to the satisfaction of Mr.Toakley, but it was time to stop. In fifteen minutes, he told me, the station would start transmitting again. And before that, it was necessary to run a "test" record to see that the transmitter was functioning correctly.
Years later I divined that the test record served only one important purpose - to give the engineers the chance to speak on the air.
The procedure was this:
At about fifteen minutes before resuming transmission, the transmitter had to be brought up to speed. It had been sitting there warming up when I arrived - hence the buzzing sound. Now the high tension had to be switched in. So far so good.
Right on the tick of a quarter to five, Tom Toakley would move to the studio desk, select a brass band record, and having set it up (with new needle in the pickup) switch on the microphone and intone the words "2KA testing". As the music swelled out into the stratosphere, he would check that the "levels" were right (that is, that the sound was not causing the meter to read in the high "red" area), pick up his log book, and note the readings of all the dials on the transmitter.
He was most precise in this matter, and the fact was that he would have had a heart attack if they had not been spot on, for he took great pride in having his transmitters in tip top condition.
Then, as the music was ending, he'd make a gallop to the studio desk, and announce "2KA test concluded. Our program will start five minutes from now..."
I spent many afternoons with him, practicing what had to be done, and listening to his tall stories about the people he knew in the radio business. I was wide-eyed as he spoke about the young actor who filled in as an announcer in Sydney, got himself a revolver and "shot up" the studio one night. And the other announcer who would dash out of the studio while a recorded program was playing and go to the recording studio down the street to earn himself a few extra shillings recording commercials. All went well except for the last time, when he forgot to go back to the station.
It was a wonder he persevered with me, because I must have become something of a nuisance to him. Every afternoon possible, I turned up at the transmitter armed with a hundred questions about why things were done the way they were, and taking over the controls of the studio in a very possessive way.
I noticed that during the afternoon, while the station was off the air, the telephone would ring and Tom would put on a set of headphones and sit quietly at his small desk listening intently.
After some time, perhaps he had yet to learn to trust me, he told me that he was listening to conversations between the manager in Sydney and the manager in Orange. They were brothers and they would discuss plans for programs, new staff, and the financial situation. Tom would not talk about what he learned, but often he would have a quiet smile playing around his lips.
He broke his silence one afternoon, however. He suddenly raised his hands in the air for a moment, then motioned me to be quiet, and held the headphones close to his ears with both hands so as not to miss a word.
He came over to me when the conversation had ended and said:
"They're going to advertise for an announcer in tomorrow's Herald. I think you're ready to apply for it. It's a job in Orange, but they're going to put the new man to work in Sydney for the first couple of weeks. Now here's what you do..."
We planned the letter in minute detail, including a casual mention that I knew Mr Toakley and felt an audition could be arranged from the 2KA transmitter, if that would be satisfactory.
It was wartime and I had a distinct advantage. All the able-bodied people were in the services - all that were left were school kids and old-age pensioners. And I had just left High School with my Intermediate Certificate, with two "A" passes - one in English, and the other, usefully, and incredibly, in woodwork.
It was almost time for the test record, and time for me to go home, draft my letter, return to the post office and send it on its way that very night.
Tom looked at me. "You'd better do the test announcement today", he said. "That'll be practice for you".
I was terrified and excited. Do the test record? Speak into the microphone so people could hear me?
No, I couldn't. Yes, I probably could. All right - are you sure?
My first words on radio are therefore indelibly imprinted on my mind.
At approximately fifteen minutes to five on that chilly winter afternoon, I spoke the immortal words "2KA testing". I put the test record to air all by myself. And three minutes later I reprised with the words "2KA test concluded. Our program will start in five minutes from now".
I didn't have my bicycle with me that day. Probably just as well. I could have had an accident.
Instead of riding, I flew home several feet above the ground, imagining that everyone I passed had heard my announcement. But nobody mentioned it - they must have missed the Big Broadcast.
When I arrived home, I found that nobody there had heard it either.
I realised that other earth-shaking events in my career would probably be similarly ignored. And that was something I was going to have to live with.
It didn't look like much of a place - it had absolutely no glamour about it. What had I come to?
I turned to the man who'd opened the door, who was watching my appraisal of the place with a smile. He put out his hand.
"I'm Tom Toakley", he said, "and you'll be Tom".
We got along fine from the moment I realised he was going to let me play with the
studio controls.
He explained that the station was off the air in the afternoons until 5 o'clock, and which time it started up again with a program coming from "our Sydney studio". I quickly discovered that the Sydney studio did not belong to 2KA, although they had had one in the past. The Sydney studio belonged to 2GZ, whose transmitter was at Orange in the centre of New South Wales.
The Sydney location allowed 2GZ to get a share of the lucrative commercial recording business.
Because of wartime measures, and because 2KA could not support itself with advertising, a partnership had been struck between the owners of the two stations to share programs - 2KA contributed very little at all.
At that time, I wasn't conscious that this was a fascinating arrangement. 2KA was owned by former Labor Premier and enemy of the free enterprise stalwarts Mr Jack Lang, and 2GZ was owned by the Grazier's Association - about as Country Party as you could get.
"I'll show you how you work the panel," said my new friend, "and you can play around with it for a bit".
It was exciting! My hands trembled as I tried to put a needle into the pick-up head. I learned that these pickups were different from the one on the gramophone at home. There were certain kinds of needles to be used. You had to know which of three or four kinds was appropriate - it depended on the kind of disc you were about to play. And each needle was to be used for one play only.
There were "trailers", used with acetate recordings, acetate being a soft material used in radio production studios to do a quick copy of a commercial. There were green shanks and red shanks for hardier records, and plain old steel needles for the old 78rpm records.
Pick-up needles had to be screwed in and tested to see that they were firmly in place. This was done by putting your index finger on the point of the needle and trying to
move it, a process damaging to one's fingerprints (but only on the index finger). In fact, they did say you could identify a wireless worker by the needle stabs on his or her index finger. I never conducted any research on this.
After three quarters of an hour I was playing records to the satisfaction of Mr.Toakley, but it was time to stop. In fifteen minutes, he told me, the station would start transmitting again. And before that, it was necessary to run a "test" record to see that the transmitter was functioning correctly.
Years later I divined that the test record served only one important purpose - to give the engineers the chance to speak on the air.
The procedure was this:
At about fifteen minutes before resuming transmission, the transmitter had to be brought up to speed. It had been sitting there warming up when I arrived - hence the buzzing sound. Now the high tension had to be switched in. So far so good.
Right on the tick of a quarter to five, Tom Toakley would move to the studio desk, select a brass band record, and having set it up (with new needle in the pickup) switch on the microphone and intone the words "2KA testing". As the music swelled out into the stratosphere, he would check that the "levels" were right (that is, that the sound was not causing the meter to read in the high "red" area), pick up his log book, and note the readings of all the dials on the transmitter.
He was most precise in this matter, and the fact was that he would have had a heart attack if they had not been spot on, for he took great pride in having his transmitters in tip top condition.
Then, as the music was ending, he'd make a gallop to the studio desk, and announce "2KA test concluded. Our program will start five minutes from now..."
I spent many afternoons with him, practicing what had to be done, and listening to his tall stories about the people he knew in the radio business. I was wide-eyed as he spoke about the young actor who filled in as an announcer in Sydney, got himself a revolver and "shot up" the studio one night. And the other announcer who would dash out of the studio while a recorded program was playing and go to the recording studio down the street to earn himself a few extra shillings recording commercials. All went well except for the last time, when he forgot to go back to the station.
It was a wonder he persevered with me, because I must have become something of a nuisance to him. Every afternoon possible, I turned up at the transmitter armed with a hundred questions about why things were done the way they were, and taking over the controls of the studio in a very possessive way.
I noticed that during the afternoon, while the station was off the air, the telephone would ring and Tom would put on a set of headphones and sit quietly at his small desk listening intently.
After some time, perhaps he had yet to learn to trust me, he told me that he was listening to conversations between the manager in Sydney and the manager in Orange. They were brothers and they would discuss plans for programs, new staff, and the financial situation. Tom would not talk about what he learned, but often he would have a quiet smile playing around his lips.
He broke his silence one afternoon, however. He suddenly raised his hands in the air for a moment, then motioned me to be quiet, and held the headphones close to his ears with both hands so as not to miss a word.
He came over to me when the conversation had ended and said:
"They're going to advertise for an announcer in tomorrow's Herald. I think you're ready to apply for it. It's a job in Orange, but they're going to put the new man to work in Sydney for the first couple of weeks. Now here's what you do..."
We planned the letter in minute detail, including a casual mention that I knew Mr Toakley and felt an audition could be arranged from the 2KA transmitter, if that would be satisfactory.
It was wartime and I had a distinct advantage. All the able-bodied people were in the services - all that were left were school kids and old-age pensioners. And I had just left High School with my Intermediate Certificate, with two "A" passes - one in English, and the other, usefully, and incredibly, in woodwork.
It was almost time for the test record, and time for me to go home, draft my letter, return to the post office and send it on its way that very night.
Tom looked at me. "You'd better do the test announcement today", he said. "That'll be practice for you".
I was terrified and excited. Do the test record? Speak into the microphone so people could hear me?
No, I couldn't. Yes, I probably could. All right - are you sure?
My first words on radio are therefore indelibly imprinted on my mind.
At approximately fifteen minutes to five on that chilly winter afternoon, I spoke the immortal words "2KA testing". I put the test record to air all by myself. And three minutes later I reprised with the words "2KA test concluded. Our program will start in five minutes from now".
I didn't have my bicycle with me that day. Probably just as well. I could have had an accident.
Instead of riding, I flew home several feet above the ground, imagining that everyone I passed had heard my announcement. But nobody mentioned it - they must have missed the Big Broadcast.
When I arrived home, I found that nobody there had heard it either.
I realised that other earth-shaking events in my career would probably be similarly ignored. And that was something I was going to have to live with.
Chapter Four
Wireless Weekly March 1935
arrived in Sydney forty seven years before that audience heard that "you never forget your first job".
The day I heard that the job was mine I went into uncontrolled orbit. If that is a slight exaggeration, then it's certainly true that I tried to send the family cat into orbit (and failed) much to the cat's obvious annoyance. I tossed the poor animal high in the air out of sheer excitement - and although I caught it on the way down, it never trusted me again.
Sixteen and, as one of my family puts it, "proud of it", I was about to start my first job in radio, and I was going to Sydney to find out what it was all about.
It wasn't likely that my mother would let me loose in Sydney, sedately safe as it was in 1942. Nor did she even think about me commuting on a daily basis. I had to stay with my two maiden aunts in Bellevue Hill. They lived in a small mansion in the Federation style, dominated by two monstrously large paintings on the sitting room wall - one my great great grandfather (who chose to die on Christmas Day in 1849) and another of a woman of great character if little beauty, about whom I was not so sure, and whose death, while likely, did not seem to have been recorded.
Allowing me to stay with the Aunts was a major concession, for mum had not willingly spoken to either of them in many years. She was convinced that, given half a chance, they would take her two children and put them in boarding school. I am not sure that they had shown much inclination to do so, nor am I sure that it would have been a bad thing - except that she would have been pretty lonely between school holidays.
Mum's kin, the Rankens, were an old family from the Ayr district in Scotland, some members of which had arrived in Australia (without the assistance of the British Government) around 1810 and settled "on the land". Our branch of the family did not go into sheep raising. Our grandfather was a Government Surveyor who lived and worked for many years in Lismore and then in Dubbo NSW before retiring to Bellevue Hill. There he set to work on two books - one a volume of poems he had written during his working life, and another in which he traced the history of land development in this country - with the warning that the Asian hordes would soon invade and take us over. Its title was "Fire Over Australia" and was published shortly before his death just after the second world war broke out. Unfortunately there were many copies remaining in his estate when he died.
He had also earlier written a book on an aspect of mathematics which, according to family legend, earned him a Fellowship of the Royal Society in London.
He worried a lot about what was then thought of as the "yellow peril" and was proved right very soon after when World War 2 broke out. In a family in which there was a significant degree of odd thinking, he represented the fountain of sanity. Even if he did not think much of the Aeroplane Jelly song.
Proud of the tradition behind the name, one of the Aunts did not really feel comfortable with people of lower standing. Once she remarked to Mary - after someone had said good afternoon to the Aunt and she had walked haughtily onwards, ignoring the impertinence - "Don't they know we're Rankens?"
But I digress.
The Bellevue Hill wireless (and it was called a wireless, not a radio) was only switched on to hear the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which did not perform all that often. Therefore it was excusable that the two old ladies had not noticed that there was something wrong with the receiver.
You could get 2FC all right. 2FC was one of the two very strong ABC stations, so you might expect to receive it fairly well, but anything else was scratchy.
Both aunts worked in banking, and had done so since the days of the first world war, so when I arrived on the first day, they were safely enscounced in their teller's cages in the city. I let myself in and started to tune in my favourite station.
2KA was faint and totally unintelligible. The thousand watts transmitted from 60 miles distant Wentworth Falls did not survive the atmospherics of the city, thus improving the program enormously.
The kitchen was liberally supplied with cans of sheeps tongues and other delicacies. I wondered how I was going to stay alive for the duration, but figured that the thirty shillings a week I was about to start earning would pay for a steak every now and then on top of my tram fares and the occasional milk shake.
The next morning at five o'clock I hardly noticed how the chill wind. I had to be on deck at six, although the station didn't go on the air until six thirty. Wartime regulations required that no radio station hit the air before that time. (It was unfortunate for 2UW, which had started its all-night show just before the war began and then had to put the idea on hold until peace broke out again).
None of the Bellevue Hill mob were up and about as I made for the tram stop. Why should they? Most of them I figured would be executives, and everyone knew that those kinds of people didn't rise before 8.30 or even later. The good thing about that lack of activity was that the stillness allowed me to hear the tram coming up from
Bondi, and I could tell it was still a long way off as I walked along to the tram stop.
The trip to the city was thrilling for me - a country lad starting the job I'd dreamed about and feeling quite strange about it all. I sat at the window in the dimly-lit compartment watching the suburbs and the city come awake, until Martin Place hove into view.
I knew where 2GZ was. I'd been there before to fail an audition, but that was because I was fourteen and anyway I didn't know Tom Toakley at the time.
I reflected about the audition which had won me the job. As the clock ticked around to the selected time, Tom Toakley completed the arrangements for the greatest hoax in radio up to that time. There have, of course, been better ones since.
First, he rehearsed me rigidly. The script had pencil marks all over it after the first run through, and I was pretty uncertain as to what any of those scribblings meant. He corrected my pronunciation, he worked over and over to make sure I would announce the only record in the audition in his approved style, and then there was my ad-lib, off-the-cuff sign off asking for the position. He thought it was rather good. As indeed he should have. He wrote it all.
Then with only minutes to go, he tackled a major problem - the voice. It was thin, he said. I figured it should be anyway. I was very thin myself. No, he explained, it needs some depth to it. You get that with experience, of course, but - there WAS a way. Quickly he fumbled with some plugs (he called them patch cords) and had me reading while he made some adjustments, his eyes reflecting his disappointment at the result.
That's no good, we've got to try something else, those eyes said.
Helpfully, I told him I could "put on" a deep voice, but the eyes advised that was not a proposition. There was a technical answer and he would find it.
He moved me closer to the microphone. Then back from it. Then closer still. "Hold it!" he said, as he fumbled with the patch cords again. "TALK!" he said. I did. He sat back in his chair and his eyes announced a minor miracle.
The telephone rang. It was Sydney to ask if he was ready to send the audition. It was going to be recorded. Recorded!! Never in my life had I considered that I would go on disc (tape wasn't even a twinkle then). This was new experience piled on new experience, all adding to the excitement and strangeness of the moment.
Yes, said Tom. "He's ready". He held his hand over the telephone and said: "When I point to you, son, go for your life. And good luck". He hadn't heard of the theatre taboo, or maybe he was worried about the effect on me had he told me to break a leg.
The result came back two days later.
Tom got it as he listened, in his usual fashion, across the landline conversation between the two managers.
He raised the Winston Churchill V-for-Victory salute.
Much later it occurred to me that the number of applicants was probably very small.
A letter confirmed that I should be there at six o'clock the day after next so I could "sit in with the announcer", and now I was heading for Hosking House in Pitt Street where 2GZ and its unlikely cousin 2KA were housed - up there on the sixth floor.
The lift was slow and noisier than the toastrack tram I'd just left, so after what seemed some minutes it ground to a halt, I pushed open the grille, fumbled with the main doors and stepped into the foyer.
There were one or two lights, but they were dim, and the only human I could see was doing a most un-wireless job - he was washing the floor. I walked down the corridor to where I remembered the studios were and found myself in a room full of dials and wires and panel lights. There were two people there.
One was sitting at a desk on which four turntables were loaded with records ready to play. The other was just standing there. Leaning there may be a better way to describe it.
This man's voice I recognised. I knew he was Frank Semple, 2GZ's night announcer. So what was he doing here at six o'clock in the morning? I was soon to find out that the regular breakfast announcer, one Clark McKay, had the flu and Frank had received a late-night phone call giving him the guernsey not only for the breakfast show, but to try and bring not one, but two, newcomers on stream.
"Thank the Lord you're here, son", he said. "Have you done any broadcasting before?" Since I didn't think that 2KA-testing could be counted, I told him no, and he looked upwards towards the Being he'd just thanked. But at least he was friendly. "Well, let's get into the studio" he said.
The day I heard that the job was mine I went into uncontrolled orbit. If that is a slight exaggeration, then it's certainly true that I tried to send the family cat into orbit (and failed) much to the cat's obvious annoyance. I tossed the poor animal high in the air out of sheer excitement - and although I caught it on the way down, it never trusted me again.
Sixteen and, as one of my family puts it, "proud of it", I was about to start my first job in radio, and I was going to Sydney to find out what it was all about.
It wasn't likely that my mother would let me loose in Sydney, sedately safe as it was in 1942. Nor did she even think about me commuting on a daily basis. I had to stay with my two maiden aunts in Bellevue Hill. They lived in a small mansion in the Federation style, dominated by two monstrously large paintings on the sitting room wall - one my great great grandfather (who chose to die on Christmas Day in 1849) and another of a woman of great character if little beauty, about whom I was not so sure, and whose death, while likely, did not seem to have been recorded.
Allowing me to stay with the Aunts was a major concession, for mum had not willingly spoken to either of them in many years. She was convinced that, given half a chance, they would take her two children and put them in boarding school. I am not sure that they had shown much inclination to do so, nor am I sure that it would have been a bad thing - except that she would have been pretty lonely between school holidays.
Mum's kin, the Rankens, were an old family from the Ayr district in Scotland, some members of which had arrived in Australia (without the assistance of the British Government) around 1810 and settled "on the land". Our branch of the family did not go into sheep raising. Our grandfather was a Government Surveyor who lived and worked for many years in Lismore and then in Dubbo NSW before retiring to Bellevue Hill. There he set to work on two books - one a volume of poems he had written during his working life, and another in which he traced the history of land development in this country - with the warning that the Asian hordes would soon invade and take us over. Its title was "Fire Over Australia" and was published shortly before his death just after the second world war broke out. Unfortunately there were many copies remaining in his estate when he died.
He had also earlier written a book on an aspect of mathematics which, according to family legend, earned him a Fellowship of the Royal Society in London.
He worried a lot about what was then thought of as the "yellow peril" and was proved right very soon after when World War 2 broke out. In a family in which there was a significant degree of odd thinking, he represented the fountain of sanity. Even if he did not think much of the Aeroplane Jelly song.
Proud of the tradition behind the name, one of the Aunts did not really feel comfortable with people of lower standing. Once she remarked to Mary - after someone had said good afternoon to the Aunt and she had walked haughtily onwards, ignoring the impertinence - "Don't they know we're Rankens?"
But I digress.
The Bellevue Hill wireless (and it was called a wireless, not a radio) was only switched on to hear the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which did not perform all that often. Therefore it was excusable that the two old ladies had not noticed that there was something wrong with the receiver.
You could get 2FC all right. 2FC was one of the two very strong ABC stations, so you might expect to receive it fairly well, but anything else was scratchy.
Both aunts worked in banking, and had done so since the days of the first world war, so when I arrived on the first day, they were safely enscounced in their teller's cages in the city. I let myself in and started to tune in my favourite station.
2KA was faint and totally unintelligible. The thousand watts transmitted from 60 miles distant Wentworth Falls did not survive the atmospherics of the city, thus improving the program enormously.
The kitchen was liberally supplied with cans of sheeps tongues and other delicacies. I wondered how I was going to stay alive for the duration, but figured that the thirty shillings a week I was about to start earning would pay for a steak every now and then on top of my tram fares and the occasional milk shake.
The next morning at five o'clock I hardly noticed how the chill wind. I had to be on deck at six, although the station didn't go on the air until six thirty. Wartime regulations required that no radio station hit the air before that time. (It was unfortunate for 2UW, which had started its all-night show just before the war began and then had to put the idea on hold until peace broke out again).
None of the Bellevue Hill mob were up and about as I made for the tram stop. Why should they? Most of them I figured would be executives, and everyone knew that those kinds of people didn't rise before 8.30 or even later. The good thing about that lack of activity was that the stillness allowed me to hear the tram coming up from
Bondi, and I could tell it was still a long way off as I walked along to the tram stop.
The trip to the city was thrilling for me - a country lad starting the job I'd dreamed about and feeling quite strange about it all. I sat at the window in the dimly-lit compartment watching the suburbs and the city come awake, until Martin Place hove into view.
I knew where 2GZ was. I'd been there before to fail an audition, but that was because I was fourteen and anyway I didn't know Tom Toakley at the time.
I reflected about the audition which had won me the job. As the clock ticked around to the selected time, Tom Toakley completed the arrangements for the greatest hoax in radio up to that time. There have, of course, been better ones since.
First, he rehearsed me rigidly. The script had pencil marks all over it after the first run through, and I was pretty uncertain as to what any of those scribblings meant. He corrected my pronunciation, he worked over and over to make sure I would announce the only record in the audition in his approved style, and then there was my ad-lib, off-the-cuff sign off asking for the position. He thought it was rather good. As indeed he should have. He wrote it all.
Then with only minutes to go, he tackled a major problem - the voice. It was thin, he said. I figured it should be anyway. I was very thin myself. No, he explained, it needs some depth to it. You get that with experience, of course, but - there WAS a way. Quickly he fumbled with some plugs (he called them patch cords) and had me reading while he made some adjustments, his eyes reflecting his disappointment at the result.
That's no good, we've got to try something else, those eyes said.
Helpfully, I told him I could "put on" a deep voice, but the eyes advised that was not a proposition. There was a technical answer and he would find it.
He moved me closer to the microphone. Then back from it. Then closer still. "Hold it!" he said, as he fumbled with the patch cords again. "TALK!" he said. I did. He sat back in his chair and his eyes announced a minor miracle.
The telephone rang. It was Sydney to ask if he was ready to send the audition. It was going to be recorded. Recorded!! Never in my life had I considered that I would go on disc (tape wasn't even a twinkle then). This was new experience piled on new experience, all adding to the excitement and strangeness of the moment.
Yes, said Tom. "He's ready". He held his hand over the telephone and said: "When I point to you, son, go for your life. And good luck". He hadn't heard of the theatre taboo, or maybe he was worried about the effect on me had he told me to break a leg.
The result came back two days later.
Tom got it as he listened, in his usual fashion, across the landline conversation between the two managers.
He raised the Winston Churchill V-for-Victory salute.
Much later it occurred to me that the number of applicants was probably very small.
A letter confirmed that I should be there at six o'clock the day after next so I could "sit in with the announcer", and now I was heading for Hosking House in Pitt Street where 2GZ and its unlikely cousin 2KA were housed - up there on the sixth floor.
The lift was slow and noisier than the toastrack tram I'd just left, so after what seemed some minutes it ground to a halt, I pushed open the grille, fumbled with the main doors and stepped into the foyer.
There were one or two lights, but they were dim, and the only human I could see was doing a most un-wireless job - he was washing the floor. I walked down the corridor to where I remembered the studios were and found myself in a room full of dials and wires and panel lights. There were two people there.
One was sitting at a desk on which four turntables were loaded with records ready to play. The other was just standing there. Leaning there may be a better way to describe it.
This man's voice I recognised. I knew he was Frank Semple, 2GZ's night announcer. So what was he doing here at six o'clock in the morning? I was soon to find out that the regular breakfast announcer, one Clark McKay, had the flu and Frank had received a late-night phone call giving him the guernsey not only for the breakfast show, but to try and bring not one, but two, newcomers on stream.
"Thank the Lord you're here, son", he said. "Have you done any broadcasting before?" Since I didn't think that 2KA-testing could be counted, I told him no, and he looked upwards towards the Being he'd just thanked. But at least he was friendly. "Well, let's get into the studio" he said.
John Hudson - ABC Weekly September 1945
The other newcomer actually had a job in radio. He was 2GZ's office boy. His name was John Hudson who created one of Sydney's most comprehensive traffic jams many years later when he announced exclusively on 2GB at 7am that millions of sheep were milling around in Martin Place and that motorists should avoid the city like the plague. The date was April 1st.
We played musical chairs that first morning. The Sydney manager was on the telephone constantly. Since 2GZ transmitted from Orange and he lived on Sydney's North Shore, he had a landline from the studio to his home so he could keep an ear on things. He would ring and ask for one or the other to go on the air. First it was John. Then me. Then John again. Then Frank took over for a while. Then me again. Finally the decree came down, leave him there. It's time for John to start work anyway. After all, he was the office boy.
They gave me the breakfast session to run when Frank Semple became ill and the regular announcer, Clark, had to take over the much more important night-time shift.
It was a glorious couple of weeks for me. I'm not sure if it was so for the listeners, but in those days there weren't many radio stations around, so somebody must have heard some of it. There was just one small thing that worried me. There was an announcement that had to be read live each morning which skated around pregnancy (it was thought to be indelicate in those days to refer to such matters) and it worried me that my mother was listening and that she would think I knew more than she thought I knew.
At the end of two weeks I was due to go to Orange and into the big time. But on the last day, Mr Ridley (Mr John Ridley) caught up with me in the corridor.
"Mr Crozier", he said. He called all males "Mister" regardless of age, I noticed. "I just thought I'd tell you that there's a job going in Kempsey and we'd rather you went there".
Kempsey?
I didn't know where it was. My father, an Englishman, thought it was a Sydney suburb, but he was three hundred miles out. It was, and remains, on the Central North Coast, about half-way between Sydney and Brisbane. It was pretty tired old town in those days.
It turned out that the office boy had got the job. Lesson one was now duly noted: Never take anything for granted in radio: especially a job.
We played musical chairs that first morning. The Sydney manager was on the telephone constantly. Since 2GZ transmitted from Orange and he lived on Sydney's North Shore, he had a landline from the studio to his home so he could keep an ear on things. He would ring and ask for one or the other to go on the air. First it was John. Then me. Then John again. Then Frank took over for a while. Then me again. Finally the decree came down, leave him there. It's time for John to start work anyway. After all, he was the office boy.
They gave me the breakfast session to run when Frank Semple became ill and the regular announcer, Clark, had to take over the much more important night-time shift.
It was a glorious couple of weeks for me. I'm not sure if it was so for the listeners, but in those days there weren't many radio stations around, so somebody must have heard some of it. There was just one small thing that worried me. There was an announcement that had to be read live each morning which skated around pregnancy (it was thought to be indelicate in those days to refer to such matters) and it worried me that my mother was listening and that she would think I knew more than she thought I knew.
At the end of two weeks I was due to go to Orange and into the big time. But on the last day, Mr Ridley (Mr John Ridley) caught up with me in the corridor.
"Mr Crozier", he said. He called all males "Mister" regardless of age, I noticed. "I just thought I'd tell you that there's a job going in Kempsey and we'd rather you went there".
Kempsey?
I didn't know where it was. My father, an Englishman, thought it was a Sydney suburb, but he was three hundred miles out. It was, and remains, on the Central North Coast, about half-way between Sydney and Brisbane. It was pretty tired old town in those days.
It turned out that the office boy had got the job. Lesson one was now duly noted: Never take anything for granted in radio: especially a job.
Chapter Five
Broadcasting Business Year Book 1938
Kempsey, in July 1942.
I'd been there a few hours and had just finished the morning shift - that is, a stint starting at 7.30 and ending at 11 o'clock, when the station closed down until later that afternoon.
Having finished the job (or, as it turned out, that part of the job) I wondered what a highly popular radio star would do at that point, and I decided that a cup of coffee was called for. With the extra sixpence over the 2GZ salary, coffee was a decided luxury, but I took myself down the street and found Mr Mottee's Greek café, leaving the station in the hands of a 17 year old young lady.
It was a pleasant place, very like hundreds of other such cafes in Australian country towns at that time. There were three rows of tables, and along one side of the cafe stood an enormous soda fountain backed by mirrors that gave the shop a spacious look. The genial proprietor could usually be found comfortably placed behind that long bar, drumming his fingers on the metal lids of the ice cream containers, from where he could survey his domain and at the same time, scan the street for likely customers.
You could tell that he was absolutely at home there.
It was quiet everywhere. The cafe had one solitary customer - me. And the passers by were very occasional.
Quite suddenly, I noticed Mr Mottee acting strangely. Rather, his face was acting strangely. Where he had seemed at peace with the world. he now had a distinctly worried, or worse - agitated - air.
He looked around to see if there was some place to hide, but there didn't seem to be one. Then he started to act in a nonchalant manner, mopping up around the milk shake flavourings and straightening up the meagre supply of packaged sweets on the counter top. I expected him to start whistling any moment.
All the time he was staring out at the street.
I turned around to see what had drawn his attention and found that the focus of all this concern was my new boss.
Rex was flat footed like me, but much taller and slower in his movements. This seemed to give him a particularly interesting walk. He was loping across the street in the direction of the cafe, fountain pen at the ready in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other.
Mr Mottee stood transfixed, his mouth open, as Rex walked through the door and greeted him.
"Ah, there Mottee", he shouted. "Time to renew your contract."
I was pleased. It was to be my first insight into how a person sold radio advertising, something that already interested me. I had an ulterior motive. I understood there was some kind of plan that allowed the sales person to actually get his or her hands on some of the money involved, and that this was called commission. I had something of an ambition about commission - although it took a long number of years to achieve.
I waited for the next move. Obviously that was meant to come from Mr Mottee, but he said nothing. He just looked agitated.
"Ten bob a week", said Rex. "No increase. All you gotta do is put your monicker on the bottom line here".
And with that, Rex shoved the sheet of paper under Mr Mottee's nose, together with the fountain pen, the cap of which had been thoughtfully removed. Having made the sales pitch, he stood back and looked out into the street. Ah ha, I thought. A text-book ploy - say nothing, do nothing once you have asked for the order.
Wrong.
Mr Mottee saw his big chance. With Rex eyeing the passing scenery, Mr Mottee surveyed the cafe. He figured it out that if he made a dash from behind the soda fountain to the first aisle between the tables, he could make it to the kitchen in good time. The kitchen could be his refuge - something like a church in ancient times.
Thought became action.
But Rex was waiting for the move. I admired his flat-footed fleetness. From somewhere, he achieved a youthful speed, and made a similar dash for the second aisle, flew down it and cornered his client just outside the swinging doors Mr Mottee's own kitchen.
Seated at a table there, Mr Mottee sorrowfully wrote his name the way he usually spelt it on the bottom of the contract.
Rex picked it up, shook Mr Mottee's hand, said "Congratulations on your decision, Mottee" and strode out of the cafe, tucking the contract into his inside pocket but carrying the fountain pen like a trademark.
I decided then and there that selling radio advertising was not for me.
Rex and I had met only the night before last.
The Sydney office had supplied me with a second-class rail ticket on the Kempsey Mail, leaving Sydney early in the morning. Twelve hours of grit-in-the-eye Wartime Luxury Travel had been spent looking at the endless North Coast forests flashing by the train window hour after everlasting hour, interrupted only by the occasional river - and when the scenery palled, trying to make sense of the ribald conversation of my two fellow travellers who had been to Sydney for a rather interesting holiday.
I didn't think I'd be taking any lessons from them either.
They were what my mother would have described as "common", so it was something of a surprise when they invited me to share a sandwich from the packet they'd bought at a Railway Refreshment Room.
And we bought railway pies for lunch. Given the stay at the Aunt's place, with its kitchen stocked with canned lamb's tongues, this was the best meal I'd had in three weeks.
The forests had long since disappeared in darkness as we arrived at Kempsey, and there didn't seem to be anyone home. Even the passengers had all disembarked at other places. The lights were out (the enemy was looking for them). There was no one waiting on the platform either. Obviously I was expected to make my way to the radio station where I would learn where my accommodation would be. Or not expected at all.
A station master about my own age materialised, looked at my suitcase and figured I needed a taxi, so he telephoned for one. It arrived very fast. I may have been the fare for the day.
The driver knew where the radio station was, told me it wasn't worth listening to - a conversation I was to have with many cab drivers as I arrived to start other jobs - and agreed to wait outside while I got my orders.
We pulled up outside a shop in the one of the two main streets.
The front door was open, and as I walked into the dim light of the outer office (well, it was the only office) I could hear no sounds at all. I wondered if I was in the right place, but I had seen an old neon sign, unlit, under the awning outside. It clearly but modestly, said 2KM.
There was a double door ahead of me. I cautiously pushed one of the doors and it opened. I took my first look at the studio.
Wood-coloured Caneite walls enclosed a dimly lit room. The piece de resistance was an enormous piano. The rest of the furniture was sparse. There was a grandfather clock, a shabby lounge suite, one or two cane chairs, and, in a corner of the room, an announcing panel.
There were two people there, sitting around the said announcing panel. One was Mandrake the Magician, straight out of the Women's Weekly.
Black Brylcreemed hair, dark suit, a slit of a moustache. He was pouring a drink for the other man from a bottle of schnapps.
On one of the turntables, a sixteen-inch record was grinding around very slowly, and I knew that was the current episode of "Calling the Stars" sponsored nationally by Colgate Palmolive. City stations took it "live", but in the bush it came on transcription.
Mandrake looked up at me.
"You'd be Tom", he said judicially. "Press the flesh".
We shook hands. I hoped that was what he meant.
Mandrake, or Rex, had been an advertising man adversely affected by the paper shortage of wartime Australia. Not being able to print his advertising copy-books, which were handed out at school gates so children could brush up on their handwriting skills and absorb an important advertising message at the same time, he figured that radio offered a secure industry in which to spend the war. As it happened, he stayed in it for the rest of his life.
Perhaps that was wise. "Bananas - buy when yellow, eat when flecked" was an outstanding example of his creative advertising.
Rex was the first larrikin I met in radio. I was soon to learn that larrikins were the driving force of the industry.
He had a powerful bellow. He also had the affectation of leaving the gs off the end of words, but only at the end of sentences, and "hotel" was always pronounced in the French manner.
He and his wife were well known in town. They lived at the Royal Hotel, and family rows, faithfully enacted in front of the open window, could be heard for miles around each night. They served to keep the local community supplied with talking points.
Regularly as clockwork, very little happened in Kempsey, so a family argument could be the highlight of the week.
"Well, son", Rex said, "you can do the children's session tomorrow afternoon, and then go through until 7 when I'll take over. Come in first thing in the morning and I'll show you how to work the panel".
"You'll be doing the breakfast session as well from then on".
There was none of the style of 2GZ there. The station had lots of old equipment, piled up as if it were rubbish. It looked like somebody's junk shop. I told myself it didn't matter what it looked like - it was what came out over the air that mattered.
My boarding house was weatherboard, old, and two-storied. Its main attribute was its close proximity to 2KM. It was in the other main street. It had a reputation to uphold: it served the worst meals on the entire north coast. Those who were lucky - that is everyone but me - people who worked in banks or retail stores and therefore had more money than I had - would often leave the dinner table and go up to Mr Mottee's establishment. I quietly and gratefully ate what I was given.
Boarding house life could be a great builder of character.
In the few days before I arrived, 2KM had had a staff of precisely one person for the past few days. It was, of course, Rex himself. The engineer had left, some feat given the stringent manpower laws, and they had trouble replacing the previous junior announcer.
That young man, of whom Rex often spoke affectionately (he called him JohnBloodyKingstonPearce), was now serving his country. I never asked him whether he had stayed at the same boarding house and if that had been a factor in his decision.
That same young man made a go of it later, having dropped his middle name..
I settled down to take over his duties, sweeping the studio, writing the copy, answering the bell at the front counter. and announcing seven days a week, but never entirely to the satisfaction of Rex. "JohnBloodyKingstonPearce would have done it this way", or "you should have heard how JohnBloodyKingston did a birthday call", and how the very same JBKP could kid to the ladies in the request sessions.
I was so pleased to be on the air so much that I baptised the station, giving it a new name. I called it "2 K Happy M", and was amazed to find that it caught on with the locals. Letters arrived addressed that way, and callers at the front desk asked if this was 2 K Happy M. Rex was somewhat unimpressed.
A happy memory I have is of riding a bicycle through the streets of Kempsey on a summer night, having just finished my shift by starting the transcription of "Dad and Dave". As I passed the open doors one by one, the voices of the George Edwards Players came out to me so clearly that I could follow what passed for the plot.
But the joy of regular broadcasting, and the opportunity to learn the skill of chatting up birds in public - before a vast audience of hundreds - was not to last very long.
We went off the air. And nothing that Rex could do could get us back on.
The problem, apparently, was the transmitter's high tension.
This transmitter, a gleaming mass of valves and meters, was a bit like a giant-sized refrigerator. It sat in the room behind the studio, with its back doors open to a wide open window in the hope that occasional breezes would help the cooling process. The high tension kept on switching off. This was a challenge to Rex, who devised a handy gadget from a piece of conjute and a bottletop. Placing the bottle-top end of the conjute on the high tension switch, and the other against the wall, ensured that the high tension button was firmly pressed-in at all times.
This was the last of several temporary solutions.
It succeeded in blowing half the transmitter up. The other half wasn't working anyway.
There was still no engineer, although one was coming as soon as 2GZ could let him go. It seemed that 2KM recruited all its staff from 2GZ.
Meantime, Rex found a radio "ham" who had never seen a transmitter anything like the one we had. Rex pointed out that it was only a bloody transmitter and anyone who knew anything about them should be able to make it work. The luckless man agreed to give it a go.
It took him three days as Rex answered searching questions from the Sydney office about the delay in getting back on air while still maintaining his important local sales calls. It was interesting that as the time progressed, the sales calls took longer and longer, and that on his return the bellow was louder (he might have been able to address our entire audience without the benefit of microphone and transmitter had he tried), the enunciation less clear and the reasoning less lucid.
The studio and the transmitter room were criss-crossed with wires. You ignored the buttons on the transmitter and used an ordinary power point. Somehow, the noise created by this makeshift arrangement was deafening. The trick was to use the microphone rarely. As a matter of fact, no matter what, nobody ever eliminated that noise during my stay. Even after the new engineer got the rest back to normal by installing a second-hand high tension switch there still remained what was technically termed "hum on mike".
Rex and I mostly got along well, except for the occasional mentions of a former boy genius called JBKP.
One day he generously allowed me to write his copy for him, as the sales calls were becoming something of a burden. He would come up with the ideas and I would put them into English.
His ideas were generally in the form of a slogan.
A shoe store got the memorable line "Let Brown's boot you", one that Mr Brown found especially objectionable and blamed on me.
As Rex pointed out, it was good customer relations to let Mr Brown think he was right, so I was a good lad and took the blame.
Rex did his part. He took the commission.
Our relationship soured during the Christmas season.
One of our sponsors, a national advertiser, had sent a special script to be read instead of the normal recorded program on Christmas Eve. The script called for four well-known Christmas songs, none of which we had in our extensive library of five hundred records.
Rex told me that was OK. Just re-write the script to put in the songs we did have. At last my script-writing skills were to be recognised. I polished every word, linked the titles to one another, and produced a masterpiece designed to be remembered for decades.
Unfortunately, only the first minute of it got to air.
In the best tradition of great mysteries, it was a dark and sultry night. There was a storm about. I was at home, listening for my masterpiece. I heard Rex introduce it, and play the introductory music. Then silence - or rather, static. The station was off the air.
I knew that the new engineer had taken his new girl friend to the pictures, so I decided to go to the studio and assist - or at least, go to the picture theatre and find help.
There was lots of noise at the station. Ten or twelve people were wandering around looking puzzled. I realised later that their concern was for the disappearing drinks, as Rex cleaned up the place waiting for someone to come and help. He'd been having a party.
"Son", he said, very deliberately, "we are off the air. The bloody high tension has bloody gone again".
Very worried that we might see the return of the dreaded conjute and bottle top solution, I quickly took a look at the transmitter, noted that the rear doors were, as usual, open to the window, and noted as well that there was some substance that seemed to have sprayed around the area.
After a few seconds, I figured the substance could be the remains of a frog. There was an abundance of them - they sometimes made their way into the studio at night and one could easily have jumped through the window onto a relay switch, short-circuiting everything. (Strange to say, I have not yet won any award for my technical expertise). Having made the diagnosis, I carefully cleaned the remains of whatever it was from the relay circuit, went to the switch board and changed a fuse. When fearfully I switched the transmitter on again it worked.
"What happened, son?" he bellowed at me. I told him.
He switched on the microphone and apologised to the outside world.
"I'm shorry, ladeeees and gennlemen. We've been off the air for a while, but 's a matter of fact, a FROG jumped into the transhmittah".
Uninterrupted music ended the day's transmlsslon.
I'd been there a few hours and had just finished the morning shift - that is, a stint starting at 7.30 and ending at 11 o'clock, when the station closed down until later that afternoon.
Having finished the job (or, as it turned out, that part of the job) I wondered what a highly popular radio star would do at that point, and I decided that a cup of coffee was called for. With the extra sixpence over the 2GZ salary, coffee was a decided luxury, but I took myself down the street and found Mr Mottee's Greek café, leaving the station in the hands of a 17 year old young lady.
It was a pleasant place, very like hundreds of other such cafes in Australian country towns at that time. There were three rows of tables, and along one side of the cafe stood an enormous soda fountain backed by mirrors that gave the shop a spacious look. The genial proprietor could usually be found comfortably placed behind that long bar, drumming his fingers on the metal lids of the ice cream containers, from where he could survey his domain and at the same time, scan the street for likely customers.
You could tell that he was absolutely at home there.
It was quiet everywhere. The cafe had one solitary customer - me. And the passers by were very occasional.
Quite suddenly, I noticed Mr Mottee acting strangely. Rather, his face was acting strangely. Where he had seemed at peace with the world. he now had a distinctly worried, or worse - agitated - air.
He looked around to see if there was some place to hide, but there didn't seem to be one. Then he started to act in a nonchalant manner, mopping up around the milk shake flavourings and straightening up the meagre supply of packaged sweets on the counter top. I expected him to start whistling any moment.
All the time he was staring out at the street.
I turned around to see what had drawn his attention and found that the focus of all this concern was my new boss.
Rex was flat footed like me, but much taller and slower in his movements. This seemed to give him a particularly interesting walk. He was loping across the street in the direction of the cafe, fountain pen at the ready in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other.
Mr Mottee stood transfixed, his mouth open, as Rex walked through the door and greeted him.
"Ah, there Mottee", he shouted. "Time to renew your contract."
I was pleased. It was to be my first insight into how a person sold radio advertising, something that already interested me. I had an ulterior motive. I understood there was some kind of plan that allowed the sales person to actually get his or her hands on some of the money involved, and that this was called commission. I had something of an ambition about commission - although it took a long number of years to achieve.
I waited for the next move. Obviously that was meant to come from Mr Mottee, but he said nothing. He just looked agitated.
"Ten bob a week", said Rex. "No increase. All you gotta do is put your monicker on the bottom line here".
And with that, Rex shoved the sheet of paper under Mr Mottee's nose, together with the fountain pen, the cap of which had been thoughtfully removed. Having made the sales pitch, he stood back and looked out into the street. Ah ha, I thought. A text-book ploy - say nothing, do nothing once you have asked for the order.
Wrong.
Mr Mottee saw his big chance. With Rex eyeing the passing scenery, Mr Mottee surveyed the cafe. He figured it out that if he made a dash from behind the soda fountain to the first aisle between the tables, he could make it to the kitchen in good time. The kitchen could be his refuge - something like a church in ancient times.
Thought became action.
But Rex was waiting for the move. I admired his flat-footed fleetness. From somewhere, he achieved a youthful speed, and made a similar dash for the second aisle, flew down it and cornered his client just outside the swinging doors Mr Mottee's own kitchen.
Seated at a table there, Mr Mottee sorrowfully wrote his name the way he usually spelt it on the bottom of the contract.
Rex picked it up, shook Mr Mottee's hand, said "Congratulations on your decision, Mottee" and strode out of the cafe, tucking the contract into his inside pocket but carrying the fountain pen like a trademark.
I decided then and there that selling radio advertising was not for me.
Rex and I had met only the night before last.
The Sydney office had supplied me with a second-class rail ticket on the Kempsey Mail, leaving Sydney early in the morning. Twelve hours of grit-in-the-eye Wartime Luxury Travel had been spent looking at the endless North Coast forests flashing by the train window hour after everlasting hour, interrupted only by the occasional river - and when the scenery palled, trying to make sense of the ribald conversation of my two fellow travellers who had been to Sydney for a rather interesting holiday.
I didn't think I'd be taking any lessons from them either.
They were what my mother would have described as "common", so it was something of a surprise when they invited me to share a sandwich from the packet they'd bought at a Railway Refreshment Room.
And we bought railway pies for lunch. Given the stay at the Aunt's place, with its kitchen stocked with canned lamb's tongues, this was the best meal I'd had in three weeks.
The forests had long since disappeared in darkness as we arrived at Kempsey, and there didn't seem to be anyone home. Even the passengers had all disembarked at other places. The lights were out (the enemy was looking for them). There was no one waiting on the platform either. Obviously I was expected to make my way to the radio station where I would learn where my accommodation would be. Or not expected at all.
A station master about my own age materialised, looked at my suitcase and figured I needed a taxi, so he telephoned for one. It arrived very fast. I may have been the fare for the day.
The driver knew where the radio station was, told me it wasn't worth listening to - a conversation I was to have with many cab drivers as I arrived to start other jobs - and agreed to wait outside while I got my orders.
We pulled up outside a shop in the one of the two main streets.
The front door was open, and as I walked into the dim light of the outer office (well, it was the only office) I could hear no sounds at all. I wondered if I was in the right place, but I had seen an old neon sign, unlit, under the awning outside. It clearly but modestly, said 2KM.
There was a double door ahead of me. I cautiously pushed one of the doors and it opened. I took my first look at the studio.
Wood-coloured Caneite walls enclosed a dimly lit room. The piece de resistance was an enormous piano. The rest of the furniture was sparse. There was a grandfather clock, a shabby lounge suite, one or two cane chairs, and, in a corner of the room, an announcing panel.
There were two people there, sitting around the said announcing panel. One was Mandrake the Magician, straight out of the Women's Weekly.
Black Brylcreemed hair, dark suit, a slit of a moustache. He was pouring a drink for the other man from a bottle of schnapps.
On one of the turntables, a sixteen-inch record was grinding around very slowly, and I knew that was the current episode of "Calling the Stars" sponsored nationally by Colgate Palmolive. City stations took it "live", but in the bush it came on transcription.
Mandrake looked up at me.
"You'd be Tom", he said judicially. "Press the flesh".
We shook hands. I hoped that was what he meant.
Mandrake, or Rex, had been an advertising man adversely affected by the paper shortage of wartime Australia. Not being able to print his advertising copy-books, which were handed out at school gates so children could brush up on their handwriting skills and absorb an important advertising message at the same time, he figured that radio offered a secure industry in which to spend the war. As it happened, he stayed in it for the rest of his life.
Perhaps that was wise. "Bananas - buy when yellow, eat when flecked" was an outstanding example of his creative advertising.
Rex was the first larrikin I met in radio. I was soon to learn that larrikins were the driving force of the industry.
He had a powerful bellow. He also had the affectation of leaving the gs off the end of words, but only at the end of sentences, and "hotel" was always pronounced in the French manner.
He and his wife were well known in town. They lived at the Royal Hotel, and family rows, faithfully enacted in front of the open window, could be heard for miles around each night. They served to keep the local community supplied with talking points.
Regularly as clockwork, very little happened in Kempsey, so a family argument could be the highlight of the week.
"Well, son", Rex said, "you can do the children's session tomorrow afternoon, and then go through until 7 when I'll take over. Come in first thing in the morning and I'll show you how to work the panel".
"You'll be doing the breakfast session as well from then on".
There was none of the style of 2GZ there. The station had lots of old equipment, piled up as if it were rubbish. It looked like somebody's junk shop. I told myself it didn't matter what it looked like - it was what came out over the air that mattered.
My boarding house was weatherboard, old, and two-storied. Its main attribute was its close proximity to 2KM. It was in the other main street. It had a reputation to uphold: it served the worst meals on the entire north coast. Those who were lucky - that is everyone but me - people who worked in banks or retail stores and therefore had more money than I had - would often leave the dinner table and go up to Mr Mottee's establishment. I quietly and gratefully ate what I was given.
Boarding house life could be a great builder of character.
In the few days before I arrived, 2KM had had a staff of precisely one person for the past few days. It was, of course, Rex himself. The engineer had left, some feat given the stringent manpower laws, and they had trouble replacing the previous junior announcer.
That young man, of whom Rex often spoke affectionately (he called him JohnBloodyKingstonPearce), was now serving his country. I never asked him whether he had stayed at the same boarding house and if that had been a factor in his decision.
That same young man made a go of it later, having dropped his middle name..
I settled down to take over his duties, sweeping the studio, writing the copy, answering the bell at the front counter. and announcing seven days a week, but never entirely to the satisfaction of Rex. "JohnBloodyKingstonPearce would have done it this way", or "you should have heard how JohnBloodyKingston did a birthday call", and how the very same JBKP could kid to the ladies in the request sessions.
I was so pleased to be on the air so much that I baptised the station, giving it a new name. I called it "2 K Happy M", and was amazed to find that it caught on with the locals. Letters arrived addressed that way, and callers at the front desk asked if this was 2 K Happy M. Rex was somewhat unimpressed.
A happy memory I have is of riding a bicycle through the streets of Kempsey on a summer night, having just finished my shift by starting the transcription of "Dad and Dave". As I passed the open doors one by one, the voices of the George Edwards Players came out to me so clearly that I could follow what passed for the plot.
But the joy of regular broadcasting, and the opportunity to learn the skill of chatting up birds in public - before a vast audience of hundreds - was not to last very long.
We went off the air. And nothing that Rex could do could get us back on.
The problem, apparently, was the transmitter's high tension.
This transmitter, a gleaming mass of valves and meters, was a bit like a giant-sized refrigerator. It sat in the room behind the studio, with its back doors open to a wide open window in the hope that occasional breezes would help the cooling process. The high tension kept on switching off. This was a challenge to Rex, who devised a handy gadget from a piece of conjute and a bottletop. Placing the bottle-top end of the conjute on the high tension switch, and the other against the wall, ensured that the high tension button was firmly pressed-in at all times.
This was the last of several temporary solutions.
It succeeded in blowing half the transmitter up. The other half wasn't working anyway.
There was still no engineer, although one was coming as soon as 2GZ could let him go. It seemed that 2KM recruited all its staff from 2GZ.
Meantime, Rex found a radio "ham" who had never seen a transmitter anything like the one we had. Rex pointed out that it was only a bloody transmitter and anyone who knew anything about them should be able to make it work. The luckless man agreed to give it a go.
It took him three days as Rex answered searching questions from the Sydney office about the delay in getting back on air while still maintaining his important local sales calls. It was interesting that as the time progressed, the sales calls took longer and longer, and that on his return the bellow was louder (he might have been able to address our entire audience without the benefit of microphone and transmitter had he tried), the enunciation less clear and the reasoning less lucid.
The studio and the transmitter room were criss-crossed with wires. You ignored the buttons on the transmitter and used an ordinary power point. Somehow, the noise created by this makeshift arrangement was deafening. The trick was to use the microphone rarely. As a matter of fact, no matter what, nobody ever eliminated that noise during my stay. Even after the new engineer got the rest back to normal by installing a second-hand high tension switch there still remained what was technically termed "hum on mike".
Rex and I mostly got along well, except for the occasional mentions of a former boy genius called JBKP.
One day he generously allowed me to write his copy for him, as the sales calls were becoming something of a burden. He would come up with the ideas and I would put them into English.
His ideas were generally in the form of a slogan.
A shoe store got the memorable line "Let Brown's boot you", one that Mr Brown found especially objectionable and blamed on me.
As Rex pointed out, it was good customer relations to let Mr Brown think he was right, so I was a good lad and took the blame.
Rex did his part. He took the commission.
Our relationship soured during the Christmas season.
One of our sponsors, a national advertiser, had sent a special script to be read instead of the normal recorded program on Christmas Eve. The script called for four well-known Christmas songs, none of which we had in our extensive library of five hundred records.
Rex told me that was OK. Just re-write the script to put in the songs we did have. At last my script-writing skills were to be recognised. I polished every word, linked the titles to one another, and produced a masterpiece designed to be remembered for decades.
Unfortunately, only the first minute of it got to air.
In the best tradition of great mysteries, it was a dark and sultry night. There was a storm about. I was at home, listening for my masterpiece. I heard Rex introduce it, and play the introductory music. Then silence - or rather, static. The station was off the air.
I knew that the new engineer had taken his new girl friend to the pictures, so I decided to go to the studio and assist - or at least, go to the picture theatre and find help.
There was lots of noise at the station. Ten or twelve people were wandering around looking puzzled. I realised later that their concern was for the disappearing drinks, as Rex cleaned up the place waiting for someone to come and help. He'd been having a party.
"Son", he said, very deliberately, "we are off the air. The bloody high tension has bloody gone again".
Very worried that we might see the return of the dreaded conjute and bottle top solution, I quickly took a look at the transmitter, noted that the rear doors were, as usual, open to the window, and noted as well that there was some substance that seemed to have sprayed around the area.
After a few seconds, I figured the substance could be the remains of a frog. There was an abundance of them - they sometimes made their way into the studio at night and one could easily have jumped through the window onto a relay switch, short-circuiting everything. (Strange to say, I have not yet won any award for my technical expertise). Having made the diagnosis, I carefully cleaned the remains of whatever it was from the relay circuit, went to the switch board and changed a fuse. When fearfully I switched the transmitter on again it worked.
"What happened, son?" he bellowed at me. I told him.
He switched on the microphone and apologised to the outside world.
"I'm shorry, ladeeees and gennlemen. We've been off the air for a while, but 's a matter of fact, a FROG jumped into the transhmittah".
Uninterrupted music ended the day's transmlsslon.
Chapter Six
Bruce Carty Collection
A shy young country boy came into the station. He said he was a cowboy singer.
A preferred position at the radio station, during the steamy summer days on the mid North Coast of NSW, was outside the building. A breeze might blow up at any time and you didn't want to miss it. It might not come back for ages. There wasn't much at the back door, just the privvy and the two wooden sticks that served as transmission
towers.
It was different at the front door.
With morning office duties completed it was still too early to make sales calls, so Rex preferred to take his place in the station entrance - that small area between the two shop windows which carried posters for the two local movie houses.
If there was a breeze about, you'd find it there.
Rex would bow with exaggerated gallantry to the ladies and say "G'day" to the gentlemen passers by.
On sale days there was quite a parade as the country people came to town in their best bib and tucker.
The station was jammed between a sandwich shop and a shoe store (Mr.Brown's opposition). From the doorway, we had a pleasant view of the local Ambulance station and another boarding house, though somewhat less talked about than mine.
Occasionally Rex would invite me to join him to view the passing parade. Quite a privilege to stand there and chew the fat with the man himself, as he graciously acknowledged listeners' goodwill.
"They all say they never listen to us, son", he declared so the whole town could hear whether they wanted to or not, "but it's not bloody true. They listen all right. Just you bloody swear on the air and they'll all start crowing at you". He was not speaking from experience, but many years later I figured that he had been given the gift of prophecy.
"Yeah", he said, "they're just bloody well waiting to catch us out".
Then, most uncharacteristically, he lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper. "See those two guys across the street?"
"The ones in the cowboy suits?" I asked.
They both looked about the same age as me, which made them sixteen or so.
"Yeah", said Rex. "I reckon this is the tenth time they've walked along the street. They keep on looking over here. I reckon they want to talk to us but they're too damn nervous. Tell you what, you go inside and I'll see if I can meet them".
Kids in cowboy gear were not unusual - this what was called "hillbilly" country. The radio station broadcast more cowboy songs than anything else. Records made by Tex Morton, and Buddy Williams (both home-grown) and artists like Gene Autry who you could also see at the Saturday afternoon matinees at the Empire Theatre.
I recognised the dismissal. I disappeared into the dim interior and proceeded to prepare a program or type copy or perhaps answer the one telephone should it happen to ring.
The rules during wartime were that all music programs should be prepared two weeks in advance. This security measure meant that we could not send coded messages by means of record titles, I guess. We used the back of a vacant shop along the street to store the bundles of records for each of the programs over that period.
We got the records out, I typed up the list, and the theory was that they would stay in place until the due day.
With five hundred records, there were always very few left to choose from. A lot of cannibalising between programs was necessary and records got out of place and lost so that few programs actually went to air exactly as they had been chosen, thus contravening the regulations.
I worried that someone from security might arrive and take us off the air, for our month-long program selection was an absolute debacle. They probably had other things on their minds. Nobody ever checked us out.
A preferred position at the radio station, during the steamy summer days on the mid North Coast of NSW, was outside the building. A breeze might blow up at any time and you didn't want to miss it. It might not come back for ages. There wasn't much at the back door, just the privvy and the two wooden sticks that served as transmission
towers.
It was different at the front door.
With morning office duties completed it was still too early to make sales calls, so Rex preferred to take his place in the station entrance - that small area between the two shop windows which carried posters for the two local movie houses.
If there was a breeze about, you'd find it there.
Rex would bow with exaggerated gallantry to the ladies and say "G'day" to the gentlemen passers by.
On sale days there was quite a parade as the country people came to town in their best bib and tucker.
The station was jammed between a sandwich shop and a shoe store (Mr.Brown's opposition). From the doorway, we had a pleasant view of the local Ambulance station and another boarding house, though somewhat less talked about than mine.
Occasionally Rex would invite me to join him to view the passing parade. Quite a privilege to stand there and chew the fat with the man himself, as he graciously acknowledged listeners' goodwill.
"They all say they never listen to us, son", he declared so the whole town could hear whether they wanted to or not, "but it's not bloody true. They listen all right. Just you bloody swear on the air and they'll all start crowing at you". He was not speaking from experience, but many years later I figured that he had been given the gift of prophecy.
"Yeah", he said, "they're just bloody well waiting to catch us out".
Then, most uncharacteristically, he lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper. "See those two guys across the street?"
"The ones in the cowboy suits?" I asked.
They both looked about the same age as me, which made them sixteen or so.
"Yeah", said Rex. "I reckon this is the tenth time they've walked along the street. They keep on looking over here. I reckon they want to talk to us but they're too damn nervous. Tell you what, you go inside and I'll see if I can meet them".
Kids in cowboy gear were not unusual - this what was called "hillbilly" country. The radio station broadcast more cowboy songs than anything else. Records made by Tex Morton, and Buddy Williams (both home-grown) and artists like Gene Autry who you could also see at the Saturday afternoon matinees at the Empire Theatre.
I recognised the dismissal. I disappeared into the dim interior and proceeded to prepare a program or type copy or perhaps answer the one telephone should it happen to ring.
The rules during wartime were that all music programs should be prepared two weeks in advance. This security measure meant that we could not send coded messages by means of record titles, I guess. We used the back of a vacant shop along the street to store the bundles of records for each of the programs over that period.
We got the records out, I typed up the list, and the theory was that they would stay in place until the due day.
With five hundred records, there were always very few left to choose from. A lot of cannibalising between programs was necessary and records got out of place and lost so that few programs actually went to air exactly as they had been chosen, thus contravening the regulations.
I worried that someone from security might arrive and take us off the air, for our month-long program selection was an absolute debacle. They probably had other things on their minds. Nobody ever checked us out.
Ian Grieve Postcard Collection
I'd just got back into the office having spent some time trying to resolve the exact location of a record called "Beautiful Queensland", sung by Tex Morton, when I heard Rex in earnest conversation with someone outside.
He had a wicked sense of humour, especially when the other person had no idea what he was talking about, so I moved to the front door to see what was going on.
The two lads in cowboy gear were talking to him and he was bellowing back with great good humour.
"I tell you what", he shouted, "you fellers come in and give us a song on the mike".
The station was on its mid-morning/afternoon break - from llam to 5.30pm. The transmitter was switched off and only static issued from the station's frequency.
"Ah, here's Tom", he said. "He's the studio manager and he's in charge of auditions".
It was exciting to know that I had gained a promotion after such a short stay at the station, even as I reflected that there was precious little studio to manage.
"Hello", I said.
"Is the studio free Tom?"
It certainly was.
One of them said "I'm Slim Dusty" and his mate said "I'm Dusty Slim".
Rex gave me a wink. He was having fun.
"Just show the boys into the studio, Tom, and switch on the gear. Then you can get them to sing a song each and I'll listen on the speaker in my office. That way, I'll be able to hear how they'll sound on the air".
I did not protest that the loudspeaker in his office was not working, and probably hadn't worked for donkey's years. I did. what I was told. I ushered the fellows into the studio, switched on the gear, moved our one microphone from the announcing panel to a cane table in the centre of the studio, and asked them to sing something.
He had a wicked sense of humour, especially when the other person had no idea what he was talking about, so I moved to the front door to see what was going on.
The two lads in cowboy gear were talking to him and he was bellowing back with great good humour.
"I tell you what", he shouted, "you fellers come in and give us a song on the mike".
The station was on its mid-morning/afternoon break - from llam to 5.30pm. The transmitter was switched off and only static issued from the station's frequency.
"Ah, here's Tom", he said. "He's the studio manager and he's in charge of auditions".
It was exciting to know that I had gained a promotion after such a short stay at the station, even as I reflected that there was precious little studio to manage.
"Hello", I said.
"Is the studio free Tom?"
It certainly was.
One of them said "I'm Slim Dusty" and his mate said "I'm Dusty Slim".
Rex gave me a wink. He was having fun.
"Just show the boys into the studio, Tom, and switch on the gear. Then you can get them to sing a song each and I'll listen on the speaker in my office. That way, I'll be able to hear how they'll sound on the air".
I did not protest that the loudspeaker in his office was not working, and probably hadn't worked for donkey's years. I did. what I was told. I ushered the fellows into the studio, switched on the gear, moved our one microphone from the announcing panel to a cane table in the centre of the studio, and asked them to sing something.
Ian Grieve Postcard Collection
They were more than happy to do so.
As the first song started, I crept out through the double doors, and almost decapitated Rex as he crouched behind one of them.
After a song from each of them, Rex and I walked back into the studio.
"What do you think, Tom?" he asked, in what he must have thought of as his conversational tone..
I wanted to think whatever Rex thought, but how to explain that in front of two very earnest young singers.
"OK", I said.
"Yeah, just what I reckon. You're all right fellers. Star material I say. We're going to give you a go, aren't we Tom?"
"Yes", I said. I was waiting for whatever would come next.
"Tell you what", said Rex. "Come back at 5.30 this afternoon and Tom will put you on the Gumnuts' Club".
I wanted to remind him that we had to have the programs ready one month in advance, but he was enjoying himself so much I didn't like to.
"See you", he said.
"They'll never come back", he confided, "but they'll talk about this for the rest of their lives".
As the first song started, I crept out through the double doors, and almost decapitated Rex as he crouched behind one of them.
After a song from each of them, Rex and I walked back into the studio.
"What do you think, Tom?" he asked, in what he must have thought of as his conversational tone..
I wanted to think whatever Rex thought, but how to explain that in front of two very earnest young singers.
"OK", I said.
"Yeah, just what I reckon. You're all right fellers. Star material I say. We're going to give you a go, aren't we Tom?"
"Yes", I said. I was waiting for whatever would come next.
"Tell you what", said Rex. "Come back at 5.30 this afternoon and Tom will put you on the Gumnuts' Club".
I wanted to remind him that we had to have the programs ready one month in advance, but he was enjoying himself so much I didn't like to.
"See you", he said.
"They'll never come back", he confided, "but they'll talk about this for the rest of their lives".
Tom Crozier Family
Rex was wrong, of course. It was the first time I had realised he could make a mistake and it was naturally a great relief to me. He also came to recognise that we had found some very good and unusual talent.
Slim Dusty came back that afternoon all ready to sing a song on the wireless. Dusty Slim didn't make it on that occasion. He went away to change his name to Shorty Ranger.
Slim had been to visit his married sister in town, and had told her he'd be on the air that afternoon, so if Rex had wanted to wriggle out of it, he would not have been able to - he liked to keep faith with people.
I don't know if David Kirkpatrick had a good memory of that afternoon, but it must have been thrilling for him.
For years he had been writing bush songs and he had taught himself to play the guitar. With about two years' schooling behind him, he had developed into a superb bush balladeer - a natural poet with a good sense of fun. But he presented himself in a very serious way. He loved to write and sing about the things he knew on the family property at Nulla Nulla, near Bellbrook which was up in the hills beyond Kempsey.
I remember he sang and sang that afternoon so almost the whole of the children's session was country music. And I remember the telephone ringing right after he had ended. It rang several times with people saying "give us more" which proved we did have some listeners in spite of what they told us. One of the callers was his married sister, who was on Cloud Nine about little brother's talent.
When I realised who was calling, I handed the phone over to Slim and he had to ask me which end to speak into. Our telephone was one of those new-fangled handsets and it was the first of its kind Slim had seen. It was very different to the wall model at his home at Nulla Nulla.
He became one of the few people of my age that I got to know in Kempsey. We became firm friends, and on one occasion decided to have a photograph taken, which we had printed and made available to the fans at something like sixpence a time.
That photograph turned up in a collection of the photographer's work many years later and got a run in a Sunday newspaper and in some other publications - and even the ABC used it in a television feature.
On one occasion I was invited to go and spend a day or so on the Kirkpatrick farm.
"We'll take you up to the farm (Melody Ranch, Slim had named it) one afternoon after we come down for the sales", Slim told me, and so it was arranged.
I duly met up with Slim and his dad and mum near the railway station, where the old family car was parked.
I gathered that Mr. Kirkpatrick enjoyed a drink after a day at the sales, and this was one of the days when he had several, and enjoyed all of them.
With both car and driver loaded up, we set off into the hill country, with Kirkpatrick senior in full control.
The daylight dimmed as we drove up winding hills with deep valleys to one side, the driver constantly aiming hearty remarks at the people in the back seat, leaning back, one hand on the wheel, to get a good view of his audience.
For me it was two hours of sheer and absolute terror. Nobody else seemed worried.
I slept well that night in spite of it all, and did not wake until Mr Kirkpatrick came into the room to wake Slim up to do the milkin' at about 4.30 the next morning. Slim and I had to share the bed. Fortunately it was an old-fashioned double bed.
Slim Dusty came back that afternoon all ready to sing a song on the wireless. Dusty Slim didn't make it on that occasion. He went away to change his name to Shorty Ranger.
Slim had been to visit his married sister in town, and had told her he'd be on the air that afternoon, so if Rex had wanted to wriggle out of it, he would not have been able to - he liked to keep faith with people.
I don't know if David Kirkpatrick had a good memory of that afternoon, but it must have been thrilling for him.
For years he had been writing bush songs and he had taught himself to play the guitar. With about two years' schooling behind him, he had developed into a superb bush balladeer - a natural poet with a good sense of fun. But he presented himself in a very serious way. He loved to write and sing about the things he knew on the family property at Nulla Nulla, near Bellbrook which was up in the hills beyond Kempsey.
I remember he sang and sang that afternoon so almost the whole of the children's session was country music. And I remember the telephone ringing right after he had ended. It rang several times with people saying "give us more" which proved we did have some listeners in spite of what they told us. One of the callers was his married sister, who was on Cloud Nine about little brother's talent.
When I realised who was calling, I handed the phone over to Slim and he had to ask me which end to speak into. Our telephone was one of those new-fangled handsets and it was the first of its kind Slim had seen. It was very different to the wall model at his home at Nulla Nulla.
He became one of the few people of my age that I got to know in Kempsey. We became firm friends, and on one occasion decided to have a photograph taken, which we had printed and made available to the fans at something like sixpence a time.
That photograph turned up in a collection of the photographer's work many years later and got a run in a Sunday newspaper and in some other publications - and even the ABC used it in a television feature.
On one occasion I was invited to go and spend a day or so on the Kirkpatrick farm.
"We'll take you up to the farm (Melody Ranch, Slim had named it) one afternoon after we come down for the sales", Slim told me, and so it was arranged.
I duly met up with Slim and his dad and mum near the railway station, where the old family car was parked.
I gathered that Mr. Kirkpatrick enjoyed a drink after a day at the sales, and this was one of the days when he had several, and enjoyed all of them.
With both car and driver loaded up, we set off into the hill country, with Kirkpatrick senior in full control.
The daylight dimmed as we drove up winding hills with deep valleys to one side, the driver constantly aiming hearty remarks at the people in the back seat, leaning back, one hand on the wheel, to get a good view of his audience.
For me it was two hours of sheer and absolute terror. Nobody else seemed worried.
I slept well that night in spite of it all, and did not wake until Mr Kirkpatrick came into the room to wake Slim up to do the milkin' at about 4.30 the next morning. Slim and I had to share the bed. Fortunately it was an old-fashioned double bed.
Slim would come down from Nulla Nulla, sometimes with his pal Shorty (it was relief not to call him Dusty), and appear on the children's program or on the Sunday morning request show.
In fact, his appearances on the Sunday show became so popular that people used to turn up at the studio and push their way in to watch it go on the air. One of my friends was unkind enough to say that there was nobody listening because they'd all come into the studio. Rex never knew of the overflow crowds because I forgot to tell him, and if he didn't have to work, Sunday was his day to lie in and rest after a week of sales calls.
In fact, his appearances on the Sunday show became so popular that people used to turn up at the studio and push their way in to watch it go on the air. One of my friends was unkind enough to say that there was nobody listening because they'd all come into the studio. Rex never knew of the overflow crowds because I forgot to tell him, and if he didn't have to work, Sunday was his day to lie in and rest after a week of sales calls.
Macleay Argus September 1944
eople would ask when Slim was going to make a record. Slim was asking the same question, because the only recording company in Australia, which rejoiced in the name of Columbia Graphophone, had closed its artists' list for the duration of the war. Slim was keen and persisted with them - he was positive they would put him on their list. They were interested, but they were sticking to their policy. Slim would have to wait until the war was over.
The solution came when his father forked out some cash so he could make the records privately - still at the same record company. These were sent out to radio stations that Slim thought would want to play them. My copies caught up with me when I arrived at Lithgow.
It's interesting that neither Rex nor I thought to ask the young men what their real names were. They chose their stage names at sixteen and that was it. In fact, it was some time before I found out Slim's real name.
I had grown tired of being part of a two-and-a-half-man team. Rex, as manager, took the evening program and did every second Sunday morning. I did the breakfast show and the alternate Sunday morning, and as well managed to cope with the children's session and the early evening session, which finished with the ABC news at 7 o'clock, mostly read by my old hero Peter Possum, masquerading as Heath Burdock.
The solution came when his father forked out some cash so he could make the records privately - still at the same record company. These were sent out to radio stations that Slim thought would want to play them. My copies caught up with me when I arrived at Lithgow.
It's interesting that neither Rex nor I thought to ask the young men what their real names were. They chose their stage names at sixteen and that was it. In fact, it was some time before I found out Slim's real name.
I had grown tired of being part of a two-and-a-half-man team. Rex, as manager, took the evening program and did every second Sunday morning. I did the breakfast show and the alternate Sunday morning, and as well managed to cope with the children's session and the early evening session, which finished with the ABC news at 7 o'clock, mostly read by my old hero Peter Possum, masquerading as Heath Burdock.
Ian Grieve Collection
The children's session was called the Gumnuts Club, and strangely nobody ever raised an objection. Sometime in the early days of the station, it had been an active institution, with concerts and other entertainments for children, but when I took it over, it was half an hour of comedy records (some achievement given the state of the record library) many of which were of doubtful merit as children's entertainment.With the help of a couple of my friends, especially the projectionist at one of the movie theatres, I began writing and producing a serial. The projectionist's involvement had a helpful by-product: a free seat at any matinee performance.
Having started it, I had to keep it going. I remembered back in the old days - a year or so before - when I had listened regularly to 2KA, George Foster had started a serial which he obviously wrote just before it went to air each day. (He later turned up at 2GB Macquarie where he wrote and produced comedy shows for many years). In Foster's serial, just as the villains - the Pearl Pirates - had arrived at Wentworth Falls and were holed up at the refreshment rooms, holding the place to ransom and putting the audience in high suspense, George got another job. There has been a breathless silence ever since.
Our serial ran its course.
Inspired with this notable success, I designed a membership card for the Gumnuts Club and had it printed, using part of my 31/6 a week to pay for it. The card declared that the holder was a certified member of the Gumnuts Club, though it did not specify any benefits, and had to have a signature on it. Mine.
I had cleverly given myself the title of "Chief Gumnut".
This delighted Rex.
When someone came to the front counter to ask for me, Rex would roar in a companionable way "Ah, the Chief Gumnut! Are you there, CHIEF GUMNUT?"
Having started it, I had to keep it going. I remembered back in the old days - a year or so before - when I had listened regularly to 2KA, George Foster had started a serial which he obviously wrote just before it went to air each day. (He later turned up at 2GB Macquarie where he wrote and produced comedy shows for many years). In Foster's serial, just as the villains - the Pearl Pirates - had arrived at Wentworth Falls and were holed up at the refreshment rooms, holding the place to ransom and putting the audience in high suspense, George got another job. There has been a breathless silence ever since.
Our serial ran its course.
Inspired with this notable success, I designed a membership card for the Gumnuts Club and had it printed, using part of my 31/6 a week to pay for it. The card declared that the holder was a certified member of the Gumnuts Club, though it did not specify any benefits, and had to have a signature on it. Mine.
I had cleverly given myself the title of "Chief Gumnut".
This delighted Rex.
When someone came to the front counter to ask for me, Rex would roar in a companionable way "Ah, the Chief Gumnut! Are you there, CHIEF GUMNUT?"
The banter failed to amuse me, and on my holidays, I looked around for another job. I fancied that 2CH might like my services. They had taken one of my predecessors, Leon Becker, and there was a chance that lightning might strike twice in the same place.
It didn't.
The best thing they could do was to put me in touch with 2LT at Lithgow. I arrived back from holidays with the news that I was leaving.
"No, you're not, son", Rex roared. "You're staying here, in this bloody town until this bloody war is over".
He had a point. The Manpower authorities had the power to stop people moving from job to job in certain industries, including radio broadcasting. Rex said I was stuck there.
The Manpower man said I had no choice. That was it.
Except, said the Manpower man, who knew that the new job paid five pounds a week, an enormous increase on the Kempsey wage, if you can get to Lithgow and start work there before we know what you're doing, we can't drag you back.
Good idea! I decided to leave on the early train next morning, arrive in Lithgow the next afternoon and go on the air.
The arrangements were made via public telephone, and Des Day at 2LT said he'd meet me at the railway station.
All I had to do was allow Rex to think I'd resigned myself to staying in Kempsey.
That was easy, and I had a willing accomplice. My mother had come to Kempsey to set up home and keep me well fed, or perhaps simply to see that I didn't get myself into any kind of "trouble", whatever that might mean.
Next morning early, as I was sitting in a rattling carriage steaming out of Kempsey, she rang and told him I would not be in that day. I presume he thought I was sick, and I was - scared sick I'd be found out.
This next thing would be different. It was a bigger station with a staff of ten or twelve people, including girls who typed and selected programs. The boss was a former Sydney announcer. It had a full-time engineer. It was going to be much, much better.
Meantime, there was one further small challenge. I would spend the night at Bellevue Hill with my aunts. There would be sheep's tongue for dinner. Had I known, there were to be worse things on the menu in Lithgow.
In spite of my heavy suitcase, I bounded up the steps at Lithgow railway station at 2 the next afternoon. I was weary from breathing the smoke from the engine, and my eyes were sore from the grit, but I was excited at seeing a new place and a new radio station.
Des arrived.
"You're Tom", he decided, a fair guess since I was the only passenger left at the station ten minutes after the train had arrived.
He drove me to the station - in the station's own car! We had nothing like that at Kempsey. This was class. This was style!
The radio station, he explained, was off the air until 5 o'clock, but he felt it would be wise if I stayed there through the afternoon in case the manpower people came to pick me up. At least I could claim to be there on duty, helping to get the birthday calls together for the evening program. There was nobody on duty of course - it was Saturday afternoon.
Meantime, he had some sales calls to make, so would I just make myself at home until he returned.
Somehow, it sounded familiar.
But anyway, no Manpower man telephoned or knocked at the door. I had made it!
It didn't.
The best thing they could do was to put me in touch with 2LT at Lithgow. I arrived back from holidays with the news that I was leaving.
"No, you're not, son", Rex roared. "You're staying here, in this bloody town until this bloody war is over".
He had a point. The Manpower authorities had the power to stop people moving from job to job in certain industries, including radio broadcasting. Rex said I was stuck there.
The Manpower man said I had no choice. That was it.
Except, said the Manpower man, who knew that the new job paid five pounds a week, an enormous increase on the Kempsey wage, if you can get to Lithgow and start work there before we know what you're doing, we can't drag you back.
Good idea! I decided to leave on the early train next morning, arrive in Lithgow the next afternoon and go on the air.
The arrangements were made via public telephone, and Des Day at 2LT said he'd meet me at the railway station.
All I had to do was allow Rex to think I'd resigned myself to staying in Kempsey.
That was easy, and I had a willing accomplice. My mother had come to Kempsey to set up home and keep me well fed, or perhaps simply to see that I didn't get myself into any kind of "trouble", whatever that might mean.
Next morning early, as I was sitting in a rattling carriage steaming out of Kempsey, she rang and told him I would not be in that day. I presume he thought I was sick, and I was - scared sick I'd be found out.
This next thing would be different. It was a bigger station with a staff of ten or twelve people, including girls who typed and selected programs. The boss was a former Sydney announcer. It had a full-time engineer. It was going to be much, much better.
Meantime, there was one further small challenge. I would spend the night at Bellevue Hill with my aunts. There would be sheep's tongue for dinner. Had I known, there were to be worse things on the menu in Lithgow.
In spite of my heavy suitcase, I bounded up the steps at Lithgow railway station at 2 the next afternoon. I was weary from breathing the smoke from the engine, and my eyes were sore from the grit, but I was excited at seeing a new place and a new radio station.
Des arrived.
"You're Tom", he decided, a fair guess since I was the only passenger left at the station ten minutes after the train had arrived.
He drove me to the station - in the station's own car! We had nothing like that at Kempsey. This was class. This was style!
The radio station, he explained, was off the air until 5 o'clock, but he felt it would be wise if I stayed there through the afternoon in case the manpower people came to pick me up. At least I could claim to be there on duty, helping to get the birthday calls together for the evening program. There was nobody on duty of course - it was Saturday afternoon.
Meantime, he had some sales calls to make, so would I just make myself at home until he returned.
Somehow, it sounded familiar.
But anyway, no Manpower man telephoned or knocked at the door. I had made it!
Chapter Seven - Coming soon
2LT - Bruce Carty Collection
I was right. The station at Lithgow was different.
2LT was in a house. Not a shop, or an office, but in a house that had been adapted for the station. There were four rooms and a wide foyer that stretched from the front door to the back of the building. The one item of furniture in the foyer was a radiogram - a combination radio receiver and record player.
This receiver was used to pick up the BBC for the latest news each night at around 9 o'clock. Today the BBC comes to us noise free via satellite. Not so then - each night around eight, we'd try around the dial for what seemed like the best reception on one of the London frequencies - usually they were all quite poor, and invariably the one selected would deteriorate to the point of inaudibility by the time 9 o'clock came around. We would cross over anyway, and then we had to tip-toe around, because any heavy footwork caused a variety of awful sounds to accompany the BBC voice. There was something loose inside the receiver, but we never got around to finding out what.
Luckily, on some nights we could simply switch over to an ABC station and pinch the BBC from them. There weren't too many choices; the number of broadcasting stations was small, and close-by ABC stations extremely rare. So it all depended on reception conditions, and Lithgow was a notoriously lousy place for outside radio reception. That's why it had its own radio station.
The one studio had no announcing panel - just a desk with a microphone on it. The panel had been moved out into the transmitter room because Des had grown to love the city-station concept of panel operators. Whenever Des was on the air, someone sat outside and played the transcriptions and the music - and, with the shouted warning "Coming UP!", switched on the microphone as well.
It became the regular routine.
That was fine at nighttime, but during the day, all broadcasts had to be done from the control room, because we didn't have enough people to provide a panel operator as well as an announcer. The control room also answered to the name Transmitter room, for that was where the hundred-watt transmitter lived.
2LT started in 1939, just before World War Two began, and I joined the staff when it was just four years old. The transmitting mast in the back paddock bore testimony to the haste with which it was installed just four years previously - half-way through the installation process it crashed to the ground, and from that time on, it looked like the back leg of a dog, upended, gigantic, pointing to some upended tree.
Security was tighter than at Kempsey for several reasons. First, Lithgow was a production centre for small arms, and as such might be considered a likely target if the enemy could find it. It was also a centre for coal production.
Second, for some technical reason, 2LT could be heard out at sea, even though it sent out a paltry hundred watts, so it was considered that any spy might be able to send a message. How that humble hundred watts got so far out of its way was a mystery - a fluke of nature. No announcements were broadcast that did not have the manager's approval, and the local news was personally selected by the Managing Director.
The MD's name was Mr Taylor and he was also the managing editor of the Lithgow Mercury, which he pronounced as "Merkry", and the Mercury owned the station.
He would outline in thick blue pencil the items from the day's edition of the paper that were to be used. Sometimes there was lots, sometimes very little - so the length of the local news varied considerably with every broadcast.
He took the radio news very seriously. His routine every night was to take his favourite chair, switch on the radio, and listen carefully to his 6 o'clock local news. If anything untoward happened, we would know about it as soon as he could get to the telephone.
I did not know that miner's showers were required to be of a specific temperature. I did know that the hot water in the showers at the Small Arms Factory, where I lived, varied from scalding to South Pole frigid, and I presumed that to be the way of life of the common miner as well.
One night, the lead story in the local news was about the temperature of the showers at one of the local collieries. I had not learned that it is always a good idea to know what you're going to have to read before you read it, so I read (without any knowledge of what I was getting into) that a group of miners was on strike because their bathroom water was one degree colder than it should have been. As I did so, I heard a guffaw from the next room.
It came from Keith, panel operator or junior technician as the occasion demanded, and he thought it was very funny. Instantly I agreed with him. I laughed too, and had extreme difficulty completing the local news.
When someone starts laughing in a radio studio, it is hard to stop. Don't ask why - as far as I know, nobody knows.
Mr Taylor certainly did not know, and for whatever reason, this unwarranted hilarity in the middle of the Local News infuriated him. He rang the boss, then he rang the station and told me that I could go tomorrow, manpower or not. Anyone who didn't understand the political implications of the temperature of miner's shower water was no use to the station.
2LT was in a house. Not a shop, or an office, but in a house that had been adapted for the station. There were four rooms and a wide foyer that stretched from the front door to the back of the building. The one item of furniture in the foyer was a radiogram - a combination radio receiver and record player.
This receiver was used to pick up the BBC for the latest news each night at around 9 o'clock. Today the BBC comes to us noise free via satellite. Not so then - each night around eight, we'd try around the dial for what seemed like the best reception on one of the London frequencies - usually they were all quite poor, and invariably the one selected would deteriorate to the point of inaudibility by the time 9 o'clock came around. We would cross over anyway, and then we had to tip-toe around, because any heavy footwork caused a variety of awful sounds to accompany the BBC voice. There was something loose inside the receiver, but we never got around to finding out what.
Luckily, on some nights we could simply switch over to an ABC station and pinch the BBC from them. There weren't too many choices; the number of broadcasting stations was small, and close-by ABC stations extremely rare. So it all depended on reception conditions, and Lithgow was a notoriously lousy place for outside radio reception. That's why it had its own radio station.
The one studio had no announcing panel - just a desk with a microphone on it. The panel had been moved out into the transmitter room because Des had grown to love the city-station concept of panel operators. Whenever Des was on the air, someone sat outside and played the transcriptions and the music - and, with the shouted warning "Coming UP!", switched on the microphone as well.
It became the regular routine.
That was fine at nighttime, but during the day, all broadcasts had to be done from the control room, because we didn't have enough people to provide a panel operator as well as an announcer. The control room also answered to the name Transmitter room, for that was where the hundred-watt transmitter lived.
2LT started in 1939, just before World War Two began, and I joined the staff when it was just four years old. The transmitting mast in the back paddock bore testimony to the haste with which it was installed just four years previously - half-way through the installation process it crashed to the ground, and from that time on, it looked like the back leg of a dog, upended, gigantic, pointing to some upended tree.
Security was tighter than at Kempsey for several reasons. First, Lithgow was a production centre for small arms, and as such might be considered a likely target if the enemy could find it. It was also a centre for coal production.
Second, for some technical reason, 2LT could be heard out at sea, even though it sent out a paltry hundred watts, so it was considered that any spy might be able to send a message. How that humble hundred watts got so far out of its way was a mystery - a fluke of nature. No announcements were broadcast that did not have the manager's approval, and the local news was personally selected by the Managing Director.
The MD's name was Mr Taylor and he was also the managing editor of the Lithgow Mercury, which he pronounced as "Merkry", and the Mercury owned the station.
He would outline in thick blue pencil the items from the day's edition of the paper that were to be used. Sometimes there was lots, sometimes very little - so the length of the local news varied considerably with every broadcast.
He took the radio news very seriously. His routine every night was to take his favourite chair, switch on the radio, and listen carefully to his 6 o'clock local news. If anything untoward happened, we would know about it as soon as he could get to the telephone.
I did not know that miner's showers were required to be of a specific temperature. I did know that the hot water in the showers at the Small Arms Factory, where I lived, varied from scalding to South Pole frigid, and I presumed that to be the way of life of the common miner as well.
One night, the lead story in the local news was about the temperature of the showers at one of the local collieries. I had not learned that it is always a good idea to know what you're going to have to read before you read it, so I read (without any knowledge of what I was getting into) that a group of miners was on strike because their bathroom water was one degree colder than it should have been. As I did so, I heard a guffaw from the next room.
It came from Keith, panel operator or junior technician as the occasion demanded, and he thought it was very funny. Instantly I agreed with him. I laughed too, and had extreme difficulty completing the local news.
When someone starts laughing in a radio studio, it is hard to stop. Don't ask why - as far as I know, nobody knows.
Mr Taylor certainly did not know, and for whatever reason, this unwarranted hilarity in the middle of the Local News infuriated him. He rang the boss, then he rang the station and told me that I could go tomorrow, manpower or not. Anyone who didn't understand the political implications of the temperature of miner's shower water was no use to the station.
Bruce Carty Collection
I spent a miserable night. I could see myself back with Rex and being called the Chief Gumnut for the duration - and maybe for longer than that. Even worse, I might have done my dash in radio and be forced into a life of banking.
By next morning, Mr Taylor had had second thoughts. The solution was to put me on the breakfast session where there was never any local news to muck about with.
Around that time, we got a second engineer who said he had some announcing experience. Our engineer, Sid Emerton, was somewhat cynical about the new character, who had been a radio operator on board merchant ships, been dunked three times as the result of enemy action and was probably looking for a quieter and less watery existence.
Sid was happy to have him announce.
Later in life, that second engineer became known as a practical joker of some renown, but we knew him as a genius who could make almost anything work, write copy, play comedian. We even accepted his favourite recreation - lying prone in the corner of the studio, invisible from the outside, while transcriptions of fifteen minutes or more were going to air, and rising again in time to reach the microphone as the closing music swelled up and out.
His name was Graham Connolly, later to become one of the ABC's star newsreaders.
Graham built a disc recorder from some junk that was lying around the station and managed to buy some soft acetate recording disc blanks. He then commandeered the radiogram record player to provide him with a recording turntable and proceeded to record anything his heart desired. Good practice as it turned out. He recorded and issued the first "microgroove" recording ever made in Australia later on.
I was in seventh heaven because I could listen back to what I had just done on the air - but at a price. If he used a blank for me, Graham would have to charge the cost of that blank. Both our salaries were low.
Inspiration came as the result of drinking Milo, a product well and truly advertised on the station. We had an ad for Milo, to be read live, four or five times a day. And they were long ads too - a hundred words. All of this advertising got to Graham - he went out and bought some of it. At odd times of day, he would invite people to share his favourite drink, although he did not get many takers.
He lived in the room next to me at the hostel, and one night I heard him come in around eleven o'clock and remembered that I had a message for him. I knocked on his door, and he opened it with a mug in one hand and a can of Milo in the other.
"Come and have some Milo", he said. Generous to a fault.
To mix this nourishing drink, we needed some hot water, so we went to the communal bathroom at the end of the hostel hut. But - shame! - it was between factory shifts, a traditional time for the water to be at its luke coldest.
"Never mind", said Graham, and proceeded to mix Milo and powdered milk in generous quantities in both our mugs, topping them off with the rapidly cooling water.
"Down the hatch!" he cried.
I don't wish to criticise Mr Nestle's product, nor the equally famous brand of powdered milk used in this experiment, or even the hospitality offered by Graham, but I have to admit that the result left much to be desired. To my way of thinking, it was impossible to drink. But Graham loved it
"There's nothing like it", he volunteered, and I found myself able to agree with him on that score at least.
The story got around the station the next day, and Sid, who played piano and sang in addition to engineering, wrote a song about it. He called it "The Milo Song", and he sang it to everyone on the staff during the lunch break.
From that time on, only one person could read a Milo ad with any conviction. Graham had no trouble, but everyone else broke into hearty laughter before they got half way through.
The return of this laughing disease caused the managing director some concern.
"I'm blowed if I can see what's so all-fired funny about Milo", Mr Taylor growled. "The sooner this nonsense stops, the sooner we can all get back to serious matters".
When I first arrived in Lithgow, there was no accommodation available anywhere. As a factory town totally involved in the war effort, all available rooms were occupied, and you had to wait your turn in the queue.
"You'd better come home to my place", Des told me when he got back to the station after his sales calls on that first Saturday. "I'll pick you up after the Dance broadcast".
It turned out that the station broadcast an hour and a half of the Biggest Dance in the West, which took place in the main pavilion at the showground every Saturday night. Des compered the broadcast himself and then came back to the station for me.
During the interim, I had broadcast several birthday calls in order to establish my credentials as a 2LT announcer and hopefully stymie any action the Manpower authorities may have had in mind.
The Manager's house had two bedrooms and a sleep-out. When I walked into the lounge room, I met half the staff. All the imports were living there.
Des had arrived in Lithgow only a month or so before, called to take over in an emergency when the then staff all left around the same time, using somewhat the same strategy I had thought was my own invention.
He quickly found a new engineer, and Sid and his new wife were waiting on a flat that had been promised to them. Roger, the chief announcer, was also there, and then there was Mary, who had come up from Sydney to fix up the record library. Des's wife looked at me as though I was the last thing she wanted to see, but what she said was "I hope you don't mind sleeping with our baby".
The baby was bedded down in a bassinette in the sleep-out, a glassed in side verandah, and there was a camp stretcher that Des had picked up during his sales calls that day that was to serve as my bed.
Mrs Des not only tolerated all these strangers in her home, but cooked and cleaned and entertained as well.
Sid and his wife got their flat quickly. It turned out to be located at the back of the paddock in which the transmitter mast stood. This flat was part of the Lithgow Woollen Mills centre so quite a few people lived there. A path through the 2LT transmitter paddock was used by the locals as a short cut to the Great Western Highway, so Sid could make it to the station in five minutes easily, or, in an emergency, in about thirty seconds flat.
That is, provided he knew about the emergency. There was a shortage of telephones, so the rule was that he had to be listening at all times he was away from the station so we could send him a subtle message.
Such an emergency soon happened.
It was the lunch hour, and I was broadcasting from the transmitter room. The office girl on duty walked in and told me that the Radio Inspector was there.
We both knew that the Radio Inspector was A Very Important and Powerful Person. We also knew that the rule was that there must be an engineer on duty at all times when the transmitter was in operation. But Sid was home having lunch.
I stepped out and met the Great Man. I thought a near approach to the truth was needed, so I told him that Sid had just slipped out for a minute and would be back in a flash. The Radio Inspector gave me a look that said, "He'd better be", and I went back to my broadcasting.
2LT had a dedicated test record, unlike 2KA which played anything the engineer felt like, so long as it was a brass band. Our test record could be played at any other time however as a message to Sid that he had to fast track himself to the station, no matter what might have to be interrupted.
Appropriately, the record was titled "I Want to be Snappy" and was a selection of popular tunes played on a theatre organ. It was a double-sided rendition on a ten inch "His Master's Voice" disc of some "get up and go" music.
Nonchalantly, I hoped. I introduced the next record - "I Want to be Snappy". I tried to make it sound casual.
I moved to the window at the back of the building, confident that Sid would be racing through the back paddock.
I waited for two long minutes, went back to the panel, and played the second side. Again, I stationed myself by the window, and again there was no indication of life at the end of the paddock.
I decided on one last try. The record came to an end. I said that it was very enjoyable, and that we would hear some of it again. And played the first side once more.
"Listen son", said the Radio Inspector as he joined me at the window, "I think you'd better get on with it. If he hasn't got the message by now, he never will".
By next morning, Mr Taylor had had second thoughts. The solution was to put me on the breakfast session where there was never any local news to muck about with.
Around that time, we got a second engineer who said he had some announcing experience. Our engineer, Sid Emerton, was somewhat cynical about the new character, who had been a radio operator on board merchant ships, been dunked three times as the result of enemy action and was probably looking for a quieter and less watery existence.
Sid was happy to have him announce.
Later in life, that second engineer became known as a practical joker of some renown, but we knew him as a genius who could make almost anything work, write copy, play comedian. We even accepted his favourite recreation - lying prone in the corner of the studio, invisible from the outside, while transcriptions of fifteen minutes or more were going to air, and rising again in time to reach the microphone as the closing music swelled up and out.
His name was Graham Connolly, later to become one of the ABC's star newsreaders.
Graham built a disc recorder from some junk that was lying around the station and managed to buy some soft acetate recording disc blanks. He then commandeered the radiogram record player to provide him with a recording turntable and proceeded to record anything his heart desired. Good practice as it turned out. He recorded and issued the first "microgroove" recording ever made in Australia later on.
I was in seventh heaven because I could listen back to what I had just done on the air - but at a price. If he used a blank for me, Graham would have to charge the cost of that blank. Both our salaries were low.
Inspiration came as the result of drinking Milo, a product well and truly advertised on the station. We had an ad for Milo, to be read live, four or five times a day. And they were long ads too - a hundred words. All of this advertising got to Graham - he went out and bought some of it. At odd times of day, he would invite people to share his favourite drink, although he did not get many takers.
He lived in the room next to me at the hostel, and one night I heard him come in around eleven o'clock and remembered that I had a message for him. I knocked on his door, and he opened it with a mug in one hand and a can of Milo in the other.
"Come and have some Milo", he said. Generous to a fault.
To mix this nourishing drink, we needed some hot water, so we went to the communal bathroom at the end of the hostel hut. But - shame! - it was between factory shifts, a traditional time for the water to be at its luke coldest.
"Never mind", said Graham, and proceeded to mix Milo and powdered milk in generous quantities in both our mugs, topping them off with the rapidly cooling water.
"Down the hatch!" he cried.
I don't wish to criticise Mr Nestle's product, nor the equally famous brand of powdered milk used in this experiment, or even the hospitality offered by Graham, but I have to admit that the result left much to be desired. To my way of thinking, it was impossible to drink. But Graham loved it
"There's nothing like it", he volunteered, and I found myself able to agree with him on that score at least.
The story got around the station the next day, and Sid, who played piano and sang in addition to engineering, wrote a song about it. He called it "The Milo Song", and he sang it to everyone on the staff during the lunch break.
From that time on, only one person could read a Milo ad with any conviction. Graham had no trouble, but everyone else broke into hearty laughter before they got half way through.
The return of this laughing disease caused the managing director some concern.
"I'm blowed if I can see what's so all-fired funny about Milo", Mr Taylor growled. "The sooner this nonsense stops, the sooner we can all get back to serious matters".
When I first arrived in Lithgow, there was no accommodation available anywhere. As a factory town totally involved in the war effort, all available rooms were occupied, and you had to wait your turn in the queue.
"You'd better come home to my place", Des told me when he got back to the station after his sales calls on that first Saturday. "I'll pick you up after the Dance broadcast".
It turned out that the station broadcast an hour and a half of the Biggest Dance in the West, which took place in the main pavilion at the showground every Saturday night. Des compered the broadcast himself and then came back to the station for me.
During the interim, I had broadcast several birthday calls in order to establish my credentials as a 2LT announcer and hopefully stymie any action the Manpower authorities may have had in mind.
The Manager's house had two bedrooms and a sleep-out. When I walked into the lounge room, I met half the staff. All the imports were living there.
Des had arrived in Lithgow only a month or so before, called to take over in an emergency when the then staff all left around the same time, using somewhat the same strategy I had thought was my own invention.
He quickly found a new engineer, and Sid and his new wife were waiting on a flat that had been promised to them. Roger, the chief announcer, was also there, and then there was Mary, who had come up from Sydney to fix up the record library. Des's wife looked at me as though I was the last thing she wanted to see, but what she said was "I hope you don't mind sleeping with our baby".
The baby was bedded down in a bassinette in the sleep-out, a glassed in side verandah, and there was a camp stretcher that Des had picked up during his sales calls that day that was to serve as my bed.
Mrs Des not only tolerated all these strangers in her home, but cooked and cleaned and entertained as well.
Sid and his wife got their flat quickly. It turned out to be located at the back of the paddock in which the transmitter mast stood. This flat was part of the Lithgow Woollen Mills centre so quite a few people lived there. A path through the 2LT transmitter paddock was used by the locals as a short cut to the Great Western Highway, so Sid could make it to the station in five minutes easily, or, in an emergency, in about thirty seconds flat.
That is, provided he knew about the emergency. There was a shortage of telephones, so the rule was that he had to be listening at all times he was away from the station so we could send him a subtle message.
Such an emergency soon happened.
It was the lunch hour, and I was broadcasting from the transmitter room. The office girl on duty walked in and told me that the Radio Inspector was there.
We both knew that the Radio Inspector was A Very Important and Powerful Person. We also knew that the rule was that there must be an engineer on duty at all times when the transmitter was in operation. But Sid was home having lunch.
I stepped out and met the Great Man. I thought a near approach to the truth was needed, so I told him that Sid had just slipped out for a minute and would be back in a flash. The Radio Inspector gave me a look that said, "He'd better be", and I went back to my broadcasting.
2LT had a dedicated test record, unlike 2KA which played anything the engineer felt like, so long as it was a brass band. Our test record could be played at any other time however as a message to Sid that he had to fast track himself to the station, no matter what might have to be interrupted.
Appropriately, the record was titled "I Want to be Snappy" and was a selection of popular tunes played on a theatre organ. It was a double-sided rendition on a ten inch "His Master's Voice" disc of some "get up and go" music.
Nonchalantly, I hoped. I introduced the next record - "I Want to be Snappy". I tried to make it sound casual.
I moved to the window at the back of the building, confident that Sid would be racing through the back paddock.
I waited for two long minutes, went back to the panel, and played the second side. Again, I stationed myself by the window, and again there was no indication of life at the end of the paddock.
I decided on one last try. The record came to an end. I said that it was very enjoyable, and that we would hear some of it again. And played the first side once more.
"Listen son", said the Radio Inspector as he joined me at the window, "I think you'd better get on with it. If he hasn't got the message by now, he never will".
Chapter Eight
Wireless Weekly September 1942
"Ada", said Elsie, "did you hear about poor Mrs Jones?"
Ada and Elsie was the comedy team that brightened listeners lives all over Australia in "Calling the Stars", the Colgate Tuesday night program. They were in Lithgow to appear in a show, organised by the radio station. It was a way of raising funds to keep the place going. The management took over the Theatre Royal for a Friday night, did a package deal with a Sydney producer, and made lots of money. The other major source of funds was birthday calls at two-and-sixpence a go.
"What about poor Mrs Jones?" asked Ada after a short pause.
"She fell flat on her face in the middle of Main Street", said Elsie.
"Why, how did that happen?" asked Ada.
"Well, the wind stopped, didn't it?" was the answer.
It brought a roar from the thousand people in the Theatre Royal, for Lithgow deserves the title Windy City if ever a place did.
Main Street was a point of focus for the city, and fairly sheltered as it dog-legged its way around the shops, but try moving out a couple of kilometres west, where the radio station was, and a Main Street breeze became a Force Ten gale.
Good shelter was a prime consideration, and not just in Main Street.
In its short three or four years of existence, 2LT had established several "traditions". One of them was the right of the new-chum announcers and technicians to advertise free of charge for accommodation.
As a result of the efficacy of radio advertising, I ended up on the doorstep of Byron family, just Mrs and Mr really, who lived a few hundred yards up the road from the station. It looked to be very convenient for a breakfast announcer on cold winter mornings.
Full board was one pound ten shillings a week.
They gave me the use of their front bedroom, a far cry in terms of comfort and style from anything I had ever seen in my life before. The water jug was filled each day so I could wash my face and hands in the room itself without disturbing the bathroom. Obviously they had vacated the front bedroom themselves in order to give a stunning radio personality his rightful degree of comfort and respect. Or perhaps, because they needed the money.
I knew I had made a seriously wrong decision at the first meal, which we all shared.
A bowl of onions graced the centre of the table, sitting in a pool of vinegar, and Mr Byron advised me that this vegetable, or whatever it was, was essential to the well-being of all. That's why onions would be on the menu for all meals.
"Eat hearty", he advised. I was familiar with the expression because my father used it a lot, but he was a man who had an appreciation of food of all kinds, having sailed to far-flung parts of the world and fought in two major wars. He "ate hearty" no matter what was on the menu. He would not have thought, however, of the humble raw onion as the shining star of any menu.
There was more to eat than the common or garden onion, of course. But I felt that four eyes were fixed on me each time I sat at the table, to see that the boarder took a full share of the health-giving onion.
They were nice people, but a change had to happen.
It took some work on my part to get myself a bed at the Small Arms factory hostel. This was a place where workers essential to the war effort might get full board, a private room, showers at the end of each hut, all mod cons for about two pounds a week.
In an effort to quieten me, and my constant enquiries about accommodation, the manager looked up his book of directions, since all else had failed, and found that people who worked in radio were in a "reserved": occupation, and were regarded as important, if not essential, to the war effort. I was entitled to accommodation at the Hostel if there was a room available.
Privately, I couldn't see that playing records and laughing at Milo ads constituted much of an offering to the war effort (although we did stage concerts at the Army camp at Marangaroo and the Factory quite often).
With the key to the room came a heavy crockery mug and a knife, fork and spoon. These were to be guarded with my life, as they could not be replaced.
Roger, the chief announcer, also got himself a room there, but he stayed only for a short time as he was about to marry, and was busy looking for a place to begin wedded bliss. I had told him about the onions and he opined that there'd be nothing as healthful as onions on the menu at the hostel.
He was right.
However, rabbits were in plentiful supply, since the countryside was infested with them, and the general consensus was that each evening, the army sent out a battalion to cut down the rabbit population, and so provide us with the next day's meal.
Rabbit came in a variety of prescriptions. Baked, stewed, braised, hot and cold, with vegetables and without vegetables.
The blackboard menu never changed in essentials - "rabbit" was there permanently. Only the adjective varied.
There was general disquiet at the hostel. The old chap who sat opposite me told me he'd been thinking of giving up going home on his days off, but his old woman always gave him a meal without rabbit. Eventually, the unions got involved, and threatened to call a halt at the Factory unless there was a change in the catering arrangements. We
didn't realise that the fellows in the Army camp were on the same healthy diet as we were and that complaining would not do them any damn good at all.
Management took note of the mood, and with some difficulty, was able to effect a change.
One morning we were faced with a freshly-painted blackboard, and printed indelibly, the word "barracuda". This tropical fish, we learned quite quickly, was a vicious denizen of the deep which attacked just about everything in the sea, including human beings. We thought it appropriate that it should end up on our plates. It came in one principal form - smoked. And even though the method of dealing with the smoked barracuda changed about as much as the rabbit, we accepted it gratefully for the next six months.
So, I believe, did the Army.
It surely was better fare than what was being served in Tobruk and the Pacific islands.
The food was better at the Sewells.
Margaret Sewell worked at 2LT, and took pity on the seventeen-year old who had to eat rabbit/barracuda for every meal. She invited me to visit one Sunday afternoon, and to stay for "tea". It became a regular event, even if a bowl of onions appeared on the menu from time to time.
She and her sister looked after their father. He was a hearty old retired miner, who rarely moved from his place in front of the kitchen stove, occasionally leaning forward to catch a flame on a piece of rolled-up newspaper to re-kindle his pipe. He loved to tell stories which, while based on fact, had severe extensions of the truth throughout. He would end each story with the line "What do you think of that?" and I would respond "I don't believe it".
This would encourage him to take greater liberties with the truth in order to convince me.
I thought them all particularly old, which was wrong of me and not very gallant - but then they treated me as someone who was especially young and in need of protection. They were, of course, absolutely right.
If they had had room in their small cottage, they would have had me living there.
Sunday evening "tea" was most often a baked dinner, with Margaret's sister insisting that the meat was rabbit. They refused to believe the story of the barracuda, believing that no such animal existed.
Lithgow was the centre of their world, and it must have been a terrible wrench for them when Margaret was offered a job at Gunnedah, and as a family, they all moved there in the 1950's, long after I had left the town.
There was one day in the week when my breakfast did not consist of the standard hostel fare. Starting at seven o'clock on Sunday mornings, I missed the more relaxed hostel weekend breakfast time, but found that a local corner shop had a great stock of Mr Gartrell White's fruit cake, packaged in quarter-pound slabs.
It sufficed, and the variety sparked my appetite for rabbit or barracuda anew.
After Graham arrived at the station, he and I took to taking our Sunday lunch at a restaurant in the town. Not many establishments were open on Sundays, so this place did a roaring trade.
Food rationing was in full flight, but if a steak was available, you could get it in a restaurant without parting with your coupons. In fact, we didn't have the coupons. As fast as they were issued, they had to be handed in to the hostel as part contribution for the full meal service they provided.
Graham was older than me, and had travelled, having been overseas (courtesy of the war). Not only that - he had been to Bega. He was also extremely interested in the fair sex. This was more a mental activity than anything else. He could not get over how attractive the young ladies were who waited on the tables at the restaurant.
Sunday after Sunday he would comment on this. Sunday after Sunday he would exert all his charm. I thought that he had a face only a mother could truly love but his engaging personality often produced amazing results - anywhere else. But nothing worked in the cafe. It puzzled and provoked him. He worked harder and harder but they were totally impervious to his enticements.
One day, however, we found out the reason why none of them seemed interested in "a cup of coffee and a nice chat". While the Merkry did not print the item - it was, after all, in bad taste - the owner of the restaurant found himself in the local court on a charge of keeping a house of ill fame.
The restaurant, good as it was, was a cover for one of the most essential and lucrative businesses in any factory town in wartime - or any other time.
We did not visit the restaurant again after that, although we noted with some curiosity that it remained open and continued to trade without any noticeable decline in clientele.
Ada and Elsie was the comedy team that brightened listeners lives all over Australia in "Calling the Stars", the Colgate Tuesday night program. They were in Lithgow to appear in a show, organised by the radio station. It was a way of raising funds to keep the place going. The management took over the Theatre Royal for a Friday night, did a package deal with a Sydney producer, and made lots of money. The other major source of funds was birthday calls at two-and-sixpence a go.
"What about poor Mrs Jones?" asked Ada after a short pause.
"She fell flat on her face in the middle of Main Street", said Elsie.
"Why, how did that happen?" asked Ada.
"Well, the wind stopped, didn't it?" was the answer.
It brought a roar from the thousand people in the Theatre Royal, for Lithgow deserves the title Windy City if ever a place did.
Main Street was a point of focus for the city, and fairly sheltered as it dog-legged its way around the shops, but try moving out a couple of kilometres west, where the radio station was, and a Main Street breeze became a Force Ten gale.
Good shelter was a prime consideration, and not just in Main Street.
In its short three or four years of existence, 2LT had established several "traditions". One of them was the right of the new-chum announcers and technicians to advertise free of charge for accommodation.
As a result of the efficacy of radio advertising, I ended up on the doorstep of Byron family, just Mrs and Mr really, who lived a few hundred yards up the road from the station. It looked to be very convenient for a breakfast announcer on cold winter mornings.
Full board was one pound ten shillings a week.
They gave me the use of their front bedroom, a far cry in terms of comfort and style from anything I had ever seen in my life before. The water jug was filled each day so I could wash my face and hands in the room itself without disturbing the bathroom. Obviously they had vacated the front bedroom themselves in order to give a stunning radio personality his rightful degree of comfort and respect. Or perhaps, because they needed the money.
I knew I had made a seriously wrong decision at the first meal, which we all shared.
A bowl of onions graced the centre of the table, sitting in a pool of vinegar, and Mr Byron advised me that this vegetable, or whatever it was, was essential to the well-being of all. That's why onions would be on the menu for all meals.
"Eat hearty", he advised. I was familiar with the expression because my father used it a lot, but he was a man who had an appreciation of food of all kinds, having sailed to far-flung parts of the world and fought in two major wars. He "ate hearty" no matter what was on the menu. He would not have thought, however, of the humble raw onion as the shining star of any menu.
There was more to eat than the common or garden onion, of course. But I felt that four eyes were fixed on me each time I sat at the table, to see that the boarder took a full share of the health-giving onion.
They were nice people, but a change had to happen.
It took some work on my part to get myself a bed at the Small Arms factory hostel. This was a place where workers essential to the war effort might get full board, a private room, showers at the end of each hut, all mod cons for about two pounds a week.
In an effort to quieten me, and my constant enquiries about accommodation, the manager looked up his book of directions, since all else had failed, and found that people who worked in radio were in a "reserved": occupation, and were regarded as important, if not essential, to the war effort. I was entitled to accommodation at the Hostel if there was a room available.
Privately, I couldn't see that playing records and laughing at Milo ads constituted much of an offering to the war effort (although we did stage concerts at the Army camp at Marangaroo and the Factory quite often).
With the key to the room came a heavy crockery mug and a knife, fork and spoon. These were to be guarded with my life, as they could not be replaced.
Roger, the chief announcer, also got himself a room there, but he stayed only for a short time as he was about to marry, and was busy looking for a place to begin wedded bliss. I had told him about the onions and he opined that there'd be nothing as healthful as onions on the menu at the hostel.
He was right.
However, rabbits were in plentiful supply, since the countryside was infested with them, and the general consensus was that each evening, the army sent out a battalion to cut down the rabbit population, and so provide us with the next day's meal.
Rabbit came in a variety of prescriptions. Baked, stewed, braised, hot and cold, with vegetables and without vegetables.
The blackboard menu never changed in essentials - "rabbit" was there permanently. Only the adjective varied.
There was general disquiet at the hostel. The old chap who sat opposite me told me he'd been thinking of giving up going home on his days off, but his old woman always gave him a meal without rabbit. Eventually, the unions got involved, and threatened to call a halt at the Factory unless there was a change in the catering arrangements. We
didn't realise that the fellows in the Army camp were on the same healthy diet as we were and that complaining would not do them any damn good at all.
Management took note of the mood, and with some difficulty, was able to effect a change.
One morning we were faced with a freshly-painted blackboard, and printed indelibly, the word "barracuda". This tropical fish, we learned quite quickly, was a vicious denizen of the deep which attacked just about everything in the sea, including human beings. We thought it appropriate that it should end up on our plates. It came in one principal form - smoked. And even though the method of dealing with the smoked barracuda changed about as much as the rabbit, we accepted it gratefully for the next six months.
So, I believe, did the Army.
It surely was better fare than what was being served in Tobruk and the Pacific islands.
The food was better at the Sewells.
Margaret Sewell worked at 2LT, and took pity on the seventeen-year old who had to eat rabbit/barracuda for every meal. She invited me to visit one Sunday afternoon, and to stay for "tea". It became a regular event, even if a bowl of onions appeared on the menu from time to time.
She and her sister looked after their father. He was a hearty old retired miner, who rarely moved from his place in front of the kitchen stove, occasionally leaning forward to catch a flame on a piece of rolled-up newspaper to re-kindle his pipe. He loved to tell stories which, while based on fact, had severe extensions of the truth throughout. He would end each story with the line "What do you think of that?" and I would respond "I don't believe it".
This would encourage him to take greater liberties with the truth in order to convince me.
I thought them all particularly old, which was wrong of me and not very gallant - but then they treated me as someone who was especially young and in need of protection. They were, of course, absolutely right.
If they had had room in their small cottage, they would have had me living there.
Sunday evening "tea" was most often a baked dinner, with Margaret's sister insisting that the meat was rabbit. They refused to believe the story of the barracuda, believing that no such animal existed.
Lithgow was the centre of their world, and it must have been a terrible wrench for them when Margaret was offered a job at Gunnedah, and as a family, they all moved there in the 1950's, long after I had left the town.
There was one day in the week when my breakfast did not consist of the standard hostel fare. Starting at seven o'clock on Sunday mornings, I missed the more relaxed hostel weekend breakfast time, but found that a local corner shop had a great stock of Mr Gartrell White's fruit cake, packaged in quarter-pound slabs.
It sufficed, and the variety sparked my appetite for rabbit or barracuda anew.
After Graham arrived at the station, he and I took to taking our Sunday lunch at a restaurant in the town. Not many establishments were open on Sundays, so this place did a roaring trade.
Food rationing was in full flight, but if a steak was available, you could get it in a restaurant without parting with your coupons. In fact, we didn't have the coupons. As fast as they were issued, they had to be handed in to the hostel as part contribution for the full meal service they provided.
Graham was older than me, and had travelled, having been overseas (courtesy of the war). Not only that - he had been to Bega. He was also extremely interested in the fair sex. This was more a mental activity than anything else. He could not get over how attractive the young ladies were who waited on the tables at the restaurant.
Sunday after Sunday he would comment on this. Sunday after Sunday he would exert all his charm. I thought that he had a face only a mother could truly love but his engaging personality often produced amazing results - anywhere else. But nothing worked in the cafe. It puzzled and provoked him. He worked harder and harder but they were totally impervious to his enticements.
One day, however, we found out the reason why none of them seemed interested in "a cup of coffee and a nice chat". While the Merkry did not print the item - it was, after all, in bad taste - the owner of the restaurant found himself in the local court on a charge of keeping a house of ill fame.
The restaurant, good as it was, was a cover for one of the most essential and lucrative businesses in any factory town in wartime - or any other time.
We did not visit the restaurant again after that, although we noted with some curiosity that it remained open and continued to trade without any noticeable decline in clientele.
Chapter Nine
Wireless Weekly January 1937
"Listen to you", Roger said. He was manager now, having seen Des depart. "You sound more like Bryson Taylor every day".
I was about to enter my third year in radio. Time to write a book, get out and find a good daytime job, or get serious about it.
I had decided to try the serious tack. The first move obviously, was to learn something about the job I'd been doing for the past two years.
There were no "schools" where you could learn, but one was about to open. Bryson Taylor was an ABC personality who had had some commercial experience (including 2GZ, as it happened) but had left 2FC and 2BL to try his luck in the real world, teaching voice production. He was one of the few people who believed there was money to be made out of training people off the job.
He advertised in the ABC Weekly, which had become the Bible for all radio types, no matter where they worked. I wrote to him.
I must have been the first person who responded to the ad, because he wrote back by return, and a week later I turned up for my first lesson.
I actually got a day off in Lithgow each week. Usually I spent it going back to the Blue Mountains family home so the washing could be done by someone more talented in that area than me. But my mother kindly suggested that I could post it to her.
The arrangement was that I should go to Sydney, have my lesson, catch the train back to the family home, have dinner and take the later train on to Lithgow, taking with me the freshly washed, dried and ironed clothing.
"Brother Crozier!" exclaimed Bryson as he opened the door to his studio in Ash Street Sydney. "You're here, then".
He must have had some idea that I might have second thoughts. He was right, of course. I was worried that the two guinea fee might well break me, having to pay board at the hostel, pay off my bicycle at two shillings a week, and pay the train fares amounting to at least ten shillings each Tuesday. All out of my five pounds.
Bryson's studio was on the second floor of an old building, in which the lift was operated by a man pulling a cord, similar to many lifts in Sydney at that time. The studio was dim and dark, which helped to hide the fact that apart from a piano, there was very little else in the room save a couple of chairs.
He tested me for my musical ability by striking a note on the piano and asking me to sing it. Difficult for someone who is not tone deaf to understand, I know, but to me singing anything was an impossibility.
Undaunted, he proceeded to the first lesson.
I got the feeling we were both learning.
I wondered whether he would have carried on after the musical item was cancelled had he had a whole string of applicants waiting for a place.
Over some weeks, the lessons became less daunting for both of us, and I began to realise there was more to broadcasting than sitting at a microphone and saying whatever you liked in any way you liked.
He was the first really professional radio man I ever met. He not only showed me what could be done, he tried to point my career in the right direction. Right after my regular lesson each week, he had a regular engagement back at the ABC to take part in live school broadcasts, and he began to take me along with him. The studios were in Forbes Street in the basement of a building that hadn't been built - underground, presumably, in case of air raids for they would have been as deep as an air raid shelter.
Eventually he suggested that I apply for a position at the ABC. I told him I'd tried once before and had received my first terse note from the manager which told me that I would never be offered a position with them.
Bryson said that didn't count. I had been learning from him, and that made the difference.
It was certainly different from the audition I had done at age sixteen. This one was a much advanced version.
Part of my coaching had included pronunciation of the names of composers, world leaders, cities, and Australian country towns. I managed that list well enough, and felt that Bryson was right, after all. Maybe I was star ABC material.
Then a disembodied voice boomed into the studio.
"Open the sealed section", it said.
I hadn't noticed there was one, but I found it and started reading. It appeared that I was broadcasting from the Sydney Town Hall on the occasion of a concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
There was a list of the works to be performed. A piece of cake. Bryson had been drumming pronunciations of composers and their works into me for weeks. I was gaining confidence by the minute.
Suddenly there was an interruption.
The disembodied voice boomed through a loudspeaker.
"The conductor has been delayed. Please keep talking until he arrives..."
That audition resulted in my second terse letter from the ABC manager.
The man was obviously prescient - I have never worked for the ABC - although there was one occasion when things went wrong on one of their outside broadcasts, and they had to take the commercial version. So I did get to appear on the ABC, however fleetingly.
Bryson was disappointed at my failure.
"Brother Crozier", he said, "there are other opportunities. Nil desperandum!"
There came a time when the Tuesday lessons had to finish, and we parted company. I had learned all that he could teach me at that time.
During my studies with him, Bryson had added some equipment and the studio looked more like some place where one could learn something about radio announcing. I take pride that some of that was supplied from my regular two guinea fee.
I knew now that one stage of my career would be behind the microphone. I now had the skills to move up to a bigger station, and perhaps step from there to another - and from there to - who knew where?
Back in Lithgow, Roger decided to take a holiday and get married. Mr Taylor surprised everyone but me by demonstrating that he had a sense of humour. He appointed me Acting Manager for two weeks.
The major part of that management function entailed picking him up in the station car each morning, driving him to work, returning at lunchtime to take him home, getting him back to the office at 2, and finally returning him to his home at 5 o'clock. The trips included picking up the mail, the pre-marked paper for the Local News, and a range of other essential executive activities.
Here was a dilemma. I had just started to think about advancing my career as an announcer, but this new responsibility put some doubt in my mind. Should I concentrate on air-work, or should I look for a chance at management?
Fortunately for the Australian commercial radio industry, fate took a hand and ensured that I stayed out of management for the foreseeable future. I was eighteen.
Bryson took an engagement as an adjudicator at an Eisteddfod at Lismore on the NSW Norh Coast and within a day or so of his arrival there I received a telegram telling me to contact the manager of the local radio station immediately, without fail, Brother Crozier. They wanted an announcer. Better still, he assured me, they wanted me!
I needed very little urging. I liked dirty, freezing, windy, hailing, snowing Lithgow, sizzling hot, humid, slow old Lithgow. I liked it, because the people there had taken me to their hearts and I had eaten lots of their food for nothing. But stardom called.
I answered with a telegram. "I'm your man! I'm coming!"
I was about to enter my third year in radio. Time to write a book, get out and find a good daytime job, or get serious about it.
I had decided to try the serious tack. The first move obviously, was to learn something about the job I'd been doing for the past two years.
There were no "schools" where you could learn, but one was about to open. Bryson Taylor was an ABC personality who had had some commercial experience (including 2GZ, as it happened) but had left 2FC and 2BL to try his luck in the real world, teaching voice production. He was one of the few people who believed there was money to be made out of training people off the job.
He advertised in the ABC Weekly, which had become the Bible for all radio types, no matter where they worked. I wrote to him.
I must have been the first person who responded to the ad, because he wrote back by return, and a week later I turned up for my first lesson.
I actually got a day off in Lithgow each week. Usually I spent it going back to the Blue Mountains family home so the washing could be done by someone more talented in that area than me. But my mother kindly suggested that I could post it to her.
The arrangement was that I should go to Sydney, have my lesson, catch the train back to the family home, have dinner and take the later train on to Lithgow, taking with me the freshly washed, dried and ironed clothing.
"Brother Crozier!" exclaimed Bryson as he opened the door to his studio in Ash Street Sydney. "You're here, then".
He must have had some idea that I might have second thoughts. He was right, of course. I was worried that the two guinea fee might well break me, having to pay board at the hostel, pay off my bicycle at two shillings a week, and pay the train fares amounting to at least ten shillings each Tuesday. All out of my five pounds.
Bryson's studio was on the second floor of an old building, in which the lift was operated by a man pulling a cord, similar to many lifts in Sydney at that time. The studio was dim and dark, which helped to hide the fact that apart from a piano, there was very little else in the room save a couple of chairs.
He tested me for my musical ability by striking a note on the piano and asking me to sing it. Difficult for someone who is not tone deaf to understand, I know, but to me singing anything was an impossibility.
Undaunted, he proceeded to the first lesson.
I got the feeling we were both learning.
I wondered whether he would have carried on after the musical item was cancelled had he had a whole string of applicants waiting for a place.
Over some weeks, the lessons became less daunting for both of us, and I began to realise there was more to broadcasting than sitting at a microphone and saying whatever you liked in any way you liked.
He was the first really professional radio man I ever met. He not only showed me what could be done, he tried to point my career in the right direction. Right after my regular lesson each week, he had a regular engagement back at the ABC to take part in live school broadcasts, and he began to take me along with him. The studios were in Forbes Street in the basement of a building that hadn't been built - underground, presumably, in case of air raids for they would have been as deep as an air raid shelter.
Eventually he suggested that I apply for a position at the ABC. I told him I'd tried once before and had received my first terse note from the manager which told me that I would never be offered a position with them.
Bryson said that didn't count. I had been learning from him, and that made the difference.
It was certainly different from the audition I had done at age sixteen. This one was a much advanced version.
Part of my coaching had included pronunciation of the names of composers, world leaders, cities, and Australian country towns. I managed that list well enough, and felt that Bryson was right, after all. Maybe I was star ABC material.
Then a disembodied voice boomed into the studio.
"Open the sealed section", it said.
I hadn't noticed there was one, but I found it and started reading. It appeared that I was broadcasting from the Sydney Town Hall on the occasion of a concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
There was a list of the works to be performed. A piece of cake. Bryson had been drumming pronunciations of composers and their works into me for weeks. I was gaining confidence by the minute.
Suddenly there was an interruption.
The disembodied voice boomed through a loudspeaker.
"The conductor has been delayed. Please keep talking until he arrives..."
That audition resulted in my second terse letter from the ABC manager.
The man was obviously prescient - I have never worked for the ABC - although there was one occasion when things went wrong on one of their outside broadcasts, and they had to take the commercial version. So I did get to appear on the ABC, however fleetingly.
Bryson was disappointed at my failure.
"Brother Crozier", he said, "there are other opportunities. Nil desperandum!"
There came a time when the Tuesday lessons had to finish, and we parted company. I had learned all that he could teach me at that time.
During my studies with him, Bryson had added some equipment and the studio looked more like some place where one could learn something about radio announcing. I take pride that some of that was supplied from my regular two guinea fee.
I knew now that one stage of my career would be behind the microphone. I now had the skills to move up to a bigger station, and perhaps step from there to another - and from there to - who knew where?
Back in Lithgow, Roger decided to take a holiday and get married. Mr Taylor surprised everyone but me by demonstrating that he had a sense of humour. He appointed me Acting Manager for two weeks.
The major part of that management function entailed picking him up in the station car each morning, driving him to work, returning at lunchtime to take him home, getting him back to the office at 2, and finally returning him to his home at 5 o'clock. The trips included picking up the mail, the pre-marked paper for the Local News, and a range of other essential executive activities.
Here was a dilemma. I had just started to think about advancing my career as an announcer, but this new responsibility put some doubt in my mind. Should I concentrate on air-work, or should I look for a chance at management?
Fortunately for the Australian commercial radio industry, fate took a hand and ensured that I stayed out of management for the foreseeable future. I was eighteen.
Bryson took an engagement as an adjudicator at an Eisteddfod at Lismore on the NSW Norh Coast and within a day or so of his arrival there I received a telegram telling me to contact the manager of the local radio station immediately, without fail, Brother Crozier. They wanted an announcer. Better still, he assured me, they wanted me!
I needed very little urging. I liked dirty, freezing, windy, hailing, snowing Lithgow, sizzling hot, humid, slow old Lithgow. I liked it, because the people there had taken me to their hearts and I had eaten lots of their food for nothing. But stardom called.
I answered with a telegram. "I'm your man! I'm coming!"
Chapter Ten
Northern Star - September 1946
In February, Lismore, at the top end of NSW, can be pretty trying, even though you're concentrating on learning about your new and very professional radio station.
It's the humidity, you know.
I arrived one February Monday morning at nine o'clock, having achieved this precision timing by taking a holiday with my mother and sister at Brunswick Heads, then a little village further north, and catching an early morning train into the Big Smoke.
This time there was nobody to meet me, but being flush with cash from my final 2LT pay, I took a taxi from the railway to the radio station.
The sweat was pouring off me as I got out of the cab and took my first look at my new place of employment.
It looked anything but a radio station. For all the world it looked like a newspaper building. And indeed it was.
"The Northern Star" was writ large on the two-storey brick building, which also had an add-on building on its right-hand end. That part looked relatively new, I compared to the main structure. As an afterthought, this add-on had a neon sign that said "2LM".
The tradition had been that newspapers got licences to operate radio stations by fair means or foul. So the Northern Star newspaper owned 2LM, and you got into the station by going past the newspaper's front desk and climbing a very narrow staircase that turned sharp left halfway to the top.
The area at the top of the stairs was in perpetual darkness, being the dividing line between the haves - the newspaper people - and the have-nots who lived up to the right in the radio station..
The station itself had less space than 2LT, but much more than I remembered at 2KM. We had a studio. A big one. It was the only one. The beautifully styled timber announcing desk, with a modified control panel was at one end, the remainder of the room held a grand piano and a variety of stools and chairs.
Next to it was the Control Room. It was a very narrow room - space for one person in comfort, two if you wanted to be cosy. It held another panel, some equipment bays, and later a newfangled "Ferrograph" tape recorder and a disc recorder. There was always an operator there whose main task was to watch the level meter to make sure the volume was right. Sometimes when he got bored, he would ask to be allowed to play the transcriptions - those big, sixteen inch records that carried the dramas, the comedies, the variety shows - the main fare of evening radio.
It's the humidity, you know.
I arrived one February Monday morning at nine o'clock, having achieved this precision timing by taking a holiday with my mother and sister at Brunswick Heads, then a little village further north, and catching an early morning train into the Big Smoke.
This time there was nobody to meet me, but being flush with cash from my final 2LT pay, I took a taxi from the railway to the radio station.
The sweat was pouring off me as I got out of the cab and took my first look at my new place of employment.
It looked anything but a radio station. For all the world it looked like a newspaper building. And indeed it was.
"The Northern Star" was writ large on the two-storey brick building, which also had an add-on building on its right-hand end. That part looked relatively new, I compared to the main structure. As an afterthought, this add-on had a neon sign that said "2LM".
The tradition had been that newspapers got licences to operate radio stations by fair means or foul. So the Northern Star newspaper owned 2LM, and you got into the station by going past the newspaper's front desk and climbing a very narrow staircase that turned sharp left halfway to the top.
The area at the top of the stairs was in perpetual darkness, being the dividing line between the haves - the newspaper people - and the have-nots who lived up to the right in the radio station..
The station itself had less space than 2LT, but much more than I remembered at 2KM. We had a studio. A big one. It was the only one. The beautifully styled timber announcing desk, with a modified control panel was at one end, the remainder of the room held a grand piano and a variety of stools and chairs.
Next to it was the Control Room. It was a very narrow room - space for one person in comfort, two if you wanted to be cosy. It held another panel, some equipment bays, and later a newfangled "Ferrograph" tape recorder and a disc recorder. There was always an operator there whose main task was to watch the level meter to make sure the volume was right. Sometimes when he got bored, he would ask to be allowed to play the transcriptions - those big, sixteen inch records that carried the dramas, the comedies, the variety shows - the main fare of evening radio.
Norther Star - September 1936
Then there was a general office, and the manager's office.
The transmitter was separate, a couple of miles out of town at Goonellabah, and connected by landline. That was something new to get used to. It meant I didn't have to learn how to switch it on and off.
That was it. Except, of course, for the copy department, which lived in part of a huge room in the newspaper known as the "process engraving" department. That was where they turned photographs into printing plates. The place had the inspiring smell of photographer's chemicals - surely an ingredient in making sure the creative level was also high.
The copywriters were the announcers.
There were five of us. Peter le Brun, who had been a Stage Manager with J C Williamsons, had been there longest. His creative touch was always the same, depending on who the message was aimed at.
"Ladies!" he would start. And you knew right away this was for fashion goods or groceries.
"Gentlemen!" he would say, and without drawing breath you knew this was for a motor mechanic or a builder.
"Hey kids!" left no doubt in anyone's mind. Well, all the books on copywriting say that you should target your copy, and Peter did it - not subtly, but with certainty.
John James didn't enjoy writing copy. He would do anything not to write - he even went to Brisbane later, took a job as a breakfast announcer and got his name up in lights. He and I once ran a book on the Melbourne Cup but lost our nerve half way through when it looked like we might have to pay out more than twenty pounds, so we laid it all off with a local SP operator. As John pointed out later that day, if I had stuck to my guns and not persuaded him to drop out, we would have each been a quid richer.
Gloria Wells looked after the transcriptions, which were stored next to a batch of engraving chemicals, but she was part of the copy department. In fact, everyone who wasn't a technician, an office assistant, or the manager, was in the copy department.
Don Scriven was the copy boss. He was the Chief Night announcer too, so he came in about eleven each day, handed out the assignments, took a hefty batch for himself, and with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, take charge of the only good typewriter and bash out ten or twelve scripts before he went to the studio to present his "Request Hour".
The engineers. those who knew how to fix things, worked at the transmitter - a few miles out of town at Goonellanah. There were three of them including the Chief Engineer, Hector Green. He and his staff of Eric Rowe and Jim Hudson became good mates. In fact, the station was a very harmonious place to work.
The station went to silence at three o'clock each afternoon and resumed at 5.30 with the Children's Session. Miss Molly (Noonan) ran it, in between doing the beans for dinner, dusting while records were playing, and figuring out her household accounts as she read the story.
This was the "big" radio station. But it had a big reputation around the North Coast.
I quickly learned that it was folly to be near Molly at the time she was doing the riddles. She got stacks of letters from kids, and all of them had riddles. She would call the unwary into the studio, hand you a bundle of letters and announce that it was your turn to ask a riddle. You had to beware of some of them. Racism hadn't been coined as a word, but it was pretty rife among the kids on the North Coast. And since most of the riddles tended to turn up over and over again, Molly knew them all.
Looking up from asking a riddle, you would see Molly grimly shaking her head, at the same time saying "I don't know the answer to that one, and you don't either Tom". This really did not have the desired effect. She would get dozens of letters next day from kids who did know the answer, and wanted it broadcast.
The boss was Keith Spencer, square jawed and resolute like someone who had helped fight a war and knew he could do it again if asked, which was just what he was. He had recently returned from an engagement with His Majesty's Royal Australian Air Force, flying English aeroplanes.
He called us all "Mister", "Miss" or "Mrs", at least during working hours.
Keith was a quiet man, he angered slowly, but he could be caustic when aroused.
He had been in radio before world war two started, and he had firm ideas about behaviour.
First, you did not go on air if you had been caught up in a meeting. Most meetings were held in the saloon bar of the Hotel Ryan, which happened to be on the corner, almost next door to the radio station if you didn't count the approach to the bridge across the river. It was open from 10am to 6pm six days a week, legally. And any other time as well.
I had not tasted an alcoholic drink until I arrived in Lismore, but Don decided that, if we were to be friends, I would at least have to have a taste. I liked it. Like the character in Lennie Lower's "Here's Luck", I'm told that a beaming smile lit up my countenance.
I took my first drink on my twenty-first birthday (well, maybe a few days earlier than that), and on that special afternoon, made my way back to the studio quite creditably to answer some of Molly's riddles. By this time, I knew almost as many of the answers as she did, so the riddles session held no terrors for me. And with a couple of beers aboard, who cared anyway?
When I ended the session Keith was waiting outside the studio door.
"Not wise, Mr Crozier", he said, shaking his head sadly. "Not wise at all". He turned on his heel and marched along the murky corridor ahead of me.
I followed him down the stairway, wended my way with him through the front office of the newspaper, and out into the street. Now was the moment when he would have a piece of me for drinking before going on air. I was in trouble! And it was my birthday - at six o'clock on a very hot November evening.
"You'll take another, I expect?" he asked, a grin on his face as he led me past the Ryan to his favourite watering hole, the Canberra - superbly operated by Mr. Green - there to lecture me on the horrors of drinking before duty, as opposed to a quiet taste after the job was done.
In later months the sessions were dubbed "meetings", and it was not a rare thing to be summoned by the boss to an urgent meeting "as soon as you come off air at 10..30 tonight at Mr Green's office".
This first session lasted for some time (six o'clock closing, like the answers to the riddles, held no terrors at all at the Canberra).
I started my twenty-second year with an unexplained illness, serious hangover, and a firm resolution to give up the demon drink for some time.
Until pay day.
The transmitter was separate, a couple of miles out of town at Goonellabah, and connected by landline. That was something new to get used to. It meant I didn't have to learn how to switch it on and off.
That was it. Except, of course, for the copy department, which lived in part of a huge room in the newspaper known as the "process engraving" department. That was where they turned photographs into printing plates. The place had the inspiring smell of photographer's chemicals - surely an ingredient in making sure the creative level was also high.
The copywriters were the announcers.
There were five of us. Peter le Brun, who had been a Stage Manager with J C Williamsons, had been there longest. His creative touch was always the same, depending on who the message was aimed at.
"Ladies!" he would start. And you knew right away this was for fashion goods or groceries.
"Gentlemen!" he would say, and without drawing breath you knew this was for a motor mechanic or a builder.
"Hey kids!" left no doubt in anyone's mind. Well, all the books on copywriting say that you should target your copy, and Peter did it - not subtly, but with certainty.
John James didn't enjoy writing copy. He would do anything not to write - he even went to Brisbane later, took a job as a breakfast announcer and got his name up in lights. He and I once ran a book on the Melbourne Cup but lost our nerve half way through when it looked like we might have to pay out more than twenty pounds, so we laid it all off with a local SP operator. As John pointed out later that day, if I had stuck to my guns and not persuaded him to drop out, we would have each been a quid richer.
Gloria Wells looked after the transcriptions, which were stored next to a batch of engraving chemicals, but she was part of the copy department. In fact, everyone who wasn't a technician, an office assistant, or the manager, was in the copy department.
Don Scriven was the copy boss. He was the Chief Night announcer too, so he came in about eleven each day, handed out the assignments, took a hefty batch for himself, and with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, take charge of the only good typewriter and bash out ten or twelve scripts before he went to the studio to present his "Request Hour".
The engineers. those who knew how to fix things, worked at the transmitter - a few miles out of town at Goonellanah. There were three of them including the Chief Engineer, Hector Green. He and his staff of Eric Rowe and Jim Hudson became good mates. In fact, the station was a very harmonious place to work.
The station went to silence at three o'clock each afternoon and resumed at 5.30 with the Children's Session. Miss Molly (Noonan) ran it, in between doing the beans for dinner, dusting while records were playing, and figuring out her household accounts as she read the story.
This was the "big" radio station. But it had a big reputation around the North Coast.
I quickly learned that it was folly to be near Molly at the time she was doing the riddles. She got stacks of letters from kids, and all of them had riddles. She would call the unwary into the studio, hand you a bundle of letters and announce that it was your turn to ask a riddle. You had to beware of some of them. Racism hadn't been coined as a word, but it was pretty rife among the kids on the North Coast. And since most of the riddles tended to turn up over and over again, Molly knew them all.
Looking up from asking a riddle, you would see Molly grimly shaking her head, at the same time saying "I don't know the answer to that one, and you don't either Tom". This really did not have the desired effect. She would get dozens of letters next day from kids who did know the answer, and wanted it broadcast.
The boss was Keith Spencer, square jawed and resolute like someone who had helped fight a war and knew he could do it again if asked, which was just what he was. He had recently returned from an engagement with His Majesty's Royal Australian Air Force, flying English aeroplanes.
He called us all "Mister", "Miss" or "Mrs", at least during working hours.
Keith was a quiet man, he angered slowly, but he could be caustic when aroused.
He had been in radio before world war two started, and he had firm ideas about behaviour.
First, you did not go on air if you had been caught up in a meeting. Most meetings were held in the saloon bar of the Hotel Ryan, which happened to be on the corner, almost next door to the radio station if you didn't count the approach to the bridge across the river. It was open from 10am to 6pm six days a week, legally. And any other time as well.
I had not tasted an alcoholic drink until I arrived in Lismore, but Don decided that, if we were to be friends, I would at least have to have a taste. I liked it. Like the character in Lennie Lower's "Here's Luck", I'm told that a beaming smile lit up my countenance.
I took my first drink on my twenty-first birthday (well, maybe a few days earlier than that), and on that special afternoon, made my way back to the studio quite creditably to answer some of Molly's riddles. By this time, I knew almost as many of the answers as she did, so the riddles session held no terrors for me. And with a couple of beers aboard, who cared anyway?
When I ended the session Keith was waiting outside the studio door.
"Not wise, Mr Crozier", he said, shaking his head sadly. "Not wise at all". He turned on his heel and marched along the murky corridor ahead of me.
I followed him down the stairway, wended my way with him through the front office of the newspaper, and out into the street. Now was the moment when he would have a piece of me for drinking before going on air. I was in trouble! And it was my birthday - at six o'clock on a very hot November evening.
"You'll take another, I expect?" he asked, a grin on his face as he led me past the Ryan to his favourite watering hole, the Canberra - superbly operated by Mr. Green - there to lecture me on the horrors of drinking before duty, as opposed to a quiet taste after the job was done.
In later months the sessions were dubbed "meetings", and it was not a rare thing to be summoned by the boss to an urgent meeting "as soon as you come off air at 10..30 tonight at Mr Green's office".
This first session lasted for some time (six o'clock closing, like the answers to the riddles, held no terrors at all at the Canberra).
I started my twenty-second year with an unexplained illness, serious hangover, and a firm resolution to give up the demon drink for some time.
Until pay day.
Chapter Eleven
It has never been a mystery to me why the whole of Australia (except for those people without any sense of humour) stops because there's a horse race being run in Melbourne. Stops not for a rare two or three minutes, but for the greater part of the day.
Radio built up the excitement. Hyped it up, in fact. But it was a friendly process, based on the beliefs and desires of its audience.
Lismore, and 2LM, was no exception. In fact, it excelled itself on Cup Day, on the principle that anything the big cities could do, Lismore could do better.
Officially, "sweeps" were illegal. So "sweeps" they were not called - they became competitions. That bastion of all that was good and proper in the town, The Northern Star newspaper, had the good sense to print out the names of the runners in type large enough, and spaced appropriately for clipping out, to facilitate their use in organising the competitions.
This exercise was carried out by every bar, every boarding house, bookshop and business in the town - and all the pubs and clubs ran BIG ones, with big entry fees and big prizes.
What was less well known, but almost as important in the scheme of things, was the betting and the sweeps associated with the Snake Gully Cup.
By one of those enormous coincidences hard to explain, the Snake Gully Cup was run every year on the very same day as that other race. It was run, of course, at Snake Gully - exact map reference unknown - and each year a well-known race caller would describe the event which was broadcast at a quarter to seven in the evening.
It was part of the enormously popular radio serial "Dad and Dave", produced by George Edwards, a story about life on a farm, but to many of the listeners the Snake Gully Cup was the real thing. For to those people, Dad and Dave itself was also the real thing. The serial often mirrored real events, like the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, whenever they could be fitted into the "plot". It was sponsored by the Wrigley Company, in an effort to show that it was a great Australian Company. And to ask people to "take their change in Wrigley's" in each of their commercials.
This double attraction put an extra strain on the people whose job it was to bring these two major events to the public via radio - and who also had to give due publicity to the competitions that went side by side with them.
At 2LM, Cup Day preparations began about a week before, when the transcription* containing the description of the Snake Gully Cup arrived from Sydney.
Keith would be on the prowl for the critical episode. It would arrive, together with several other packages (transcriptions in the mail were something like elephants - hard to lose - they measured sixteen inches edge to edge and so stood out remarkably) and he made sure he opened the package, took out the correct episode, and locked it securely in the safe in the office of the General Manager who also served as General Manager at the newspaper. In this way he could be sure that nobody would learn the name of the winner from 2LM until the due date and time. This protected the SP betting operators, not to mention the sweep (sorry, competition) organisers. It also protected the honour of the staff, none of whom had any idea how to open that particular safe. The general Manager, of course, was Above Suspicion. It went with his territory.
It was not that Keith didn't trust us. He knew what we would do, given half the chance.
This exercise must have been repeated all around the country. So there was never a scandal associated with the Snake Gully Cup, thus setting up some kind of a record in the racing industry.
Radio built up the excitement. Hyped it up, in fact. But it was a friendly process, based on the beliefs and desires of its audience.
Lismore, and 2LM, was no exception. In fact, it excelled itself on Cup Day, on the principle that anything the big cities could do, Lismore could do better.
Officially, "sweeps" were illegal. So "sweeps" they were not called - they became competitions. That bastion of all that was good and proper in the town, The Northern Star newspaper, had the good sense to print out the names of the runners in type large enough, and spaced appropriately for clipping out, to facilitate their use in organising the competitions.
This exercise was carried out by every bar, every boarding house, bookshop and business in the town - and all the pubs and clubs ran BIG ones, with big entry fees and big prizes.
What was less well known, but almost as important in the scheme of things, was the betting and the sweeps associated with the Snake Gully Cup.
By one of those enormous coincidences hard to explain, the Snake Gully Cup was run every year on the very same day as that other race. It was run, of course, at Snake Gully - exact map reference unknown - and each year a well-known race caller would describe the event which was broadcast at a quarter to seven in the evening.
It was part of the enormously popular radio serial "Dad and Dave", produced by George Edwards, a story about life on a farm, but to many of the listeners the Snake Gully Cup was the real thing. For to those people, Dad and Dave itself was also the real thing. The serial often mirrored real events, like the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, whenever they could be fitted into the "plot". It was sponsored by the Wrigley Company, in an effort to show that it was a great Australian Company. And to ask people to "take their change in Wrigley's" in each of their commercials.
This double attraction put an extra strain on the people whose job it was to bring these two major events to the public via radio - and who also had to give due publicity to the competitions that went side by side with them.
At 2LM, Cup Day preparations began about a week before, when the transcription* containing the description of the Snake Gully Cup arrived from Sydney.
Keith would be on the prowl for the critical episode. It would arrive, together with several other packages (transcriptions in the mail were something like elephants - hard to lose - they measured sixteen inches edge to edge and so stood out remarkably) and he made sure he opened the package, took out the correct episode, and locked it securely in the safe in the office of the General Manager who also served as General Manager at the newspaper. In this way he could be sure that nobody would learn the name of the winner from 2LM until the due date and time. This protected the SP betting operators, not to mention the sweep (sorry, competition) organisers. It also protected the honour of the staff, none of whom had any idea how to open that particular safe. The general Manager, of course, was Above Suspicion. It went with his territory.
It was not that Keith didn't trust us. He knew what we would do, given half the chance.
This exercise must have been repeated all around the country. So there was never a scandal associated with the Snake Gully Cup, thus setting up some kind of a record in the racing industry.
We began the day itself by ignoring all imperatives save the need to obtain the "draws" for the competitions from all the major clubs and pubs in the coverage area. Since the station covered a wide territory and a lot of towns there was a lot of telephoning to do - and checking, too, because hell itself would break loose if we got any detail wrong. There were face-to-face calls to make as well in our home city.
This last job could be hazardous. Being on the radio in a country city in the 1950s was as close as you could get to being a multi-media personality (there being fewer media available to help establish the category). That meant that there was always someone in the pub or club who knew you, however slightly, and insisted on buying you a drink. Now what would a multi-media personality do in a case like that? The going rate for such personalities being relatively low, (I started at 2LM on seven pounds a week - two quid up on my 2LT salary) free drinks took up some of the leeway.
Even Keith had been known to break his own rule in the past on Melbourne Cup Day, although by the time I met him, he'd got it all figured out. Being the boss he let us do all the running around while he sheltered from the rush and bustle at Mr Green's office, keeping a keen ear to the radio playing in the reception area next door.
With a hard morning and a difficult lunch behind us, it was time to repair to the studio, for the first leg of the Big Double - the Melbourne one. This came to us on a landline (a high quality telephone line - at least, we all hoped that it would be a high quality line, but sometimes it failed the test) direct from Melbourne. The station had a loose affiliation with the Major Network for which 3DB was the Melbourne station, so that's the call we took. It came to us complete with commercials for whoever 3DB had sold it to, and because 2LM needed the money, we sold a spot before and after to one of the locals.
Peter would be busy in the studio, headphones across the line so he could hear 3DB, his cigarette idling itself away in the ash tray, waiting for Bill Collins to tell us the placings. He had every one of the competition lists in front of him, and he would mark the winners on each one between the end of the race and the "correct weight" signal.
It was his job to flash to the world about us the most important news about the Cup: who had won the money at the Commercial Hotel competition, and the Royal, and the RSL...
In his best "HERE IS THE NEWS" voice, he would read the results everyone wanted to hear.
Many of the competition organisers did not "pay out" until the winners name was officially broadcast by the station.
And all of this done in the wake of a morning accepting the side benefits of multi media personalityship. If sometimes the diction was not as clear as the listeners were used to, no doubt all was understood and forgiven.
After all, it was it was Cups Day.
The Cup in Melbourne was over, but the one in Snake Gully was yet to come. No time to waste, we had to get ready for the Snake Gully Cup.
This last job could be hazardous. Being on the radio in a country city in the 1950s was as close as you could get to being a multi-media personality (there being fewer media available to help establish the category). That meant that there was always someone in the pub or club who knew you, however slightly, and insisted on buying you a drink. Now what would a multi-media personality do in a case like that? The going rate for such personalities being relatively low, (I started at 2LM on seven pounds a week - two quid up on my 2LT salary) free drinks took up some of the leeway.
Even Keith had been known to break his own rule in the past on Melbourne Cup Day, although by the time I met him, he'd got it all figured out. Being the boss he let us do all the running around while he sheltered from the rush and bustle at Mr Green's office, keeping a keen ear to the radio playing in the reception area next door.
With a hard morning and a difficult lunch behind us, it was time to repair to the studio, for the first leg of the Big Double - the Melbourne one. This came to us on a landline (a high quality telephone line - at least, we all hoped that it would be a high quality line, but sometimes it failed the test) direct from Melbourne. The station had a loose affiliation with the Major Network for which 3DB was the Melbourne station, so that's the call we took. It came to us complete with commercials for whoever 3DB had sold it to, and because 2LM needed the money, we sold a spot before and after to one of the locals.
Peter would be busy in the studio, headphones across the line so he could hear 3DB, his cigarette idling itself away in the ash tray, waiting for Bill Collins to tell us the placings. He had every one of the competition lists in front of him, and he would mark the winners on each one between the end of the race and the "correct weight" signal.
It was his job to flash to the world about us the most important news about the Cup: who had won the money at the Commercial Hotel competition, and the Royal, and the RSL...
In his best "HERE IS THE NEWS" voice, he would read the results everyone wanted to hear.
Many of the competition organisers did not "pay out" until the winners name was officially broadcast by the station.
And all of this done in the wake of a morning accepting the side benefits of multi media personalityship. If sometimes the diction was not as clear as the listeners were used to, no doubt all was understood and forgiven.
After all, it was it was Cups Day.
The Cup in Melbourne was over, but the one in Snake Gully was yet to come. No time to waste, we had to get ready for the Snake Gully Cup.
1946
There was a lot of talking to do because - in order not to confuse anyone (and most especially ourselves) we did not broadcast the names of the runners in the Snake Gully Cup until after the Victorian event had finished, although they'd probably been given the previous night in "Dad and Dave". The producers of the show thoughtfully provided us with the information by telegram.
But at 3.30 in the afternoon we could go for it.
Fantasy took over, as people placed their bets and ran their competitions based on a fictitious field of never-heard-of horses programmed to race in a place nobody had ever been to, and run at the then unlikely time of a quarter to seven at night.
On air we would encourage people to organise their home competitions at home, or the pub, or wherever they might be. And off air, the telephone rang constantly (when you have just two lines that can happen easily enough) with people wanting to check the names. It was serious business.
At last it happened. Time moved on, and the familiar sound of "The Road to Gundagai" would start slowly grinding out over the ether, and everyone gathered round their radio sets for the next lot of excitement.
Keith had always made sure he collected the episode from the General Manager's safe late in the afternoon. There came a day a year or two later, after I had left the station and then rejoined it, that he was not with us to do this, for he had decided to become a pub keeper and set up his own office in a Queensland country town (on the principle that he could join them and beat them at the same time. He did and he didn't).
Peter was now the Manager, and every bit as thorough as Keith had been, so he carried on the grand tradition.. He had done a Keith in making sure that security was at its tightest. The recording had been rescued from the curious while still in its wrapping paper and incarcerated in its usual place.
On the eventful day, what Peter had not done was to get it back before the General Manager went home, taking the key of the safe with him.
The oversight was discovered half an hour before broadcast time. I was one of the two people on duty for the evening program, and we decided to have a sneak preview.
Shock was followed by horror. Panic panted close behind.
A calamity.
There were two options. First we had to ring Peter. In the event that he declined to accept it as his own, singular, problem, on the grounds that everyone had been playing multi-media personalities. we could tune in our nearest competitor which happened to be at Murwillumbah, and re-broadcast it from them. This was totally illegal at the time, but had been attempted from time to time. The difficulty with that was that severe static was the norm during spring, summer, autumn and winter, and previous attempts to take programs from them had generally failed spectacularly.
The other option was to break into the general manager's office, and force open the safe, an act calculated to get us both out of the multi-media syndrome fairly quickly, and possibly for ever.
Peter accepted the challenge. Normally he rode a push-bike to work, (being a multi-media personality did not pay well even at manager level) but sensing the urgency and sensitivity of the problem (and possibly having some difficulty balancing on his bike) he ordered a taxi, sped to the General Manager's home, picked up the keys, and told the driver not to spare the horses.
"The city", he said. "Fast!"
We were at the studio window, and as the taxi turned into Molesworth Street doing a respectable impression of a Grand Prix entrant, we cheered ourselves hoarse.
A description on radio would have been warranted, had the listeners known what was going on. That information was sadly denied them.
But at 3.30 in the afternoon we could go for it.
Fantasy took over, as people placed their bets and ran their competitions based on a fictitious field of never-heard-of horses programmed to race in a place nobody had ever been to, and run at the then unlikely time of a quarter to seven at night.
On air we would encourage people to organise their home competitions at home, or the pub, or wherever they might be. And off air, the telephone rang constantly (when you have just two lines that can happen easily enough) with people wanting to check the names. It was serious business.
At last it happened. Time moved on, and the familiar sound of "The Road to Gundagai" would start slowly grinding out over the ether, and everyone gathered round their radio sets for the next lot of excitement.
Keith had always made sure he collected the episode from the General Manager's safe late in the afternoon. There came a day a year or two later, after I had left the station and then rejoined it, that he was not with us to do this, for he had decided to become a pub keeper and set up his own office in a Queensland country town (on the principle that he could join them and beat them at the same time. He did and he didn't).
Peter was now the Manager, and every bit as thorough as Keith had been, so he carried on the grand tradition.. He had done a Keith in making sure that security was at its tightest. The recording had been rescued from the curious while still in its wrapping paper and incarcerated in its usual place.
On the eventful day, what Peter had not done was to get it back before the General Manager went home, taking the key of the safe with him.
The oversight was discovered half an hour before broadcast time. I was one of the two people on duty for the evening program, and we decided to have a sneak preview.
Shock was followed by horror. Panic panted close behind.
A calamity.
There were two options. First we had to ring Peter. In the event that he declined to accept it as his own, singular, problem, on the grounds that everyone had been playing multi-media personalities. we could tune in our nearest competitor which happened to be at Murwillumbah, and re-broadcast it from them. This was totally illegal at the time, but had been attempted from time to time. The difficulty with that was that severe static was the norm during spring, summer, autumn and winter, and previous attempts to take programs from them had generally failed spectacularly.
The other option was to break into the general manager's office, and force open the safe, an act calculated to get us both out of the multi-media syndrome fairly quickly, and possibly for ever.
Peter accepted the challenge. Normally he rode a push-bike to work, (being a multi-media personality did not pay well even at manager level) but sensing the urgency and sensitivity of the problem (and possibly having some difficulty balancing on his bike) he ordered a taxi, sped to the General Manager's home, picked up the keys, and told the driver not to spare the horses.
"The city", he said. "Fast!"
We were at the studio window, and as the taxi turned into Molesworth Street doing a respectable impression of a Grand Prix entrant, we cheered ourselves hoarse.
A description on radio would have been warranted, had the listeners known what was going on. That information was sadly denied them.
Peter dashed out of the cab, crashed into the downstairs office, thrashed his way up the dingy staircase and stashed the transcription on the slowly revolving waiting turntable with a bare sixty seconds to go.
Phew, it was close! Calamity averted. The important race was about to be broadcast on time. The station's credibility remained intact.
The excitement behind the scenes entirely eclipsed the historic events the listeners heard. Nor did we let them in on the drama. It was best, we thought, that we kept it secret for forty years or so.
The General Manager came on the line at seven o'clock when all was over, and we had crossed over to the ABC for the evening news, and so had a moment to re-live the events of the Past half hour or so
"Good on you!" he said - in what was a major speech for him.
One suspected he may have been playing multi-media personalities himself
Phew, it was close! Calamity averted. The important race was about to be broadcast on time. The station's credibility remained intact.
The excitement behind the scenes entirely eclipsed the historic events the listeners heard. Nor did we let them in on the drama. It was best, we thought, that we kept it secret for forty years or so.
The General Manager came on the line at seven o'clock when all was over, and we had crossed over to the ABC for the evening news, and so had a moment to re-live the events of the Past half hour or so
"Good on you!" he said - in what was a major speech for him.
One suspected he may have been playing multi-media personalities himself
Thanks to Craig Nugent for the Audio and Thanks to Bruce Ferrier of Grace Gibson Productions for permission to include the audio here.
Chapter Twelve
Northern Star - 1946 - 6.30am & 3.00pm
You can't work anywhere unless you have some place to live.
Living includes something to sleep on, three meals a day, washing and ironing facilities, and some people to talk to away from work.
It took me a week to find such a place after I arrived in Lismore.
I had put up at Mr Green's place of business in the middle of Molesworth Street, known as the Hotel Canberra. It was typical of its time. The entrance was alongside the public bar, a rowdy, spacious room tiled in the same coloured tiles that covered the aforesaid public bar, that always gave off the smell of stale beer, even on a Sunday evening when it had been closed for the entire day. (The back bar was open, however).
The entrance hall was dimly lit and seemed to carry a message: "Go home!" or "Get lost!"
The reception desk was at the foot of the elegant staircase with its majestic balustrade and threadbare carpet that led to the accommodation floor, and beside that reception desk was the entrance to the very sedate (and never rowdy) private bar, later to become familiar to me as Mr Green's office.
It became obvious the moment I realised what the tariff was that I would have to find somewhere else as quickly as possible. My holiday pay from 2LT amounted to about ten pounds, and of that Mr Green was asking two pounds ten a week for dinner, bed and breakfast. And that was a special discount rate because he knew my boss.
At the dining table on my first evening I was joined by someone who looked like everybody's maiden aunt and who had been a house guest for a number of years. This dear old soul apparently knew everyone in Lismore, and took an active interest in my search for what she called my "digs".
Her first few suggestions were not appropriate. She directed me to a residence in the posh part of the town, on Hospital Hill. I walked there on my second morning in town, but did not go in. The place was a mansion, a private residence set in large grounds and displaying an elaborate garden, with an expensive motor vehicle in the drive. (Let's face it, ALL motor vehicles were expensive to me). I did not think it was me. And if I must tell the truth, I was haunted by the thought that as it bore some minor resemblance to the private home I'd stayed at in Lithgow, it may also be that
the enforcement of onion-eating would also apply. That night, I told her that what I really needed was a boarding house, and that I'd be checking with them in the next couple of days.
She understood perfectly, and told me that I should go and see Miss Mac.
Miss Elizabeth MacNamara turned out to be a very tall woman in her late sixties, who ran a boarding house just around the corner from the 2LM studio. It was a two-storey timber residence, dating from well before the turn of the 20th century, and as I discovered later, it had a clearly marked division in it.
The ground floor was for gentlemen, who were expected to behave in like manner. The ladies lived upstairs.
Miss Mac's room was underneath the staircase, from where she could hear every creak and groan whenever anyone tried to climb the stairs stealthily at night.
Everyone in the house knew if something was up. Her hearing was perfect, and she had a very strong voice for her age, plus a mode of address that implied that she was always to be obeyed.
After nine o'clock, the moment there was a sound on the stairs, no matter what the time, she would call "Is that you, Maisie?" (she knew who was out and who wasn't) and if Maisie didn't confirm her presence, Miss Mac would be out of bed and racing up the stairs as fast as her seventy-year-old legs could carry her.
The result was that she owned the best conducted boarding house in the world.
Although there was almost a coronial inquiry one morning when a strange ladder was discovered propped up against the wall of the house and giving relatively easy access to the top floor back balcony, well away from the creaking staircase.
At my first interview, the prospect of getting a bed were dim. As she modestly told me, "everyone wants to stay here..." She spoke the truth. There was a very long waiting list and it was obvious that I would have to look elsewhere.
I morosely told my dinner companion that Miss Mac's place was out of the question. She knew the house well, its history, and Miss Mac. She told me that it had been a private girls' school in its early days - the late 1800s and the early 1900's.
A penny dropped.
Miss Mac's was opposite the Church of England and it had been a girls' school. And my mother's first school was in Lismore at a place opposite the church.
I had forgotten all about it until that moment.
"Go back and tell her!" ordered my friend. "That'll do the trick!" How to raise the matter with my prospective landlady? She had already delivered judgment. That very long queue I was on the end of really existed.
But I decided to take the advice - otherwise I would be questioned at length throughout my next meal.
I knocked at the door the next afternoon.
"May I ask you a question, Miss Mac?" I said, somewhat nervously. She was a fearsome sight, taller and heavier than me by a lot, and standing on the doorstep above me barring any attempted entrance, looked even taller and more forbidding than she had yesterday. And as I later discovered, I had woken her from her regular afternoon nap, made necessary of course by a somewhat sleepless night guarding the stairs.
"I wondered if this house had ever been a school for girls?" I asked. Quite a sensible question really.
"Why?"
"Because my mother went to a school in Lismore and I remembered that she said it was opposite the church".
"What was your mother's name?" she asked, uncharitable suspicion written all over her face. People had tried many ways to get to the top of the waiting list: this must have been a new one.
I told her.
You could feel the atmosphere change. The freeze had ended. Spring was on the way.
"Come in and have a cuppa", she said. "I think we can find you a place to sleep".
I was not an outsider any more.
She knew of the family.
She told me that in its day the school was not just any school - it was a place where the quality people of the town sent their daughters before they were old enough to go to one of the better-class Ladies Colleges in Sydney.
Some more questions about my mother's family followed, until Miss Mac was sure she didn't have an impostor.
Having discovered the important facts of the matter, she called Jenny.
Jenny was older than Miss Mac, thinner and shorter and quite frail. So she did the heavy work - the cleaning, making the beds and moving them from room to room when necessary, finding the mosquito nets and installing them.
"Make up a bed on the top back porch" she instructed. "Tom will have to sleep there until we find a bed downstairs".
I didn't know about the gender division in the house, and she was obviously not worried. There could have been two or three reasons for this.
One was that, having discovered my origins she felt that I would mind my manners in all circumstances. Or perhaps she guessed that my innocence was unsullied. If she guessed so, she was absolutely correct.
Then, too, when it came to old Lismore families, Miss Mac was undoubtedly and unashamedly an authority and a snob. especially if they had lived on Hospital Hill.
It was a comfortable bed, if open to the occasional rain squall, but its particular drawback was its location on the back porch.
The bathroom itself was a part of the back porch, with a thin wall dividing. Sound effects came through the partition loud and clear, and everyone had to pass my bed to get to it at all hours.
At least I knew when that important room was vacant, and could race in and take over at a reasonable time in the morning.
It was some weeks before a bed became available in the downstairs section.
The men's dormitories - two of them - were the old school classrooms - with a partition between them. There were four beds in each dormitory. My bed was next to a window, and I found that on sultry nights, all I had to do to get to sleep was to place my pillow at the end of the bed, next to the wide open window, and a breeze would most likely lull me to sleep.
If the accommodation was not quite what might be called "superior", there were compensations. The boarding house population was a great bunch of people who by and large got on well together. The place was spotlessly clean and Miss Mac was a cook of outstanding ability, and sometimes she produced meals, but her policy was to employ people to do the menial tasks like cooking and cleaning. The cook who didn't come up to her exacting standards would move along pretty fast. She even had a maid, dressed soberly in black, with a white lace cap to set it off. Her job it was to serve the meals seven days a week (except for Sunday evenings, which she had off and when we served ourselves and cleaned up after).
Sunday lunch was the piece de resistance. Always a baked dinner, and always crowded. Miss Mac was not above earning a few extra shillings by having paying guests in, which meant you had to be on time or your seat was taken, and you then waited until someone had what she termed "an elegant sufficiency" and had gone away to sleep it off. If we had friends who lived in other places where the meals were not so good, it was an act of humanity to invite them to attend a Sunday lunch.
You were never hungry after a Miss Macs meal.
Fred, one of the other guests, who ran the Woolworths store, approached Miss Mac with the proposal that he brew some beer and store it in the garage. (There was no car in the garage - in fact there probably had never been a car in it. Perhaps a family coach in its distant past). The garage may have been designed with Fred in mind - it had a dirt floor, so spills would not be a problem. That would take care of the tasting sessions.
Miss Mac took kindly to the idea, especially since Fred suggested he could brew her something special. (She took a Guinness now and then for health purposes). But there was a problem. Home brewing was illegal, and she supposed that also applied to boarding-house brewing. Would Fred have a word to Paul next time he came to lunch?
Paul was a policeman. Not any policeman. He was a pillar of the community. He gave lectures to little children on crossing roads, he stopped brawls in pubs, he helped people in flood times. He was everybody's friend. Everyone liked Paul.
"Just keep quiet about it" was his advice.
Keep it quiet! That was like telling a barber not to talk race tips. Everyone in town came to know about Fred's home brew and where it was brewed and stored. Fred's kerosene tins of maturing hops and malt were soon everywhere around the house. One was just outside the dormitory door and had somewhat the same appeal to the senses as Mr Green's public bar on Molesworth Street.
As the first batch was ready to bottle, Fred and a couple of the other fellers got together and arranged a bottling party. Miss Mac said it would be all right provided it was held in the garage, and that everybody remain quiet so as not to disturb the neighbours (the police station was just across the back fence and the Court House was next door). And provided of course that nobody got drunk.
She went out to a church concert and the party was a huge success, mainly because it failed on all three counts.
Everyone was invited including the police force, the local telephone exchange operators, most of the school teachers, and a gaggle of radio announcers.
Three nights later however there was a most troubling disturbance.
In the wee small hours a series of explosions shattered the quiet, sedate neighbourhood opposite the Church of England. Ninety percent of Fred's bottles exploded where they sat on the garage floor, and torrential ale ran in the gutters of Lismore, down past the boarding house, the church, the court house and police station, as well as a private home or two, pouring into the creek and finally into the Richmond River, greatly improving the quality of its water.
The general consensus was that a little less sugar in each bottle would have averted the tragedy.
The home brew experiment, highly successful in its launch, ceased forever in those early morning hours.
If it was quite damp outside; in the boarding house there was not a dry eye to be found.
Living includes something to sleep on, three meals a day, washing and ironing facilities, and some people to talk to away from work.
It took me a week to find such a place after I arrived in Lismore.
I had put up at Mr Green's place of business in the middle of Molesworth Street, known as the Hotel Canberra. It was typical of its time. The entrance was alongside the public bar, a rowdy, spacious room tiled in the same coloured tiles that covered the aforesaid public bar, that always gave off the smell of stale beer, even on a Sunday evening when it had been closed for the entire day. (The back bar was open, however).
The entrance hall was dimly lit and seemed to carry a message: "Go home!" or "Get lost!"
The reception desk was at the foot of the elegant staircase with its majestic balustrade and threadbare carpet that led to the accommodation floor, and beside that reception desk was the entrance to the very sedate (and never rowdy) private bar, later to become familiar to me as Mr Green's office.
It became obvious the moment I realised what the tariff was that I would have to find somewhere else as quickly as possible. My holiday pay from 2LT amounted to about ten pounds, and of that Mr Green was asking two pounds ten a week for dinner, bed and breakfast. And that was a special discount rate because he knew my boss.
At the dining table on my first evening I was joined by someone who looked like everybody's maiden aunt and who had been a house guest for a number of years. This dear old soul apparently knew everyone in Lismore, and took an active interest in my search for what she called my "digs".
Her first few suggestions were not appropriate. She directed me to a residence in the posh part of the town, on Hospital Hill. I walked there on my second morning in town, but did not go in. The place was a mansion, a private residence set in large grounds and displaying an elaborate garden, with an expensive motor vehicle in the drive. (Let's face it, ALL motor vehicles were expensive to me). I did not think it was me. And if I must tell the truth, I was haunted by the thought that as it bore some minor resemblance to the private home I'd stayed at in Lithgow, it may also be that
the enforcement of onion-eating would also apply. That night, I told her that what I really needed was a boarding house, and that I'd be checking with them in the next couple of days.
She understood perfectly, and told me that I should go and see Miss Mac.
Miss Elizabeth MacNamara turned out to be a very tall woman in her late sixties, who ran a boarding house just around the corner from the 2LM studio. It was a two-storey timber residence, dating from well before the turn of the 20th century, and as I discovered later, it had a clearly marked division in it.
The ground floor was for gentlemen, who were expected to behave in like manner. The ladies lived upstairs.
Miss Mac's room was underneath the staircase, from where she could hear every creak and groan whenever anyone tried to climb the stairs stealthily at night.
Everyone in the house knew if something was up. Her hearing was perfect, and she had a very strong voice for her age, plus a mode of address that implied that she was always to be obeyed.
After nine o'clock, the moment there was a sound on the stairs, no matter what the time, she would call "Is that you, Maisie?" (she knew who was out and who wasn't) and if Maisie didn't confirm her presence, Miss Mac would be out of bed and racing up the stairs as fast as her seventy-year-old legs could carry her.
The result was that she owned the best conducted boarding house in the world.
Although there was almost a coronial inquiry one morning when a strange ladder was discovered propped up against the wall of the house and giving relatively easy access to the top floor back balcony, well away from the creaking staircase.
At my first interview, the prospect of getting a bed were dim. As she modestly told me, "everyone wants to stay here..." She spoke the truth. There was a very long waiting list and it was obvious that I would have to look elsewhere.
I morosely told my dinner companion that Miss Mac's place was out of the question. She knew the house well, its history, and Miss Mac. She told me that it had been a private girls' school in its early days - the late 1800s and the early 1900's.
A penny dropped.
Miss Mac's was opposite the Church of England and it had been a girls' school. And my mother's first school was in Lismore at a place opposite the church.
I had forgotten all about it until that moment.
"Go back and tell her!" ordered my friend. "That'll do the trick!" How to raise the matter with my prospective landlady? She had already delivered judgment. That very long queue I was on the end of really existed.
But I decided to take the advice - otherwise I would be questioned at length throughout my next meal.
I knocked at the door the next afternoon.
"May I ask you a question, Miss Mac?" I said, somewhat nervously. She was a fearsome sight, taller and heavier than me by a lot, and standing on the doorstep above me barring any attempted entrance, looked even taller and more forbidding than she had yesterday. And as I later discovered, I had woken her from her regular afternoon nap, made necessary of course by a somewhat sleepless night guarding the stairs.
"I wondered if this house had ever been a school for girls?" I asked. Quite a sensible question really.
"Why?"
"Because my mother went to a school in Lismore and I remembered that she said it was opposite the church".
"What was your mother's name?" she asked, uncharitable suspicion written all over her face. People had tried many ways to get to the top of the waiting list: this must have been a new one.
I told her.
You could feel the atmosphere change. The freeze had ended. Spring was on the way.
"Come in and have a cuppa", she said. "I think we can find you a place to sleep".
I was not an outsider any more.
She knew of the family.
She told me that in its day the school was not just any school - it was a place where the quality people of the town sent their daughters before they were old enough to go to one of the better-class Ladies Colleges in Sydney.
Some more questions about my mother's family followed, until Miss Mac was sure she didn't have an impostor.
Having discovered the important facts of the matter, she called Jenny.
Jenny was older than Miss Mac, thinner and shorter and quite frail. So she did the heavy work - the cleaning, making the beds and moving them from room to room when necessary, finding the mosquito nets and installing them.
"Make up a bed on the top back porch" she instructed. "Tom will have to sleep there until we find a bed downstairs".
I didn't know about the gender division in the house, and she was obviously not worried. There could have been two or three reasons for this.
One was that, having discovered my origins she felt that I would mind my manners in all circumstances. Or perhaps she guessed that my innocence was unsullied. If she guessed so, she was absolutely correct.
Then, too, when it came to old Lismore families, Miss Mac was undoubtedly and unashamedly an authority and a snob. especially if they had lived on Hospital Hill.
It was a comfortable bed, if open to the occasional rain squall, but its particular drawback was its location on the back porch.
The bathroom itself was a part of the back porch, with a thin wall dividing. Sound effects came through the partition loud and clear, and everyone had to pass my bed to get to it at all hours.
At least I knew when that important room was vacant, and could race in and take over at a reasonable time in the morning.
It was some weeks before a bed became available in the downstairs section.
The men's dormitories - two of them - were the old school classrooms - with a partition between them. There were four beds in each dormitory. My bed was next to a window, and I found that on sultry nights, all I had to do to get to sleep was to place my pillow at the end of the bed, next to the wide open window, and a breeze would most likely lull me to sleep.
If the accommodation was not quite what might be called "superior", there were compensations. The boarding house population was a great bunch of people who by and large got on well together. The place was spotlessly clean and Miss Mac was a cook of outstanding ability, and sometimes she produced meals, but her policy was to employ people to do the menial tasks like cooking and cleaning. The cook who didn't come up to her exacting standards would move along pretty fast. She even had a maid, dressed soberly in black, with a white lace cap to set it off. Her job it was to serve the meals seven days a week (except for Sunday evenings, which she had off and when we served ourselves and cleaned up after).
Sunday lunch was the piece de resistance. Always a baked dinner, and always crowded. Miss Mac was not above earning a few extra shillings by having paying guests in, which meant you had to be on time or your seat was taken, and you then waited until someone had what she termed "an elegant sufficiency" and had gone away to sleep it off. If we had friends who lived in other places where the meals were not so good, it was an act of humanity to invite them to attend a Sunday lunch.
You were never hungry after a Miss Macs meal.
Fred, one of the other guests, who ran the Woolworths store, approached Miss Mac with the proposal that he brew some beer and store it in the garage. (There was no car in the garage - in fact there probably had never been a car in it. Perhaps a family coach in its distant past). The garage may have been designed with Fred in mind - it had a dirt floor, so spills would not be a problem. That would take care of the tasting sessions.
Miss Mac took kindly to the idea, especially since Fred suggested he could brew her something special. (She took a Guinness now and then for health purposes). But there was a problem. Home brewing was illegal, and she supposed that also applied to boarding-house brewing. Would Fred have a word to Paul next time he came to lunch?
Paul was a policeman. Not any policeman. He was a pillar of the community. He gave lectures to little children on crossing roads, he stopped brawls in pubs, he helped people in flood times. He was everybody's friend. Everyone liked Paul.
"Just keep quiet about it" was his advice.
Keep it quiet! That was like telling a barber not to talk race tips. Everyone in town came to know about Fred's home brew and where it was brewed and stored. Fred's kerosene tins of maturing hops and malt were soon everywhere around the house. One was just outside the dormitory door and had somewhat the same appeal to the senses as Mr Green's public bar on Molesworth Street.
As the first batch was ready to bottle, Fred and a couple of the other fellers got together and arranged a bottling party. Miss Mac said it would be all right provided it was held in the garage, and that everybody remain quiet so as not to disturb the neighbours (the police station was just across the back fence and the Court House was next door). And provided of course that nobody got drunk.
She went out to a church concert and the party was a huge success, mainly because it failed on all three counts.
Everyone was invited including the police force, the local telephone exchange operators, most of the school teachers, and a gaggle of radio announcers.
Three nights later however there was a most troubling disturbance.
In the wee small hours a series of explosions shattered the quiet, sedate neighbourhood opposite the Church of England. Ninety percent of Fred's bottles exploded where they sat on the garage floor, and torrential ale ran in the gutters of Lismore, down past the boarding house, the church, the court house and police station, as well as a private home or two, pouring into the creek and finally into the Richmond River, greatly improving the quality of its water.
The general consensus was that a little less sugar in each bottle would have averted the tragedy.
The home brew experiment, highly successful in its launch, ceased forever in those early morning hours.
If it was quite damp outside; in the boarding house there was not a dry eye to be found.
Chapter Thirteen
Cyril Angles - Engineer Ron Tuck 1944 Commercial Broadcasting
"Just stand behind him, Tom, and shake your head when he asks them to buy", said Peter to me on the quiet before I headed out with the smart city slicker salesman who dropped in for a day in the on the town.
Every now and then we received visitors from the fantastic and unattainable world of Sydney and Melbourne radio. Some of them were easy to deal with, some had egos that made even looking at them difficult, some were there simply to sell and get out of town fast.
We also had personalities from time to time. Race callers especially, because we had our own versions of the Snake Gully Cup. These were the Lismore Cup and the Casino Cup. Casino was Lismore's rival town, twenty miles away. The Casino Cup was possibly the most prestigious event, but it was less important than the one in our home town - at least to us.
The race callers were mostly good guys. They mixed with the people in the radio station - one of them, Cyril Angles who was then at 2GB, set up residence in a local milk bar and bought coffee for any of us who happened to be passing by, which was all of us, most of the time.
Big national radio shows would hit town for a day or two, produce their program and disappear the next morning, without a goodbye or a thank you very much you were a great help. The comperes of such programs were usually aloof but their producers were often closer to reality.
A salesman came from Melbourne to organise a competition between the various towns - hard to believe that it was a serious project that had an audience. He let it be seen that he had little time for his country cousins but he had to spend a lot of time with us, and that was the problem. We all found it very difficult even to give him the time of day. But there was money in for the station, so we had to.
As manager, Peter brought his easy going style to the position - a sometimes deceptive gimmick. He had been the salesman prior to his latest appointment, and he had hung on to that job as well in spite of my pleas that he give the job to me. There was commission in it, you see, and Peter wasn't as easy going as he looked.
He probably needed the money like the station and the rest of us did.
And here was this city slicker from Sydney sitting in Peter's office, holding forth with one great theatrical performance.
The arms went out as he sold his wares to us. He kept saying "Fantastic, isn't it?" and waiting until we sad "YES!'.
Then he would stand up and look out the window. "All those people out there", he was saying, "and all of them customers! The businesses in this town must have it made".
He looked Peter squarely in the eye.
"I've never been more excited about ANYTHING in my life", he said. There was no sign of a blush. "Not for me, of course, but for all your sponsors - because these commercials I've got will get them even better results...."
He sat down again and looked at me. He wasn't sure whether to sell Peter or me, but it was my turn.
"You'll be able to sell lots more sponsors when they have these spots", he said. "You'll see".
I actually did know what real selling was about. I had watched Peter in action for some time and was full of admiration for the way he went about it.
Peter and I would walk into a client's shop. (I was there to collect the copy information). In selling retailers, you sold in reverse - from the customer's side of the counter, And you sold between customers. It's a situation in which it is hard to gain and retain attention, and just as you got to the punch line, a customer would walk in. Then you'd have to start all over again.
Peter had the solution when the situation might be difficult from the start.
"Heh, heh", he would laugh, after the usual weather and how's your father preliminaries. "Our rates have gone up".
This statement always got a reaction.
"WHAT?", they would roar. "They went up last year".
"Yes, well, more people are settling here. We're the fourth/third/second largest growing country area on the North Coast", Peter would say, changing the degree to promote confusion. "The more you reach, the more you sell."
"By how bloody much have the rates gone up?" - this through gritted teeth, a threatening tactic that suggested that, this time, we had gone too far and were about to get our comeuppance.
"Well, seven and six, I think", Peter would say, looking them straight in the eye.
"Seven shillings and sixpence? Seven and six? I can't afford seven and sixpence".
"Let me make sure of that", Peter would say, reaching to his hip pocket where the rate card lived - fumbling blind as he fixed the client with a friendly, easy going gaze so they would not be distracted from the conjuring trick about to be performed.
The procedure was simple if somewhat slow.
The rate card would rest on the counter in front of him.
He would take off his regular glasses, and place them on the counter. He would then produce his reading glasses, safely in their case in his shirt pocket, take them out and place them on the counter. The regular glasses would then go into the case, which would then be returned to the shirt pocket. The final move was to pick up the reading glasses and adjust them on his nose, at the same time bringing the rate card into focus.
Then he would run his finger down the column.
"Did I say seven and six?" he would enquire.
Another careful examination of the card.
Then flinging the rate card to the counter with careless abandon, he would proclaim: "NO! Two and six! How's that, eh?"
That was how you sold, and it hardly ever failed.
And he always got the full rate as shown on the card - he never had to give special discounts.
Mr Easy Going did it all the time.
But as for city slickers coming into town and chatting up his clients, that was different, and not to be encouraged.
Peter nodded and smiled as the city slicker went on.
So did I. I'm a sucker for a good salesman (once I went into Encyclopedia Britannica to sell them a radio campaign and ended up with a full set of Britannica at the full price, but please don't ask what happened to the radio campaign).
I was excited as our city slicker was. Real radio commercials professionally produced for practically any purpose, all ready to go - and all we would have to do would be to put the advertiser's name on the end. Wow.
With only one studio and little in the way of recording equipment, we couldn't do much in the way of quality recorded commercials. Yet here that service was, and all we had to so was to get our customers to buy.
And with a portable record player, you could play the commercials to the prospects right in their own shop! What would they think of next? But Peter's smiles and nods didn't so much mean go-for-it-son as hurry-up-and-get-out, so when the salesman said he'd like a list of our advertisers so he could go round and give them the opportunity to buy one of these beautifully produced commercials each, Peter had painted himself into a corner.
His solution was simple. He painted me in with him.
"Better than that", he said. "Tom will take you round and introduce you".
So Dave and I stepped out of the office and headed for the murky stairway before Peter called me back and gave me the modus operandi. He told me to stand behind Dave and shake my head at the critical time.
"Every quid he gets is one we don't", he wisely said.
I had not thought of it like that, but considering all the other hurdles we had to jump to get business in the door, it seemed to fit. One of our problems was that we could not talk to any of the regular advertisers in The Northern Star, because the newspaper owned us. If a prospect was a regular Northern Star advertiser, he had to contact us. otherwise it was our job to ignore him.
It was a very hard balancing act, but I did what I was told. I kept telling myself that it was a good way to cement client relationships.
Dave did not go out of town empty-handed. Nor, I suspect, did Peter expect that he would. Several clients did not understand my sign language - and anyway, they liked the stranger and his commercials very well. They wrote their cheques out on the spot, took delivery of the vinyl disc, then handed it over to me for use in their session the following week.
This made me an accessory, as Dave subtly changed his introductory remarks to include me quoting what the last buyer had said.
This was usually followed by Dave's summation: "He's never been more excited at anything in his life"
At the end of a hard day's work, Dave headed north to Murwillumbah, with a whole host of new prospects, and left us to our own devices. But not for long.
I was mightily impressed by his style.
After an approving glance around the ramshackle premises of the prospect, Bruce would comment on what a great town he'd come to and the great radio station it had. Then he would produce a vinyl record and a portable record player - something of a novelty in those days.
"Just take a listen to this, Mr Jones", he would say. "A commercial all about YOUR business, recorded by the stars you hear in all the radio plays - and it's absolutely exclusive to you on 2LM".
Without further ado, he would drop the pickup head onto the first track of the disc, and the magic sounds would issue forth.
Music; then "At OUR store..." with lots of information that could apply to any business of that kind anywhere in the world.
Then the music would swell again, and Bruce would break in with the magic ask-for-the order "...and that's where 2LM comes in and plugs your name. Fantastic eh?"
Those who were impressed would naturally ask the price.
"Twenty quid and it's yours forever", he would say. "And it is forever - because the disc is absolutely unbreakable."
To prove the point, he would grab the record from the turntable, toss it nonchantly into the air and allow it to fall to the floor. We all knew that the ordinary gramophone record would not tolerate that - it would shatter into a million pieces. But this new vinyl disc just lay there unharmed, waiting to be picked up and replaced in its cover, which Dave graciously allowed the client to do for him.
One of my failures in this exercise was a Greek gentleman, and a friend of mine, named Peter. He owned the most modern cafe in town, right there in the main street. He sponsored a Hit Parade on Sunday afternoon.
He had been highly inspired by our salesman's approach. You could almost see his eyes shining as the voice on the record said "At OUR cafe.." He did not see my gestures (I put it down to the dim lighting). He produced his cheque book and told me he wanted it in his Sunday program without fail.
Back at the station that night, I gave an entertaining impression of the day's activities to anyone who would listen.
I started with the line that impressed me most: "Never been more EXCITED about anything in my life", went through the procession of presentation tricks I had noted, and concluded with the "Twenty quid and it's yours FOR EVER - and it's UNBREAKABLE", flinging the record to the floor with the grand gesture.
There, on the floor, was the vinyl record.
It was in a million pieces, like any common or garden record would be.
I stood there dumbfounded. He had said it was UNBREAKABLE. Not only that, he had PROVED it by hurling it to the floor. And not only that, he had sold it to Peter for TWENTY POUNDS and Peter wanted it on the air on Sunday, and not only that but how would I get another copy and not only that but WHO would have to pay for it?
I rang Dave the next day. Luckily, I interrupted his conversation with the manager of the Murwillumbah radio station, 2MW. I had spent a sleepless night and came to the conclusion that I would have to ask the station to give me a pay advance if I couldn't get a free replacement.
I confessed to Dave what had happened. I had accidentally dropped the record and it had smashed.
He started to laugh, then thought better of it. I figured later that all this had happened before.
"Trouble was", he said, "you threw it the wrong way. If you don't want it to break, you make sure it lands flat. Don't try it again. Trust me. I'll send you another in time for Sunday. Put it all down to experience".
My financial crisis was over, and of course, a brilliant advertising campaign was saved.
Every now and then we received visitors from the fantastic and unattainable world of Sydney and Melbourne radio. Some of them were easy to deal with, some had egos that made even looking at them difficult, some were there simply to sell and get out of town fast.
We also had personalities from time to time. Race callers especially, because we had our own versions of the Snake Gully Cup. These were the Lismore Cup and the Casino Cup. Casino was Lismore's rival town, twenty miles away. The Casino Cup was possibly the most prestigious event, but it was less important than the one in our home town - at least to us.
The race callers were mostly good guys. They mixed with the people in the radio station - one of them, Cyril Angles who was then at 2GB, set up residence in a local milk bar and bought coffee for any of us who happened to be passing by, which was all of us, most of the time.
Big national radio shows would hit town for a day or two, produce their program and disappear the next morning, without a goodbye or a thank you very much you were a great help. The comperes of such programs were usually aloof but their producers were often closer to reality.
A salesman came from Melbourne to organise a competition between the various towns - hard to believe that it was a serious project that had an audience. He let it be seen that he had little time for his country cousins but he had to spend a lot of time with us, and that was the problem. We all found it very difficult even to give him the time of day. But there was money in for the station, so we had to.
As manager, Peter brought his easy going style to the position - a sometimes deceptive gimmick. He had been the salesman prior to his latest appointment, and he had hung on to that job as well in spite of my pleas that he give the job to me. There was commission in it, you see, and Peter wasn't as easy going as he looked.
He probably needed the money like the station and the rest of us did.
And here was this city slicker from Sydney sitting in Peter's office, holding forth with one great theatrical performance.
The arms went out as he sold his wares to us. He kept saying "Fantastic, isn't it?" and waiting until we sad "YES!'.
Then he would stand up and look out the window. "All those people out there", he was saying, "and all of them customers! The businesses in this town must have it made".
He looked Peter squarely in the eye.
"I've never been more excited about ANYTHING in my life", he said. There was no sign of a blush. "Not for me, of course, but for all your sponsors - because these commercials I've got will get them even better results...."
He sat down again and looked at me. He wasn't sure whether to sell Peter or me, but it was my turn.
"You'll be able to sell lots more sponsors when they have these spots", he said. "You'll see".
I actually did know what real selling was about. I had watched Peter in action for some time and was full of admiration for the way he went about it.
Peter and I would walk into a client's shop. (I was there to collect the copy information). In selling retailers, you sold in reverse - from the customer's side of the counter, And you sold between customers. It's a situation in which it is hard to gain and retain attention, and just as you got to the punch line, a customer would walk in. Then you'd have to start all over again.
Peter had the solution when the situation might be difficult from the start.
"Heh, heh", he would laugh, after the usual weather and how's your father preliminaries. "Our rates have gone up".
This statement always got a reaction.
"WHAT?", they would roar. "They went up last year".
"Yes, well, more people are settling here. We're the fourth/third/second largest growing country area on the North Coast", Peter would say, changing the degree to promote confusion. "The more you reach, the more you sell."
"By how bloody much have the rates gone up?" - this through gritted teeth, a threatening tactic that suggested that, this time, we had gone too far and were about to get our comeuppance.
"Well, seven and six, I think", Peter would say, looking them straight in the eye.
"Seven shillings and sixpence? Seven and six? I can't afford seven and sixpence".
"Let me make sure of that", Peter would say, reaching to his hip pocket where the rate card lived - fumbling blind as he fixed the client with a friendly, easy going gaze so they would not be distracted from the conjuring trick about to be performed.
The procedure was simple if somewhat slow.
The rate card would rest on the counter in front of him.
He would take off his regular glasses, and place them on the counter. He would then produce his reading glasses, safely in their case in his shirt pocket, take them out and place them on the counter. The regular glasses would then go into the case, which would then be returned to the shirt pocket. The final move was to pick up the reading glasses and adjust them on his nose, at the same time bringing the rate card into focus.
Then he would run his finger down the column.
"Did I say seven and six?" he would enquire.
Another careful examination of the card.
Then flinging the rate card to the counter with careless abandon, he would proclaim: "NO! Two and six! How's that, eh?"
That was how you sold, and it hardly ever failed.
And he always got the full rate as shown on the card - he never had to give special discounts.
Mr Easy Going did it all the time.
But as for city slickers coming into town and chatting up his clients, that was different, and not to be encouraged.
Peter nodded and smiled as the city slicker went on.
So did I. I'm a sucker for a good salesman (once I went into Encyclopedia Britannica to sell them a radio campaign and ended up with a full set of Britannica at the full price, but please don't ask what happened to the radio campaign).
I was excited as our city slicker was. Real radio commercials professionally produced for practically any purpose, all ready to go - and all we would have to do would be to put the advertiser's name on the end. Wow.
With only one studio and little in the way of recording equipment, we couldn't do much in the way of quality recorded commercials. Yet here that service was, and all we had to so was to get our customers to buy.
And with a portable record player, you could play the commercials to the prospects right in their own shop! What would they think of next? But Peter's smiles and nods didn't so much mean go-for-it-son as hurry-up-and-get-out, so when the salesman said he'd like a list of our advertisers so he could go round and give them the opportunity to buy one of these beautifully produced commercials each, Peter had painted himself into a corner.
His solution was simple. He painted me in with him.
"Better than that", he said. "Tom will take you round and introduce you".
So Dave and I stepped out of the office and headed for the murky stairway before Peter called me back and gave me the modus operandi. He told me to stand behind Dave and shake my head at the critical time.
"Every quid he gets is one we don't", he wisely said.
I had not thought of it like that, but considering all the other hurdles we had to jump to get business in the door, it seemed to fit. One of our problems was that we could not talk to any of the regular advertisers in The Northern Star, because the newspaper owned us. If a prospect was a regular Northern Star advertiser, he had to contact us. otherwise it was our job to ignore him.
It was a very hard balancing act, but I did what I was told. I kept telling myself that it was a good way to cement client relationships.
Dave did not go out of town empty-handed. Nor, I suspect, did Peter expect that he would. Several clients did not understand my sign language - and anyway, they liked the stranger and his commercials very well. They wrote their cheques out on the spot, took delivery of the vinyl disc, then handed it over to me for use in their session the following week.
This made me an accessory, as Dave subtly changed his introductory remarks to include me quoting what the last buyer had said.
This was usually followed by Dave's summation: "He's never been more excited at anything in his life"
At the end of a hard day's work, Dave headed north to Murwillumbah, with a whole host of new prospects, and left us to our own devices. But not for long.
I was mightily impressed by his style.
After an approving glance around the ramshackle premises of the prospect, Bruce would comment on what a great town he'd come to and the great radio station it had. Then he would produce a vinyl record and a portable record player - something of a novelty in those days.
"Just take a listen to this, Mr Jones", he would say. "A commercial all about YOUR business, recorded by the stars you hear in all the radio plays - and it's absolutely exclusive to you on 2LM".
Without further ado, he would drop the pickup head onto the first track of the disc, and the magic sounds would issue forth.
Music; then "At OUR store..." with lots of information that could apply to any business of that kind anywhere in the world.
Then the music would swell again, and Bruce would break in with the magic ask-for-the order "...and that's where 2LM comes in and plugs your name. Fantastic eh?"
Those who were impressed would naturally ask the price.
"Twenty quid and it's yours forever", he would say. "And it is forever - because the disc is absolutely unbreakable."
To prove the point, he would grab the record from the turntable, toss it nonchantly into the air and allow it to fall to the floor. We all knew that the ordinary gramophone record would not tolerate that - it would shatter into a million pieces. But this new vinyl disc just lay there unharmed, waiting to be picked up and replaced in its cover, which Dave graciously allowed the client to do for him.
One of my failures in this exercise was a Greek gentleman, and a friend of mine, named Peter. He owned the most modern cafe in town, right there in the main street. He sponsored a Hit Parade on Sunday afternoon.
He had been highly inspired by our salesman's approach. You could almost see his eyes shining as the voice on the record said "At OUR cafe.." He did not see my gestures (I put it down to the dim lighting). He produced his cheque book and told me he wanted it in his Sunday program without fail.
Back at the station that night, I gave an entertaining impression of the day's activities to anyone who would listen.
I started with the line that impressed me most: "Never been more EXCITED about anything in my life", went through the procession of presentation tricks I had noted, and concluded with the "Twenty quid and it's yours FOR EVER - and it's UNBREAKABLE", flinging the record to the floor with the grand gesture.
There, on the floor, was the vinyl record.
It was in a million pieces, like any common or garden record would be.
I stood there dumbfounded. He had said it was UNBREAKABLE. Not only that, he had PROVED it by hurling it to the floor. And not only that, he had sold it to Peter for TWENTY POUNDS and Peter wanted it on the air on Sunday, and not only that but how would I get another copy and not only that but WHO would have to pay for it?
I rang Dave the next day. Luckily, I interrupted his conversation with the manager of the Murwillumbah radio station, 2MW. I had spent a sleepless night and came to the conclusion that I would have to ask the station to give me a pay advance if I couldn't get a free replacement.
I confessed to Dave what had happened. I had accidentally dropped the record and it had smashed.
He started to laugh, then thought better of it. I figured later that all this had happened before.
"Trouble was", he said, "you threw it the wrong way. If you don't want it to break, you make sure it lands flat. Don't try it again. Trust me. I'll send you another in time for Sunday. Put it all down to experience".
My financial crisis was over, and of course, a brilliant advertising campaign was saved.
Chapter Fourteen
The North Coast National Exhibition was the biggest thing in town. On one occasion, it was extended by two days at the earnest request of the "showies", the sideshow people, who complained heavy rains had kept the crowds away. The sun then shone brightly, the exhibits had gone and the rowdy public address system was silent, but the sideshows drew record crowds and made a mint. We were happy for them.
Everyone came to town for the Show. The place was packed with people. Even stray radio types found it hard to talk to their business friends, who were too busy selling their friends from the country, both in the centre of town and at the showground.
The station had built its own portable studio. There was nothing in it - it was simply four sides and a roof. It sat on the ground underneath the main public address stand - but never in the shade - the only place where the blare of the loudspeakers seemed somehow muted. We loaded our outside broadcast gear into it, hooked it up to a landline, and we were ready to bring the excitement to all who sorrowfully could not make it to the Show.
But not before we all went out and bought new hats.
I have never felt comfortable wearing a hat. It comes from the elementary fact that I know I look simple in one. But at that time, the "hunter's helmets" were in all the rage. They came in a select colour best described as dirty grey, and we figured they could be part of our uniform. The boss only had to stand on a high point to find one of us in an emergency.
Anyone who wasn't on duty in the studio went to the Show and took part in the Show broadcasts. Peter and I had been out and about making sure each broadcast had a sponsor. That was easy - we just picked those prospects who had stands at the Show. They loved the idea of coming on the air and talking about what they had on display.
We also had something very important with us. A receipt book, in fact. That was there in case anyone wanted some announcements on the air right away. That happened very often, and experience had taught that the revenue was good so long as you collected it on the spot. That principle also applied to travelling shows. Circus proprietors who asked us to collect our money on opening night got nowhere - they paid up front before even a whisper got to air.
The exceptions to this rule were the country singers - the "hill-billies" as they were happy to call themselves. When they came to town, they went on air right away, and for the price of a few songs they got all the publicity they needed.
Show time meant long hours of work - although we didn't regard it as such.
We got no overtime. Indeed, we had never even heard the word. Some time towards the end of my first stint with 2LM the Board introduced the idea of a day off for each of us each week, a generous idea probably influenced by pending awards for radio announcers in the bush. We were not terribly impressed. Perhaps if any of us had been married at the time, we might have responded differently. Most of us turned up at work on our days off anyway, just to see what was happening. And at Show time, going to work was a good excuse to get into the Show on a free ticket.
Fresh as the morning dew, we would settle in at our Showground "studio" underneath the public address stand, controlled firmly by Mr Meaney. He owned the AWA franchise in town, and had been the Show's announcer for years. He would insist on getting all the results first, and only after he had finished with them would he condescend to allow the humble radio people to have access to them.
Our early morning freshness would evaporate rapidly. In the "studio" where humidity would reach perspiration point instantaneously, we usually worked as a duo. The others would roam the grounds, often lugging an extremely heavy wire recorder. ("Don't complain about it chaps", said Keith, "we're lucky to have it". We weren't quite sure whether this was meant to be a comparison with our neighboring radio stations 2GF Grafton and 2MW Murwillumbah, or a reflection on the generosity of our Board of Directors).
The working conditions meant there had to be frequent changes of shift.
The Show had one special amenity we came to know and love. It was the on-the-spot bar. There were lots of them - in the cattle section, near the car displays, outside the exhibitor's entrance to the Show ring - anywhere, in fact, where the ground was dusty enough and the crowds likely to be thirsty. One's privacy while having a drink was made secure by strips of hessian stretched across pieces of wood hammered into the ground.
It was to one of these places of refreshment that we repaired at the close of each broadcasting chore. The beer came in disposable paper cups and was thoughtfully served from kegs set up on the trestle-bar in the sun so that the beer reached showground temperature very quickly.
We didn't mind, although the headache at the end of the day was a warning not to do it again. Until the next day, of course.
We were a great and happy team. What we lacked in experience we made up in enthusiasm.
John Stretch, who got his first civilian job with us, had been in the air force. A big man with a good sense of humour and son of a Big Gun in the Church, he was the only one of us with experience in worldly affairs. He showed that he was smarter than any of us when he later left the station, married the Mayor's daughter and went into business.
Dick McLaren, a copywriter from Sydney, had joined us to get himself on the air. He was also a gifted pianist who could pick up any tune and make it come alive. He became a legend in the town, joined the television station when it finally opened, and eventually had his own business before moving to Sydney and later to New Zealand. He also introduced his best friend to the station who fitted in very well.
Dick's mate Phil Charley had been in radio for some time, probably as long as I had, which was all of five or six years. Like Dick, he was a musician,. played clarinet, and cherished a burning ambition to meet Benny Goodman. Phil moved on to station management and later to the emerging commercial radio industry in Papua New Guinea before establishing himself in Sydney at 2CH and after that at the then new Film Television and Radio School.
Geoff Ryan was like me, with a similar lean and hungry look. He was ex-army, and was strongly motivated to stay that way. He shared with me the distinction of having been a Bryson Taylor pupil, the difference being that I had to pay my own fees, while the Australian Government paid them for Geoff. We once appeared together in a drama group at the Lismore Eisteddfod in a scene from "School for Scandal", and Bryson was the adjudicator. He complimented Geoff on his good, clear diction and his "open throat" and said not a word about me. He had no idea who we were. Our costumes and wigs and painted faces did not provide any clues.
And with us at the show, and one of the boys except for the discussions at the bar, was Dinah Wood. She was no token female. The wife of a local school teacher, she had come to 2LM to give talks for the CWA. She had quickly found herself a spot on the station, conducting the morning session. She only gave up her radio work when her husband was transferred to the South Coast.
Then there was Des McDonald, who came to town and had the Saturday breakfast shift as one of his chores. He quickly got himself suspended because he made a comment on air about a well-known and old fashioned cough remedy, which one of the directors found offensive. After a decent interval the suspension was lifted and he later headed for other climes. He and I would meet again in Wollongong, where he would receive a more permanent kind of suspension, which possibly enhanced his radio career. He later found himself managing radio stations in Perth.
The engineers were also part of the team. Hector Green who smiled even when he wasn't happy and who was usually the first to suggest a visit to the bar (he was an expert on the product - he made his own, with much better results than the man at Miss Macs).
Jim Hudson had been at the station before World War 2 as a junior technician, and now had his "ticket" and could legally switch on a transmitter. He was a particular mate of mine. We were most impressed by a comedy record "Running an Office", featuring an English vaudeville comedy team called Harry Tate and Company. It was full of lines like "SACK! - er, pardon me, we're just reorganising the staff" and "You're the manager? You don't look much like a manager to me..."
We would throw these lines backwards and forwards whenever the mood took us.
We lost touch for many years and only communicated after I got my name in the paper, for firing a certain radio reporter in Sydney. Jim was working for a Brisbane paint company, and reading of my achievement in the Courier Mail, quickly sent me a telex. Without introduction of any kind, it simply said "Pardon me - we're just re-organising the staff".
I knew who had sent it.
In spite of one effort to meet up again, we never have.
And Engineering Eric Rowe was everyone's mate. A cheeky grin on his face, he would walk into the copy department jingling the spare coins in his pocket and inveigle us into abandoning our creative efforts in favour of a few yarns over a brown ale. Peter's niece came to town and Eric fell head over heels in love with her. It was a marriage made in heaven, but Eric succumbed to one of the hazards of radio engineers in those days - he was electrocuted on the job only a year or so after their wedding.
From year to year, the members of the Show broadcasting team might change, due to "career moves", but the atmosphere did not. It was one of headaches, confusion, tired muscles from carting heavy equipment around, as well as dust in the eyes nose and throat. This last one could be cured quickly but was entirely recurrent.
There was always a surprise in store at the Show. One year a representative of Actors' Equity, the union that all radio announcers were supposed to belong to, arrived there. In his day job, he sold motor vehicles, and he was working in that capacity at one of the Show stands. He sent out many public address announcements asking me to contact him.
His aim was to get my help in unionising the station. This was after I'd gone back to Lismore after having worked in Sydney, where I had been compelled to join the union. I managed to avoid hearing the announcements as the public address system was not so loud at our broadcasting position.
He did not persevere. None of us wanted to join. They might try to "improve" our conditions but we all liked working in the run-down Northern Star backrooms. We didn't want anyone to spoil the fun.
One year, just as the Show was closing, one of the team came into the outside broadcast studio and told me there was a small group of people looking for me. "They look like hillbillies to me", he said.
They did and they were.
Slim Dusty, who by now had graduated to actually making recordings which were sold in large numbers by record shops, was there with his wife Joy and a team, of other people. "Like to talk to you about a show we're putting together", he said.
Everyone came to town for the Show. The place was packed with people. Even stray radio types found it hard to talk to their business friends, who were too busy selling their friends from the country, both in the centre of town and at the showground.
The station had built its own portable studio. There was nothing in it - it was simply four sides and a roof. It sat on the ground underneath the main public address stand - but never in the shade - the only place where the blare of the loudspeakers seemed somehow muted. We loaded our outside broadcast gear into it, hooked it up to a landline, and we were ready to bring the excitement to all who sorrowfully could not make it to the Show.
But not before we all went out and bought new hats.
I have never felt comfortable wearing a hat. It comes from the elementary fact that I know I look simple in one. But at that time, the "hunter's helmets" were in all the rage. They came in a select colour best described as dirty grey, and we figured they could be part of our uniform. The boss only had to stand on a high point to find one of us in an emergency.
Anyone who wasn't on duty in the studio went to the Show and took part in the Show broadcasts. Peter and I had been out and about making sure each broadcast had a sponsor. That was easy - we just picked those prospects who had stands at the Show. They loved the idea of coming on the air and talking about what they had on display.
We also had something very important with us. A receipt book, in fact. That was there in case anyone wanted some announcements on the air right away. That happened very often, and experience had taught that the revenue was good so long as you collected it on the spot. That principle also applied to travelling shows. Circus proprietors who asked us to collect our money on opening night got nowhere - they paid up front before even a whisper got to air.
The exceptions to this rule were the country singers - the "hill-billies" as they were happy to call themselves. When they came to town, they went on air right away, and for the price of a few songs they got all the publicity they needed.
Show time meant long hours of work - although we didn't regard it as such.
We got no overtime. Indeed, we had never even heard the word. Some time towards the end of my first stint with 2LM the Board introduced the idea of a day off for each of us each week, a generous idea probably influenced by pending awards for radio announcers in the bush. We were not terribly impressed. Perhaps if any of us had been married at the time, we might have responded differently. Most of us turned up at work on our days off anyway, just to see what was happening. And at Show time, going to work was a good excuse to get into the Show on a free ticket.
Fresh as the morning dew, we would settle in at our Showground "studio" underneath the public address stand, controlled firmly by Mr Meaney. He owned the AWA franchise in town, and had been the Show's announcer for years. He would insist on getting all the results first, and only after he had finished with them would he condescend to allow the humble radio people to have access to them.
Our early morning freshness would evaporate rapidly. In the "studio" where humidity would reach perspiration point instantaneously, we usually worked as a duo. The others would roam the grounds, often lugging an extremely heavy wire recorder. ("Don't complain about it chaps", said Keith, "we're lucky to have it". We weren't quite sure whether this was meant to be a comparison with our neighboring radio stations 2GF Grafton and 2MW Murwillumbah, or a reflection on the generosity of our Board of Directors).
The working conditions meant there had to be frequent changes of shift.
The Show had one special amenity we came to know and love. It was the on-the-spot bar. There were lots of them - in the cattle section, near the car displays, outside the exhibitor's entrance to the Show ring - anywhere, in fact, where the ground was dusty enough and the crowds likely to be thirsty. One's privacy while having a drink was made secure by strips of hessian stretched across pieces of wood hammered into the ground.
It was to one of these places of refreshment that we repaired at the close of each broadcasting chore. The beer came in disposable paper cups and was thoughtfully served from kegs set up on the trestle-bar in the sun so that the beer reached showground temperature very quickly.
We didn't mind, although the headache at the end of the day was a warning not to do it again. Until the next day, of course.
We were a great and happy team. What we lacked in experience we made up in enthusiasm.
John Stretch, who got his first civilian job with us, had been in the air force. A big man with a good sense of humour and son of a Big Gun in the Church, he was the only one of us with experience in worldly affairs. He showed that he was smarter than any of us when he later left the station, married the Mayor's daughter and went into business.
Dick McLaren, a copywriter from Sydney, had joined us to get himself on the air. He was also a gifted pianist who could pick up any tune and make it come alive. He became a legend in the town, joined the television station when it finally opened, and eventually had his own business before moving to Sydney and later to New Zealand. He also introduced his best friend to the station who fitted in very well.
Dick's mate Phil Charley had been in radio for some time, probably as long as I had, which was all of five or six years. Like Dick, he was a musician,. played clarinet, and cherished a burning ambition to meet Benny Goodman. Phil moved on to station management and later to the emerging commercial radio industry in Papua New Guinea before establishing himself in Sydney at 2CH and after that at the then new Film Television and Radio School.
Geoff Ryan was like me, with a similar lean and hungry look. He was ex-army, and was strongly motivated to stay that way. He shared with me the distinction of having been a Bryson Taylor pupil, the difference being that I had to pay my own fees, while the Australian Government paid them for Geoff. We once appeared together in a drama group at the Lismore Eisteddfod in a scene from "School for Scandal", and Bryson was the adjudicator. He complimented Geoff on his good, clear diction and his "open throat" and said not a word about me. He had no idea who we were. Our costumes and wigs and painted faces did not provide any clues.
And with us at the show, and one of the boys except for the discussions at the bar, was Dinah Wood. She was no token female. The wife of a local school teacher, she had come to 2LM to give talks for the CWA. She had quickly found herself a spot on the station, conducting the morning session. She only gave up her radio work when her husband was transferred to the South Coast.
Then there was Des McDonald, who came to town and had the Saturday breakfast shift as one of his chores. He quickly got himself suspended because he made a comment on air about a well-known and old fashioned cough remedy, which one of the directors found offensive. After a decent interval the suspension was lifted and he later headed for other climes. He and I would meet again in Wollongong, where he would receive a more permanent kind of suspension, which possibly enhanced his radio career. He later found himself managing radio stations in Perth.
The engineers were also part of the team. Hector Green who smiled even when he wasn't happy and who was usually the first to suggest a visit to the bar (he was an expert on the product - he made his own, with much better results than the man at Miss Macs).
Jim Hudson had been at the station before World War 2 as a junior technician, and now had his "ticket" and could legally switch on a transmitter. He was a particular mate of mine. We were most impressed by a comedy record "Running an Office", featuring an English vaudeville comedy team called Harry Tate and Company. It was full of lines like "SACK! - er, pardon me, we're just reorganising the staff" and "You're the manager? You don't look much like a manager to me..."
We would throw these lines backwards and forwards whenever the mood took us.
We lost touch for many years and only communicated after I got my name in the paper, for firing a certain radio reporter in Sydney. Jim was working for a Brisbane paint company, and reading of my achievement in the Courier Mail, quickly sent me a telex. Without introduction of any kind, it simply said "Pardon me - we're just re-organising the staff".
I knew who had sent it.
In spite of one effort to meet up again, we never have.
And Engineering Eric Rowe was everyone's mate. A cheeky grin on his face, he would walk into the copy department jingling the spare coins in his pocket and inveigle us into abandoning our creative efforts in favour of a few yarns over a brown ale. Peter's niece came to town and Eric fell head over heels in love with her. It was a marriage made in heaven, but Eric succumbed to one of the hazards of radio engineers in those days - he was electrocuted on the job only a year or so after their wedding.
From year to year, the members of the Show broadcasting team might change, due to "career moves", but the atmosphere did not. It was one of headaches, confusion, tired muscles from carting heavy equipment around, as well as dust in the eyes nose and throat. This last one could be cured quickly but was entirely recurrent.
There was always a surprise in store at the Show. One year a representative of Actors' Equity, the union that all radio announcers were supposed to belong to, arrived there. In his day job, he sold motor vehicles, and he was working in that capacity at one of the Show stands. He sent out many public address announcements asking me to contact him.
His aim was to get my help in unionising the station. This was after I'd gone back to Lismore after having worked in Sydney, where I had been compelled to join the union. I managed to avoid hearing the announcements as the public address system was not so loud at our broadcasting position.
He did not persevere. None of us wanted to join. They might try to "improve" our conditions but we all liked working in the run-down Northern Star backrooms. We didn't want anyone to spoil the fun.
One year, just as the Show was closing, one of the team came into the outside broadcast studio and told me there was a small group of people looking for me. "They look like hillbillies to me", he said.
They did and they were.
Slim Dusty, who by now had graduated to actually making recordings which were sold in large numbers by record shops, was there with his wife Joy and a team, of other people. "Like to talk to you about a show we're putting together", he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Ian Grieve Collection
Since the days in Kempsey where I first met Slim Dusty, country music - "cowboy" or "hill-billy" were the in-terms - had been a pretty important part of the radio music scene.
Each station devoted a part of its time to this segment, even if only as an opportunity to do a little clowning with pseudo yankee voices projected by the announcing team.
At Lithgow we had a fifteen minute program in the breakfast session each day, called "Happy Valley". This program name was dreamed up by an earlier announcer with a wayward sense of humour. Lithgow was in a valley, but it was sometimes not a happy place during wartime.
My Happy Valley character was "Granpop", a doughty citizen with a remedy for anything that ailed anyone.
"You've got a cold son", I would enquire of me using the Granpop voice - slightly high pitched with what I imagined was an American sound. "I know perzactly the right cure for it".
"What is it?", I'd ask - ignoring the fact that Granpop and I shared the same ailment, and that fact must have been evident to the listeners.
"Whusky!" he would shrill, punctuating the statement with a sound which was meant to represent the old man spitting (into a spittoon, of course - correct behaviour was required on radio in those days). The realism was provided by hitting the base of the microphone stand with a pencil, which resulted in a delightful vibrating sound as the spittle was heard to find its mark.
"Oh, no", I told him. "I know a better cure for a cold than whisky"
"DON'T TELL ME! Don't tell me! I don't want to know about it, son", he replied, again punctuating appropriately.
Granpop disappeared from the Happy Valley program at the same time I left Lithgow to go to Lismore. Like me, he cast a last glance over the Happy Valley from the front steps of the station, saw it filled with factory smoke, felt the chill of the wind from the mountains, and knew it was quitting time. He never reappeared, although an even more unbelievable character arrived on the scene in Lismore. It didn't worry me, as this new character was not my responsibility.
His name was Uncle Zeke.
Zeke's real name, as he confirmed to the other identities publicly on this program, was Zeke Cholmondley O'Zandervich Junior.
At this distance it is probably safe to let you know that this was a lie. His real name was Geoff Ryan, a mild mannered and entirely likeable bloke who would never dream of saying the things that Uncle Zeke came out with.
Uncle Zeke was one of the stars of Radio Ranch.
Radio Ranch was a special effort to capture a market that was large in anyone's terms. "Our kind of music" was BIG, very big on the North Coast of NSW, and Lismore was a centre to which every travelling country music show looked forward eagerly to playing because of its enthusiastic audiences and sell-out seasons.
The people who started Radio Ranch were Phillip Charley and Dick McLaren. It was a Saturday morning show - it ran for an hour from 9.30 - and gave the opportunity to would-be singers to have a go on the air. So on Saturday mornings, the 2LM studio would be full to overflowing with people wearing cowboy hats, jodhpurs, and any other regalia that made them feel like cowboy (or cowgirl) stars.
Dick called himself Trigger, and Phil was Moose.
Those names sounded perfectly reasonable back in the early 1950s, but perhaps have lost their acceptability in the meantime.
When I joined the team at Radio Ranch, I got the moniker of Buck Hawkins. Some years later, long after I had left the station, I was walking through Lismore with Gail and Vicki (we were on holiday at Ballina) and someone came up to me and asked if I was Buck Hawkins! I was delighted to confirm the fact, and complimented him on his very good memory, but on reflection would have been even more delighted had he remembered who I really was.
Each station devoted a part of its time to this segment, even if only as an opportunity to do a little clowning with pseudo yankee voices projected by the announcing team.
At Lithgow we had a fifteen minute program in the breakfast session each day, called "Happy Valley". This program name was dreamed up by an earlier announcer with a wayward sense of humour. Lithgow was in a valley, but it was sometimes not a happy place during wartime.
My Happy Valley character was "Granpop", a doughty citizen with a remedy for anything that ailed anyone.
"You've got a cold son", I would enquire of me using the Granpop voice - slightly high pitched with what I imagined was an American sound. "I know perzactly the right cure for it".
"What is it?", I'd ask - ignoring the fact that Granpop and I shared the same ailment, and that fact must have been evident to the listeners.
"Whusky!" he would shrill, punctuating the statement with a sound which was meant to represent the old man spitting (into a spittoon, of course - correct behaviour was required on radio in those days). The realism was provided by hitting the base of the microphone stand with a pencil, which resulted in a delightful vibrating sound as the spittle was heard to find its mark.
"Oh, no", I told him. "I know a better cure for a cold than whisky"
"DON'T TELL ME! Don't tell me! I don't want to know about it, son", he replied, again punctuating appropriately.
Granpop disappeared from the Happy Valley program at the same time I left Lithgow to go to Lismore. Like me, he cast a last glance over the Happy Valley from the front steps of the station, saw it filled with factory smoke, felt the chill of the wind from the mountains, and knew it was quitting time. He never reappeared, although an even more unbelievable character arrived on the scene in Lismore. It didn't worry me, as this new character was not my responsibility.
His name was Uncle Zeke.
Zeke's real name, as he confirmed to the other identities publicly on this program, was Zeke Cholmondley O'Zandervich Junior.
At this distance it is probably safe to let you know that this was a lie. His real name was Geoff Ryan, a mild mannered and entirely likeable bloke who would never dream of saying the things that Uncle Zeke came out with.
Uncle Zeke was one of the stars of Radio Ranch.
Radio Ranch was a special effort to capture a market that was large in anyone's terms. "Our kind of music" was BIG, very big on the North Coast of NSW, and Lismore was a centre to which every travelling country music show looked forward eagerly to playing because of its enthusiastic audiences and sell-out seasons.
The people who started Radio Ranch were Phillip Charley and Dick McLaren. It was a Saturday morning show - it ran for an hour from 9.30 - and gave the opportunity to would-be singers to have a go on the air. So on Saturday mornings, the 2LM studio would be full to overflowing with people wearing cowboy hats, jodhpurs, and any other regalia that made them feel like cowboy (or cowgirl) stars.
Dick called himself Trigger, and Phil was Moose.
Those names sounded perfectly reasonable back in the early 1950s, but perhaps have lost their acceptability in the meantime.
When I joined the team at Radio Ranch, I got the moniker of Buck Hawkins. Some years later, long after I had left the station, I was walking through Lismore with Gail and Vicki (we were on holiday at Ballina) and someone came up to me and asked if I was Buck Hawkins! I was delighted to confirm the fact, and complimented him on his very good memory, but on reflection would have been even more delighted had he remembered who I really was.
Ian Grieve Collection
Phil and Dick had already decided that the program needed a Club, and membership was offered at a nominal sum. For this, lucky listeners received a silver plated badge and a membership card, which incredibly looked quite like the Gumnuts card I had issued in Kempsey. It was standard stock in any printer's store room. The card indicated that the owner was "Ranch Hand" number something or other, in an unconscious, but inappropriate, imitation of the ABC's Argonauts' Club.
Membership caught on.
Now Radio Ranch was to get its own magazine.
Membership caught on.
Now Radio Ranch was to get its own magazine.
Paul Kelly Collection
"Spurs" arrived. It was originally a twelve-page publication, and it cost a shilling each month for the latest news about country singers and their songs, with a few photographs scattered about.
The editor was Moose - to give him his full name - Moose Murphy. He did the "editing" in between announcing, copywriting, and playing in a dance band.
Spurs made its first appearance in a somewhat uncaring world in May 1952.
The first edition had a Kowboy Kwizz - in which the first "kwestion" (alliteration was a strong point of the editorial staff) was "Who is Shirley Thoms' husband?" and the last "Name three tribes of Red Indians?".*
There was a letter from Slim Dusty welcoming the magazine, "wishing Spurs all the best. All my friends in cowboy music join me in this wish", a letter to Uncle Zeke (from his horse, Gus, complaining that he didn't get an invite to Zeke's weddin') - a useful article on how to play the steel guitar - a Hill Billy Horoscope - and, as they say, much much more.
The editor was Moose - to give him his full name - Moose Murphy. He did the "editing" in between announcing, copywriting, and playing in a dance band.
Spurs made its first appearance in a somewhat uncaring world in May 1952.
The first edition had a Kowboy Kwizz - in which the first "kwestion" (alliteration was a strong point of the editorial staff) was "Who is Shirley Thoms' husband?" and the last "Name three tribes of Red Indians?".*
There was a letter from Slim Dusty welcoming the magazine, "wishing Spurs all the best. All my friends in cowboy music join me in this wish", a letter to Uncle Zeke (from his horse, Gus, complaining that he didn't get an invite to Zeke's weddin') - a useful article on how to play the steel guitar - a Hill Billy Horoscope - and, as they say, much much more.
Ian Grieve Collection
Spurs took off very well with its defined audience, and as time went by, increased in size and improved its style. We became quite ambitious and made the front cover more attractive. For the first few months, we had run the same illustration on the front page, relying on a change of colour to identify the different issues, but as sales increased, we decided to run a different photograph each month - the photograph in black and white, but we needed some colour, so the title was white on a red background.
The first of these new front covers was a family photograph of the Dusty family, Slim, Joy and baby Anne. They were in Lismore for a Radio ranch appearance, and we got the photographer from the Northern Star to do a little moonlighting. That issue was a sellout.
The magazine was not popular at first with our employers, Northern Star Limited.
Undoubtedly one reason for this was that it was being printed by another company - one owned by a former Northern Star employee. I had joined the editorial team by this stage, as Moose had gone to Roma to manage his first radio station, and Trigger had shot off to start his own business for a while. Geoff and I were called into the General Manager's office, located downstairs at the back of the Northern Star's general office.
He was not renowned for his sense of humour. He had a copy of the offending publication on his desk and wanted to know why the Northern Star hadn't been asked to print it (the home firm was too costly) and what did we think we were doing, giving the business to an outside organisation? (We didn't know but we would change our ways immediately).
The first of these new front covers was a family photograph of the Dusty family, Slim, Joy and baby Anne. They were in Lismore for a Radio ranch appearance, and we got the photographer from the Northern Star to do a little moonlighting. That issue was a sellout.
The magazine was not popular at first with our employers, Northern Star Limited.
Undoubtedly one reason for this was that it was being printed by another company - one owned by a former Northern Star employee. I had joined the editorial team by this stage, as Moose had gone to Roma to manage his first radio station, and Trigger had shot off to start his own business for a while. Geoff and I were called into the General Manager's office, located downstairs at the back of the Northern Star's general office.
He was not renowned for his sense of humour. He had a copy of the offending publication on his desk and wanted to know why the Northern Star hadn't been asked to print it (the home firm was too costly) and what did we think we were doing, giving the business to an outside organisation? (We didn't know but we would change our ways immediately).
Paul Kelly Collection
Gradually Radio Ranch and Spurs just about took over at the radio station. We all spent most of our off-air time working on various Ranch projects. The Radio Ranch petty cash box was hidden in one of the filing cabinets in the copy department, in case any of us ran out of money during the week. On pay days, we'd have to put it back, otherwise the next issue of Spurs might not get printed.
Then we got the idea of running concerts. Because we felt that the demands of the whole thing were getting larger, and that might cause the General Manager with his lack of a sense of fun and adventure to put the lid on the whole operation, these concerts were to be run for charity. The charity selected always made money out of them, but we figured there was a need for the organisers themselves to be rewarded as well. And so I was able to pay for the windows in our new home to be fixed so that they actually closed when it rained.
Concerts were not an original idea. Slim Dusty had put the thought in my mind on that day at the Lismore Showground when he told me he was about to go on the road.
He and his wife Joy had been appearing in shows around the Sydney area, mostly to the financial gain of one or two entrepreneurs, so they had some ideas they wanted to develop.
The Dustys planned to have a show with a rope-spinner and one or two other people. They thought it might be a good idea to get a little help from their friends. Geoff and I thought it a good idea too - there might be some money in it - and within weeks we had lined up some country halls and a publicity campaign, spearheaded by Spurs and Radio Ranch
Then we got the idea of running concerts. Because we felt that the demands of the whole thing were getting larger, and that might cause the General Manager with his lack of a sense of fun and adventure to put the lid on the whole operation, these concerts were to be run for charity. The charity selected always made money out of them, but we figured there was a need for the organisers themselves to be rewarded as well. And so I was able to pay for the windows in our new home to be fixed so that they actually closed when it rained.
Concerts were not an original idea. Slim Dusty had put the thought in my mind on that day at the Lismore Showground when he told me he was about to go on the road.
He and his wife Joy had been appearing in shows around the Sydney area, mostly to the financial gain of one or two entrepreneurs, so they had some ideas they wanted to develop.
The Dustys planned to have a show with a rope-spinner and one or two other people. They thought it might be a good idea to get a little help from their friends. Geoff and I thought it a good idea too - there might be some money in it - and within weeks we had lined up some country halls and a publicity campaign, spearheaded by Spurs and Radio Ranch
The concerts were sell-outs. They were clinging from the rafters
We didn't put Slim and Joy on the map, so much as show them where it was.
But the concept of running concerts in our own right persisted.
We would book up a name performer and arrange a week of shows. Casino and Kyogle were our best centres - they always got to see the show, but we also went further afield at times - to Tenterfield, to Mullumbimby, Coraki and Ballina (which was just down the road from Lismore).
The outgoings were small, except for the payment sought by the star and the cost of getting him or her to Lismore. We needed a car to travel, so we hired one because none of us owned one (even the manager didn't own a car. He didn't rate one, and couldn't afford one). We had to pay for the hall, and we paid for posters.
It was all done on the box office promise, and it never let us down.
* Answers: Jack Sole, of Sole Brothers ' Circus; Sioux, Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, etc.
We didn't put Slim and Joy on the map, so much as show them where it was.
But the concept of running concerts in our own right persisted.
We would book up a name performer and arrange a week of shows. Casino and Kyogle were our best centres - they always got to see the show, but we also went further afield at times - to Tenterfield, to Mullumbimby, Coraki and Ballina (which was just down the road from Lismore).
The outgoings were small, except for the payment sought by the star and the cost of getting him or her to Lismore. We needed a car to travel, so we hired one because none of us owned one (even the manager didn't own a car. He didn't rate one, and couldn't afford one). We had to pay for the hall, and we paid for posters.
It was all done on the box office promise, and it never let us down.
* Answers: Jack Sole, of Sole Brothers ' Circus; Sioux, Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, etc.
Chapter Sixteen
"This is what you fellows want", said the travelling salesman.
He represented a well-known correspondence school and he had cornered John and me in the copy department one steamy summer afternoon
"Look", he said. "You can learn all about advertising - how to design ads, write copy. You should be preparing yourselves for the years ahead, and this will do it for you".
He added: "In a couple of years you can be in Sydney or Melbourne making a lot of money in an advertising agency. It's the coming thing, you know. A marvellous opportunity for both of you".
I'm sure he believed it. He had a Cambridge accent, which, as far as John and I were concerned, meant that he told the truth at all times.
For an outlay of five shillings a week, and with the implied guarantee of big money for life, who wouldn't take it on?
The only problem was, when we received the first lessons we realised that the whole course was prepared in England. England did not have commercial radio at all. So there were absolutely no guidelines we could apply to the present job.
Valiantly we persevered. The manuals were full of information and the exercises were always severely marked, with added words of encouragement to keep us involved.
John finished his course and did well. I got sick of mine after a couple of months - it was at the point where we had to sketch illustrations for the ads we were creating and my lack of artistic talent became painfully evident.
I had, anyway, done a course in radio writing some time before I even got a job - a course I'd seen advertised in the old Australian Journal. It was promoted by the Australian School of Journalism and it had a ring of authenticity about it - plus you got real examples of radio commercial scripts.
The people who wrote my course were said to be radio writers in real life. I am sure they were - otherwise why would they need to earn extra money preparing a "writing for radio" course?
However, the new skills we were learning - analysing what had to be said, economy of words, looking for some uniqueness for each client - helped us to cope with the new influx of exciting new local advertisers. We had canvas manufacturers, hardware stores, saddleries, farm machinery. We had them all. We had fashion showrooms, too, and jewellers, and grocers.
There were many more sponsors than I'd had to cope with in Lithgow, where I'd shared the writing chore with the manager. Now there were four or five of us - but we each still had to write around twenty announcements a day.
The fact that we had all these sponsors was a credit to somebody - certainly not me. When I arrived at the station in 1945, I was told that while it was fine for someone to go out and sell advertising, we could not approach anyone who traditionally used the newspaper.
Elementary logic at work, there. The newspaper had had everything its own way for a long, long time, and was not about to give up its sponsors to this relatively new medium which everyone knew was just a flash in the pan.
The first person to challenge the status quo was Don Scriven. As chief announcer and copy manager when I first arrived there, he had seen an opportunity to make a few shillings for himself, and convinced the boss that he should drop off on the way to work each morning and sell some sponsors, to be rewarded for his trouble by a small commission.
Don obviously decided that he would get sponsors on the air whether they "belonged" to the Northern Star or not - and then wait for questions to be asked. He probably sneaked one Northern Star advertiser onto the radio at first and waited a week or so to see if anyone noticed before approaching another one.
The policy was in tatters in no time. One very probable reason could have been that the staunchly Presbyterian Board of Directors began to see profits on the horizon - in a business they had bought and built up mainly to make sure nobody else got the chance to challenge the Northern Star's supremacy.
So the advertisers rolled in - and so did the money, although we workers in the vineyard (or similar location) did not see much evidence of this in our own pay packets.
The only problem was - where to get the ideas for all these sponsors? How can you write copy for seven different milk bars without each of them sounding the same? Not only does one milk bar look very much like any other milk bar, it also sounds the same.
Among the magazines that used to arrive at the Northern Star were several American publications, and one of them gave us our answer. It was full of ads with good catch-lines and marvellous copy.
It was called The Saturday Evening Post.
Nobody ever explained why the local newspaper subscribed. What's more, nobody could ever explain why it was opened very rarely. "Posts" in their American wrappers were piled up in a corner of the reporter's room gathering dust with all the other material that never got looked at.
Logic suggested that nobody would ever miss them.
The reporter's room was easily accessible because (a) it didn't have a lock on the door and (b) it didn't come to life until after lunch - so we could go in and borrow whatever we coveted. We borrowed typewriters regularly (theirs were much better than ours, which were Northern Star hand-me-down Remington Rands) but we were careful to return these before the journos arrived.
It wouldn't be necessary to return the Posts, we figured, because obviously none of the reporters ever noticed them.
Looking back at those days, and recalling the drab surroundings of that old reporter's room (and the rest of the establishment) I am amazed at the number of people there who moved on to much greater things - one of them was a cadet reporter named Phillip Knightley who became England's most famous spy-chaser.
Having found the Saturday Evening Post, it was important to make sure that any pirated advertising copy was marked in some way to make sure that the next radio copy writer didn't use the same lines for the next milk bar. Easier said than done, because with the perversity of human nature, we soon learned that a good line in a Coca Cola ad was going to be used by all of us. It might turn up in a saddlery spot, or making a distinctive point for a dry cleaner, and end up in a scholarly dissertation on how to deal with mastitus in dairy cows.
The American copywriters could never know they were making so many advertising campaigns come to life in far away Australia.
For a couple of years we pirated Saturday Evening Post copy to help make scintillating sales messages for the radio advertisers of the Far North Coast of New South Wales.
It would have lasted much longer than that, if for some reason, the Assistant Editor of the paper hadn't wanted to find something one afternoon, and searching through the pile of rubbish in the corner, finally bellowed "Eh, who's been pinching me Saturday Evenin' Posts?"
The suspects were immediately apparent to him. Clif Murray came storming into what was smilingly called the copy department (a room we shared with the night-time newspaper dictaphone staff, where in the days long before telex or fax, cables and other stories were read over the phone from Grafton, recorded onto cylindrical discs and then typed out for the next morning's newspaper).
"C'mon", he roared. "Gimme me Posts".
We meekly handed them over, the magazines somewhat the worse for wear, realising that the days of highly creative advertising copy had come to an abrupt end. He was not in the mood to do a deal.
While the advertising copy began to lack a certain shine, there was new life in the writing department, just the same.
He represented a well-known correspondence school and he had cornered John and me in the copy department one steamy summer afternoon
"Look", he said. "You can learn all about advertising - how to design ads, write copy. You should be preparing yourselves for the years ahead, and this will do it for you".
He added: "In a couple of years you can be in Sydney or Melbourne making a lot of money in an advertising agency. It's the coming thing, you know. A marvellous opportunity for both of you".
I'm sure he believed it. He had a Cambridge accent, which, as far as John and I were concerned, meant that he told the truth at all times.
For an outlay of five shillings a week, and with the implied guarantee of big money for life, who wouldn't take it on?
The only problem was, when we received the first lessons we realised that the whole course was prepared in England. England did not have commercial radio at all. So there were absolutely no guidelines we could apply to the present job.
Valiantly we persevered. The manuals were full of information and the exercises were always severely marked, with added words of encouragement to keep us involved.
John finished his course and did well. I got sick of mine after a couple of months - it was at the point where we had to sketch illustrations for the ads we were creating and my lack of artistic talent became painfully evident.
I had, anyway, done a course in radio writing some time before I even got a job - a course I'd seen advertised in the old Australian Journal. It was promoted by the Australian School of Journalism and it had a ring of authenticity about it - plus you got real examples of radio commercial scripts.
The people who wrote my course were said to be radio writers in real life. I am sure they were - otherwise why would they need to earn extra money preparing a "writing for radio" course?
However, the new skills we were learning - analysing what had to be said, economy of words, looking for some uniqueness for each client - helped us to cope with the new influx of exciting new local advertisers. We had canvas manufacturers, hardware stores, saddleries, farm machinery. We had them all. We had fashion showrooms, too, and jewellers, and grocers.
There were many more sponsors than I'd had to cope with in Lithgow, where I'd shared the writing chore with the manager. Now there were four or five of us - but we each still had to write around twenty announcements a day.
The fact that we had all these sponsors was a credit to somebody - certainly not me. When I arrived at the station in 1945, I was told that while it was fine for someone to go out and sell advertising, we could not approach anyone who traditionally used the newspaper.
Elementary logic at work, there. The newspaper had had everything its own way for a long, long time, and was not about to give up its sponsors to this relatively new medium which everyone knew was just a flash in the pan.
The first person to challenge the status quo was Don Scriven. As chief announcer and copy manager when I first arrived there, he had seen an opportunity to make a few shillings for himself, and convinced the boss that he should drop off on the way to work each morning and sell some sponsors, to be rewarded for his trouble by a small commission.
Don obviously decided that he would get sponsors on the air whether they "belonged" to the Northern Star or not - and then wait for questions to be asked. He probably sneaked one Northern Star advertiser onto the radio at first and waited a week or so to see if anyone noticed before approaching another one.
The policy was in tatters in no time. One very probable reason could have been that the staunchly Presbyterian Board of Directors began to see profits on the horizon - in a business they had bought and built up mainly to make sure nobody else got the chance to challenge the Northern Star's supremacy.
So the advertisers rolled in - and so did the money, although we workers in the vineyard (or similar location) did not see much evidence of this in our own pay packets.
The only problem was - where to get the ideas for all these sponsors? How can you write copy for seven different milk bars without each of them sounding the same? Not only does one milk bar look very much like any other milk bar, it also sounds the same.
Among the magazines that used to arrive at the Northern Star were several American publications, and one of them gave us our answer. It was full of ads with good catch-lines and marvellous copy.
It was called The Saturday Evening Post.
Nobody ever explained why the local newspaper subscribed. What's more, nobody could ever explain why it was opened very rarely. "Posts" in their American wrappers were piled up in a corner of the reporter's room gathering dust with all the other material that never got looked at.
Logic suggested that nobody would ever miss them.
The reporter's room was easily accessible because (a) it didn't have a lock on the door and (b) it didn't come to life until after lunch - so we could go in and borrow whatever we coveted. We borrowed typewriters regularly (theirs were much better than ours, which were Northern Star hand-me-down Remington Rands) but we were careful to return these before the journos arrived.
It wouldn't be necessary to return the Posts, we figured, because obviously none of the reporters ever noticed them.
Looking back at those days, and recalling the drab surroundings of that old reporter's room (and the rest of the establishment) I am amazed at the number of people there who moved on to much greater things - one of them was a cadet reporter named Phillip Knightley who became England's most famous spy-chaser.
Having found the Saturday Evening Post, it was important to make sure that any pirated advertising copy was marked in some way to make sure that the next radio copy writer didn't use the same lines for the next milk bar. Easier said than done, because with the perversity of human nature, we soon learned that a good line in a Coca Cola ad was going to be used by all of us. It might turn up in a saddlery spot, or making a distinctive point for a dry cleaner, and end up in a scholarly dissertation on how to deal with mastitus in dairy cows.
The American copywriters could never know they were making so many advertising campaigns come to life in far away Australia.
For a couple of years we pirated Saturday Evening Post copy to help make scintillating sales messages for the radio advertisers of the Far North Coast of New South Wales.
It would have lasted much longer than that, if for some reason, the Assistant Editor of the paper hadn't wanted to find something one afternoon, and searching through the pile of rubbish in the corner, finally bellowed "Eh, who's been pinching me Saturday Evenin' Posts?"
The suspects were immediately apparent to him. Clif Murray came storming into what was smilingly called the copy department (a room we shared with the night-time newspaper dictaphone staff, where in the days long before telex or fax, cables and other stories were read over the phone from Grafton, recorded onto cylindrical discs and then typed out for the next morning's newspaper).
"C'mon", he roared. "Gimme me Posts".
We meekly handed them over, the magazines somewhat the worse for wear, realising that the days of highly creative advertising copy had come to an abrupt end. He was not in the mood to do a deal.
While the advertising copy began to lack a certain shine, there was new life in the writing department, just the same.
Northern Star
One of our sponsors wanted something different, "something NEW", so the creative team (that's all the announcers who all also wrote the copy) went into a huddle and came up with an idea that hadn't been used in years.
It was called "Pedigree Stakes", and it involved listeners creating their own hopefully amusing pedigrees* for imaginary horses, with the best one getting a prize of ten shillings and sixpence. There was something about this sum of money at 2LM - every time a cash prize was offered, the boss would suggest ten and six. Second prize for the Stakes was a little less than that, and there was a third prize which almost certainly covered the cost of the postage stamp needed for the entry.
Two of us would then write a script to build this whole concept into a fifteen minute session. To fill out the time, we needed to write a description of a race in which each of the "starters" - the best of the week's entries - would run.
Then we had to put some people into it.
We - that's Dick the piano player and I - created a race caller called Squirrel Tangles - a clever, clever adaptation of the name Cyril Angles, the great Sydney race-caller of the day on 2UW and later 2GB. Our Squirrell's race call was a jumble of cliches, puns and oblique observations we hoped the local audience would understand. Dick would pace the room, cigarette or pipe ablaze, working on the intricacies of the script, while I, as the faster typist, sat at the typewriter and interpreted his words.
We also developed a character known as Clarence the Kind Hearted Bookie, and his side kick (name of George) whose responses to Clarence's wise and responsible sayings were always totally unintelligible but could be interpreted easily by Clarence when necessary.
Clarence was played by a very talented man who had a good day job - he was the representative of a major insurance company - but liked to spend his time at the station. In fact he spent so much time with us that the boss at one stage seriously threatened to put him on the staff - which scared him away for a couple of weeks.
His mumbling side-kick was played with great aplomb by Phil, who may have modelled George's responses on "scat" singing ("be-bop-be-dobbabob" is as close as one could get in transcribing how Phil interpreted the script's terse GEORGE: MUMBLE MUMBLE).
He was certainly a fan of Ella Fitzgerald.
My part was that of Squirrel, the race caller. Squirrel had a high-pitched, nasal tone, which Clarence would often describe as "dulcet".
The sponsor, an electrical store, thought it was the best radio production in Australia. The Manager's brother ran a similar store in Kempsey, so before long Pedigree Stakes made it to the big time by going on a two station network - the 2LM recording being replayed on 2KM the following week.
It was called "Pedigree Stakes", and it involved listeners creating their own hopefully amusing pedigrees* for imaginary horses, with the best one getting a prize of ten shillings and sixpence. There was something about this sum of money at 2LM - every time a cash prize was offered, the boss would suggest ten and six. Second prize for the Stakes was a little less than that, and there was a third prize which almost certainly covered the cost of the postage stamp needed for the entry.
Two of us would then write a script to build this whole concept into a fifteen minute session. To fill out the time, we needed to write a description of a race in which each of the "starters" - the best of the week's entries - would run.
Then we had to put some people into it.
We - that's Dick the piano player and I - created a race caller called Squirrel Tangles - a clever, clever adaptation of the name Cyril Angles, the great Sydney race-caller of the day on 2UW and later 2GB. Our Squirrell's race call was a jumble of cliches, puns and oblique observations we hoped the local audience would understand. Dick would pace the room, cigarette or pipe ablaze, working on the intricacies of the script, while I, as the faster typist, sat at the typewriter and interpreted his words.
We also developed a character known as Clarence the Kind Hearted Bookie, and his side kick (name of George) whose responses to Clarence's wise and responsible sayings were always totally unintelligible but could be interpreted easily by Clarence when necessary.
Clarence was played by a very talented man who had a good day job - he was the representative of a major insurance company - but liked to spend his time at the station. In fact he spent so much time with us that the boss at one stage seriously threatened to put him on the staff - which scared him away for a couple of weeks.
His mumbling side-kick was played with great aplomb by Phil, who may have modelled George's responses on "scat" singing ("be-bop-be-dobbabob" is as close as one could get in transcribing how Phil interpreted the script's terse GEORGE: MUMBLE MUMBLE).
He was certainly a fan of Ella Fitzgerald.
My part was that of Squirrel, the race caller. Squirrel had a high-pitched, nasal tone, which Clarence would often describe as "dulcet".
The sponsor, an electrical store, thought it was the best radio production in Australia. The Manager's brother ran a similar store in Kempsey, so before long Pedigree Stakes made it to the big time by going on a two station network - the 2LM recording being replayed on 2KM the following week.
Northern Star - June 1949 - 7.30pm
Dick and I shared 10/6 a week for writing the script, which we usually spent on Friday afternoon at Mr Ryan's friendly establishment. With beer at sixpence a glass, we would still go away with spending money in our pockets - and in time to present the "live" Friday afternoon children's session at 5.30, known internally as was the case at all radio stations that had such a program, as the "Smell and Yell".
One mother told me that her small son had told his father one afternoon that he "smelled just like the men at 2LM". This was something of a puzzlement, until checking revealed that the kid was a regular each Friday afternoon and that his Dad was also a customer of the Ryan.
Dick and I collaborated on another series which was meant to be similar in style to the BBC's Take It From Here - without the music bits.
This number was called Keep off the Grass - a title devised in desperation one summer's afternoon - a fifteen minute slot to be filled that night and nothing to put in it. A sponsor (the very same that sponsored Pedigree Stakes) awaited, and something had to be done quickly. Title selected, we had something to write at the top of the page which, in turn, suggested ideas that might turn into a script.
Keep off The Grass lasted long enough for me to remember it, but not long enough for anyone else. The scripts, alas, have been lost to posterity these many years.
Another sponsor had been involved in an "On this Day" kind of series which was recorded in Sydney. It cost a bit, and was due to be renewed. His wife suggested that we might be able find a five minute astrology session each day, at a lesser price, of course.
It was up for grabs with the weekly writing fee ten shillings and sixpence.
It struck me that I was quite well equipped to write this series, because of my earlier experience with the Aspro Year Book, so I wrote to Mum asking her to send me anything (no matter how old) that would help me.
She replied with enthusiasm - several issues of Mr Arthur de Dion's Astrology Magazine, an ephemeris (that's a book used by astronomers to locate the moon, planets and other heavenly bodies) and some other material. Now all that needed to be done was to update any old-sounding information, put it into script form, and broadcast it.
The famous Continental astrologer, Victor le Valdi, was born.
Not only were his prognostications heard and heeded in Lismore - they were also treated with all due respect by the citizens of Ayr, in North Queensland, for a fee of ten and six a week.
Despite his fame, and the fortune it brought with it, Victor gave the game away after two years. I became tired of re-hashing the same material over and over again - much to the consternation of the grocer's wife. Especially when the station at Ayr mislaid the month's forecasts while I was on holidays, and I had to spend two days re-creating thirty-one days of vital information, working without the benefit of de Dion's Astrology magazines or anything else, and using somebody else's typewriter which was older and crankier than any we had at 2LM.
I had tried to market the series all over Australia and almost succeeded. Well, there was Ayr. But after the creative strain of writing seven five minute scripts a week I was sure that Victor would never surface again.
Not so. When some old files were being sorted out at 2UE in 1961, there he was, and in great form too. It was a submission I'd made seven or eight years previously, with good old Vic full of wise counsel on what the stars had in store for you if it happened to be your birthday today, what was likely to happen in world affairs, and whether or not it was safe to venture into the garden on that day.
They found my submission and a copy of the script. Would I be interested in writing some more? they wanted to know. There might be a place for him. There was a program called Soundabout, which had lots of short segments and it ran five days a week.
I thought not.
Not even at ten and six a day.
*Examples of amusing Pedigrees:
"DRUNK out of BOOZER by SIX O'CLOCK"
"BROKEN SCALES out of HEAVYWEIGHT by STANDING ON THEM".
One mother told me that her small son had told his father one afternoon that he "smelled just like the men at 2LM". This was something of a puzzlement, until checking revealed that the kid was a regular each Friday afternoon and that his Dad was also a customer of the Ryan.
Dick and I collaborated on another series which was meant to be similar in style to the BBC's Take It From Here - without the music bits.
This number was called Keep off the Grass - a title devised in desperation one summer's afternoon - a fifteen minute slot to be filled that night and nothing to put in it. A sponsor (the very same that sponsored Pedigree Stakes) awaited, and something had to be done quickly. Title selected, we had something to write at the top of the page which, in turn, suggested ideas that might turn into a script.
Keep off The Grass lasted long enough for me to remember it, but not long enough for anyone else. The scripts, alas, have been lost to posterity these many years.
Another sponsor had been involved in an "On this Day" kind of series which was recorded in Sydney. It cost a bit, and was due to be renewed. His wife suggested that we might be able find a five minute astrology session each day, at a lesser price, of course.
It was up for grabs with the weekly writing fee ten shillings and sixpence.
It struck me that I was quite well equipped to write this series, because of my earlier experience with the Aspro Year Book, so I wrote to Mum asking her to send me anything (no matter how old) that would help me.
She replied with enthusiasm - several issues of Mr Arthur de Dion's Astrology Magazine, an ephemeris (that's a book used by astronomers to locate the moon, planets and other heavenly bodies) and some other material. Now all that needed to be done was to update any old-sounding information, put it into script form, and broadcast it.
The famous Continental astrologer, Victor le Valdi, was born.
Not only were his prognostications heard and heeded in Lismore - they were also treated with all due respect by the citizens of Ayr, in North Queensland, for a fee of ten and six a week.
Despite his fame, and the fortune it brought with it, Victor gave the game away after two years. I became tired of re-hashing the same material over and over again - much to the consternation of the grocer's wife. Especially when the station at Ayr mislaid the month's forecasts while I was on holidays, and I had to spend two days re-creating thirty-one days of vital information, working without the benefit of de Dion's Astrology magazines or anything else, and using somebody else's typewriter which was older and crankier than any we had at 2LM.
I had tried to market the series all over Australia and almost succeeded. Well, there was Ayr. But after the creative strain of writing seven five minute scripts a week I was sure that Victor would never surface again.
Not so. When some old files were being sorted out at 2UE in 1961, there he was, and in great form too. It was a submission I'd made seven or eight years previously, with good old Vic full of wise counsel on what the stars had in store for you if it happened to be your birthday today, what was likely to happen in world affairs, and whether or not it was safe to venture into the garden on that day.
They found my submission and a copy of the script. Would I be interested in writing some more? they wanted to know. There might be a place for him. There was a program called Soundabout, which had lots of short segments and it ran five days a week.
I thought not.
Not even at ten and six a day.
*Examples of amusing Pedigrees:
"DRUNK out of BOOZER by SIX O'CLOCK"
"BROKEN SCALES out of HEAVYWEIGHT by STANDING ON THEM".
Chapter Seventeen
If there was one thing that Lismore knew how to do very well, it was how to put on a Flood.
"This is real flood weather" we would tell each other when the February rains came. The tropical downpour would fill the gutters in seconds, and keep them filled. Soon the sports grounds at the lower end of town would start to show a sheen of water and we'd be using the trunk lines to get the latest weather details.
A Flood! Sad to say, the prospect thrilled us to the bone.
From the day I arrived in Lismore I had heard about the Floods. They were a part of the folk lore of the city. Somehow the floods had become a way of life there, and the business centre itself flourished and extended even though business people knew that one day, as sure as the fact that Byron Bay was the most easterly point in Australia, swirling waters would move through and destroy the work (and presumably, the profits) of years.
You only had to look at the marks on the walls in the Molesworth Street shops to know how close the place had come to terrible disaster last time around.
Or maybe the canny business people made real money out of Flood Sales.
Every flood since the first settlers arrived had a story. To fill in a couple of hours with a local was easy - you just asked what had happened in the flood of (18)94 - or (19)18 - or whatever. It was a hot topic of one-way conversation.
Weather reports excepted, the surest sign that a major Flood was about to happen would be to see almost the entire reporting staff of the Northern Star, and several of the 2LM announcers, breasting the bar of one of the local establishments in a vain attempt at a community service - diminishing the beer supplies which may be adversely affected by inundation.
The worst thing that could happen would be that the kegs might be uplifted by the water and carried out to sea by the swollen river.
Don't get me wrong. A flood is serious business. People can drown, large numbers of farm animals may die, food supplies grow scarce, power supplies cease, and before you realise what's happening you're isolated from the rest of the known world. It can be very frightening indeed.
But to us, a flood was an excitement, and a chance to do what we knew radio could do best - keep people informed and provide a service that nobody else could. We were in the spotlight, and that suited us all.
It was a time when most farmers still had battery powered radio receivers in their homes, so all we had to do was to make sure that we stayed on the air. There was no doubt they would be listening There was no other information source.
If power went off in the city we had to make sure we had enough power at the transmitter to allow us to transmit as well as operate the emergency studio. That also meant that someone would be rostered to go out to the transmitter and sit there for the duration in case power supplies died at the studio.
Lismore stands on the junction of the Richmond River and what was then called Wilson's Creek - although I think the latter has had an up-grade to river status in recent years.
The pioneers who started the Northern Star built their printing works quite high, looking down on Wilson's Creek. Even so, the high ground did not protect it from being covered with swirling muddy water every four or five years. Some time before the radio station came into being, they had made an addition to the printing works - a paper store room with space above it for a radio station and a process engraving department, where photographs were etched into metal printing plates.
"This is real flood weather" we would tell each other when the February rains came. The tropical downpour would fill the gutters in seconds, and keep them filled. Soon the sports grounds at the lower end of town would start to show a sheen of water and we'd be using the trunk lines to get the latest weather details.
A Flood! Sad to say, the prospect thrilled us to the bone.
From the day I arrived in Lismore I had heard about the Floods. They were a part of the folk lore of the city. Somehow the floods had become a way of life there, and the business centre itself flourished and extended even though business people knew that one day, as sure as the fact that Byron Bay was the most easterly point in Australia, swirling waters would move through and destroy the work (and presumably, the profits) of years.
You only had to look at the marks on the walls in the Molesworth Street shops to know how close the place had come to terrible disaster last time around.
Or maybe the canny business people made real money out of Flood Sales.
Every flood since the first settlers arrived had a story. To fill in a couple of hours with a local was easy - you just asked what had happened in the flood of (18)94 - or (19)18 - or whatever. It was a hot topic of one-way conversation.
Weather reports excepted, the surest sign that a major Flood was about to happen would be to see almost the entire reporting staff of the Northern Star, and several of the 2LM announcers, breasting the bar of one of the local establishments in a vain attempt at a community service - diminishing the beer supplies which may be adversely affected by inundation.
The worst thing that could happen would be that the kegs might be uplifted by the water and carried out to sea by the swollen river.
Don't get me wrong. A flood is serious business. People can drown, large numbers of farm animals may die, food supplies grow scarce, power supplies cease, and before you realise what's happening you're isolated from the rest of the known world. It can be very frightening indeed.
But to us, a flood was an excitement, and a chance to do what we knew radio could do best - keep people informed and provide a service that nobody else could. We were in the spotlight, and that suited us all.
It was a time when most farmers still had battery powered radio receivers in their homes, so all we had to do was to make sure that we stayed on the air. There was no doubt they would be listening There was no other information source.
If power went off in the city we had to make sure we had enough power at the transmitter to allow us to transmit as well as operate the emergency studio. That also meant that someone would be rostered to go out to the transmitter and sit there for the duration in case power supplies died at the studio.
Lismore stands on the junction of the Richmond River and what was then called Wilson's Creek - although I think the latter has had an up-grade to river status in recent years.
The pioneers who started the Northern Star built their printing works quite high, looking down on Wilson's Creek. Even so, the high ground did not protect it from being covered with swirling muddy water every four or five years. Some time before the radio station came into being, they had made an addition to the printing works - a paper store room with space above it for a radio station and a process engraving department, where photographs were etched into metal printing plates.
Northern Star - July 1948
2LM was destined to become the nerve centre for flood reports over a number of years. It did the job very well.
One of the most important reasons for having a radio station at Lismore was that it was the centre for flood control for the entire region - and in those days, there was no other way of getting messages to flood-bound farmers and townships than by means of a traditional radio station.
As soon as it was evident that a flood was on the way (and floods in coastal rivers can come up pretty quickly) the boss would declare a state of emergency. He would warn us that everything else would have to go to make sure the flood bulletins went to air as soon as they were available.
That meant that all our night time programs, which most people thought they were hearing as they happened, would be delayed - sometimes by long periods of time. This miracle was accomplished by playing the transcriptions in their usual running order between flood reports.
The transcription was a useful thing for a number of reasons. It allowed you to be very flexible in programming, and not only at flood times. On those occasions when the station had oversold its evening time slots, and we were therefore running late for an urgent appointment - something that DID come on landline, like the Lux Radio Theatre or Australia's Amateur Hour - it was not uncommon for us to speed up the rate of playing to pick up a minute or so. Or even more daring, in one musical show, to fade out close to the end of one item, move the pickup head a quarter of an inch closer to the finish, and re-establish the entertainment. Nobody ever complained.
One of the most important reasons for having a radio station at Lismore was that it was the centre for flood control for the entire region - and in those days, there was no other way of getting messages to flood-bound farmers and townships than by means of a traditional radio station.
As soon as it was evident that a flood was on the way (and floods in coastal rivers can come up pretty quickly) the boss would declare a state of emergency. He would warn us that everything else would have to go to make sure the flood bulletins went to air as soon as they were available.
That meant that all our night time programs, which most people thought they were hearing as they happened, would be delayed - sometimes by long periods of time. This miracle was accomplished by playing the transcriptions in their usual running order between flood reports.
The transcription was a useful thing for a number of reasons. It allowed you to be very flexible in programming, and not only at flood times. On those occasions when the station had oversold its evening time slots, and we were therefore running late for an urgent appointment - something that DID come on landline, like the Lux Radio Theatre or Australia's Amateur Hour - it was not uncommon for us to speed up the rate of playing to pick up a minute or so. Or even more daring, in one musical show, to fade out close to the end of one item, move the pickup head a quarter of an inch closer to the finish, and re-establish the entertainment. Nobody ever complained.
Northern Star - June, 1948
Traditionally, the manager took control after having checked with the Police Station just across the road, and after making sure that a rowing boat was made available for mooring just outside the entrance to the station. This was important for at least three reasons: it served to get staff to and from the station, it could bring in provisions (we might be holed up there for days) and it served as a last-resort means of getting information from the Police.
A rough landline would be strung across the gap. It was a long span - the Police Station was diagonally opposite 2LM and the street itself was quite wide. This, of course, was an engineering task best completed in driving rain before the river and creek had time to swell.
A wire would be strung from the studio, on the level above the paper store room, to an electric light pole across the street, from where it was a short hop, skip and jump to the Police station.
At the Police Station end, we would install our "OB" equipment - "OB" for Outside Broadcast. This equipment consisted of a line amplifier and a microphone to plug into it. With a portable radio (somewhat larger and heavier than those that came later) and a pair of headphones, we were all set to feed information to our world - and to the wider world as well.
A flood was big news in the other cities. Newspapers in Brisbane and Newcastle and Sydney wanted stories, and usually the telephone lines failed. This meant that the reporters had to ask us to read their dispatches to newspapers over the air in the hope that someone out there with access to a telephone line might transcribe the stories and telephone them on.
The way it worked was that the reporters, who all got a fee (a pittance was their description of it) from the papers for which they were stringers, would list the names of the papers they wanted their story to go to, we would read it on air and plead for the information to be passed on. The Editor would string for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Courier Mail. It seemed that the longer you served the Northern Star, and the more important your position, the more impressive the papers were that you strung for.
Those reports always got to their destinations. The stories always got printed, and the reporters got their pittances.
That pittance, however, was in vivid contrast to the reward we received from the city radio news rooms when the lines were restored. They called us for "voice reports exclusive to us"- the payment we received was the satisfaction of a job well done.
A rough landline would be strung across the gap. It was a long span - the Police Station was diagonally opposite 2LM and the street itself was quite wide. This, of course, was an engineering task best completed in driving rain before the river and creek had time to swell.
A wire would be strung from the studio, on the level above the paper store room, to an electric light pole across the street, from where it was a short hop, skip and jump to the Police station.
At the Police Station end, we would install our "OB" equipment - "OB" for Outside Broadcast. This equipment consisted of a line amplifier and a microphone to plug into it. With a portable radio (somewhat larger and heavier than those that came later) and a pair of headphones, we were all set to feed information to our world - and to the wider world as well.
A flood was big news in the other cities. Newspapers in Brisbane and Newcastle and Sydney wanted stories, and usually the telephone lines failed. This meant that the reporters had to ask us to read their dispatches to newspapers over the air in the hope that someone out there with access to a telephone line might transcribe the stories and telephone them on.
The way it worked was that the reporters, who all got a fee (a pittance was their description of it) from the papers for which they were stringers, would list the names of the papers they wanted their story to go to, we would read it on air and plead for the information to be passed on. The Editor would string for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Courier Mail. It seemed that the longer you served the Northern Star, and the more important your position, the more impressive the papers were that you strung for.
Those reports always got to their destinations. The stories always got printed, and the reporters got their pittances.
That pittance, however, was in vivid contrast to the reward we received from the city radio news rooms when the lines were restored. They called us for "voice reports exclusive to us"- the payment we received was the satisfaction of a job well done.
Northern Star - June, 1950
The station had had a lot of experience in covering floods. Keith, in particular, was an expert on what had happened where and when, and his analysis of what the picture might be in a few hours was usually pretty close to the mark. He was ably assisted by some of the local police who had the responsibility of flood assistance as well as keeping pubs to the six o'clock closing mark, road safety and crowd control.
Cinesound Newsreel would arrive in town to cover the disaster. 2LM would feature in their reports. The Northern Star would praise our efforts to the skies as soon as they'd cleaned the mud and debris from the printing plant as the waters went down (and they usually got their "Flood Special" on the streets in record time).
The story they all missed - the story of the Great Teapot Triumph of 1948 - happened at the transmitter. This was way out of reach of the floods on the high ground of Goonellabah - four or five kilometers out of the city.
The transmitter (make that transmitters - there were two of them) occupied the front room in a house, with the transmitting mast in a paddock at the back. The remainder of the house was the home of our Chief Engineer, Hector and his wife and family. It was a smart idea to have the Chief Engineer housed there - he was always available if an emergency happened.
The rule that had caused embarrassment for me in Lithgow still held true. It was compulsory for a radio transmitter to be manned while ever it was operating, and the person doing the manning had to be a fully qualified radio engineer (in other words, he had to have his "ticket"). Hector made very certain he always had a full staff, but even so he had to take his turn on the roster and engage in the mind-numbing activity of minding a very well behaved transmitter.
A stand-by studio had been built in the equipment room next to the transmitter area, and that's where I was stationed. It was in the wee small hours after a flood that had done its damage over the past couple of days was about to subside in the city and take its problems down river. Our power had failed and we were working from a small generator parked outside the back door, protected from the incessant rain by a tarpaulin.
"Better cross over to Keith now", said Eric, the engineer on duty with me.
Keith was at the police station, and battery equipment was keeping him on the air.
"What's he got for us?" I asked.
"Dunno", said Eric, "but I want a cup of tea".
So we crossed to Keith for an up-to-the-minute summary of the situation.
When we played music, or operated any other equipment except our microphone or the relay channel, we took so much power from the generator that we could not boil the electric jug. So whenever we wanted a cup of tea we had to talk - or let Keith do it.
He was perfectly aware of this and encouraged it to some extent, although he did remark, in a kindly way on our addiction to tannin and swore that next flood he would make sure that a healthier alternative was supplied. We suggested a case of beer.
We waited for that promise to come good, but it never did. We continued to call in Keith at least once an hour no matter whether he wanted to talk or not. Stocks of tea fell perilously low.
It didn't matter really. Hector had gallons of home brew in his back shed, made on the premises and guaranteed to get you going.
We used it with due diligence.
The aftermath of a flood was the worst thing. The smell of rotted carpet and garbage stayed with us for weeks. Milk had to be imported into this Dairy Country until production could be re-established. Shops took days and weeks to empty out the ruined stock they hadn't had time to move before the flood, as well as the mud and slush left behind by the flood waters.
The saddest of these was perhaps the Flood that came just after Queen Elizabeth the Second came to town.
Cinesound Newsreel would arrive in town to cover the disaster. 2LM would feature in their reports. The Northern Star would praise our efforts to the skies as soon as they'd cleaned the mud and debris from the printing plant as the waters went down (and they usually got their "Flood Special" on the streets in record time).
The story they all missed - the story of the Great Teapot Triumph of 1948 - happened at the transmitter. This was way out of reach of the floods on the high ground of Goonellabah - four or five kilometers out of the city.
The transmitter (make that transmitters - there were two of them) occupied the front room in a house, with the transmitting mast in a paddock at the back. The remainder of the house was the home of our Chief Engineer, Hector and his wife and family. It was a smart idea to have the Chief Engineer housed there - he was always available if an emergency happened.
The rule that had caused embarrassment for me in Lithgow still held true. It was compulsory for a radio transmitter to be manned while ever it was operating, and the person doing the manning had to be a fully qualified radio engineer (in other words, he had to have his "ticket"). Hector made very certain he always had a full staff, but even so he had to take his turn on the roster and engage in the mind-numbing activity of minding a very well behaved transmitter.
A stand-by studio had been built in the equipment room next to the transmitter area, and that's where I was stationed. It was in the wee small hours after a flood that had done its damage over the past couple of days was about to subside in the city and take its problems down river. Our power had failed and we were working from a small generator parked outside the back door, protected from the incessant rain by a tarpaulin.
"Better cross over to Keith now", said Eric, the engineer on duty with me.
Keith was at the police station, and battery equipment was keeping him on the air.
"What's he got for us?" I asked.
"Dunno", said Eric, "but I want a cup of tea".
So we crossed to Keith for an up-to-the-minute summary of the situation.
When we played music, or operated any other equipment except our microphone or the relay channel, we took so much power from the generator that we could not boil the electric jug. So whenever we wanted a cup of tea we had to talk - or let Keith do it.
He was perfectly aware of this and encouraged it to some extent, although he did remark, in a kindly way on our addiction to tannin and swore that next flood he would make sure that a healthier alternative was supplied. We suggested a case of beer.
We waited for that promise to come good, but it never did. We continued to call in Keith at least once an hour no matter whether he wanted to talk or not. Stocks of tea fell perilously low.
It didn't matter really. Hector had gallons of home brew in his back shed, made on the premises and guaranteed to get you going.
We used it with due diligence.
The aftermath of a flood was the worst thing. The smell of rotted carpet and garbage stayed with us for weeks. Milk had to be imported into this Dairy Country until production could be re-established. Shops took days and weeks to empty out the ruined stock they hadn't had time to move before the flood, as well as the mud and slush left behind by the flood waters.
The saddest of these was perhaps the Flood that came just after Queen Elizabeth the Second came to town.
Chapter Eighteen
Northern Star - February, 1954
"The first time you see her you'll feel like bursting into tears. Don't", said the man at the bar.
He had travelled to Lismore to see us - the people who were going to be official commentators on the visit of the new Queen, Elizabeth, and her husband Prince Phillip. Lismore was one of the few country cities she would visit on this first tour of Australia.
Our man at the bar was going to be there first, to make sure we all got it right.
He was from the BBC, yet he was well known to Australian listeners, for he had a radio program broadcast by us and by many other stations each week. His name was Wynford Vaughan Thomas.
Getting to be a Royal Visit Commentator was a mammoth task, although arguably not to be selected as a career path.
From the moment we knew Lismore was to be on the tour, all of us wanted to be Royal Visit Commentators. That wasn't possible. The ABC was providing most of the commentary, but the three North Coast commercial stations at Lismore, Grafton and Murwillumbah, wanted to provide a really "local" broadcast. They got the seal of approval.
He had travelled to Lismore to see us - the people who were going to be official commentators on the visit of the new Queen, Elizabeth, and her husband Prince Phillip. Lismore was one of the few country cities she would visit on this first tour of Australia.
Our man at the bar was going to be there first, to make sure we all got it right.
He was from the BBC, yet he was well known to Australian listeners, for he had a radio program broadcast by us and by many other stations each week. His name was Wynford Vaughan Thomas.
Getting to be a Royal Visit Commentator was a mammoth task, although arguably not to be selected as a career path.
From the moment we knew Lismore was to be on the tour, all of us wanted to be Royal Visit Commentators. That wasn't possible. The ABC was providing most of the commentary, but the three North Coast commercial stations at Lismore, Grafton and Murwillumbah, wanted to provide a really "local" broadcast. They got the seal of approval.
John and I were given the honour after very severe checks on our backgrounds. There were forms to be filled in (no doubt in triplicate), interviews and police reports. Presumably some security people snooped around a bit to find out all the low-down on us - and maybe even now there's a very dusty file somewhere that details the first twenty five years of my life.
Quite fortuitously, they did not discover the source of the extra income that had gone to making our home windows secure, or the undeclared ten and sixpences that sometimes came out of petty cash.
John was not to make it on the team eventually, because the arrangements were made prior to the cancellation of the original Tour due to the death of King George the Sixth, and he left 2LM before the Tour was resumed, so Dinah slipped into the star spot when, after the coronation, the Queen took up her commitment to see where we lived.
"It's the number one rule. Absolutely no choking up on the air," said Mr Thomas. (We had some trouble working out what to call him Wynford or Vaughan, or Mr Thomas, but he had one major recommendation as far as we were concerned - he enjoyed an occasional drink). "Tears are never far away when you get that first glance, so be aware. The listeners won't understand, and they won't stand for it".
Of course, I knew that he was talking nonsense as far as I was concerned. I could handle it. I was not going to disappoint the listeners. I would carry it off without any difficulty. There might be some people who would have some trouble, but...
The arrangement was that we would do two special local broadcasts. The first would cover the Royal Arrival at Evans Head airport late in the afternoon, and then describe the scene at the Council Chambers the following morning at the official welcome to the City.
The remainder of the broadcasts would come from the official ABC team.
The day of the Arrival dawned wet, and stayed that way, on and off. The Royal party was to arrive late in the afternoon from Newcastle, so early that afternoon we set off on the twenty-mile run to the airport.
Early departure was necessary for one simple reason. One of the engineers, Dennis, actually owned a car. It was old by anyone's standards, and draughty too - the canvas hood had holes in it. And Dennis had made certain obvious technical adjustments to the car which would not have been approved by the manufacturer. It was a bomb,
and questions had been raised as to its suitability. But the alternative was to get there and back by bus.
But it performed rather better than expected. It got us there.
To make access to the airport easy we prepared our own signs.
These indicated that the car was an "Official Royal Visit Vehicle", that it was an "Official Broadcast Vehicle" and that it could be parked in the Official Car Park. Only the last of these claims could be justified. We had a piece of paper that told us where to park.
We rather cursed our enthusiasm. At the entrance to the airport we were held up and interrogated by people who didn't seem to realise that there were other radio stations apart from the ABC, but after several telephone calls to some mysterious central intelligence source, we were allowed in and were even allowed to keep the signs on the car.
Dinah and I had prepared a lot of material - all carefully typewritten, so that we could fill in for just about any length of time. This had been one of the recommendations of the wise Mr Thomas, who probably felt it entirely desirable to make sure we would not embarrass ourselves or our listeners by becoming tongue-tied.
We set up the gear and got into position. We made a broadcast, setting the scene, standing on the spot where the Royal Aircraft would land, and getting reactions from the crowd that around us - just so the people back in Lismore would know we had everything hooked up correctly.
Everything was going well.
Then we crossed back to the studio and started our wait for the plane. But it was going to be late - quite late. It had been delayed by the unsuitable weather Newcastle had turned on.
All air traffic was affected.
A technician from the ABC came through the crowd looking for us. He'd just got a message from Newcastle that the Royal plane would arrive first - and his commentators would be arriving half an hour after the Queen. There was a rule that no plane could take off within half an hour of the Royal aircraft, and travel arrangements had been messed up by the terrible weather - storms, wind and rain - that had bothered Newcastle the whole day long.
So he had nobody to use his microphone.
He wanted to know if we could help him..
Help the ABC? The ABC that we disdained (except for Take It From Here, but that was really a BBC program). The ABC that was holier than any of us, and seemed intent on shoving that fact down our throats at any time other than this?
What? Get the ABC out of a flaming jam?
No way.
Let them get somebody else.
"Yes", of course," we said. What would you like us to do?"
It turned out that he just wanted us to take his microphone, tie it to ours, and let him pick up and broadcast our commentary.
We thought it was a fine idea. We would do it. After all, there must be somebody out there listening to the ABC.
I rang Peter at the manager's residence. He had just been down to the local shop and was parking his bicycle.
"Ho Ho Ho", he said, all his Christmasses come at once, "Ho Ho bloody Ho. So the ABC wants to use us do they? NO, I say, NO".
Terrified that he meant it, I asked him again.
"Yeah, all right", he said. "Just give us a bloody good plug".
The Royal plane arrived. I remembered what Mr Thomas had said. I described the landing, its disappearance at the other end of the runway and its reappearance, the expectant state of the crowd. I handed the two microphones to Dinah, who promptly separated them (she knew where most of the listeners would be on this occasion) and handed back the 2LM microphone to me and spoke exclusively to the ABC for a few seconds while I hurriedly tied the two back together.
The plane came to a halt. The steps were being wheeled up to the aircraft. Dinah reluctantly gave me both microphones. and this was the time to cover my commitment to Peter. I gave our names, listed the three local stations incorporating bloody good plugs all round and then welcomed ABC listeners.
I recalled to myself again the words of Wynford Vaughan Thomas, and hoped Dinah was doing the same.
The aircraft door opened. There was nobody there for some thirty seconds - but it seemed like an hour. Where were all those notes I'd had so carefully typed up? Before my nervous fingers could thumb through them - there She was.
I took one look. I announced the fact - She was there, visible dimly inside the aircraft. The crowd around me began to applaud and cheer. I said "And I can see her! Our Queen is with us on the lovely North coast - she's stepping out of the aircraft now" or some similar words.
And promptly disobeyed Mr Wynford Vaughan Thomas' number one rule.
Wholeheartedly.
But ever the thoughtful broadcaster, I handed the microphones to Dinah who very professionally described what the Queen was wearing, steady in voice but with tears rolling down her cheeks.
That gave me time to regain my composure.
What a thrill that broadcast was for Mum, sitting by her radio in suburban Coogee. An avid fan of the Royals, as most of us were in those days, she was following the Royal Tour enthusiastically - on the ABC.
Right after the 7 o'clock news she heard the announcer say that the coverage of the Royal Tour would now continue, and that they were crossing to Tom Crozier and Dinah Wood at Evans Head Airport.
For that Royalty fan, that was the highlight of the tour.
Quite fortuitously, they did not discover the source of the extra income that had gone to making our home windows secure, or the undeclared ten and sixpences that sometimes came out of petty cash.
John was not to make it on the team eventually, because the arrangements were made prior to the cancellation of the original Tour due to the death of King George the Sixth, and he left 2LM before the Tour was resumed, so Dinah slipped into the star spot when, after the coronation, the Queen took up her commitment to see where we lived.
"It's the number one rule. Absolutely no choking up on the air," said Mr Thomas. (We had some trouble working out what to call him Wynford or Vaughan, or Mr Thomas, but he had one major recommendation as far as we were concerned - he enjoyed an occasional drink). "Tears are never far away when you get that first glance, so be aware. The listeners won't understand, and they won't stand for it".
Of course, I knew that he was talking nonsense as far as I was concerned. I could handle it. I was not going to disappoint the listeners. I would carry it off without any difficulty. There might be some people who would have some trouble, but...
The arrangement was that we would do two special local broadcasts. The first would cover the Royal Arrival at Evans Head airport late in the afternoon, and then describe the scene at the Council Chambers the following morning at the official welcome to the City.
The remainder of the broadcasts would come from the official ABC team.
The day of the Arrival dawned wet, and stayed that way, on and off. The Royal party was to arrive late in the afternoon from Newcastle, so early that afternoon we set off on the twenty-mile run to the airport.
Early departure was necessary for one simple reason. One of the engineers, Dennis, actually owned a car. It was old by anyone's standards, and draughty too - the canvas hood had holes in it. And Dennis had made certain obvious technical adjustments to the car which would not have been approved by the manufacturer. It was a bomb,
and questions had been raised as to its suitability. But the alternative was to get there and back by bus.
But it performed rather better than expected. It got us there.
To make access to the airport easy we prepared our own signs.
These indicated that the car was an "Official Royal Visit Vehicle", that it was an "Official Broadcast Vehicle" and that it could be parked in the Official Car Park. Only the last of these claims could be justified. We had a piece of paper that told us where to park.
We rather cursed our enthusiasm. At the entrance to the airport we were held up and interrogated by people who didn't seem to realise that there were other radio stations apart from the ABC, but after several telephone calls to some mysterious central intelligence source, we were allowed in and were even allowed to keep the signs on the car.
Dinah and I had prepared a lot of material - all carefully typewritten, so that we could fill in for just about any length of time. This had been one of the recommendations of the wise Mr Thomas, who probably felt it entirely desirable to make sure we would not embarrass ourselves or our listeners by becoming tongue-tied.
We set up the gear and got into position. We made a broadcast, setting the scene, standing on the spot where the Royal Aircraft would land, and getting reactions from the crowd that around us - just so the people back in Lismore would know we had everything hooked up correctly.
Everything was going well.
Then we crossed back to the studio and started our wait for the plane. But it was going to be late - quite late. It had been delayed by the unsuitable weather Newcastle had turned on.
All air traffic was affected.
A technician from the ABC came through the crowd looking for us. He'd just got a message from Newcastle that the Royal plane would arrive first - and his commentators would be arriving half an hour after the Queen. There was a rule that no plane could take off within half an hour of the Royal aircraft, and travel arrangements had been messed up by the terrible weather - storms, wind and rain - that had bothered Newcastle the whole day long.
So he had nobody to use his microphone.
He wanted to know if we could help him..
Help the ABC? The ABC that we disdained (except for Take It From Here, but that was really a BBC program). The ABC that was holier than any of us, and seemed intent on shoving that fact down our throats at any time other than this?
What? Get the ABC out of a flaming jam?
No way.
Let them get somebody else.
"Yes", of course," we said. What would you like us to do?"
It turned out that he just wanted us to take his microphone, tie it to ours, and let him pick up and broadcast our commentary.
We thought it was a fine idea. We would do it. After all, there must be somebody out there listening to the ABC.
I rang Peter at the manager's residence. He had just been down to the local shop and was parking his bicycle.
"Ho Ho Ho", he said, all his Christmasses come at once, "Ho Ho bloody Ho. So the ABC wants to use us do they? NO, I say, NO".
Terrified that he meant it, I asked him again.
"Yeah, all right", he said. "Just give us a bloody good plug".
The Royal plane arrived. I remembered what Mr Thomas had said. I described the landing, its disappearance at the other end of the runway and its reappearance, the expectant state of the crowd. I handed the two microphones to Dinah, who promptly separated them (she knew where most of the listeners would be on this occasion) and handed back the 2LM microphone to me and spoke exclusively to the ABC for a few seconds while I hurriedly tied the two back together.
The plane came to a halt. The steps were being wheeled up to the aircraft. Dinah reluctantly gave me both microphones. and this was the time to cover my commitment to Peter. I gave our names, listed the three local stations incorporating bloody good plugs all round and then welcomed ABC listeners.
I recalled to myself again the words of Wynford Vaughan Thomas, and hoped Dinah was doing the same.
The aircraft door opened. There was nobody there for some thirty seconds - but it seemed like an hour. Where were all those notes I'd had so carefully typed up? Before my nervous fingers could thumb through them - there She was.
I took one look. I announced the fact - She was there, visible dimly inside the aircraft. The crowd around me began to applaud and cheer. I said "And I can see her! Our Queen is with us on the lovely North coast - she's stepping out of the aircraft now" or some similar words.
And promptly disobeyed Mr Wynford Vaughan Thomas' number one rule.
Wholeheartedly.
But ever the thoughtful broadcaster, I handed the microphones to Dinah who very professionally described what the Queen was wearing, steady in voice but with tears rolling down her cheeks.
That gave me time to regain my composure.
What a thrill that broadcast was for Mum, sitting by her radio in suburban Coogee. An avid fan of the Royals, as most of us were in those days, she was following the Royal Tour enthusiastically - on the ABC.
Right after the 7 o'clock news she heard the announcer say that the coverage of the Royal Tour would now continue, and that they were crossing to Tom Crozier and Dinah Wood at Evans Head Airport.
For that Royalty fan, that was the highlight of the tour.
Northern Star - January, 1954
Very late at night, we arrived back in the city in the "Official Car" and very Full of Triumph. There was nowhere to park, for Lismore was in carnival mode. The Queen was in town. The pubs had been allowed officially to do what they did unofficially every night - stay open. People were walking the four main city streets, but especially they gathered around the Gollan Hotel, which was Buckingham Palace for the night.
And we had our own reporter right there on the scene, in there with the Queen. John had missed out on being a Royal broadcaster but he was among the guests at an informal reception for the Queen and Prince Phillip because his father-in-law was the Mayor. Unfortunately, when interrogated by one of our team of intrepid roundsmen, all he could say was "I can't say", for it had been impressed on him that he should make no public comments because it was a special privilege to be among the guests.
As indeed it was. We were all jealous of him.
The next day dawned wet and got wetter. Newcastle's weather had come upon us overnight. The bright sparkly banners that had brought new colour to the city were hanging soggily in pouring rain one minute, then whipped up into dangerous road hazards by the wind.
The show must go on, of course. And it did.
The first event of the day was timed for ten o'clock, and we were in place at 9.15, on the balcony of the Council Chambers - a tangle of radio equipment, tarpaulins, raincoats, gumboots and umbrellas.
But we could see what was happening. The unprecedented crowds, the howling children, the people selling food and drink on the streets (a strange sight in Lismore in 1954) and the wind whipping up the decorations, the trees and shrubs, blowing away flags which belonged to the howling children, plus rubbish of every kind.
The ABC people were wisely out of the wet inside the Council Chambers, where they could see none of the above.
The rain was teeming down when the Royal procession of cars rounded the Post Office corner right on time at two minutes to ten and made its imposing way along the street, the Royal Vehicle coming to a halt just below our broadcasting point.
The Post Office clock ponderously chimed ten o'clock.
And the sun came out!
As the three-station network joined us, I threw away my notes and told them what I could see. I had just done the shortest ever course in real-life radio commentary.
Sure, the sun was not as bright as one would want or expect, but it helped pick up all the colour, there was so much noise from the crowd, and the atmosphere was so exciting. The words came quickly and easily. But too soon the stars of the show had vanished into the dim interior of the Council Chambers, and our moment with the Glory of England and Empire had ended.
The rain came back, and the wind. We packed up the equipment and took it back to the car and up he street to the station, while the Queen and Prince went to a sports ground where thousands of drenched children cheered themselves hoarse, so the ABC commentator didn't have to say a word.
Later I walked in the rain across the two bridges that span the river and Creek. The pathway was very narrow with room for two people abreast perhaps - but there was nobody else there but me. It was too wet.
I think I was in need of what show business people call "winding down" but we were about to go on holidays so I didn't have enough cash to go to the pub.
As I walked across I realised that the roadway was strangely quiet - no cars had passed me for a minute or two. I looked over my shoulder and saw the police motor cycles leading the Royal procession. She was leaving us. But not before she looked across at the young radio commentator, and said to Phillip "Look! There he is! Let's give him a wave".
Or perhaps it was "Well! Another one done. Only twenty more to go!"
At any rate, they waved.
But we should have known what was going to happen. We were just so busy with the Royal Occasion that we forgot to say the words: "This is flood weather"
Only a day or so later it all happened.
The banners and decorations dangled in the dark, swirling drink. The flood waters reached up to the "Welcome to Our Royal Guests" in the shop windows, dead cattle drifted along the path of the Royal progress, and 2LM moved into Flood Mode once again.
String up the landline!
Organise the flood boat!
Check the generator!
Oh, and better get some beer this time.
And we had our own reporter right there on the scene, in there with the Queen. John had missed out on being a Royal broadcaster but he was among the guests at an informal reception for the Queen and Prince Phillip because his father-in-law was the Mayor. Unfortunately, when interrogated by one of our team of intrepid roundsmen, all he could say was "I can't say", for it had been impressed on him that he should make no public comments because it was a special privilege to be among the guests.
As indeed it was. We were all jealous of him.
The next day dawned wet and got wetter. Newcastle's weather had come upon us overnight. The bright sparkly banners that had brought new colour to the city were hanging soggily in pouring rain one minute, then whipped up into dangerous road hazards by the wind.
The show must go on, of course. And it did.
The first event of the day was timed for ten o'clock, and we were in place at 9.15, on the balcony of the Council Chambers - a tangle of radio equipment, tarpaulins, raincoats, gumboots and umbrellas.
But we could see what was happening. The unprecedented crowds, the howling children, the people selling food and drink on the streets (a strange sight in Lismore in 1954) and the wind whipping up the decorations, the trees and shrubs, blowing away flags which belonged to the howling children, plus rubbish of every kind.
The ABC people were wisely out of the wet inside the Council Chambers, where they could see none of the above.
The rain was teeming down when the Royal procession of cars rounded the Post Office corner right on time at two minutes to ten and made its imposing way along the street, the Royal Vehicle coming to a halt just below our broadcasting point.
The Post Office clock ponderously chimed ten o'clock.
And the sun came out!
As the three-station network joined us, I threw away my notes and told them what I could see. I had just done the shortest ever course in real-life radio commentary.
Sure, the sun was not as bright as one would want or expect, but it helped pick up all the colour, there was so much noise from the crowd, and the atmosphere was so exciting. The words came quickly and easily. But too soon the stars of the show had vanished into the dim interior of the Council Chambers, and our moment with the Glory of England and Empire had ended.
The rain came back, and the wind. We packed up the equipment and took it back to the car and up he street to the station, while the Queen and Prince went to a sports ground where thousands of drenched children cheered themselves hoarse, so the ABC commentator didn't have to say a word.
Later I walked in the rain across the two bridges that span the river and Creek. The pathway was very narrow with room for two people abreast perhaps - but there was nobody else there but me. It was too wet.
I think I was in need of what show business people call "winding down" but we were about to go on holidays so I didn't have enough cash to go to the pub.
As I walked across I realised that the roadway was strangely quiet - no cars had passed me for a minute or two. I looked over my shoulder and saw the police motor cycles leading the Royal procession. She was leaving us. But not before she looked across at the young radio commentator, and said to Phillip "Look! There he is! Let's give him a wave".
Or perhaps it was "Well! Another one done. Only twenty more to go!"
At any rate, they waved.
But we should have known what was going to happen. We were just so busy with the Royal Occasion that we forgot to say the words: "This is flood weather"
Only a day or so later it all happened.
The banners and decorations dangled in the dark, swirling drink. The flood waters reached up to the "Welcome to Our Royal Guests" in the shop windows, dead cattle drifted along the path of the Royal progress, and 2LM moved into Flood Mode once again.
String up the landline!
Organise the flood boat!
Check the generator!
Oh, and better get some beer this time.
Chapter Nineteen
LITHGOW was a town full of kind hearted people. Kempsey may have been the same. It's hard to know, because I was not on my own in Kempsey, except for a week or so before Mum and Mary arrived to keep me out of harm's way.
Certainly, the people in the Kempsey boarding house where I first stayed for a week or so before Mum came to town. I had every intention of staying in the boarding house but she had other ideas.
The food was not good, I have to say. The boarding house had a bit of a reputation for not really getting to grips with the concept of a filling meal, and so the rest of the boarders used to leave after the evening meal and go "up the street" to one of the cafes to top up whatever had been on the boarding house menu.
Rex knew of this little caper, although the owner of the boarding house did not. One afternoon during the Gumnuts' Session, he strolled into the studio and casually mentioned it on air - he had had a big selling day and was quite talkative as a result of it - and didn't realise for a while that he was putting me in a difficult situation.
When the thought struck him, he kept on repeating "...but not in THIS town, eh, Tom? Not in THIS town, as though his poor beknighted newcomer, aged 17, had wide experience of boarding houses all over the world..
You couldn't mention the name of the town, because the Japanese may be listening and so get a hint as to where we were, given that they were in listening distance of the 300 watts that 2KM generated, and taking into account the very likely fact that they did not know where 2KM was. We could say the name of the station, but the location was forbidden.
As a result of Rex's indiscretion, the owner of the boarding house revised her opinion of me, and my portions became smaller day by day.
It was really a relief when Mum arrived, if only because the meals would be better.
She did not follow me to any other town, probably having decided to give up - she had done her best to make me a bank clerk, and she had protected me from myself for a year in Kempsey.
In Lithgow, the Sewell family took me under their wing. They not only fed me two substantial meals every Sunday, loaned me books that I would never otherwise read, and allowed me to chat for hours on end with their very-old father who had a great sense of humour, as well as a great pride in the work he'd done as a miner.
They also tried to encourage a friendship between me and their niece, somewhat younger than I was (she must have been sixteen, I was seventeen). Their efforts were to no avail.
She had no interest in radio.
I fared not much better with one of the station office assistants. She helped in the record library, had Scottish parents who spent most of their time trying to make sure she didn't get too involved in the radio station, eventually finding her a job in a bank.
Saturday nights became a highlight when Des left the station, and it was my duty to compere the Saturday night old time dance from the "Pavilion Ballroom" at the local showground. We went on the air at 8 o'clock and went through until close down time at 10 o'clock.
Lots of Mums dragged me onto the dance floor to participate in the dances for quite some time, until my two left feet became common knowledge.
So when I went to Lismore, there was no track record of any importance. As it turned out, I probably missed many opportunities in Lithgow to get to know people because it was a town where everyone was as good as everyone else - a no-pretence town.
Lismore was different.
There, it was best to have been born there. Then you were readily accepted.
I had an advantage. Mum had been born there, and there were people still around who knew of the Ranken family. My grandfather had been the Government Surveyor, and that was a position of some prominence. He was also a writer and a skilled mathematician.
I got to know a few of them, mainly through my landlady, Miss Mac - herself locally-born and of some renown. She had only one problem with me, I think. Wile Mum had the Lismore stamp upon her, neither Mum nor I measured up in Miss Mac's most important criterion - Miss Mac was Catholic (she pronounced it as Car-tholic, after the Irish version) and Mum and I were not.
However, gradually I got to know, on the acquaintanceship level if not as personal friends, some of the people who knew where I came from, and were prepared to acknowledge me from time to time.
If they mentioned my job, which they tried hard not to do, they took some pains to explain that they did not listen to commercial radio, so up until the time of our meeting, had not had the opportunity to hear me on the air.
"We listen to the ABC, you know", was their comment.
Privately I thought that was some feat.
In 1945, when I first arrived in Lismore for what would be the first of two four-year engagements, the only station you could listen to with any degree of comfort was 2LM. This was especially so in the summer, when atmospheric interference (call that static) drowned out everything else.
The nearest ABC station was at Grafton, and in spite of high power, it was mostly impossible to get reasonable reception - and listening to shows like Take It from Here on Sunday nights was a feat of endurance on our part. The fact that we missed most of the punch lines did not matter.
However, there was one occasion when at least three of my contacts actually listened to the station, and were able to tell me that they had heard me.
John had just arrived at the station, fresh out of the Air Force and anxious to prove himself on the air.
Keith asked me to take him under my wing and train him in studio operation.
I have to explain that the 2LM studio operation was quite simple. The panel consisted of two faders (to increase or decrease the volume going to air), two microphone switches, and four turntables on which records and program transcriptions were played.
The control room operator took care of everything else, which was very little anyway. There were no such things as cassettes, no compact disc players or cartridge machines. They had to play the rare tape recording. These were tapes we'd recorded ourselves, because most other country stations did not have such a thing as a tape machine, so no programs were circulated on reel-to-reel tapes.
The thing that was different was that the console had a separate set of switches and faders on each side of the desk. And there were two turntables on each side. The "main" side had the two transcription turntables, great lumbering things to support the sixteen inch transcriptions which provided our major night-time programs.
At times when we were simply playing records, we would use the "other" side. But at night time, when it was very busy, we needed to use both sides and therefore always had two announcers on duty until about 9.30.
I decided to let John take the "main" side. I could reach over and stop him if he made a wrong move, but it wasn't necessary. He took to it like a salesman to a commission, and he was very conscious of the need to keep the show rolling.
On the "other" side, the two turntables in use had seen out the war years, and despite expert maintenance, were liable to fail just when you were trying to get the best possible effect.
That's what happened on this occasion.
John was playing the transcriptions, I was playing theme music and recorded commercials, of which we had an ample supply scheduled. We came to the end of the 7.30 serial, which was called Martin's Corner - a situational series about "ordinary and likeable people" who ran a corner grocery shop - one of what seemed a never-ending series of programs from The George Edwards Players - the people who provided us with Dad and Dave.
The final Kellogg's commercial was always read live, followed by the tag to "listen again tomorrow night for Martin's Corner". Then the theme music faded up and that was it.
The main transcription was finishing, so John gave me the nod, and I switched on the microphone from my side of the desk. I read the script, and gave the tag line - and began to fade up the closing theme.
Problem! The turntable had decided not to co-operate. It was standing still.
The technical solution to this, tried and tested over a great number of months, was to push it violently while at the same time commenting on its ancestry. It never failed. It did not fail on this occasion. But there was a short pause.
However, John, on the other side of the desk, was not familiar with the procedure. He noticed that I had switched off the microphone at the end of the invitation to "listen again", but he saw that I had some trouble and was about to speak again, so he thoughtfully switched it on again for me.
So my new acquaintances and several thousand other attentive listeners heard me say "Listen again tomorrow night for Martin's Corner - you bastard".
John was dismayed. Upset. Nervous for me, too, because language like that was not acceptable. You could lose your job for less.
I was also somewhat put out, but there was nothing that could be done so the program went on.
Over the next few days some of my new non-2LM listening friends came up to me in the street to tell me they had been listening, obviously somewhat by accident, and - oh, dear, was I in trouble?
Anyway it was a good way to get the locals to know who I was. I could see them pointing me out on the street. "He's the one who swore on the radio - he DID!"
And in fact, I was in trouble.
A report was called for by the broadcasting authority of the time, the Broadcasting Control Board.
Keith tried to circumvent the whole thing by getting in first with a report, defining me as a young man not given to swearing under normal circumstances, and never in a studio atmosphere, dear me no.
He was right, of course. I was an innocent. A stupid one.
I was not the first, nor will I be the last, to vent my exasperation with faulty equipment in front of the audience, although ideally the idea is to keep it in club. That is, the engineers ought to be aware of it so they can deliberate and pontificate before they go ahead and fix it, but the listeners don't have a need to know.
It was all resolved within a week, but for a few days my future career in radio looked quite uncertain.
It had taken me back to the time when I left Kempsey. There had been a threat from the then General Manager of the group (2KA and 2KM) that I would be black listed, and would never get a job in radio again.
I know now that there is no such black list, although there was for many years a very effective bush telegraph between station managers (it probably still exists) which allowed stations to get a fair picture of the person they're thinking of hiring.
As if to make amends, we began some Saturday morning live shows with the kiddies, broadcast from one of the local halls - larger versions of the Friday afternoon "smell and yells".
We actually got a sponsor on condition that the kids had to sing the Aeroplane Jelly Song in unison each Saturday.
After some time with these productions, I was happy to leave the "getting to know you" process to my colleagues.
It was time for a change.
For some time I had been attending the local Presbyterian Church, first at the instigation of a young lady in the city who was also a reporter on the newspaper. She was a regular attendee, and I became one too. It improved the relationship quite remarkably - we briefly became engaged, until she thought better of it.
There came a time when she was offered a job on a Newcastle newspaper and the parting of the ways occurred. She later went to England, found herself a job in Fleet Street and then married.
Back in Lismore, I decided that my future career would be in the church and I was accepted into the Home Mission Service as a trainee. I was stationed in Lismore, and worked with a remarkable man (and a very tolerant one) named Jim Sweet. He encouraged me to keep up some radio work and the station agreed to allow me to present a Sunday night program, an Epilogue, for which they paid me the standard fee (ten and sixpence a time). This added substantially to my new stipend, which was seven pounds a week.
Jim ended up in hospital, probably due to the strain of keeping me on the straight and narrow. I also managed to damage his car in a collision with a truck (the truck was in the wrong, of course) and I was somewhat disappointed to find that not all the adherents of the church were logical and kind.
One of them would walk into the church at any time, and begin to play the organ no matter what was happening. She would sing, too, and as far as I could tell, she was very much out of tune.
The first few times this occurred as I was doing my studies in the vestry, I was very confused. Was it a visitation? What should I do? I did nothing.
But the most disappointing factor was the accusation that I was secretly drinking. I had given up all such activities, in spite of the proposals of my friends that one or two would simply make me a better minister. (I believe now they were very probably right). I had been seen emerging from a hotel just a little way from the main shopping area one afternoon when I should have been pastoral visiting.
My explanation was that I had gone there to book a friend some accommodation - he had rung me from out of town.
I was believed with reluctance.
I found pastoral visiting something of a drag. I wasn't ready for it, nor were the parishioners.
I was given a list of all the "no shows" at Church and asked to practice my skills on them. They were embarrassed to see me - they were in as much of a predicament as I was. Neither of us could find much in common.
It was time for another change. Back to radio.
But this time in Sydney.
Keith lined up an appointment for me with a friend of his, Bill Stephenson, the staff manager at 2UE. No promises, naturally.
With my savings account growing ever lower, I took a luxury flight with Butler Airways to the Big Smoke.
Certainly, the people in the Kempsey boarding house where I first stayed for a week or so before Mum came to town. I had every intention of staying in the boarding house but she had other ideas.
The food was not good, I have to say. The boarding house had a bit of a reputation for not really getting to grips with the concept of a filling meal, and so the rest of the boarders used to leave after the evening meal and go "up the street" to one of the cafes to top up whatever had been on the boarding house menu.
Rex knew of this little caper, although the owner of the boarding house did not. One afternoon during the Gumnuts' Session, he strolled into the studio and casually mentioned it on air - he had had a big selling day and was quite talkative as a result of it - and didn't realise for a while that he was putting me in a difficult situation.
When the thought struck him, he kept on repeating "...but not in THIS town, eh, Tom? Not in THIS town, as though his poor beknighted newcomer, aged 17, had wide experience of boarding houses all over the world..
You couldn't mention the name of the town, because the Japanese may be listening and so get a hint as to where we were, given that they were in listening distance of the 300 watts that 2KM generated, and taking into account the very likely fact that they did not know where 2KM was. We could say the name of the station, but the location was forbidden.
As a result of Rex's indiscretion, the owner of the boarding house revised her opinion of me, and my portions became smaller day by day.
It was really a relief when Mum arrived, if only because the meals would be better.
She did not follow me to any other town, probably having decided to give up - she had done her best to make me a bank clerk, and she had protected me from myself for a year in Kempsey.
In Lithgow, the Sewell family took me under their wing. They not only fed me two substantial meals every Sunday, loaned me books that I would never otherwise read, and allowed me to chat for hours on end with their very-old father who had a great sense of humour, as well as a great pride in the work he'd done as a miner.
They also tried to encourage a friendship between me and their niece, somewhat younger than I was (she must have been sixteen, I was seventeen). Their efforts were to no avail.
She had no interest in radio.
I fared not much better with one of the station office assistants. She helped in the record library, had Scottish parents who spent most of their time trying to make sure she didn't get too involved in the radio station, eventually finding her a job in a bank.
Saturday nights became a highlight when Des left the station, and it was my duty to compere the Saturday night old time dance from the "Pavilion Ballroom" at the local showground. We went on the air at 8 o'clock and went through until close down time at 10 o'clock.
Lots of Mums dragged me onto the dance floor to participate in the dances for quite some time, until my two left feet became common knowledge.
So when I went to Lismore, there was no track record of any importance. As it turned out, I probably missed many opportunities in Lithgow to get to know people because it was a town where everyone was as good as everyone else - a no-pretence town.
Lismore was different.
There, it was best to have been born there. Then you were readily accepted.
I had an advantage. Mum had been born there, and there were people still around who knew of the Ranken family. My grandfather had been the Government Surveyor, and that was a position of some prominence. He was also a writer and a skilled mathematician.
I got to know a few of them, mainly through my landlady, Miss Mac - herself locally-born and of some renown. She had only one problem with me, I think. Wile Mum had the Lismore stamp upon her, neither Mum nor I measured up in Miss Mac's most important criterion - Miss Mac was Catholic (she pronounced it as Car-tholic, after the Irish version) and Mum and I were not.
However, gradually I got to know, on the acquaintanceship level if not as personal friends, some of the people who knew where I came from, and were prepared to acknowledge me from time to time.
If they mentioned my job, which they tried hard not to do, they took some pains to explain that they did not listen to commercial radio, so up until the time of our meeting, had not had the opportunity to hear me on the air.
"We listen to the ABC, you know", was their comment.
Privately I thought that was some feat.
In 1945, when I first arrived in Lismore for what would be the first of two four-year engagements, the only station you could listen to with any degree of comfort was 2LM. This was especially so in the summer, when atmospheric interference (call that static) drowned out everything else.
The nearest ABC station was at Grafton, and in spite of high power, it was mostly impossible to get reasonable reception - and listening to shows like Take It from Here on Sunday nights was a feat of endurance on our part. The fact that we missed most of the punch lines did not matter.
However, there was one occasion when at least three of my contacts actually listened to the station, and were able to tell me that they had heard me.
John had just arrived at the station, fresh out of the Air Force and anxious to prove himself on the air.
Keith asked me to take him under my wing and train him in studio operation.
I have to explain that the 2LM studio operation was quite simple. The panel consisted of two faders (to increase or decrease the volume going to air), two microphone switches, and four turntables on which records and program transcriptions were played.
The control room operator took care of everything else, which was very little anyway. There were no such things as cassettes, no compact disc players or cartridge machines. They had to play the rare tape recording. These were tapes we'd recorded ourselves, because most other country stations did not have such a thing as a tape machine, so no programs were circulated on reel-to-reel tapes.
The thing that was different was that the console had a separate set of switches and faders on each side of the desk. And there were two turntables on each side. The "main" side had the two transcription turntables, great lumbering things to support the sixteen inch transcriptions which provided our major night-time programs.
At times when we were simply playing records, we would use the "other" side. But at night time, when it was very busy, we needed to use both sides and therefore always had two announcers on duty until about 9.30.
I decided to let John take the "main" side. I could reach over and stop him if he made a wrong move, but it wasn't necessary. He took to it like a salesman to a commission, and he was very conscious of the need to keep the show rolling.
On the "other" side, the two turntables in use had seen out the war years, and despite expert maintenance, were liable to fail just when you were trying to get the best possible effect.
That's what happened on this occasion.
John was playing the transcriptions, I was playing theme music and recorded commercials, of which we had an ample supply scheduled. We came to the end of the 7.30 serial, which was called Martin's Corner - a situational series about "ordinary and likeable people" who ran a corner grocery shop - one of what seemed a never-ending series of programs from The George Edwards Players - the people who provided us with Dad and Dave.
The final Kellogg's commercial was always read live, followed by the tag to "listen again tomorrow night for Martin's Corner". Then the theme music faded up and that was it.
The main transcription was finishing, so John gave me the nod, and I switched on the microphone from my side of the desk. I read the script, and gave the tag line - and began to fade up the closing theme.
Problem! The turntable had decided not to co-operate. It was standing still.
The technical solution to this, tried and tested over a great number of months, was to push it violently while at the same time commenting on its ancestry. It never failed. It did not fail on this occasion. But there was a short pause.
However, John, on the other side of the desk, was not familiar with the procedure. He noticed that I had switched off the microphone at the end of the invitation to "listen again", but he saw that I had some trouble and was about to speak again, so he thoughtfully switched it on again for me.
So my new acquaintances and several thousand other attentive listeners heard me say "Listen again tomorrow night for Martin's Corner - you bastard".
John was dismayed. Upset. Nervous for me, too, because language like that was not acceptable. You could lose your job for less.
I was also somewhat put out, but there was nothing that could be done so the program went on.
Over the next few days some of my new non-2LM listening friends came up to me in the street to tell me they had been listening, obviously somewhat by accident, and - oh, dear, was I in trouble?
Anyway it was a good way to get the locals to know who I was. I could see them pointing me out on the street. "He's the one who swore on the radio - he DID!"
And in fact, I was in trouble.
A report was called for by the broadcasting authority of the time, the Broadcasting Control Board.
Keith tried to circumvent the whole thing by getting in first with a report, defining me as a young man not given to swearing under normal circumstances, and never in a studio atmosphere, dear me no.
He was right, of course. I was an innocent. A stupid one.
I was not the first, nor will I be the last, to vent my exasperation with faulty equipment in front of the audience, although ideally the idea is to keep it in club. That is, the engineers ought to be aware of it so they can deliberate and pontificate before they go ahead and fix it, but the listeners don't have a need to know.
It was all resolved within a week, but for a few days my future career in radio looked quite uncertain.
It had taken me back to the time when I left Kempsey. There had been a threat from the then General Manager of the group (2KA and 2KM) that I would be black listed, and would never get a job in radio again.
I know now that there is no such black list, although there was for many years a very effective bush telegraph between station managers (it probably still exists) which allowed stations to get a fair picture of the person they're thinking of hiring.
As if to make amends, we began some Saturday morning live shows with the kiddies, broadcast from one of the local halls - larger versions of the Friday afternoon "smell and yells".
We actually got a sponsor on condition that the kids had to sing the Aeroplane Jelly Song in unison each Saturday.
After some time with these productions, I was happy to leave the "getting to know you" process to my colleagues.
It was time for a change.
For some time I had been attending the local Presbyterian Church, first at the instigation of a young lady in the city who was also a reporter on the newspaper. She was a regular attendee, and I became one too. It improved the relationship quite remarkably - we briefly became engaged, until she thought better of it.
There came a time when she was offered a job on a Newcastle newspaper and the parting of the ways occurred. She later went to England, found herself a job in Fleet Street and then married.
Back in Lismore, I decided that my future career would be in the church and I was accepted into the Home Mission Service as a trainee. I was stationed in Lismore, and worked with a remarkable man (and a very tolerant one) named Jim Sweet. He encouraged me to keep up some radio work and the station agreed to allow me to present a Sunday night program, an Epilogue, for which they paid me the standard fee (ten and sixpence a time). This added substantially to my new stipend, which was seven pounds a week.
Jim ended up in hospital, probably due to the strain of keeping me on the straight and narrow. I also managed to damage his car in a collision with a truck (the truck was in the wrong, of course) and I was somewhat disappointed to find that not all the adherents of the church were logical and kind.
One of them would walk into the church at any time, and begin to play the organ no matter what was happening. She would sing, too, and as far as I could tell, she was very much out of tune.
The first few times this occurred as I was doing my studies in the vestry, I was very confused. Was it a visitation? What should I do? I did nothing.
But the most disappointing factor was the accusation that I was secretly drinking. I had given up all such activities, in spite of the proposals of my friends that one or two would simply make me a better minister. (I believe now they were very probably right). I had been seen emerging from a hotel just a little way from the main shopping area one afternoon when I should have been pastoral visiting.
My explanation was that I had gone there to book a friend some accommodation - he had rung me from out of town.
I was believed with reluctance.
I found pastoral visiting something of a drag. I wasn't ready for it, nor were the parishioners.
I was given a list of all the "no shows" at Church and asked to practice my skills on them. They were embarrassed to see me - they were in as much of a predicament as I was. Neither of us could find much in common.
It was time for another change. Back to radio.
But this time in Sydney.
Keith lined up an appointment for me with a friend of his, Bill Stephenson, the staff manager at 2UE. No promises, naturally.
With my savings account growing ever lower, I took a luxury flight with Butler Airways to the Big Smoke.
Chapter Twenty
Wireless Weekly 1950
"Anyone who works with Paddy Campbell Jones has got to be a larrikin", said Sir John Butters.
He was speaking from practical experience because he was the BIG BOSS - the Chairman of Associated Newspapers, the company that owned the majority shareholding in 2UE.
I therefore qualified as a larrikin. I was in a class with my old friend Rex from Kempsey days, and with all the people who worked at 2UE, where Paddy (sorry, Mr Campbell Jones) was the General Manager. I was sitting in Sydney's old Usher's Hotel with some of the big names of 1950 in Sydney radio.
There was Eric Wright, a breakfast man of great standing who absolutely hated rising at dawn, and had to have an alarm clock in a kerosene tin to make sure he got out of bed in time.
Norman Blackler, whose "Fancy free with Norman B" was a night-time winner was sitting next to me, and Harry Yates - billed as "the most handsome man radio" - an exaggeration of immense proportion at face value (but was always handsome and generous in his actions) - was at the table too. Harry presented the Digger's Show, a throw-back to the war years, each Sunday afternoon. There were very few diggers in it (Harry was a World War 1 veteran - he remembered my dad because they were both Seventh Light Horse). The show was a talent quest, in which he was still looking for talent when it came off the air many years later.
The event was the 2UE 25th anniversary lunch.
All the announcers had been lined up near the door - we were introduced to the people the station wanted to impress, but I don't remember who any of them were.
While Paddy got a ribbing from his boss, and we laughed as though we were his equals, I remembered my one and only interview with him so far.
I'd been working there for about two weeks, and he had just returned from holidays. One of his first actions was to get me into his office for a heart-to-heart talk. And I wasn't enjoying it.
". . And at twenty past ten you said Joe Loss plays for you. Now you know he's playing for everyone, dontcha son?"
I nodded miserable agreement. I could now picture myself walking out of his office, taking the lift to the ground floor, and never darkening the doorway to 2UE again.
All because I'd forgotten that Joe Loss played for everyone.
Paddy had a diary of some kind hidden in the top drawer of his desk, in which he had recorded a list of my sins. They were manifold. Having run his finger down the page, he would withdraw his hand, and in the same motion slam the drawer shut. Then he would fix me with a baleful eye and slowly, very slowly tell me what he had seen there.
"And what about the time?" He asked. "You said..." and here he carefully examined the interior of the drawer for some time "...you said the time at expletive 2UE is ..."
"Now you better understand, son", as he slammed the drawer shut for what turned out to be the final time, "that it's the same expletive time any expletive where in this expletive city. A simple expletive 'Time Is ' will be elegantly expletive, expletive sufficient".
Thank God I hadn't played that record of organ music that someone had slipped into the pile of records for the late night program. It was only that morning I had learned that Paddy loathed organ music as much as John Harper on 2KY loathed the Andrews Sisters. *
He began a soliloquy on why we had to keep our style exactly right, and suggested that I spend some time listening to the regular late-night announcer, Eric Parrant.
Perhaps I wouldn't have to take that lift after all.
Suddenly the tongue-thrashing was over.
He took a pack of cigarettes from that same desk drawer, opened it, and flicked one across the desk at me.
He even leaned over the desk and lit it for me.
"You're doin' a good job, son", he said.
For a moment or so I wondered where the conversation was going from that point, until I realised that I had received the Dismissal from the Presence. I thanked him (I meant it too) and I took my cigarette with me.
He was speaking from practical experience because he was the BIG BOSS - the Chairman of Associated Newspapers, the company that owned the majority shareholding in 2UE.
I therefore qualified as a larrikin. I was in a class with my old friend Rex from Kempsey days, and with all the people who worked at 2UE, where Paddy (sorry, Mr Campbell Jones) was the General Manager. I was sitting in Sydney's old Usher's Hotel with some of the big names of 1950 in Sydney radio.
There was Eric Wright, a breakfast man of great standing who absolutely hated rising at dawn, and had to have an alarm clock in a kerosene tin to make sure he got out of bed in time.
Norman Blackler, whose "Fancy free with Norman B" was a night-time winner was sitting next to me, and Harry Yates - billed as "the most handsome man radio" - an exaggeration of immense proportion at face value (but was always handsome and generous in his actions) - was at the table too. Harry presented the Digger's Show, a throw-back to the war years, each Sunday afternoon. There were very few diggers in it (Harry was a World War 1 veteran - he remembered my dad because they were both Seventh Light Horse). The show was a talent quest, in which he was still looking for talent when it came off the air many years later.
The event was the 2UE 25th anniversary lunch.
All the announcers had been lined up near the door - we were introduced to the people the station wanted to impress, but I don't remember who any of them were.
While Paddy got a ribbing from his boss, and we laughed as though we were his equals, I remembered my one and only interview with him so far.
I'd been working there for about two weeks, and he had just returned from holidays. One of his first actions was to get me into his office for a heart-to-heart talk. And I wasn't enjoying it.
". . And at twenty past ten you said Joe Loss plays for you. Now you know he's playing for everyone, dontcha son?"
I nodded miserable agreement. I could now picture myself walking out of his office, taking the lift to the ground floor, and never darkening the doorway to 2UE again.
All because I'd forgotten that Joe Loss played for everyone.
Paddy had a diary of some kind hidden in the top drawer of his desk, in which he had recorded a list of my sins. They were manifold. Having run his finger down the page, he would withdraw his hand, and in the same motion slam the drawer shut. Then he would fix me with a baleful eye and slowly, very slowly tell me what he had seen there.
"And what about the time?" He asked. "You said..." and here he carefully examined the interior of the drawer for some time "...you said the time at expletive 2UE is ..."
"Now you better understand, son", as he slammed the drawer shut for what turned out to be the final time, "that it's the same expletive time any expletive where in this expletive city. A simple expletive 'Time Is ' will be elegantly expletive, expletive sufficient".
Thank God I hadn't played that record of organ music that someone had slipped into the pile of records for the late night program. It was only that morning I had learned that Paddy loathed organ music as much as John Harper on 2KY loathed the Andrews Sisters. *
He began a soliloquy on why we had to keep our style exactly right, and suggested that I spend some time listening to the regular late-night announcer, Eric Parrant.
Perhaps I wouldn't have to take that lift after all.
Suddenly the tongue-thrashing was over.
He took a pack of cigarettes from that same desk drawer, opened it, and flicked one across the desk at me.
He even leaned over the desk and lit it for me.
"You're doin' a good job, son", he said.
For a moment or so I wondered where the conversation was going from that point, until I realised that I had received the Dismissal from the Presence. I thanked him (I meant it too) and I took my cigarette with me.
I still had a job. I was in Sydney, where everyone wanted to be, and I had been in the radio business for seven years.
The man that Keith had sent me to, Bill Stephenson, was an old-fashioned Mr Nice Guy who had come out of the Public Service to handle the staff at 2UE.
Bill later became what he called a "huckster" and joined the 2UE sales team for a while, but eventually he was head-hunted and became General Manager of 2SM. I still have a letter he wrote me many years later when I'd become the sales manager of 2UE. He humbly asked me to be sure that "any crumbs from the 2UE table might come 2SM's way."
In 1949, when I arrived there, Sydney radio was as exciting as it could be. Television was a long way off, and for entertainment there were really only three choices - the movies, stage shows and radio.
And in radio they used to say there were three "biggies" and three "littlies" - the big ones being 2GB, 2UE and 2UW and the others 2KY, 2CH and 2SM.
That's all there were - except for 2FC and 2BL.
The 2UE studios were in Bligh Street, above the Savoy Theatre, where for years both 2GB and 2UE had operated - 2GB being on the sixth and seventh floors, 2UE on the fourth and fifth - until 2GB moved across to Phillip Street. It was said that in those times, if the manager of one station was in the lift, the other station manager would not enter it. Both stations were controlled by Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Sydney Sun and a variety of magazines including one of my favourites, "Wireless Weekly" which dealt with the happenings in the wireless world.
2UE was quite daunting the day I arrived for my audition. First, the lift was troublesome (what was it about the lifts in the buildings that housed radio stations in those days - 2SM's lift was quite life-threatening) but eventually I made it to the fifth floor. Second, I was suitably challenged by the receptionist who wanted to know what I wanted and seemed to suspect I was up to no good, and told me that I ought to be aware that I was in a radio station.
The moment I got a chance I mentioned Bill Stephenson's name.
It made a difference. I was then escorted into Bill's office and offered a cup of tea. (Well, it was 3.30 in the afternoon).
"Well, Tige", (short for Tiger, I hoped) "what brings you to Sydney?"
A good question. Should I answer it truthfully and tell him that I didn't have anything in common with the Presbyterians I'd had to call on in Lismore and that since 2LM didn't have a job to give me, I thought I'd try the next best? I decided not to do this, and my eventual answer must have been really whelming.
"Better take a listen to you", he said.
Down the stairs we went (Bill evidently didn't trust the lift, and he knew it much better than I did), and into one of the three studios, which was set up ready for my appearance. Bill left me in the hands of an operator who was about my own age, who handed me a bundle of live commercials with some news items and told me to go ahead.
I did my best. Probably it was my extreme nervousness that brought it off for me, because I didn't even think of trying to be clever or funny.
"Thanks for coming in, Tige," said Bill as he shook my hand.
"We'll be in touch, of course".
That sounded too much like the don't-call-us-we'll-call-you routine, and I went down in the lift and out into noisy and crowded Bligh Street with a heavy heart. I didn't even think about visiting the Library in the basement where Mum had got all those far-out books just a few years previously. (In fact, it had moved).
But I had another iron in the fire.
I'd heard that there was a job going at Tamworth where 2TM reigned supreme as one of the most successful country radio stations. They had a representative in the city, and I headed in the direction of his Carrington Street office.
This man had a very Scottish accent and was hard to understand - especially when he said that I could have the job. My hearing was excellent then, but I still had to ask him to repeat himself.
"You've got the job", he said. , "You can start next week".
I got the tram out to Coogee where Mum and Mary lived.
I didn't want to go to Tamworth. I wanted to be a star in Sydney radio and make big money. (Neither eventuated). I spent a miserable night - and a miserable morning. That is, until about 11are when a telegram arrived (there was no telephone at Coogee) and it said I should start at 2UE the following Monday night.
There was no family cat to throw in the air. Anyway, I had to go back to Lismore and collect my stuff - all stashed away in a wardrobe at Miss Mac's. And I had to tell the Scottish gentleman that I had a better job.
He was not terribly amused. I suppose he had to go out and find someone else instead of selling time and making money. The conversation was mercifully short.
I remember sending Keith a telegram as soon as I saw a Post Office. It said "I start next Monday NIGHT - repeats NIGHT", for night time was prime time on radio and presumably you had to be good to be rostered from 6pm.
That Monday night was more than just exciting. I got into the city about 4 o'clock, had a sustaining steak in a milk-bar come cafe in Pitt Street (I supposed that was what a big-time radio announcer would do) and wandered into the station at 5.
Of the three studios, one was that in which I'd done the audition. It was generally used for the production of soap operas of which 2UE produced a great number, another was the general announcing studio used from station opening at 6am until close-down at l1pm. (The midnight to dawn "wasteland" was left to 2UW who must have made a small fortune out of it). And the third studio was the Rumpus Room studio, where Howard Craven and Frank Scott, presented the best-ever smell and yell program ever produced. They had some help from John Burgess from the record library, whose father was the compere of the big time Colgate variety show, Calling the Stars.
The program manager met me and told me to hang around and watch for a while - and that when the copy came down from the 7th floor at about 5.30, I could go into the studio and look through it.
"Toy will be here in a couple of minutes", he said as he disappeared into the lift on his way home.
But there was plenty to occupy my time. Studio C had been busy all day producing drama, soaps, and thrillers. The actors were milling around the corridor, as though unwilling to go out into the harsh world. I recognised many of them, because I had been an ardent fan of the radio magazines.
The man that Keith had sent me to, Bill Stephenson, was an old-fashioned Mr Nice Guy who had come out of the Public Service to handle the staff at 2UE.
Bill later became what he called a "huckster" and joined the 2UE sales team for a while, but eventually he was head-hunted and became General Manager of 2SM. I still have a letter he wrote me many years later when I'd become the sales manager of 2UE. He humbly asked me to be sure that "any crumbs from the 2UE table might come 2SM's way."
In 1949, when I arrived there, Sydney radio was as exciting as it could be. Television was a long way off, and for entertainment there were really only three choices - the movies, stage shows and radio.
And in radio they used to say there were three "biggies" and three "littlies" - the big ones being 2GB, 2UE and 2UW and the others 2KY, 2CH and 2SM.
That's all there were - except for 2FC and 2BL.
The 2UE studios were in Bligh Street, above the Savoy Theatre, where for years both 2GB and 2UE had operated - 2GB being on the sixth and seventh floors, 2UE on the fourth and fifth - until 2GB moved across to Phillip Street. It was said that in those times, if the manager of one station was in the lift, the other station manager would not enter it. Both stations were controlled by Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Sydney Sun and a variety of magazines including one of my favourites, "Wireless Weekly" which dealt with the happenings in the wireless world.
2UE was quite daunting the day I arrived for my audition. First, the lift was troublesome (what was it about the lifts in the buildings that housed radio stations in those days - 2SM's lift was quite life-threatening) but eventually I made it to the fifth floor. Second, I was suitably challenged by the receptionist who wanted to know what I wanted and seemed to suspect I was up to no good, and told me that I ought to be aware that I was in a radio station.
The moment I got a chance I mentioned Bill Stephenson's name.
It made a difference. I was then escorted into Bill's office and offered a cup of tea. (Well, it was 3.30 in the afternoon).
"Well, Tige", (short for Tiger, I hoped) "what brings you to Sydney?"
A good question. Should I answer it truthfully and tell him that I didn't have anything in common with the Presbyterians I'd had to call on in Lismore and that since 2LM didn't have a job to give me, I thought I'd try the next best? I decided not to do this, and my eventual answer must have been really whelming.
"Better take a listen to you", he said.
Down the stairs we went (Bill evidently didn't trust the lift, and he knew it much better than I did), and into one of the three studios, which was set up ready for my appearance. Bill left me in the hands of an operator who was about my own age, who handed me a bundle of live commercials with some news items and told me to go ahead.
I did my best. Probably it was my extreme nervousness that brought it off for me, because I didn't even think of trying to be clever or funny.
"Thanks for coming in, Tige," said Bill as he shook my hand.
"We'll be in touch, of course".
That sounded too much like the don't-call-us-we'll-call-you routine, and I went down in the lift and out into noisy and crowded Bligh Street with a heavy heart. I didn't even think about visiting the Library in the basement where Mum had got all those far-out books just a few years previously. (In fact, it had moved).
But I had another iron in the fire.
I'd heard that there was a job going at Tamworth where 2TM reigned supreme as one of the most successful country radio stations. They had a representative in the city, and I headed in the direction of his Carrington Street office.
This man had a very Scottish accent and was hard to understand - especially when he said that I could have the job. My hearing was excellent then, but I still had to ask him to repeat himself.
"You've got the job", he said. , "You can start next week".
I got the tram out to Coogee where Mum and Mary lived.
I didn't want to go to Tamworth. I wanted to be a star in Sydney radio and make big money. (Neither eventuated). I spent a miserable night - and a miserable morning. That is, until about 11are when a telegram arrived (there was no telephone at Coogee) and it said I should start at 2UE the following Monday night.
There was no family cat to throw in the air. Anyway, I had to go back to Lismore and collect my stuff - all stashed away in a wardrobe at Miss Mac's. And I had to tell the Scottish gentleman that I had a better job.
He was not terribly amused. I suppose he had to go out and find someone else instead of selling time and making money. The conversation was mercifully short.
I remember sending Keith a telegram as soon as I saw a Post Office. It said "I start next Monday NIGHT - repeats NIGHT", for night time was prime time on radio and presumably you had to be good to be rostered from 6pm.
That Monday night was more than just exciting. I got into the city about 4 o'clock, had a sustaining steak in a milk-bar come cafe in Pitt Street (I supposed that was what a big-time radio announcer would do) and wandered into the station at 5.
Of the three studios, one was that in which I'd done the audition. It was generally used for the production of soap operas of which 2UE produced a great number, another was the general announcing studio used from station opening at 6am until close-down at l1pm. (The midnight to dawn "wasteland" was left to 2UW who must have made a small fortune out of it). And the third studio was the Rumpus Room studio, where Howard Craven and Frank Scott, presented the best-ever smell and yell program ever produced. They had some help from John Burgess from the record library, whose father was the compere of the big time Colgate variety show, Calling the Stars.
The program manager met me and told me to hang around and watch for a while - and that when the copy came down from the 7th floor at about 5.30, I could go into the studio and look through it.
"Toy will be here in a couple of minutes", he said as he disappeared into the lift on his way home.
But there was plenty to occupy my time. Studio C had been busy all day producing drama, soaps, and thrillers. The actors were milling around the corridor, as though unwilling to go out into the harsh world. I recognised many of them, because I had been an ardent fan of the radio magazines.
Tony McFayden came about three minutes before six, slapping the latest edition of the Daily Mirror across his knees as he raced down the corridor.
He was the Chief Announcer, but more notable for the fact that he said he had a bullet in his skull, about which he told a succession of stories. We were never quite sure whether he really did have one there until one day he announced that the Company had decided to pay for an operation by a famous surgeon to remove said bullet.
They had. And he did.
I went to visit him in hospital the day before he was operated on. His head was shaved and electrodes were attached to him and I was there to give him his pay which I'd picked up at lunch time, but he launched into a recital of what had happened to him so far, and what they had planned for the next day.
I passed out. Tony got up and lifted me onto the bed next to his. How he managed to do this in the state he was in still remains a mystery. I woke up to the tirade of advice the sister was giving Tony, slipped out of the hospital and was boarding a tram before I realised I still had his pay in my pocket.
Tony seemed to me the saddest man I had met in my life.
Yet when it was time for him to speak, a lively smile would start at his mouth and gradually cover his whole face. And then he would utter the immortal words "THIS is Radio 2UE Sydneeeey. Mac.Williams Wines, vignerons of Mac.Williams Old Yendarra Port, announce the time as SIX o'clock!"
And his arm would fling wide, to let the panel operator know that as far as he was concerned that was that, and the next item on the agenda could now follow - whatever it was.
Tony never missed a shift, no matter how he felt. And as we grew to know each other better, I began to realise that he had a close affinity with the Royal family. If the King got an ailment, Tony would have something similar. If the Queen got a cold, Tony would sniffle.
I was discussing this remarkable connection with one of the engineers, who had also noted it. Suddenly there was a news flash. Princess Elizabeth was pregnant.
"Poor bloody Tony!" said the engineer.
The 2UE night shift required two announcers, a panel operator, a control room engineer, and if there was anything happening at the Sydney Radio Theatre in the Sydney movie theatre area which was a part of 2UE, there would be someone in the recording room - to get that show down on disc.
The panel operator sat in a booth with six turntables and a then mind-boggling array of faders and switches. He orchestrated the whole event from 6 to about 9.30, and the announcers were just a part of his armory. We said our words when he switched on the microphone. That is, until he went home, when most of the advertising was out of the way, and all the big audience-pulling shows had been broadcast. One announcer left at that time as well. The remaining announcer then ran everything from the studio.
The operator handled the transcriptions - large discs 16 inches across that ran at 33rpm, and quite often started at the inside of the disc and ran to the outside. This inside-outside recording technique allowed for even quality of sound, it was said. A new needle was used in the pick-up for each transcription. By starting the new needle at the inside where the sound quality was inferior and running it to the outside with the needle wearing down, a constant quality was achieved.
2UE started in 1925, on Australia Day, as a commercial station, broadcast from the home of its founder, Cecil Vincent Stevenson at Maroubra, and it's said that the first commercial was for a local butcher.
Mr. Stevenson had a company called Electrical Utilities, It supplied radio parts. He took the initials of the company as the call sign for his radio station, so 2UE was originally called 2EU. The 2UE folk law said that someone told him it sounded like a constricted bird call, so he changed the letters around. And then changed Electrical Utility's name to Radio House. He got for himself a good, hard-sounding and therefore memorable call sign. Did he play around with the idea of changing the call-sign to 2RH? (Radio House stayed around until the 1990s).
2UE was not the first commercial station in Sydney, but it was the one that stayed the distance. 2FC and 2BL had carried "advertising messages" prior to becoming part of the National service. A station called 2BE was launched and sank quite quickly, but 2UE kept going, and when I joined them in 1949, they were gearing up for that twenty-five year celebration.
Only the fittest survived in the depression climate into which 2UE was born. Sometime after we got our Airzone radio, I can remember listening to Si Meredith telling an amateur station to get off the air because it was interfering with 2UE's transmission.
A fire destroyed their studios in 1943, leaving only the record library and the engineering department untouched, but they went to air at 6am the next morning from the transmitter at Homebush and later from a studio loaned by 2CH.
It was a fortunate fire for the station, if that's the right expression... The damage made it possible to refurbish the studios at a time when wartime shortages and restrictions meant that only essential work was permitted.
At some stage, the Stevensons decided to sell a large slice of their ownership to Associated Newspapers. It gave the station a means to publicise itself, and also to perform at least one quite amazing technical stunt for those times.
One night, after the day's program had finished and the station had "closed down", Murray Stevenson, C.V's son, transmitted a picture through their normal transmitter. The impulses generated were picked up at the Sun newspaper and re-processed into a photograph. The result, a scratchy but recognisable image, was published the next
afternoon.
That involvement, of course, brought Paddy Campbell Jones into the picture.
Paddy (nobody called him "Mr Campbell Jones" when he wasn't around, except timid new announcers who had only been in the business for seven years) was a character. A journalist by training, a lobbyist by profession, he had been selected by Associated Newspapers to take over the troublesome radio station and make it work.
He was the Chief Announcer, but more notable for the fact that he said he had a bullet in his skull, about which he told a succession of stories. We were never quite sure whether he really did have one there until one day he announced that the Company had decided to pay for an operation by a famous surgeon to remove said bullet.
They had. And he did.
I went to visit him in hospital the day before he was operated on. His head was shaved and electrodes were attached to him and I was there to give him his pay which I'd picked up at lunch time, but he launched into a recital of what had happened to him so far, and what they had planned for the next day.
I passed out. Tony got up and lifted me onto the bed next to his. How he managed to do this in the state he was in still remains a mystery. I woke up to the tirade of advice the sister was giving Tony, slipped out of the hospital and was boarding a tram before I realised I still had his pay in my pocket.
Tony seemed to me the saddest man I had met in my life.
Yet when it was time for him to speak, a lively smile would start at his mouth and gradually cover his whole face. And then he would utter the immortal words "THIS is Radio 2UE Sydneeeey. Mac.Williams Wines, vignerons of Mac.Williams Old Yendarra Port, announce the time as SIX o'clock!"
And his arm would fling wide, to let the panel operator know that as far as he was concerned that was that, and the next item on the agenda could now follow - whatever it was.
Tony never missed a shift, no matter how he felt. And as we grew to know each other better, I began to realise that he had a close affinity with the Royal family. If the King got an ailment, Tony would have something similar. If the Queen got a cold, Tony would sniffle.
I was discussing this remarkable connection with one of the engineers, who had also noted it. Suddenly there was a news flash. Princess Elizabeth was pregnant.
"Poor bloody Tony!" said the engineer.
The 2UE night shift required two announcers, a panel operator, a control room engineer, and if there was anything happening at the Sydney Radio Theatre in the Sydney movie theatre area which was a part of 2UE, there would be someone in the recording room - to get that show down on disc.
The panel operator sat in a booth with six turntables and a then mind-boggling array of faders and switches. He orchestrated the whole event from 6 to about 9.30, and the announcers were just a part of his armory. We said our words when he switched on the microphone. That is, until he went home, when most of the advertising was out of the way, and all the big audience-pulling shows had been broadcast. One announcer left at that time as well. The remaining announcer then ran everything from the studio.
The operator handled the transcriptions - large discs 16 inches across that ran at 33rpm, and quite often started at the inside of the disc and ran to the outside. This inside-outside recording technique allowed for even quality of sound, it was said. A new needle was used in the pick-up for each transcription. By starting the new needle at the inside where the sound quality was inferior and running it to the outside with the needle wearing down, a constant quality was achieved.
2UE started in 1925, on Australia Day, as a commercial station, broadcast from the home of its founder, Cecil Vincent Stevenson at Maroubra, and it's said that the first commercial was for a local butcher.
Mr. Stevenson had a company called Electrical Utilities, It supplied radio parts. He took the initials of the company as the call sign for his radio station, so 2UE was originally called 2EU. The 2UE folk law said that someone told him it sounded like a constricted bird call, so he changed the letters around. And then changed Electrical Utility's name to Radio House. He got for himself a good, hard-sounding and therefore memorable call sign. Did he play around with the idea of changing the call-sign to 2RH? (Radio House stayed around until the 1990s).
2UE was not the first commercial station in Sydney, but it was the one that stayed the distance. 2FC and 2BL had carried "advertising messages" prior to becoming part of the National service. A station called 2BE was launched and sank quite quickly, but 2UE kept going, and when I joined them in 1949, they were gearing up for that twenty-five year celebration.
Only the fittest survived in the depression climate into which 2UE was born. Sometime after we got our Airzone radio, I can remember listening to Si Meredith telling an amateur station to get off the air because it was interfering with 2UE's transmission.
A fire destroyed their studios in 1943, leaving only the record library and the engineering department untouched, but they went to air at 6am the next morning from the transmitter at Homebush and later from a studio loaned by 2CH.
It was a fortunate fire for the station, if that's the right expression... The damage made it possible to refurbish the studios at a time when wartime shortages and restrictions meant that only essential work was permitted.
At some stage, the Stevensons decided to sell a large slice of their ownership to Associated Newspapers. It gave the station a means to publicise itself, and also to perform at least one quite amazing technical stunt for those times.
One night, after the day's program had finished and the station had "closed down", Murray Stevenson, C.V's son, transmitted a picture through their normal transmitter. The impulses generated were picked up at the Sun newspaper and re-processed into a photograph. The result, a scratchy but recognisable image, was published the next
afternoon.
That involvement, of course, brought Paddy Campbell Jones into the picture.
Paddy (nobody called him "Mr Campbell Jones" when he wasn't around, except timid new announcers who had only been in the business for seven years) was a character. A journalist by training, a lobbyist by profession, he had been selected by Associated Newspapers to take over the troublesome radio station and make it work.
He did just that.
Upstairs he and a gentleman named Ron R Beck set up Ron R Beck Radio Productions, taking a former ABC producer, Paul Jacklin (sorry, Mr Jacklin to everyone) to establish one of the leading radio production houses in the country.
He set up a commercial news service - the first since the start of World War 2. For the duration, all stations had to broadcast the ABC news - but as soon as the war ended, Paddy had set up 2UE news by buying two top reporters (one of whom, Don Angel, became a good friend) and the ABC's top news reader, Heath Burdock.
And he lobbied tirelessly for the Colgate Shows.
These programs, including a quiz show, a one-hour variety show complete with what was very correctly described as a "full" orchestra, as well as a weekly musical as well as a comedy show, had been on 2GB for a long time. If there was any station Paddy wanted to get the better of, it was 2GB (a rivalry that outlived him by forty years or so, until 2GB was eventually bashed into submission).
When I arrived, the Colgate Shows had been part of 2UE for some time. The Colgate Unit, which was a division of the advertising agency, George Patterson, was located on the fifth floor next to Ron R Beck.
All the stars came in on pay day.
I was fascinated to find that I could be sharing the ricketty lift with Roy Rene ("Mo") or Rex Dawe - he was the schoolmaster in "Yes What" and by now had graduated to Producer of the Colgate Shows. Or even on occasion with Jack Davey, but he moved back to 2GB about a year after I joined 2UE. I don't think there was a connection.
It's said that when the General Manager of George Pattersons walked into Paddy's office one day to give him the welcome news that the Colgate Shows were to leave 2GB and appear on 2UE, Paddy reached unto the top drawer of his desk.
From it he produced a revolver and pointed it directly at the GM's chest.
"You'd expletively better not be joking", he said. And meant it.
I wonder if that revolver had also been in his desk drawer when he was talking to me? The thought was a sobering influence on me for a long time, although I have to admit that the number of missing radio announcers presumed shot by their General Managers has not been great, however much such punishment might be deserved.
* John Harper ran 2KY's afternoon program on weekdays, and the Sunday morning show. He made a big thing of loathing the Andrews Sisters, whose close harmony drove him into a frenzy, and would take their record off the turntable and smash it into a million pieces just to prove the point. Remarkably, and in spite of this, their records turned up with great regularity in his programs. More remarkably, the record he smashed into a million fragments on Monday afternoon might turn up again on Sunday morning, seemingly unaffected by the rough handling.
Upstairs he and a gentleman named Ron R Beck set up Ron R Beck Radio Productions, taking a former ABC producer, Paul Jacklin (sorry, Mr Jacklin to everyone) to establish one of the leading radio production houses in the country.
He set up a commercial news service - the first since the start of World War 2. For the duration, all stations had to broadcast the ABC news - but as soon as the war ended, Paddy had set up 2UE news by buying two top reporters (one of whom, Don Angel, became a good friend) and the ABC's top news reader, Heath Burdock.
And he lobbied tirelessly for the Colgate Shows.
These programs, including a quiz show, a one-hour variety show complete with what was very correctly described as a "full" orchestra, as well as a weekly musical as well as a comedy show, had been on 2GB for a long time. If there was any station Paddy wanted to get the better of, it was 2GB (a rivalry that outlived him by forty years or so, until 2GB was eventually bashed into submission).
When I arrived, the Colgate Shows had been part of 2UE for some time. The Colgate Unit, which was a division of the advertising agency, George Patterson, was located on the fifth floor next to Ron R Beck.
All the stars came in on pay day.
I was fascinated to find that I could be sharing the ricketty lift with Roy Rene ("Mo") or Rex Dawe - he was the schoolmaster in "Yes What" and by now had graduated to Producer of the Colgate Shows. Or even on occasion with Jack Davey, but he moved back to 2GB about a year after I joined 2UE. I don't think there was a connection.
It's said that when the General Manager of George Pattersons walked into Paddy's office one day to give him the welcome news that the Colgate Shows were to leave 2GB and appear on 2UE, Paddy reached unto the top drawer of his desk.
From it he produced a revolver and pointed it directly at the GM's chest.
"You'd expletively better not be joking", he said. And meant it.
I wonder if that revolver had also been in his desk drawer when he was talking to me? The thought was a sobering influence on me for a long time, although I have to admit that the number of missing radio announcers presumed shot by their General Managers has not been great, however much such punishment might be deserved.
* John Harper ran 2KY's afternoon program on weekdays, and the Sunday morning show. He made a big thing of loathing the Andrews Sisters, whose close harmony drove him into a frenzy, and would take their record off the turntable and smash it into a million pieces just to prove the point. Remarkably, and in spite of this, their records turned up with great regularity in his programs. More remarkably, the record he smashed into a million fragments on Monday afternoon might turn up again on Sunday morning, seemingly unaffected by the rough handling.
Chapter Twenty One
"Du-Merrick or Dum-er-esk? Let's get it right Harley".
It was Peter Possum talking, but in his Heath Burdock voice.
As a listener I had known Heath in his early radio days as Peter Possum, who took over from Bobby Bluegum on the 2FC children's session - and when we met at 2UE he was quietly amused to find that someone actually remembered that part of his life.
We were having what might be called a top-level conference on place names in New South Wales, brought on by the fact that 2GZ was closing down its Sydney studios and working purely from Orange. They wanted us to handle their 1 o'clock weather broadcasts from 2UE in future, and our program manager, Harley Goodsell, had called Heath Burdock, Norman Blackler and me for a discussion about how we were to go about it.
The conversation had quickly got around to pronunciations, because the mechanics of presentation were self-evident. But the 2GZ weather report carried all the river heights, temperatures and other vital information for people on the land all over NSW.
Heath Burdock knew his place names. After all, he'd been doing place names since he got into radio, which was when I was in primary school. The place under discussion was an island in the Clarence River, and it was pronounced DUE-MERRICK.
Normally Heath was a placid man, quietly spoken except when in a studio, but when someone tried to tell him his business, feathers would get ruffled.
Before his ABC days he had been a Church of England rector, driving around visiting his parishioners in a horse and sulky in progressive Gerringong. Legend also had him as a Shakespearian actor but I never did ask him about that.
He and I became good friends. Often, when he was reading Sunday evening news (6.45 followed by a 10 o'clock bulletin) and I had been working on Sunday afternoons, he would invite me to travel with him to the Garrison Church in
Paddington, where he was an occasional guest preacher. He fitted the appearance in between news bulletins. He always attracted a full house, so my invitation was not just to build up the congregation.
Then it would be a hurried trip back to the station in the city so he could read the late bulletin.
There was no such thing as a separate news booth. Heath would come into the working studio for each of his Sydney bulletins, and it was wise to place something heavy on the studio chimes when he started reading.
Studio chimes were created using an old-fashioned dinner gong, with five distinct notes. They were used until the late fifties to indicate breaks in programs or as dividers between commercials.
When Heath was in full voice, he made the gong sing of its own accord, as a soprano can shatter glass with a particularly high note. This contrasted with his off-air personality, quiet and unassuming, with a great sense of humour.
Norman Blackler was a quiet man too. He called everyone "Guv", which saved him having to recall names in a hurry and earned him the same nickname of Guv, anyway, so we didn't really have to remember his.
Norm had been a stunt man in British films, and had become a much demanded voice-over talent in Sydney radio. When he joined 2UE he retained much of this work, even though he wasn't supposed to. When called to account for the fact that he had been on 2UW the night before presenting the Wrigley's commercials in Dad and Dave, he expressed great surprise. "Why, Guv", he told Harley, "I did those spots ages ago". True it was, but still at a time when he was employed by 2UE. Most commercials were recorded well in advance of broadcast, even up to a month.
Harley let it go. It was one of those unstoppable practices, like Eric Wright training his would-be announcers in the studio while he was doing the breakfast session, or Peter Bergin playing the record "Evelyn" twice or more often in a shift - Evelyn being the name of his fiancee at the time.
Or maybe Harley was relieved that Norman didn't ask him what he was doing listening to 2UW when he worked at 2UE.
The conference ended and Harley went back to his pieces of paper. He could always be seen bustling around with paper in hand, rather as one would use a stage prop. And while we felt that he did not understand us very well, we had to admit that everything went smoothly when Harley organised it.
What a crew he had to work with!
It was Peter Possum talking, but in his Heath Burdock voice.
As a listener I had known Heath in his early radio days as Peter Possum, who took over from Bobby Bluegum on the 2FC children's session - and when we met at 2UE he was quietly amused to find that someone actually remembered that part of his life.
We were having what might be called a top-level conference on place names in New South Wales, brought on by the fact that 2GZ was closing down its Sydney studios and working purely from Orange. They wanted us to handle their 1 o'clock weather broadcasts from 2UE in future, and our program manager, Harley Goodsell, had called Heath Burdock, Norman Blackler and me for a discussion about how we were to go about it.
The conversation had quickly got around to pronunciations, because the mechanics of presentation were self-evident. But the 2GZ weather report carried all the river heights, temperatures and other vital information for people on the land all over NSW.
Heath Burdock knew his place names. After all, he'd been doing place names since he got into radio, which was when I was in primary school. The place under discussion was an island in the Clarence River, and it was pronounced DUE-MERRICK.
Normally Heath was a placid man, quietly spoken except when in a studio, but when someone tried to tell him his business, feathers would get ruffled.
Before his ABC days he had been a Church of England rector, driving around visiting his parishioners in a horse and sulky in progressive Gerringong. Legend also had him as a Shakespearian actor but I never did ask him about that.
He and I became good friends. Often, when he was reading Sunday evening news (6.45 followed by a 10 o'clock bulletin) and I had been working on Sunday afternoons, he would invite me to travel with him to the Garrison Church in
Paddington, where he was an occasional guest preacher. He fitted the appearance in between news bulletins. He always attracted a full house, so my invitation was not just to build up the congregation.
Then it would be a hurried trip back to the station in the city so he could read the late bulletin.
There was no such thing as a separate news booth. Heath would come into the working studio for each of his Sydney bulletins, and it was wise to place something heavy on the studio chimes when he started reading.
Studio chimes were created using an old-fashioned dinner gong, with five distinct notes. They were used until the late fifties to indicate breaks in programs or as dividers between commercials.
When Heath was in full voice, he made the gong sing of its own accord, as a soprano can shatter glass with a particularly high note. This contrasted with his off-air personality, quiet and unassuming, with a great sense of humour.
Norman Blackler was a quiet man too. He called everyone "Guv", which saved him having to recall names in a hurry and earned him the same nickname of Guv, anyway, so we didn't really have to remember his.
Norm had been a stunt man in British films, and had become a much demanded voice-over talent in Sydney radio. When he joined 2UE he retained much of this work, even though he wasn't supposed to. When called to account for the fact that he had been on 2UW the night before presenting the Wrigley's commercials in Dad and Dave, he expressed great surprise. "Why, Guv", he told Harley, "I did those spots ages ago". True it was, but still at a time when he was employed by 2UE. Most commercials were recorded well in advance of broadcast, even up to a month.
Harley let it go. It was one of those unstoppable practices, like Eric Wright training his would-be announcers in the studio while he was doing the breakfast session, or Peter Bergin playing the record "Evelyn" twice or more often in a shift - Evelyn being the name of his fiancee at the time.
Or maybe Harley was relieved that Norman didn't ask him what he was doing listening to 2UW when he worked at 2UE.
The conference ended and Harley went back to his pieces of paper. He could always be seen bustling around with paper in hand, rather as one would use a stage prop. And while we felt that he did not understand us very well, we had to admit that everything went smoothly when Harley organised it.
What a crew he had to work with!
Wireless Weekly - 1935
Bill Honeyfield had been with 2UE since its very early days, and had built up a reputation, somehow, as an expert on agriculture. Why a station based in Sydney would want a regular session on agriculture was never particularly clear - but there it was every Sunday morning at 8.15. It was a hangover from earlier radio times.
Bill would walk into the studio, having dropped his trade-mark hat on the control room desk, his arms full of files from The Department, as he called it. He would then proceed to go through the latest pronouncements of The Minister and other experts until the clock showed that his time had expired. He would then depart, picking up his hat to cover his baldness, not to be seen in the studio for a full seven days. However, he would turn up next day and occupy his office (way up there on the seventh floor), between 12 and 12.30pm.
That was because one of his good friends and fellow 2UE old-timer, would come in to read the mid-day serial. This had been sponsored by a menswear firm, F J Palmers, for a record number of years. Si Meredith would read direct from the book, taking the various voices as they came, and expertly summarising the story both at the beginning and end of each episode.
Having completed that chore, he would join Bill and they would ride the lift to the ground floor and head in the direction of the Durban Castle in Elizabeth Street, that being close enough for a short walk, but far enough away to have a drink without being interrupted by the station executives.
When Ken Stone joined the team it seemed that he and I were the "new blood", without any of the waywardness of the old timers, although I did manage to begin a routine based on the Honeyfield-Meredith model.
For some time, I handled the morning shift which included news reading chores at 7.45am and 12.30. Peter Bergin took over after the serial story and introduced me reading the news. We decided the period between noon and 12.25 as just ample for two beers at the Metropole, only half a block away.
This reputable watering hole was not far enough away to avoid being interrupted by station executives, and that practice came to a halt when Bill Stephenson happened to drop in for a quick beer on the way back to lunch in the office. He came over to us and quietly observed that the custom should cease forthwith.
It did.
Some of the real characters never got in front of a microphone.
One of them was Bill Adams, a control room engineer who joined the station for three weeks back in 1938 and somehow stayed for twenty years or more.
He had a routine for new announcers, so I became a victim in November 1949.
He would wait until the new announcer was on his own and playing the records himself. At an appropriate time, he would stride idly into the studio and comment on the record, peering down at it as it went round and round at 78rpm, his head moving as he pretended to read the label. To make the reading easier, it made sense for him to put his hand on the disc and stop it. This had the obvious effect of stopping the music immediately, replacing it with seriously dead silence.
You might imagine the terrified horror he inspired in the new boy.
"Hey! Look what you've done!" I said.
"What?" he asked, releasing the record so that it came back on the air?
"You stopped the record", I spluttered.
"Did I?" He asked. "What - like this?"
And he did it again.
Unfortunately, his cueing system failed the second time around and I guessed that I was being set up.
He kept one hand behind his back, to signal through the glass to the panel operator when he was about to stop record. The panel operator had a second copy of the disc and that was the one going to air. What's more, the panel operator had stayed back to do it.
It was a simple routine and he had used it on new announcers for many long years.
He also enjoyed substituting the Symphony Concert from 2FC on the studio speaker at top volume while the announcer was trying to present a popular music program. There was no way to escape it, and no amount of pleading would make him relent.
Announcers at that time did not use headphones to monitor their programs. We just heard everything from the studio speaker. And anyway, Bill would have found a way around that. You just knew that when the microphone light went on, it was time to talk again.
He also had a habit of using the studio mike as a communication channel so that he could listen to private conversations between the announcers (or in some cases, between the announcers and their girl friends).
But he reserved his best pranks for someone who would always appreciate them: poor old Peter Possum - er - Heath Burdock.
News reading was a serious career choice in those days - separate from news preparation. Radio news readers were stars and personalities in their own right, but Bill discovered that Heath could take a joke, even when he was on the air and reading the most serious of stories.
For his first trick, Bill chose a simple one.
He walked into the studio, flicked on his cigarette lighter and set fire to Heath's copy. Brushing the flames aside as he continued to read, Heath got to within a paragraph of the end when there was nothing left to read.
"...Further news is expected", he said, and picked up the next story as Bill's cigarette lighter clicked in the distance but did no more damage.
One night, Heath had read the Sydney bulletin at 6.45, and went into the drama studio from which he would read the same bulletin for country stations at 7. He was a bit surprised to find that the room was set up in an unusual fashion - but then, it had been the setting for "Officer Crosby" or Larry Kent's "I Hate Crime" only an hour or so before.
In the centre of the room, a microphone hung from the ceiling on a piece of scrappy rope. There was a small desk with a set of studio chimes on it, a Chinese gong in one corner of the room - and a step ladder set up right next to the desk.
Seven o'clock came, the news theme started (it was the march called "The Middy" which still sounds like a good news theme to me) and Heath started to read.
"In Korea", he began (indeed all the news bulletins at that time started with news of the Korean war and 2UE bulletins always started with those two words - "in Korea".
But something was happening. Heath noticed that the microphone had taken on a life of its own, and was moving very slowly. It was rising. As each sentence ended, Heath would glance up only to see the microphone hitch itself up another notch or so. There was nothing for it but to stand up and face the mobile mike.
Heath's standing up only encouraged the microphone to move a little faster.
Then Heath realised what the step ladder was for. He took the bulletin with him, and didn't miss a beat as sentence by sentence he followed the microphone to the ceiling. At which point he came to a spot where he had to hit the small studio chime to signal some of the stations to cut the relay. But it was on the desk below.
Quickly he stepped down, picked up the stick and struck one chime. The microphone, of course, came down for the event and then sped back to the ceiling with Heath in hot pursuit.
As he finished the bulletin with the words "That ends this news bulletin, read by Heath Burdock", the padded gong stick hanging at the front of the Chinese gong in the corner raised itself and struck a single resounding thud.
In the corridor Bill was putting way his pulleys and ropes and the mirrors he'd used to achieve the full effect, knowing that when Heath came out of the studio he could share the fun with him again.
Especially since the country listeners had heard none of this performance - they were treated to a recording of the earlier 2UE bulletin.
I dreaded the thought that one night I might be the victim of Bill's need for entertainment when I was reading the news, but it never happened. He always picked his mark.
One night, however, I was reading the Saturday night bulletins and there was a party at 2GZ, whose studios were a couple of blocks away from 2UE. I was invited, and ended up reading the late night news from a small studio at 2GZ. Bill was on the job Back at 2UE.
What neither of us realised was that 2GZ had its own distinctive sound, and Murray Stevenson, then the Chief Engineer of 2UE and a director as well, was listening and picked the difference. He rang the control room and spoke to Bill.
"What's he doing reading the news from 2GZ?" He asked.
Bill, knowing that both of us were going to be in hot water unless he came up with something, swore that he could see me reading in "A" studio so he didn't understand the question.
Having solved the problem, he rang me at 2GZ.
"If Mr Murray says anything to you on Monday" he said, "tell him your cold is much much better".
Bill gave up his pranks on newsreaders after he achieved what he thought was the impossible.
Halfway through a bulletin read by Norman Blackler, he and one of the other engineers went into the studio, picked up the studio chair with the Guv in it and carried him out of the room - Norman, of course, raising his voice more and more appropriately the farther he got from the microphone.
Once again the earlier news was going out to the unsuspecting country stations. It had been recorded on the unused side of a thrown-away episode of a serial in which the actors had cracked up: a fairly rare but costly event.
Bill later turned his mind to copywriting, and although I wasn't there when this is alleged to have happened, I believe the story.
One Sunday morning, he sat down and wrote a commercial for a product that couldn't be bought in a supermarket, entered it onto the afternoon schedule and slipped his masterpiece into the copy file.
The afternoon announcer came to it at last and launched into it with all the skill of his many years in radio. Having sold the product brilliantly, he had second thoughts about it, so he walked out of the studio into the Control Room.
"Bloody awful copy", he said. "But what a slogan: 'BRAINS - the wonder head-filler..."
Once again, nothing was impossible if it could break the monotony of control room life. But the copy for BRAINS the wonder head filler and the entry on the announcer's schedule had to be wiped out of existence.
The invention of logging recorders, which fortunately occurred after Bill retired, would have broken his heart.
Bill would walk into the studio, having dropped his trade-mark hat on the control room desk, his arms full of files from The Department, as he called it. He would then proceed to go through the latest pronouncements of The Minister and other experts until the clock showed that his time had expired. He would then depart, picking up his hat to cover his baldness, not to be seen in the studio for a full seven days. However, he would turn up next day and occupy his office (way up there on the seventh floor), between 12 and 12.30pm.
That was because one of his good friends and fellow 2UE old-timer, would come in to read the mid-day serial. This had been sponsored by a menswear firm, F J Palmers, for a record number of years. Si Meredith would read direct from the book, taking the various voices as they came, and expertly summarising the story both at the beginning and end of each episode.
Having completed that chore, he would join Bill and they would ride the lift to the ground floor and head in the direction of the Durban Castle in Elizabeth Street, that being close enough for a short walk, but far enough away to have a drink without being interrupted by the station executives.
When Ken Stone joined the team it seemed that he and I were the "new blood", without any of the waywardness of the old timers, although I did manage to begin a routine based on the Honeyfield-Meredith model.
For some time, I handled the morning shift which included news reading chores at 7.45am and 12.30. Peter Bergin took over after the serial story and introduced me reading the news. We decided the period between noon and 12.25 as just ample for two beers at the Metropole, only half a block away.
This reputable watering hole was not far enough away to avoid being interrupted by station executives, and that practice came to a halt when Bill Stephenson happened to drop in for a quick beer on the way back to lunch in the office. He came over to us and quietly observed that the custom should cease forthwith.
It did.
Some of the real characters never got in front of a microphone.
One of them was Bill Adams, a control room engineer who joined the station for three weeks back in 1938 and somehow stayed for twenty years or more.
He had a routine for new announcers, so I became a victim in November 1949.
He would wait until the new announcer was on his own and playing the records himself. At an appropriate time, he would stride idly into the studio and comment on the record, peering down at it as it went round and round at 78rpm, his head moving as he pretended to read the label. To make the reading easier, it made sense for him to put his hand on the disc and stop it. This had the obvious effect of stopping the music immediately, replacing it with seriously dead silence.
You might imagine the terrified horror he inspired in the new boy.
"Hey! Look what you've done!" I said.
"What?" he asked, releasing the record so that it came back on the air?
"You stopped the record", I spluttered.
"Did I?" He asked. "What - like this?"
And he did it again.
Unfortunately, his cueing system failed the second time around and I guessed that I was being set up.
He kept one hand behind his back, to signal through the glass to the panel operator when he was about to stop record. The panel operator had a second copy of the disc and that was the one going to air. What's more, the panel operator had stayed back to do it.
It was a simple routine and he had used it on new announcers for many long years.
He also enjoyed substituting the Symphony Concert from 2FC on the studio speaker at top volume while the announcer was trying to present a popular music program. There was no way to escape it, and no amount of pleading would make him relent.
Announcers at that time did not use headphones to monitor their programs. We just heard everything from the studio speaker. And anyway, Bill would have found a way around that. You just knew that when the microphone light went on, it was time to talk again.
He also had a habit of using the studio mike as a communication channel so that he could listen to private conversations between the announcers (or in some cases, between the announcers and their girl friends).
But he reserved his best pranks for someone who would always appreciate them: poor old Peter Possum - er - Heath Burdock.
News reading was a serious career choice in those days - separate from news preparation. Radio news readers were stars and personalities in their own right, but Bill discovered that Heath could take a joke, even when he was on the air and reading the most serious of stories.
For his first trick, Bill chose a simple one.
He walked into the studio, flicked on his cigarette lighter and set fire to Heath's copy. Brushing the flames aside as he continued to read, Heath got to within a paragraph of the end when there was nothing left to read.
"...Further news is expected", he said, and picked up the next story as Bill's cigarette lighter clicked in the distance but did no more damage.
One night, Heath had read the Sydney bulletin at 6.45, and went into the drama studio from which he would read the same bulletin for country stations at 7. He was a bit surprised to find that the room was set up in an unusual fashion - but then, it had been the setting for "Officer Crosby" or Larry Kent's "I Hate Crime" only an hour or so before.
In the centre of the room, a microphone hung from the ceiling on a piece of scrappy rope. There was a small desk with a set of studio chimes on it, a Chinese gong in one corner of the room - and a step ladder set up right next to the desk.
Seven o'clock came, the news theme started (it was the march called "The Middy" which still sounds like a good news theme to me) and Heath started to read.
"In Korea", he began (indeed all the news bulletins at that time started with news of the Korean war and 2UE bulletins always started with those two words - "in Korea".
But something was happening. Heath noticed that the microphone had taken on a life of its own, and was moving very slowly. It was rising. As each sentence ended, Heath would glance up only to see the microphone hitch itself up another notch or so. There was nothing for it but to stand up and face the mobile mike.
Heath's standing up only encouraged the microphone to move a little faster.
Then Heath realised what the step ladder was for. He took the bulletin with him, and didn't miss a beat as sentence by sentence he followed the microphone to the ceiling. At which point he came to a spot where he had to hit the small studio chime to signal some of the stations to cut the relay. But it was on the desk below.
Quickly he stepped down, picked up the stick and struck one chime. The microphone, of course, came down for the event and then sped back to the ceiling with Heath in hot pursuit.
As he finished the bulletin with the words "That ends this news bulletin, read by Heath Burdock", the padded gong stick hanging at the front of the Chinese gong in the corner raised itself and struck a single resounding thud.
In the corridor Bill was putting way his pulleys and ropes and the mirrors he'd used to achieve the full effect, knowing that when Heath came out of the studio he could share the fun with him again.
Especially since the country listeners had heard none of this performance - they were treated to a recording of the earlier 2UE bulletin.
I dreaded the thought that one night I might be the victim of Bill's need for entertainment when I was reading the news, but it never happened. He always picked his mark.
One night, however, I was reading the Saturday night bulletins and there was a party at 2GZ, whose studios were a couple of blocks away from 2UE. I was invited, and ended up reading the late night news from a small studio at 2GZ. Bill was on the job Back at 2UE.
What neither of us realised was that 2GZ had its own distinctive sound, and Murray Stevenson, then the Chief Engineer of 2UE and a director as well, was listening and picked the difference. He rang the control room and spoke to Bill.
"What's he doing reading the news from 2GZ?" He asked.
Bill, knowing that both of us were going to be in hot water unless he came up with something, swore that he could see me reading in "A" studio so he didn't understand the question.
Having solved the problem, he rang me at 2GZ.
"If Mr Murray says anything to you on Monday" he said, "tell him your cold is much much better".
Bill gave up his pranks on newsreaders after he achieved what he thought was the impossible.
Halfway through a bulletin read by Norman Blackler, he and one of the other engineers went into the studio, picked up the studio chair with the Guv in it and carried him out of the room - Norman, of course, raising his voice more and more appropriately the farther he got from the microphone.
Once again the earlier news was going out to the unsuspecting country stations. It had been recorded on the unused side of a thrown-away episode of a serial in which the actors had cracked up: a fairly rare but costly event.
Bill later turned his mind to copywriting, and although I wasn't there when this is alleged to have happened, I believe the story.
One Sunday morning, he sat down and wrote a commercial for a product that couldn't be bought in a supermarket, entered it onto the afternoon schedule and slipped his masterpiece into the copy file.
The afternoon announcer came to it at last and launched into it with all the skill of his many years in radio. Having sold the product brilliantly, he had second thoughts about it, so he walked out of the studio into the Control Room.
"Bloody awful copy", he said. "But what a slogan: 'BRAINS - the wonder head-filler..."
Once again, nothing was impossible if it could break the monotony of control room life. But the copy for BRAINS the wonder head filler and the entry on the announcer's schedule had to be wiped out of existence.
The invention of logging recorders, which fortunately occurred after Bill retired, would have broken his heart.
Chapter Twenty Two
"Do you do a bit of writing? the young panel operator asked.
"My dad's a writer, but he makes a living out of it".
The panel operator was Dick Heming, a few years younger than me, and one of the team of operators trained by Neville Merchant, the production manager. He was interested because his father, Jack, made a living out of writing paperbacks.
A panel operator might be on duty paneling the studio program one day, the next mixing live actors, sound effects and music in one of the soap operas and dramas produced by Ron R Beck.
Dick and I had worked together once or twice by the time the 1949 staff Christmas party came round. Significantly different from the kinds of parties for which some radio stations later became famous, the 2UE staff "do" was held around a keg of beer with a few pies and nibbles charmingly set up in the station's sales department. The crowd was relatively small - there were probably only around 40 or 50 people on the team - and some of them (the wise ones) would have avoided the party by sneaking out early,
The Keg of Beer was set up on a spare sales department desk, on which someone had thought to place a fairly spotless tablecloth.
With remarkable foresight, the food, such as it was, was placed on a couple of desks at the other end of the room. And it was apparent that the expert who would broach the Keg, allowing its contents to be poured into jugs for recycling into the motley collection of glasses, cups and mugs, was none other than the Most Handsome Man in Radio, Harry Yates.
Harry was somewhat portly. He looked the part of Mine Host, and it did not take a great stretch of imagination to see him with a glass of foaming beer in his hand at any time. Anyway, he was a salesman, selling station time to advertisers, and we all had a pretty good idea how they filled in their day.
In this very room, so the story went, Paddy Campbell Jones once ran a sales meeting.
Using the opening-the-drawer technique I was familiar with, he had come to the point that business was not what it might be. Everyone had to make a better effort.
"And that reminds me", he said. "There's a rumor going around that one of you blokes has been offered a job by 2UW". 2UW was next in line for "Bad Boy of the Year" after 2GB.
He looked around for the culprit, but there was no volunteer. So he tried the direct attack.
"Was it you, Harry?" he asked.
"Not me, CJ", said Harry, who, after all, was afraid of nobody.
"What about you, Norman?" Paddy asked. "Were you offered a job at 2UW?"
"No, not me", said Norman.
Around the room he went, getting nine or ten denials. He surveyed them all one by one, shaking his head.
"And no expletive wonder", he said, as he rose to go.
Harry was proclaiming that there was a skill to the art of opening a keg. To illustrate the point, he was holding in his hands a long, silver implement which, eventually, would allow the beer to flow.
I had seen this done in Lismore, and to my mind it was no big deal. In Lismore, the barmen would toss a keg on the bar, pierce it somehow with the silver implement, and that was it. But Harry was selling his skills.
There was a sudden explosion of gas, and the beer started to pour - everywhere. Harry had made a small mistake, and now the beer was all over the floor and starting to move into the hallway.
Three minds with but a single thought, Peter Bergin, Dick Heming and I headed for the cleaning cupboard, where we found two mops. We rushed back to the scene, but met the beer on the way, moving steadily along the corridor in the direction of the lifts.
"She's fixed here", someone called. "You fellers just mop it up".
A bit easier said than done, because we had nothing to mop it up into. But Peter had a thought which we accepted quickly.
"Let's mop it along to the lift well", he said. "That'll get rid of it".
A remarkable decision, since neither of us had yet tasted a drink that day. All sign of the beer (but not the aroma) disappeared down the lift well, and the three of us went back to the sales department, where the remainder of beer was being distributed by Harry and his mates - the Dynamic 2UE Sales Team.
Harry explained that we should have got the Keg earlier, and let it rest. "It got shaken up when it was delivered. You should never shake a keg of beer", pronounced Harry - an instruction I have observed for the rest of my life.
Due to the unexpected loss of half the keg, the party lasted only an hour or so, nobody having had the foresight to order a stand-by.
Bill was the executive whose job it was to make sure that the party didn't kick on too late, and to keep a weather eye on the younger members of the staff to make sure they didn't drink too much. Somehow he must have missed Dick, who had gotten a good taste for the stuff even though he was only about 18.
He was having a terrific time. He had a fine voice, and it was raised in song, in German sayings - he had taken to studying German without outside help - and in a variety of slogans the station broadcast often.
"Tom", said Bill, "I think we've got a problem with young Dick here. Do you know where he lives?"
I didn't, but I felt that the problem had been delegated, and I rose to the task.
"Don't worry, Bill", I told him, "I'll get him home".
Getting him to the tram was easy, just as soon as the Keg had dribbled out its last few drops of beer. Dick was walking well, and the only problem was to make him keep reasonably quiet.
Like me, he was pretty proud of working at 2UE, and he wanted to talk about it in quite a loud voice.
I had discovered that he lived at Belmore, and after a while he volunteered the full address - for the whole world to hear.
We arrived at Central Station.
I had decided that I would take him by train as far as possible, and then we would get a taxi. But first I realised that he needed some sobering up.
I had no idea how this might be achieved, but thought that maybe I could march him around Central Station for a while and see what happened. And it worked - partly.
But here was another problem. Dick somehow saw a neon sign advertising McWilliams Old Yendarra Sherry - the very same product that we plugged with the six o'clock time call each evening. This triggered the latent radio announcer in Dick. In full voice, he announced, to my great embarrassment, "McWilliams Wines, vignerons of McWilliams Old Yendarra Sherry, announce the time as SIX O'CLOCK" and continued to do so as we walked around and around the steam trains section of Sydney's Central Station.
Quite apart from the amused looks on the faces of the people we met, it was obvious that something was wrong with his watch.
It was approaching midnight.
Some semblance of quiet ensued, with an occasional breakout into the time call, when I decided that I had better get home myself and took him down to the taxi rank, where a driver said he'd be pleased to take Dick to Belmore for a fiver. I reckoned that was cheap, so I handed over almost half my wages, put Dick in the back seat, watched the cab disappear in the direction of Sydney's inner west, and caught a tram to Coogee.
The next morning, feeling poorly but refusing to admit it, I was on the air, when Dick arrived for work. Pale of face, and with a minor tremble in his hands, he came into the studio and handed me five pounds. And I had thought it was gone forever! That must have been most of his weekly pay.
Even though he had been severely ill at the time, he had heard my conversation with the driver, and while unable to explain that five quid was a rip-off, he had remembered the whole transaction.
We were mates.
And that lasted for more than forty years.
Dick's father was Jack Heming, a sometime journalist who had carved a small niche for himself by writing paperback westerns.
These sold on the bookstalls well enough for the publisher to pay him twenty pounds for each book, which took him around two weeks to write.
He made it a living.
His creative method was interesting.
Encyclopedia Britannica offered fifty coupons to the buyer of each new set, so every time Jack ran out of ideas for stories, he used this service to find out little-known events in the lives of some of the legends of the American West. When he ran out of vouchers he bought a new Britannica. He became an expert on people like Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, the Sundance Kid, and all the rest.
From the backroom boys at Britannica, then, came all this information which would form the basis of the next J W Heming western, and consequently, keep the family in food and supply a place to live. The book would be written in the wee small hours of the night, long after everyone else had gone to bed.
When inspiration failed, usually as dawn started to light up his world, or when he was feeling mischievous, Jack would write a short radio play or two. For this exercise he favoured a mystery story, and created a range of characters that cropped up regularly in these plays. I'm not sure how many of these made their way onto the airwaves. The ABC would have been the only interested party, but this didn't worry Jack at all - each one of them got recorded.
His garage had no car - he couldn't afford one - so it became a recording studio where the Masque Players performed each Sunday night.
We were simply an amateur company, like the theatrical groups that existed then and still perform today, but we were exclusively for radio.
Only three of us knew something about working to a microphone.
There was Dick - and he watched the professionals at it every day of the week as he panelled for radio plays, so he picked up a lot of pointers - there was a technician who worked for the ABC, and me.
By his own choice, Dick was the panel operator. A sheet of glass separated his end of the garage from the "studio" end. We communicated with him in the time-honoured way - hand signals - except when that failed and we shouted at each other.
Our ABC technician was just that - a sorely needed role, for the equipment often needed remedial surgery.
I was there because I enjoyed it. And I fancied that maybe one day I would be called to perform in a play or two. In fact, that happened several times. If Ron R Beck wanted a voice to do a one or two line piece for one of his immortal radio dramas, he'd send someone down to ask me to pop into the recording studio and say the words before the actors came in.
The going rate? Something of an advance on 2LM's ten shillings and sixpence - two pounds ten shillings, and a handy additive to the twelve pounds ten shillings I got regularly each week.
The other Masque Players were friends and acquaintances of the Heming family. Fred was what was called a "commercial artist" and made his way designing logos and working on commissions from advertising agencies. There was Gail, the daughter of a popular Sydney cartoonist, and lots of other interested and eager people struck with the idea of performing on the radio.
To convert his suburban garage into a recording studio without much capital, Jack used his ingenuity. First, he remembered that he had the ideal material to sound-proof and acoustically treats the garage so that it would produce a suitable quality of sound: he had once published a book of his own, on his own, and had not been able to sell it. He lined the walls with the hundreds of copies he'd been storing in boxes.
A makeshift production panel, built from throw-aways (and perhaps some from the back of a truck) from the professional recording places and radio stations, was the centrepiece of the facility, with a temperamental turntable and recording head.
The recordings were made onto acetate blanks - cast-off by the ABC or 2UE recording departments when a mistake had been made and they'd had to start all over again. Usually the other side was completely blank, just waiting for the Masque Players to fill it up.
The 2UE recording engineer knew he was going to see Dick wandering into his workroom at the end of a long day, just to see if there were any spoils. He was happy to go along with it, knowing that there would be a change soon - something new was happening in recording. It would be here soon.
It was called magnetic tape.
But in 1949, it was a year or so off and something of a mystery - something like microgroove records. We actually had one or two of those at 2UE at that time, but nothing to play them on.
The Masque Players would gather at about seven o'clock Sunday night - ten or fifteen of us - and Jack would cast his scripts for the night. The procedure was the same as that adopted at 2UE - a read-through, then the actual recording. This would be followed by a play-back of the masterpiece, and a general discussion. We would get two recorded - plus the piece de resistance: the Masque Players Magazine, which was not rehearsed but recorded without preparation, "at sight", in the Jack Heming hope that we would "break up" at the really funny bits.
It consisted of snippets about most of us, dreamed up just before dawn at the end of one of Jack's writing sessions, and there could have been objections raised if the material was known in advance.
As I became more and more a stalwart of the Masque Players, Jack rewarded me with the task of adapting one of his old novels for radio. With this went the privilege of playing the leading role.
The book rejoiced in the title "Snap Burke Intervenes", and I played the part of Snap himself with what I fondly imagined was a laid-back western drawl. I would probably have forgotten all about Snap (in fact, I had forgotten about him) until more than forty years later, I heard him coming back at me.
I was in the Regent Hotel in Sydney, and the Award to the Radio Person of the Year was about to be made. In an effort to keep up the suspense the previous Radio Person of the Year, Des Foster, then one of my colleagues in the FARB organisation, had given some cryptic clues as to who it might be, and Snap Burke was the last.
The question of who it might be was still a mystery to everyone but three of us in the room. Phil Charley, although he hadn't been a member of the Masque Players, knew that Dick still had the old recordings, and that he had taken good care of them for many years. He had got in touch with Dick who by then was lecturer in radio at the university in Lismore, and Dick had sent him a copy.
Snap Burke briefly had his moment of fame, and disappeared immediately after I accepted my award.
Strangely enough, the Award no longer exists. It did not re-appear the following year, and has not surfaced since.
Can Snap Burke have had anything to do with it?
Perhaps not. Perhaps it was difficult to find someone who was prepared to do his bit for the commercial radio industry by resigning from it, as I had done a few months before the Award was made.
"My dad's a writer, but he makes a living out of it".
The panel operator was Dick Heming, a few years younger than me, and one of the team of operators trained by Neville Merchant, the production manager. He was interested because his father, Jack, made a living out of writing paperbacks.
A panel operator might be on duty paneling the studio program one day, the next mixing live actors, sound effects and music in one of the soap operas and dramas produced by Ron R Beck.
Dick and I had worked together once or twice by the time the 1949 staff Christmas party came round. Significantly different from the kinds of parties for which some radio stations later became famous, the 2UE staff "do" was held around a keg of beer with a few pies and nibbles charmingly set up in the station's sales department. The crowd was relatively small - there were probably only around 40 or 50 people on the team - and some of them (the wise ones) would have avoided the party by sneaking out early,
The Keg of Beer was set up on a spare sales department desk, on which someone had thought to place a fairly spotless tablecloth.
With remarkable foresight, the food, such as it was, was placed on a couple of desks at the other end of the room. And it was apparent that the expert who would broach the Keg, allowing its contents to be poured into jugs for recycling into the motley collection of glasses, cups and mugs, was none other than the Most Handsome Man in Radio, Harry Yates.
Harry was somewhat portly. He looked the part of Mine Host, and it did not take a great stretch of imagination to see him with a glass of foaming beer in his hand at any time. Anyway, he was a salesman, selling station time to advertisers, and we all had a pretty good idea how they filled in their day.
In this very room, so the story went, Paddy Campbell Jones once ran a sales meeting.
Using the opening-the-drawer technique I was familiar with, he had come to the point that business was not what it might be. Everyone had to make a better effort.
"And that reminds me", he said. "There's a rumor going around that one of you blokes has been offered a job by 2UW". 2UW was next in line for "Bad Boy of the Year" after 2GB.
He looked around for the culprit, but there was no volunteer. So he tried the direct attack.
"Was it you, Harry?" he asked.
"Not me, CJ", said Harry, who, after all, was afraid of nobody.
"What about you, Norman?" Paddy asked. "Were you offered a job at 2UW?"
"No, not me", said Norman.
Around the room he went, getting nine or ten denials. He surveyed them all one by one, shaking his head.
"And no expletive wonder", he said, as he rose to go.
Harry was proclaiming that there was a skill to the art of opening a keg. To illustrate the point, he was holding in his hands a long, silver implement which, eventually, would allow the beer to flow.
I had seen this done in Lismore, and to my mind it was no big deal. In Lismore, the barmen would toss a keg on the bar, pierce it somehow with the silver implement, and that was it. But Harry was selling his skills.
There was a sudden explosion of gas, and the beer started to pour - everywhere. Harry had made a small mistake, and now the beer was all over the floor and starting to move into the hallway.
Three minds with but a single thought, Peter Bergin, Dick Heming and I headed for the cleaning cupboard, where we found two mops. We rushed back to the scene, but met the beer on the way, moving steadily along the corridor in the direction of the lifts.
"She's fixed here", someone called. "You fellers just mop it up".
A bit easier said than done, because we had nothing to mop it up into. But Peter had a thought which we accepted quickly.
"Let's mop it along to the lift well", he said. "That'll get rid of it".
A remarkable decision, since neither of us had yet tasted a drink that day. All sign of the beer (but not the aroma) disappeared down the lift well, and the three of us went back to the sales department, where the remainder of beer was being distributed by Harry and his mates - the Dynamic 2UE Sales Team.
Harry explained that we should have got the Keg earlier, and let it rest. "It got shaken up when it was delivered. You should never shake a keg of beer", pronounced Harry - an instruction I have observed for the rest of my life.
Due to the unexpected loss of half the keg, the party lasted only an hour or so, nobody having had the foresight to order a stand-by.
Bill was the executive whose job it was to make sure that the party didn't kick on too late, and to keep a weather eye on the younger members of the staff to make sure they didn't drink too much. Somehow he must have missed Dick, who had gotten a good taste for the stuff even though he was only about 18.
He was having a terrific time. He had a fine voice, and it was raised in song, in German sayings - he had taken to studying German without outside help - and in a variety of slogans the station broadcast often.
"Tom", said Bill, "I think we've got a problem with young Dick here. Do you know where he lives?"
I didn't, but I felt that the problem had been delegated, and I rose to the task.
"Don't worry, Bill", I told him, "I'll get him home".
Getting him to the tram was easy, just as soon as the Keg had dribbled out its last few drops of beer. Dick was walking well, and the only problem was to make him keep reasonably quiet.
Like me, he was pretty proud of working at 2UE, and he wanted to talk about it in quite a loud voice.
I had discovered that he lived at Belmore, and after a while he volunteered the full address - for the whole world to hear.
We arrived at Central Station.
I had decided that I would take him by train as far as possible, and then we would get a taxi. But first I realised that he needed some sobering up.
I had no idea how this might be achieved, but thought that maybe I could march him around Central Station for a while and see what happened. And it worked - partly.
But here was another problem. Dick somehow saw a neon sign advertising McWilliams Old Yendarra Sherry - the very same product that we plugged with the six o'clock time call each evening. This triggered the latent radio announcer in Dick. In full voice, he announced, to my great embarrassment, "McWilliams Wines, vignerons of McWilliams Old Yendarra Sherry, announce the time as SIX O'CLOCK" and continued to do so as we walked around and around the steam trains section of Sydney's Central Station.
Quite apart from the amused looks on the faces of the people we met, it was obvious that something was wrong with his watch.
It was approaching midnight.
Some semblance of quiet ensued, with an occasional breakout into the time call, when I decided that I had better get home myself and took him down to the taxi rank, where a driver said he'd be pleased to take Dick to Belmore for a fiver. I reckoned that was cheap, so I handed over almost half my wages, put Dick in the back seat, watched the cab disappear in the direction of Sydney's inner west, and caught a tram to Coogee.
The next morning, feeling poorly but refusing to admit it, I was on the air, when Dick arrived for work. Pale of face, and with a minor tremble in his hands, he came into the studio and handed me five pounds. And I had thought it was gone forever! That must have been most of his weekly pay.
Even though he had been severely ill at the time, he had heard my conversation with the driver, and while unable to explain that five quid was a rip-off, he had remembered the whole transaction.
We were mates.
And that lasted for more than forty years.
Dick's father was Jack Heming, a sometime journalist who had carved a small niche for himself by writing paperback westerns.
These sold on the bookstalls well enough for the publisher to pay him twenty pounds for each book, which took him around two weeks to write.
He made it a living.
His creative method was interesting.
Encyclopedia Britannica offered fifty coupons to the buyer of each new set, so every time Jack ran out of ideas for stories, he used this service to find out little-known events in the lives of some of the legends of the American West. When he ran out of vouchers he bought a new Britannica. He became an expert on people like Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, the Sundance Kid, and all the rest.
From the backroom boys at Britannica, then, came all this information which would form the basis of the next J W Heming western, and consequently, keep the family in food and supply a place to live. The book would be written in the wee small hours of the night, long after everyone else had gone to bed.
When inspiration failed, usually as dawn started to light up his world, or when he was feeling mischievous, Jack would write a short radio play or two. For this exercise he favoured a mystery story, and created a range of characters that cropped up regularly in these plays. I'm not sure how many of these made their way onto the airwaves. The ABC would have been the only interested party, but this didn't worry Jack at all - each one of them got recorded.
His garage had no car - he couldn't afford one - so it became a recording studio where the Masque Players performed each Sunday night.
We were simply an amateur company, like the theatrical groups that existed then and still perform today, but we were exclusively for radio.
Only three of us knew something about working to a microphone.
There was Dick - and he watched the professionals at it every day of the week as he panelled for radio plays, so he picked up a lot of pointers - there was a technician who worked for the ABC, and me.
By his own choice, Dick was the panel operator. A sheet of glass separated his end of the garage from the "studio" end. We communicated with him in the time-honoured way - hand signals - except when that failed and we shouted at each other.
Our ABC technician was just that - a sorely needed role, for the equipment often needed remedial surgery.
I was there because I enjoyed it. And I fancied that maybe one day I would be called to perform in a play or two. In fact, that happened several times. If Ron R Beck wanted a voice to do a one or two line piece for one of his immortal radio dramas, he'd send someone down to ask me to pop into the recording studio and say the words before the actors came in.
The going rate? Something of an advance on 2LM's ten shillings and sixpence - two pounds ten shillings, and a handy additive to the twelve pounds ten shillings I got regularly each week.
The other Masque Players were friends and acquaintances of the Heming family. Fred was what was called a "commercial artist" and made his way designing logos and working on commissions from advertising agencies. There was Gail, the daughter of a popular Sydney cartoonist, and lots of other interested and eager people struck with the idea of performing on the radio.
To convert his suburban garage into a recording studio without much capital, Jack used his ingenuity. First, he remembered that he had the ideal material to sound-proof and acoustically treats the garage so that it would produce a suitable quality of sound: he had once published a book of his own, on his own, and had not been able to sell it. He lined the walls with the hundreds of copies he'd been storing in boxes.
A makeshift production panel, built from throw-aways (and perhaps some from the back of a truck) from the professional recording places and radio stations, was the centrepiece of the facility, with a temperamental turntable and recording head.
The recordings were made onto acetate blanks - cast-off by the ABC or 2UE recording departments when a mistake had been made and they'd had to start all over again. Usually the other side was completely blank, just waiting for the Masque Players to fill it up.
The 2UE recording engineer knew he was going to see Dick wandering into his workroom at the end of a long day, just to see if there were any spoils. He was happy to go along with it, knowing that there would be a change soon - something new was happening in recording. It would be here soon.
It was called magnetic tape.
But in 1949, it was a year or so off and something of a mystery - something like microgroove records. We actually had one or two of those at 2UE at that time, but nothing to play them on.
The Masque Players would gather at about seven o'clock Sunday night - ten or fifteen of us - and Jack would cast his scripts for the night. The procedure was the same as that adopted at 2UE - a read-through, then the actual recording. This would be followed by a play-back of the masterpiece, and a general discussion. We would get two recorded - plus the piece de resistance: the Masque Players Magazine, which was not rehearsed but recorded without preparation, "at sight", in the Jack Heming hope that we would "break up" at the really funny bits.
It consisted of snippets about most of us, dreamed up just before dawn at the end of one of Jack's writing sessions, and there could have been objections raised if the material was known in advance.
As I became more and more a stalwart of the Masque Players, Jack rewarded me with the task of adapting one of his old novels for radio. With this went the privilege of playing the leading role.
The book rejoiced in the title "Snap Burke Intervenes", and I played the part of Snap himself with what I fondly imagined was a laid-back western drawl. I would probably have forgotten all about Snap (in fact, I had forgotten about him) until more than forty years later, I heard him coming back at me.
I was in the Regent Hotel in Sydney, and the Award to the Radio Person of the Year was about to be made. In an effort to keep up the suspense the previous Radio Person of the Year, Des Foster, then one of my colleagues in the FARB organisation, had given some cryptic clues as to who it might be, and Snap Burke was the last.
The question of who it might be was still a mystery to everyone but three of us in the room. Phil Charley, although he hadn't been a member of the Masque Players, knew that Dick still had the old recordings, and that he had taken good care of them for many years. He had got in touch with Dick who by then was lecturer in radio at the university in Lismore, and Dick had sent him a copy.
Snap Burke briefly had his moment of fame, and disappeared immediately after I accepted my award.
Strangely enough, the Award no longer exists. It did not re-appear the following year, and has not surfaced since.
Can Snap Burke have had anything to do with it?
Perhaps not. Perhaps it was difficult to find someone who was prepared to do his bit for the commercial radio industry by resigning from it, as I had done a few months before the Award was made.
According to my copy of Australian Vintage Paperback Guide - J.W. Heming wrote Westerns for Horwitz under the pseudonym 'Tex Barton'. Sadly I don't have any in my collection. Ian Grieve
Chapter Twenty Three
Harry Yates had his Digger's Show, as well as selling advertising time and being an expert on opening a keg of beer.
He also had one other job he did at least twice a week.
He broadcast the Lottery Results.
It had been the only program on 2UE that Mum had listened to prior to me joining the station, and the Lottery remained one of her favourite listening choices, although now she had to listen to me as well.
2UE had a microphone and amplifier in the room where the NSW State Lottery was drawn. This place was in the same building as Bryson Taylor's announcer training studio. The room was known as Paling's Concert Hall, and the centrepiece on lottery days was a huge barrel which contained all the marbles, each with a separate number on it. All Harry had to do was to walk in, open a cupboard, switch on the amplifier, bring out the microphone and headphones so he could hear Eric Wright in the studio, and he was in business.
One morning after I'd read the news at a quarter to eight, Harry was on the phone.
Harry had news for me.
"Tommy", he said. I hated being called Tommy, but somehow Harry was different. He had a nickname for everyone. "It's your turn today, mate. Just go down, tell 'em I sent you and they'll look after you".
They did, too. I often did the Lottery broadcast after that, and if I was late they would wait for me. There was only one Lottery, for which tickets cost five shillings and threepence, and drawings were two or three times a week.
Harry got to realise that he had a good back stop in me, especially if he'd had a bad night and needed time to recover.
The proceedings were standard: They were always punctuated by the sound of the marbles being shaken around in the barrel. Eric in the studio would play part of the record "We're in the Money", and then he would cross over to the hall, where I would cue the operator who would push a button to make the barrel move around once or twice so people could hear the hundred thousand marbles crashing against each other.
Then I would tell people the number of the Lottery being drawn. This had to be done with great deliberation, to make sure everyone knew whether or not it was their lottery being drawn.
That was followed by a brief summary of the career of the person invited to draw that particular lottery. Usually these people were unknown to anyone except close family and one or two workmates, but the public relations department of the Lottery Office made them all into stars.
The next event was another brief shuffle of the huge drum, to build up the suspense, and I would announce "And now to the drawing of NSW State Lottery Number....".
There would follow the sound of a real shaking up of the marbles as the drum revolved perhaps eight or ten times, and as the crash of marble on marble ground to a halt, there was the sound of what might be construed as an incompetent trying to open a very troublesome door - it was a loud clicking and clanking that indicated that the barrel was being unlocked. Following this high drama, it was my task to announce "And now, Mr. Whatsisname will draw the first marble!"
Guided by a Lottery Office official, the guest would insert a long metal rod into the drum. The rod had a clasp which would seize just one marble when the guest pushed a trigger.
There would be deathly silence in the Concert Hall. Not really difficult to achieve, considering that, apart from me and the guest, there were usually only three or four other people there - the Director of State Lotteries and two of his minions.It didn't attract a huge crowd.
The marble would drop out of its clasp onto a metal plate, carefully selected so that its crisp drop could be picked up by even the deafest of 2UE's listeners.
The guest was encouraged to read out the number. Then the Director would repeat it and then point to me so that I could also repeat it.
The drama continued.
"Now to the drawing of the second prize..." and so it went on until the five major prizes had been drawn.
As the minor prizes started to spit out, to a background of barrel-shuffling, my closing announcement would be to remind people that the full list would be published in "this afternoon's edition of The Sun". We had to get the company plug in somehow.
And then it was back to Eric Wright, who had been busy shaving while he had the break, because he had thirty minutes to make it to Broadway when he came off air at nine o'clock.
Eric's exit from the studio was spectacular. He had a brief case which carried, amongst other things, all his fan mail, mostly unanswered.
This case would be lying on the studio floor, spilling out papers, lunch, matches, cigarettes, scripts to be recorded later in the day at other radio stations or production studios, (something he thought 2UE didn't know about) and letters he wanted to look at. Now, it all came together as he snapped the catch closed, grabbed his jacket and tie and sped down the corridor shouting "Hold that LIFT!"
While cars were sent to collect us at the start of the day, there was no transport provided from that time on, so Eric used the tram to take him to Broadway.
One morning I finished the Lottery broadcast just in time to receive a telephone call from the studio.
"Get up to Broadway", they said. "Eric's sick!"
He must have been ill, because Eric Wright was one of the main exponents of the concept that "the show must go on".
The quickest way to old Broadway was via George Street tram which took me to Grace Brother's twin stores, and what was described as "the beautiful Grace auditorium", from which, four times weekly, two radio programs originated.
The first, at nine thirty, was a quiz show, done in traditional style with plenty of quips and instructions in microphone technique to the contestants "right up close, please", by one Pat Hodgkins. He had an American accent and a tendency to sound exactly like Jack Davey without, as he pointed out to us all, any intention to do so.
The second show, following immediately, was sponsored by Grace Brothers and featured one of the country's best-known comperes, Jack Burgess, who had arrived in Sydney from Adelaide some years previously to join the Colgate Unit, and did some fairly public moonlighting on 2UE with this program. It was essentially a community singing concert, with one or more variety acts.
To knit these two half-hours together, they needed a commercial announcer.
As best I can remember, this consisted of just being there in case something didn't happen for the first half hour. There was the l0am time-call to be announced from the stage of the auditorium: "Ten o'clock and the Commonwealth Bank are open for business".
Then there was the introduction to be read, starting with the dreaded line "From the beautiful Grace Auditorium on Broadway, GRACE BROS present PAINTING THE CLOUDS WITH SUNSHINE with ....Jack Burgess"!
The Applause sign lit up.
"Spontaneous" applause followed. The audience knew what to do when that sign flickered. They were the same people who started attending the morning TV shows when it all began six or seven years later) and pianist Frank Scott would give Jack his musical cue to start singing the theme song.
This started with the line
"When I pretend I'm gay
I never feel that way
I'm only
Painting the clouds with Sunshine..."
Try that song today and it obviously wouldn't mean what it did in 1949.
The auditorium was usually only half full, but the boys in the production booth at the back of the hall knew all about that, and they could make it sound like a thousand people.
My big chance in this show came when I read the 60-second commercial for Grace Brothers - live on stage!
I came to know the beautiful Grace Auditorium quite well until I scored the morning announcing shift back at the studio, and had to listen to it all at the other end.
What I missed most was Frank Scott, whom we all thought was a tremendous person, and his marvellous descriptions of what had happened to him, or some well-known person, last night. These, of course, were off-air - told in the so-called dressing room at the Grace Auditorium. The punch line was always funny, although it always took Frank some considerable time to get to it. He had a terrible stutter.
He was also Musical Director of 2UE, which meant that he was available for any program requiring a piano player, and he wrote and produced singing commercials as they were needed. 2UE, in spite of its limited facilities, had a substantial business in the production of radio commercials.
In this environment, it wasn't long before I was faced with the fact that I would have to join the trade union.
I was never a trade unionist at heart. In fact, in Lismore we had all felt very despondent when the Board of Directors decreed that all their announcers must take a day off work each week. We felt as though we were being banned from the station, which was a kind of focal point for us all. With one exception, we were imports. Each of us had a boarding house room (in my case shared with three non-radio types), a favourite milk bar, or the radio station. That was our world.
Next thing, we told ourselves, they'll want us to join the union. We misjudged the strongly Presbyterian Board. All they were trying to do was to stop us playing records, or using their typewriters and toilet paper, when we weren't on duty.
But now it was on the line.
Actors and Announcers Equity was the union, and they had declared Sydney a "closed shop". It was a case of US versus THEM, they said. "Them" being the management.
This closed shop meant that if you didn't hold a union ticket nobody could legally employ you. I joined with great reluctance, but was refused admission to the only meeting I ever tried to attend, which was the first after I had signed on. Their office system had lost me. It was temporary - they found me in time for the next dues notice.
I had wanted to go to that first meeting because one of our members, a very famous radio writer, comic and announcer named George Foster, had told one of the newspapers that the union was run by communists and he wouldn't take any notice of them.
This was very courageous of him, because he had a lot to lose. He was a mainstay of 2GB and the Macquarie Network, writing and appearing in a couple of shows each week.
I was especially interested because I had never met George Foster, but knew him very well. He had been the manager of 2KA when I was going to school in Katoomba, and I would often stand at the bottom of the stairs of the building in which the station was located, waiting to see if anyone important came down them. They rarely did.
George ran the first "small and yell" affairs I ever knew - Saturday morning "children's parties" at the Katoomba Town Hall, where we paid sixpence for admission and received a bag of sweets and somewhere to sit.
I had to miss out on all the drama at that union meeting, but was able to read all about it in one of the afternoon papers.
The union didn't get George fired. They didn't even call a strike as they had threatened to do, which might have had some serious consequences for the Macquarie Network. They just accepted it.
Perhaps they had to, because one of the country's most famous stage and radio performers, the comedian Roy Rene ("Mo") who appeared in the Colgate-sponsored "Calling the Stars" in a segment called "McCackie Mansion" on 2UE at that time was not a member either.
And Roy Rene's side-kick, and friend, Hal Lashwood, was the President of the union.
It wasn't until some two or three years later that I found a way to get out of the union, which did not seem interested in us except for the subscriptions we had to pay.
If it was really a case or US or THEM, I decided I should take action.
I found a loophole in the rules, became Assistant Manager of a radio station, and that did the trick.
I had become one of THEM.
He also had one other job he did at least twice a week.
He broadcast the Lottery Results.
It had been the only program on 2UE that Mum had listened to prior to me joining the station, and the Lottery remained one of her favourite listening choices, although now she had to listen to me as well.
2UE had a microphone and amplifier in the room where the NSW State Lottery was drawn. This place was in the same building as Bryson Taylor's announcer training studio. The room was known as Paling's Concert Hall, and the centrepiece on lottery days was a huge barrel which contained all the marbles, each with a separate number on it. All Harry had to do was to walk in, open a cupboard, switch on the amplifier, bring out the microphone and headphones so he could hear Eric Wright in the studio, and he was in business.
One morning after I'd read the news at a quarter to eight, Harry was on the phone.
Harry had news for me.
"Tommy", he said. I hated being called Tommy, but somehow Harry was different. He had a nickname for everyone. "It's your turn today, mate. Just go down, tell 'em I sent you and they'll look after you".
They did, too. I often did the Lottery broadcast after that, and if I was late they would wait for me. There was only one Lottery, for which tickets cost five shillings and threepence, and drawings were two or three times a week.
Harry got to realise that he had a good back stop in me, especially if he'd had a bad night and needed time to recover.
The proceedings were standard: They were always punctuated by the sound of the marbles being shaken around in the barrel. Eric in the studio would play part of the record "We're in the Money", and then he would cross over to the hall, where I would cue the operator who would push a button to make the barrel move around once or twice so people could hear the hundred thousand marbles crashing against each other.
Then I would tell people the number of the Lottery being drawn. This had to be done with great deliberation, to make sure everyone knew whether or not it was their lottery being drawn.
That was followed by a brief summary of the career of the person invited to draw that particular lottery. Usually these people were unknown to anyone except close family and one or two workmates, but the public relations department of the Lottery Office made them all into stars.
The next event was another brief shuffle of the huge drum, to build up the suspense, and I would announce "And now to the drawing of NSW State Lottery Number....".
There would follow the sound of a real shaking up of the marbles as the drum revolved perhaps eight or ten times, and as the crash of marble on marble ground to a halt, there was the sound of what might be construed as an incompetent trying to open a very troublesome door - it was a loud clicking and clanking that indicated that the barrel was being unlocked. Following this high drama, it was my task to announce "And now, Mr. Whatsisname will draw the first marble!"
Guided by a Lottery Office official, the guest would insert a long metal rod into the drum. The rod had a clasp which would seize just one marble when the guest pushed a trigger.
There would be deathly silence in the Concert Hall. Not really difficult to achieve, considering that, apart from me and the guest, there were usually only three or four other people there - the Director of State Lotteries and two of his minions.It didn't attract a huge crowd.
The marble would drop out of its clasp onto a metal plate, carefully selected so that its crisp drop could be picked up by even the deafest of 2UE's listeners.
The guest was encouraged to read out the number. Then the Director would repeat it and then point to me so that I could also repeat it.
The drama continued.
"Now to the drawing of the second prize..." and so it went on until the five major prizes had been drawn.
As the minor prizes started to spit out, to a background of barrel-shuffling, my closing announcement would be to remind people that the full list would be published in "this afternoon's edition of The Sun". We had to get the company plug in somehow.
And then it was back to Eric Wright, who had been busy shaving while he had the break, because he had thirty minutes to make it to Broadway when he came off air at nine o'clock.
Eric's exit from the studio was spectacular. He had a brief case which carried, amongst other things, all his fan mail, mostly unanswered.
This case would be lying on the studio floor, spilling out papers, lunch, matches, cigarettes, scripts to be recorded later in the day at other radio stations or production studios, (something he thought 2UE didn't know about) and letters he wanted to look at. Now, it all came together as he snapped the catch closed, grabbed his jacket and tie and sped down the corridor shouting "Hold that LIFT!"
While cars were sent to collect us at the start of the day, there was no transport provided from that time on, so Eric used the tram to take him to Broadway.
One morning I finished the Lottery broadcast just in time to receive a telephone call from the studio.
"Get up to Broadway", they said. "Eric's sick!"
He must have been ill, because Eric Wright was one of the main exponents of the concept that "the show must go on".
The quickest way to old Broadway was via George Street tram which took me to Grace Brother's twin stores, and what was described as "the beautiful Grace auditorium", from which, four times weekly, two radio programs originated.
The first, at nine thirty, was a quiz show, done in traditional style with plenty of quips and instructions in microphone technique to the contestants "right up close, please", by one Pat Hodgkins. He had an American accent and a tendency to sound exactly like Jack Davey without, as he pointed out to us all, any intention to do so.
The second show, following immediately, was sponsored by Grace Brothers and featured one of the country's best-known comperes, Jack Burgess, who had arrived in Sydney from Adelaide some years previously to join the Colgate Unit, and did some fairly public moonlighting on 2UE with this program. It was essentially a community singing concert, with one or more variety acts.
To knit these two half-hours together, they needed a commercial announcer.
As best I can remember, this consisted of just being there in case something didn't happen for the first half hour. There was the l0am time-call to be announced from the stage of the auditorium: "Ten o'clock and the Commonwealth Bank are open for business".
Then there was the introduction to be read, starting with the dreaded line "From the beautiful Grace Auditorium on Broadway, GRACE BROS present PAINTING THE CLOUDS WITH SUNSHINE with ....Jack Burgess"!
The Applause sign lit up.
"Spontaneous" applause followed. The audience knew what to do when that sign flickered. They were the same people who started attending the morning TV shows when it all began six or seven years later) and pianist Frank Scott would give Jack his musical cue to start singing the theme song.
This started with the line
"When I pretend I'm gay
I never feel that way
I'm only
Painting the clouds with Sunshine..."
Try that song today and it obviously wouldn't mean what it did in 1949.
The auditorium was usually only half full, but the boys in the production booth at the back of the hall knew all about that, and they could make it sound like a thousand people.
My big chance in this show came when I read the 60-second commercial for Grace Brothers - live on stage!
I came to know the beautiful Grace Auditorium quite well until I scored the morning announcing shift back at the studio, and had to listen to it all at the other end.
What I missed most was Frank Scott, whom we all thought was a tremendous person, and his marvellous descriptions of what had happened to him, or some well-known person, last night. These, of course, were off-air - told in the so-called dressing room at the Grace Auditorium. The punch line was always funny, although it always took Frank some considerable time to get to it. He had a terrible stutter.
He was also Musical Director of 2UE, which meant that he was available for any program requiring a piano player, and he wrote and produced singing commercials as they were needed. 2UE, in spite of its limited facilities, had a substantial business in the production of radio commercials.
In this environment, it wasn't long before I was faced with the fact that I would have to join the trade union.
I was never a trade unionist at heart. In fact, in Lismore we had all felt very despondent when the Board of Directors decreed that all their announcers must take a day off work each week. We felt as though we were being banned from the station, which was a kind of focal point for us all. With one exception, we were imports. Each of us had a boarding house room (in my case shared with three non-radio types), a favourite milk bar, or the radio station. That was our world.
Next thing, we told ourselves, they'll want us to join the union. We misjudged the strongly Presbyterian Board. All they were trying to do was to stop us playing records, or using their typewriters and toilet paper, when we weren't on duty.
But now it was on the line.
Actors and Announcers Equity was the union, and they had declared Sydney a "closed shop". It was a case of US versus THEM, they said. "Them" being the management.
This closed shop meant that if you didn't hold a union ticket nobody could legally employ you. I joined with great reluctance, but was refused admission to the only meeting I ever tried to attend, which was the first after I had signed on. Their office system had lost me. It was temporary - they found me in time for the next dues notice.
I had wanted to go to that first meeting because one of our members, a very famous radio writer, comic and announcer named George Foster, had told one of the newspapers that the union was run by communists and he wouldn't take any notice of them.
This was very courageous of him, because he had a lot to lose. He was a mainstay of 2GB and the Macquarie Network, writing and appearing in a couple of shows each week.
I was especially interested because I had never met George Foster, but knew him very well. He had been the manager of 2KA when I was going to school in Katoomba, and I would often stand at the bottom of the stairs of the building in which the station was located, waiting to see if anyone important came down them. They rarely did.
George ran the first "small and yell" affairs I ever knew - Saturday morning "children's parties" at the Katoomba Town Hall, where we paid sixpence for admission and received a bag of sweets and somewhere to sit.
I had to miss out on all the drama at that union meeting, but was able to read all about it in one of the afternoon papers.
The union didn't get George fired. They didn't even call a strike as they had threatened to do, which might have had some serious consequences for the Macquarie Network. They just accepted it.
Perhaps they had to, because one of the country's most famous stage and radio performers, the comedian Roy Rene ("Mo") who appeared in the Colgate-sponsored "Calling the Stars" in a segment called "McCackie Mansion" on 2UE at that time was not a member either.
And Roy Rene's side-kick, and friend, Hal Lashwood, was the President of the union.
It wasn't until some two or three years later that I found a way to get out of the union, which did not seem interested in us except for the subscriptions we had to pay.
If it was really a case or US or THEM, I decided I should take action.
I found a loophole in the rules, became Assistant Manager of a radio station, and that did the trick.
I had become one of THEM.
Chapter Twenty Four
Craig Nugent Collection
It was time to involve the listeners in 2UE's twenty-fifth birthday.
To mark the occasion, a slickly-produced documentary had been produced and was scheduled to go to air right after the night's main attraction - the Colgate Show for that night - had been broadcast.
The audience would be at its peak.
The studio cast was Norman Blackler and me, with Basil Piermont (known as "No Panic Pieremont") in the control room, Don Neely as the panel operator in charge of presentation, and Basil's cousin Monty, in the recording room.
We had all been alerted to the fact that this was a MOST IMPORTANT BROADCAST. All the Directors would be listening, and Paddy had personally contacted all the important people he knew (and they were legion) to make sure they would be tuned in.
We were out to impress.
To mark the occasion, a slickly-produced documentary had been produced and was scheduled to go to air right after the night's main attraction - the Colgate Show for that night - had been broadcast.
The audience would be at its peak.
The studio cast was Norman Blackler and me, with Basil Piermont (known as "No Panic Pieremont") in the control room, Don Neely as the panel operator in charge of presentation, and Basil's cousin Monty, in the recording room.
We had all been alerted to the fact that this was a MOST IMPORTANT BROADCAST. All the Directors would be listening, and Paddy had personally contacted all the important people he knew (and they were legion) to make sure they would be tuned in.
We were out to impress.
Norman Blackler, possibly the smoothest-talking radio host ever to grace the Sydney airwaves, was a good choice because he could sell anything on radio. I was there because the dual announcer presentation was a trade-mark of 2UE's night programs.
The listeners were in for a great treat (it's our birthday but you get to listen to us praising ourselves) and they knew it, because we had been telling them to listen for weeks.
While the Colgate Show came from the Sydney Radio Theatre, the special birthday feature sat on the shiny, bulky, brand-new console tape recorder - on a huge reel of magnetic tape. This machine had pride of place in the recording room, which was just across the corridor from the control room. The preferred means of intercom was to leave both doors open so the person looking after the tape recorder could shout to the control room engineer if need be.
Not everyone trusted tape at this time. It was new and therefore did not have the substance of the good old stand-by - the steel disc coated in acetate. Somehow, and quite suddenly, magnetic tape had arrived, and because the station prided itself in its technical leadership, it had to be put to use. But just in case, the special program had also been dubbed onto two large acetate discs. A wise precaution, as anyone would understand.
These acetate disks were set up on the panel operator's desk.
They were to be played at exactly the same time as the tape, so that if there was a problem (the tape might snap, or go spiraling all over the floor like the wire used to do with the recently discarded wire recorders) the panel and its acetate version would be switched to air.
Absolutely foolproof.
Everything had been thought of. Or so it seemed.
This was going to be a radio broadcast to remember.
Roy Cox, who wrote all the important copy for the station, had prepared an introductory statement, which was to be read in the grand manner by the two studio announcers. To avoid arguments as to who would say what, the Program Manager, Harley Good sell, had scribbled our initials against "Announcer 1" and "Announcer 2" as he did regularly.
We had no choice in what we read. Harley had pre-ordained. Worse, as we had discovered, he would always remember who he'd given what to. We obeyed implicitly.
At 8.30 it came time for the trumpets to blow to start the celebration of 25 years radio service to Sydney, the panel operator switched on the microphone, and we gave it our best - with the introduction of "tonight's very special program featuring Australia's finest performers".
On cue, Monty pushed the button to play the tape it started immediately.
At the same time, Don started his acetate discs spinning, and the teamwork was so good that you could have switched from the tape to the acetate without interrupting the program. This was the object of the whole exercise. These fellows really knew what "good, smooth presentation" meant.
It was, I remember, a splendid broadcast. Normally, during those long half-hours of serials and drama, the announcers used to spend time making and drinking tea (you made it in a little room at the back of the panel operator's booth, with entry through the control room), doing crossword puzzles, talking on the telephone in the corridor (no phone in the studio, by order), telling - or listening to - stories of doubtful validity, or any other activity that would while away the time.
But on this night we listened, pleased and proud to be a part of such a wonderful organisation - and one that could tell its own story with such sincerity, dramatically and effectively.
The music ended.
Don knew that was all on his acetate disc. He switched on our microphone. That was his job.
Norman and I went into the routine scripted for us. It had been decided that, for the narrator to list the cast might take away from the mood of the program, so all the credits fell to our lot.
The listeners were in for a great treat (it's our birthday but you get to listen to us praising ourselves) and they knew it, because we had been telling them to listen for weeks.
While the Colgate Show came from the Sydney Radio Theatre, the special birthday feature sat on the shiny, bulky, brand-new console tape recorder - on a huge reel of magnetic tape. This machine had pride of place in the recording room, which was just across the corridor from the control room. The preferred means of intercom was to leave both doors open so the person looking after the tape recorder could shout to the control room engineer if need be.
Not everyone trusted tape at this time. It was new and therefore did not have the substance of the good old stand-by - the steel disc coated in acetate. Somehow, and quite suddenly, magnetic tape had arrived, and because the station prided itself in its technical leadership, it had to be put to use. But just in case, the special program had also been dubbed onto two large acetate discs. A wise precaution, as anyone would understand.
These acetate disks were set up on the panel operator's desk.
They were to be played at exactly the same time as the tape, so that if there was a problem (the tape might snap, or go spiraling all over the floor like the wire used to do with the recently discarded wire recorders) the panel and its acetate version would be switched to air.
Absolutely foolproof.
Everything had been thought of. Or so it seemed.
This was going to be a radio broadcast to remember.
Roy Cox, who wrote all the important copy for the station, had prepared an introductory statement, which was to be read in the grand manner by the two studio announcers. To avoid arguments as to who would say what, the Program Manager, Harley Good sell, had scribbled our initials against "Announcer 1" and "Announcer 2" as he did regularly.
We had no choice in what we read. Harley had pre-ordained. Worse, as we had discovered, he would always remember who he'd given what to. We obeyed implicitly.
At 8.30 it came time for the trumpets to blow to start the celebration of 25 years radio service to Sydney, the panel operator switched on the microphone, and we gave it our best - with the introduction of "tonight's very special program featuring Australia's finest performers".
On cue, Monty pushed the button to play the tape it started immediately.
At the same time, Don started his acetate discs spinning, and the teamwork was so good that you could have switched from the tape to the acetate without interrupting the program. This was the object of the whole exercise. These fellows really knew what "good, smooth presentation" meant.
It was, I remember, a splendid broadcast. Normally, during those long half-hours of serials and drama, the announcers used to spend time making and drinking tea (you made it in a little room at the back of the panel operator's booth, with entry through the control room), doing crossword puzzles, talking on the telephone in the corridor (no phone in the studio, by order), telling - or listening to - stories of doubtful validity, or any other activity that would while away the time.
But on this night we listened, pleased and proud to be a part of such a wonderful organisation - and one that could tell its own story with such sincerity, dramatically and effectively.
The music ended.
Don knew that was all on his acetate disc. He switched on our microphone. That was his job.
Norman and I went into the routine scripted for us. It had been decided that, for the narrator to list the cast might take away from the mood of the program, so all the credits fell to our lot.
Ian Grieve Collection
Suddenly all hell broke loose. Our microphone light went off, which meant we could then hear what was going to air through the studio loudspeaker.
And what was going to air was quite strange. There was a voice we all knew well, and so did most of our listeners, because he had been one of the best-known voices in ABC variety programs during the war years. His name was Paul Jacklin, and he had produced the program that had so gripped us a few moments ago.
Now, he was declaiming "The ASPRO SHOW: Mr and Mrs Australia", followed by applause and cheers and then the ubiquitous recorded theme music from the station's Chappell production Library.
We could see Basil, in full panic flight around the control room, racing between the two or three telephones there and the one in the corridor, with his cousin standing in the doorway trying to pacify him, while in the panel booth, Don was holding his hands in the air as though someone was pointing a gun at him.
Someone made a decision. All sound ceased. Norman looked at me and I returned the compliment.
The red light on the microphone came up. It went off again, and someone (probably Don) said "SAY something".
Norman said something. He said something like "Arrrrh. Yes. Eastern Standard Time is 9.38".
After all, what else was there to say? And he had correctly told the time.
It suited Don, who put the 9.30 program straight to air as though it was perfectly natural that we should be eight or nine minutes late.
"I think I'll go, Guv", said Norman. He was due to finish at 10 anyway.
There was one other staff member on duty. She was the switchboard operator, Belle, whose domain was on the floor above us where all the top brass from the station had their offices.
Late that night, after fielding a barrage of phone calls, she put the switch on night stand-by, and came down to wish us goodnight.
"What a night", she said. "I knew something was up when Paddy came on the phone and said 'Expletive gets me the expletive control expletive room".
She did, of course. Paddy was on one of the phones that Basil had been fielding.
We waited for the repercussions, but they never came.
We got an explanation as to what had happened, though.
Magnetic tape, being new, was expensive. It came in very big reels, which suited the station's very big new recorder.
But nobody had learned the obvious lesson: that if you record something on the end of a major program, especially if it is a secret, Murphy's Law says that it will somehow get broadcast.
And what was going to air was quite strange. There was a voice we all knew well, and so did most of our listeners, because he had been one of the best-known voices in ABC variety programs during the war years. His name was Paul Jacklin, and he had produced the program that had so gripped us a few moments ago.
Now, he was declaiming "The ASPRO SHOW: Mr and Mrs Australia", followed by applause and cheers and then the ubiquitous recorded theme music from the station's Chappell production Library.
We could see Basil, in full panic flight around the control room, racing between the two or three telephones there and the one in the corridor, with his cousin standing in the doorway trying to pacify him, while in the panel booth, Don was holding his hands in the air as though someone was pointing a gun at him.
Someone made a decision. All sound ceased. Norman looked at me and I returned the compliment.
The red light on the microphone came up. It went off again, and someone (probably Don) said "SAY something".
Norman said something. He said something like "Arrrrh. Yes. Eastern Standard Time is 9.38".
After all, what else was there to say? And he had correctly told the time.
It suited Don, who put the 9.30 program straight to air as though it was perfectly natural that we should be eight or nine minutes late.
"I think I'll go, Guv", said Norman. He was due to finish at 10 anyway.
There was one other staff member on duty. She was the switchboard operator, Belle, whose domain was on the floor above us where all the top brass from the station had their offices.
Late that night, after fielding a barrage of phone calls, she put the switch on night stand-by, and came down to wish us goodnight.
"What a night", she said. "I knew something was up when Paddy came on the phone and said 'Expletive gets me the expletive control expletive room".
She did, of course. Paddy was on one of the phones that Basil had been fielding.
We waited for the repercussions, but they never came.
We got an explanation as to what had happened, though.
Magnetic tape, being new, was expensive. It came in very big reels, which suited the station's very big new recorder.
But nobody had learned the obvious lesson: that if you record something on the end of a major program, especially if it is a secret, Murphy's Law says that it will somehow get broadcast.
Ian Grieve Collection
The secret program, which the Aspro people knew nothing about - it was to be revealed to them in a special presentation during the coming week - had been produced with the idea of selling them a substantial sponsorship.
It followed so closely on the anniversary show that it seemed to Basil and his cousin that they were one and the same program. Don knew that his disc had finished, but all his shouting from the panel room was drowned by the sounds of telephones ringing and the shuffling of Basil's feet as he moved from panic button to damage control and back again.
Never again were two different programs recorded on the same reel of tape.
And it was a long time before an original tape recording went to air again.
From that night on, they were recorded on tape and then dubbed to reliable acetate
and those discs were what went to air.
The Aspro Show, "Mr and Mrs Australia", was born on Australian radio later in the year, unharmed by its premature delivery, and was a resounding success.
It followed so closely on the anniversary show that it seemed to Basil and his cousin that they were one and the same program. Don knew that his disc had finished, but all his shouting from the panel room was drowned by the sounds of telephones ringing and the shuffling of Basil's feet as he moved from panic button to damage control and back again.
Never again were two different programs recorded on the same reel of tape.
And it was a long time before an original tape recording went to air again.
From that night on, they were recorded on tape and then dubbed to reliable acetate
and those discs were what went to air.
The Aspro Show, "Mr and Mrs Australia", was born on Australian radio later in the year, unharmed by its premature delivery, and was a resounding success.
Chapter Twenty Five
"What a big place!" Exclaimed my bride to be as Jim Hudson's Ford Anglia topped the hill and Lismore was spread out in front of us, late on an early summer's day.
We were driving back from the Evans Head airport. Nan had made the ninety minute trip from Sydney in one of Butler Airlines' sturdy DC3s.
We had chosen the longer run into the city so she could see the city from the best perspective, for the other entrance was through industrialized North Lismore. Even the attraction of the famous Norco Butter Factory was not enough to compensate for the rest of this part of town.
She was coming to Lismore to have a look at the place I'd been bragging about ever since we met. I had left Sydney to go back to the bush to learn something about radio management - a decision that amazed my friends but seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
Especially as 2UE's General Manager Jack Ridley had accepted my resignation so warmly, almost as though he was waiting for it. (He had in fact fired me from 2GZ nine years earlier, and it was something he was very good at). There was at first no reaction and then he told me he was sure that one day I would sit in "this chair of mine". He was wrong about that, although eventually I got as close to it as I dared.
He was not to know that his own tenure of that chair was not secure - a few short years and there would be a change of ownership at 2UE which would see him hit the Great Western Highway back to Orange, to end his radio career back where it had started.
It turned out to be easy to arrange for a return to the country.
Dick Heming and Fred Gill (from the Masque Players) and another fellow who was an advertising artist like Fred were going on holiday together. I was invited to be the fourth.
Fred was one of the lucky ones in those days - he had a car. We decided to drive along the New England Highway to Tenterfield, then down the hills and across to Lismore, eventually ending up in Brisbane.
The moment I called in to 2LM for a brief visit I wanted to go back. I had enjoyed my four years there so much that I would have given anything to take a job there once more. But I didn't have to give a thing.
"Would you like to come back, run the copy department and act as my assistant?" asked Keith Spencer, who was getting the station set up so he could move out.
I agreed, especially when he told me that while it would be a real effort, he would make sure I got the same money as 2UE was giving me - about fourteen pounds a week.
I went back to Sydney and proposed to Nancy Begg, who was the Announcers' Secretary as well as handling the work of the station's publicity director, Stan Coleman.
We'd been "walking out" as they used to say.
She must have agreed to the proposal: Six months later we were married at St David's Church in Arncliffe. It was her twenty-first birthday, November 3rd, 1951, and after a short honeymoon on the South Coast we headed to Lismore.
("How much should I give you for performing the ceremony?" I asked the minister, conscious from my days at the church in Lismore that ministers relied on such gifts to make ends meet.
"Whatever you think she's worth", he told me.
That was a curly one. What would happen if I undervalued her?
I opted for twenty pounds, which was much more than a week's salary - a small fortune for me - and I suspect for him as well - and later received a very grateful note).
House hunting was new to me: it had until then been confined to getting a room in a boarding house. In spite of this lack of experience, I managed to get a flat, which was in reality half a cottage, built like a real Lismore house - on stilts in case a flood came.
We owned no furniture, but the flat was furnished, in a way. The kitchen, (formerly the verandah, or part of it) had a table and a couple of chairs, the lounge room had two ancient lounge chairs, and the bedroom had a bed and two small wardrobes. There was also an area which might be called a walk-in wardrobe, just behind the bed, where you could hang clothes. Since you couldn't close the door on them because there wasn't one, they had air circulating round them all the time. In that climate, it meant that they didn't get musty as quickly as those locked in the wardrobe.
We were to share the bathroom with the couple in the other flat.
This meant that we had to spy on the other tenants by keeping our door open so we could watch for the bathroom becoming vacant.
Early mornings it was a game of hide and seeks.
I had rented this outstanding piece of real estate the moment it became vacant, moving in straight away, and had time to buy a refrigerator and paint the kitchen.
Since the sink was a red plastic job, I painted the trim to match, and have been reminded of my interesting colour sense regularly ever since.
Jim Hudson, driving his Ford, had taken me to the airport to meet Nan. Jim was to be best man at the wedding, because he and I had been good friends for some years, ever since the Army released him early in 1946. One of the three people on the 2LM engineering team and an astute commentator on the foibles of people behind the microphone, he had a happy outlook on life that allowed him to make friends very easily.
But Nan couldn't stay at the flat on this pre-nuptial visit. . It was 1951, and that sort of thing was frowned upon (and all the Presbyterians would know, anyway).
Nobody had invented a motel; the word had not been coined in Australia at least, so travellers had the choice of a quiet pub or a noisy one. Being only about a hundred yards from the police station, I had figured that all things being equal, the Hotel Ryan was about the best choice I could make.
The Ryan was the pub closest to 2LM, where all the radio people were well and generally favourably known. In fact, we had our own corner of the public bar.
So when Nan and I walked into the foyer of the pub around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, she was the centre of attention. The customers in the public bar had a good view, because that bar looked straight into the foyer. The lady in charge of the private bar got her act together as soon as she heard the message and rushed out to make her assessment.
Nan got the seal of approval and business returned to normal in both bars.
I'm not sure she was favourably impressed with the flat or the radio station. Both were so different from those she had been used to.
Her home in Earlwood was one of those cosy Federation places built to house returned soldiers from the war, with a reasonably large lounge room and in addition to the bedrooms, there was sleeping space on the back verandah, which had been glassed in.
But she accepted it. In fact, Lismore, like most country towns after the Second World War, had a shortage of homes on offer - people took what they could get and were grateful.
She did ask whether the place flooded, and I had to admit that it had a bit of a name for that sort of thing, but I figured the stilts would protect us.
What the city did have going for it was its central shopping area - always clean as a new pin (except at flood times) - and some people who wanted to help newcomers settle in.
The radio station was another thing. It was so small, and constantly in need of cleaning. Nor we did not have offices like they did in the big city stations. The good thing about that was that it didn't take long to meet my colleagues. They were all gathered together in the same small room.
After a few days I put Nan back on Mr. Butler's plane to Sydney where she had her job at 2UE. She also had another job, taken to earn money for the wedding, working at a place that staged and catered for wedding receptions
We had our reception there, on one of Sydney's hottest November days in years.
Norman Blackler was master of ceremonies. He was almost the star attraction because so many of the women were his devoted fans. It was not fashionable to swoon or faint, so they just gazed at him, bovine-like, as they busily fanned
themselves.
Most of the younger members of the 2UE staff were wedding guests. While I was working in Sydney, we had started a series of Sunday outings to places like National Park, and the near South Coast. Several office romances blossomed on these innocently healthful walking and picnic expeditions.
Everyone was welcome to go on these outings, in company or solo. And because the girls were there, we were quite a well-behaved bunch. Just about the only time we ever got ourselves in the spotlight was as we were returning from Waterfall after dark on a crowded train. Keith Maling, the Romeo of the Record Library, brought a different Juliet with him each time - and on this occasion he decided to serenade the lucky girl of the day in his rather good and very powerful tenor voice.
Some other passengers objected to the noise, so Keith leaned out the window and sang into the night air all the way to Central Station.
The wedding reception ended somewhat later than intended, much to the temporary annoyance of the wedding group following us. We met that couple at Jervis Bay a few days later, and they told of driving around Arncliffe waiting for the guests from the previous wedding to get out of the place.
When I asked whether they knew anything about the previous wedding, the new groom told me that it was some bloody 2UE announcer. We quickly confessed. We had left on time in the car belonging to my new father in law and were well out of it by the time the last of the guests left the function room.
Two weeks later, best man Jim Hudson drove us all the way back to Lismore - he had taken a holiday in the Big Smoke - and we arrived late in the afternoon of another typical summer's day. Our little flat was sadly in need of a rush of air, but some kind person had come in and made sure it was clean and tidy.
That kind person was Marie Charley, She and Phil lived half a minute away in the next street, although a narrow lane ran between the streets and made visiting very easy. Marie made sure that my housekeeping sins were not visited on the new bride.
A few days later, Nan had a visitor while I was at work.
The visitor explained that she was married to a man who ran an electrical store in town. I had become friendly with Roy Furrow who was a sponsor on 2LM. Part of my job was to get the copy from each advertiser early enough to ensure there was time to put it into an advertising message.
Roy had suggested to his wife that she might make a friendly call.
Sadie Furrow and Roy became our best friends in town. When they went out with their family, we would go with them if there was room in the Furrow car. At Christmas, we were invited to join them. At night, they would arrive for a visit -
especially if they noticed I was on the air and therefore Nan was on her own until 10.30.
The Ferrows had three children. There was Margaret who was just starting out as a dental nurse, Ken, apprenticed to Jim Hudson's brother who was a plumber, and Robert, much younger than the other two, who - after school - liked to sit on the fence and say rude words to passing cars, postmen and casual walkers. Roy, strict disciplinarian that he was, had little success with his youngest son in this matter.
After a couple of months of married bliss, Nan found she was pregnant. She was a thousand kilometres away from her mother in Sydney, but at least she had Sadie to turn to and talk. It also happened that my colleague Peter le Brun's wife became pregnant at the same time.
One of the first signs of pregnancy occurred when I became very nauseous. The doctor decided to take out my appendix, which made very little difference. The shock of discovering I was to be a father was, however, an effective cure.
Gail Susan was born on August l9th 1952 at Lismore Base Hospital and although she was unaware of it became the reason for a party in the three-roomed flat. The party overflowed into the back garden and even into the neighbour's place.
Needless to say, neither mother nor daughter was present.
We were very proud parents, and didn't let on that Gail was pretty independent about when she slept - which was when we were not sleeping.
It was the time when husbands were discouraged from hanging around the hospital and told to go back to work and - in my case - to ring next morning. We had gone up the hill to the hospital around noon the previous day.
Then I was sent away.
That night I was rostered to work, and Keith had counselled me to do so as it would keep me out of the pub. He was very probably right.
About 9.30, I was sure something was happening, so I rang the hospital, and was told not to ring again until the next morning.
I did. Meanwhile, I tried to concentrate on what Randy Stone was doing in his "Night Beat" program without much success.
At six o'clock the next morning I found that Gail was born just a short time after I made that call.
Nan's mother came up to help as soon as mother and baby came home. She bought a stretcher for herself and put it in the lounge room - the only part of the flat where there was some space - and we somehow found the cash for a bassinette for the baby, who slept in our bedroom most nights. On a really hot night, however, she went out on the front porch where there was always a chance of a slight breeze.
It was immediately apparent that the flat was too small, and something would have to be done.
With no money to speak of there didn't seem to be an answer. One of the real estate gentlemen in town suggested we buy a prime piece of land right on top of the big hill around which Lismore was built, and explained that it was a snap at a hundred pounds.
I was dumbfounded. I wondered where he thought we could get a hundred pounds from. The deal died.
Then the General Manager announced that we could buy his house if we wanted to. He was moving to a bigger and better residence in a more interesting area.
We could pay if off at four pounds a week.
We moved quickly. Our furniture by now consisted of a bedroom suite, a bassinette, four kitchen chairs and a table. The latter two items had been given to us by a local furniture maker who asked me what we were going to sit on to eat our meals and I had told him that it would be the bed or the floor.
Our new home was on the side of the hill that contained the hundred pound block of land, still unsold. We could see Roy and Sadie's house from our front porch.
We had three bedrooms, a bathroom recently "modernised" but without a toilet, a lounge room as large itself as the flat we had just left, a kitchen, a separate dining room, and a sleep-out. The laundry and toilet were under cover down some steps from the kitchen.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
While we were in the flat there had been no sign of a flood. But almost as we moved in, Noah's kind of weather started and it stayed with us for many days and nights.
We were now out of flood reach and went on holidays to show off the new baby.
In Lismore, muddy swirling water steadily climbed up around the stilts and entered our old flat. Motor boats chugged along Ballina Street, and tons of rubbish deposited on the front lawn as the waters receded.
We were driving back from the Evans Head airport. Nan had made the ninety minute trip from Sydney in one of Butler Airlines' sturdy DC3s.
We had chosen the longer run into the city so she could see the city from the best perspective, for the other entrance was through industrialized North Lismore. Even the attraction of the famous Norco Butter Factory was not enough to compensate for the rest of this part of town.
She was coming to Lismore to have a look at the place I'd been bragging about ever since we met. I had left Sydney to go back to the bush to learn something about radio management - a decision that amazed my friends but seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
Especially as 2UE's General Manager Jack Ridley had accepted my resignation so warmly, almost as though he was waiting for it. (He had in fact fired me from 2GZ nine years earlier, and it was something he was very good at). There was at first no reaction and then he told me he was sure that one day I would sit in "this chair of mine". He was wrong about that, although eventually I got as close to it as I dared.
He was not to know that his own tenure of that chair was not secure - a few short years and there would be a change of ownership at 2UE which would see him hit the Great Western Highway back to Orange, to end his radio career back where it had started.
It turned out to be easy to arrange for a return to the country.
Dick Heming and Fred Gill (from the Masque Players) and another fellow who was an advertising artist like Fred were going on holiday together. I was invited to be the fourth.
Fred was one of the lucky ones in those days - he had a car. We decided to drive along the New England Highway to Tenterfield, then down the hills and across to Lismore, eventually ending up in Brisbane.
The moment I called in to 2LM for a brief visit I wanted to go back. I had enjoyed my four years there so much that I would have given anything to take a job there once more. But I didn't have to give a thing.
"Would you like to come back, run the copy department and act as my assistant?" asked Keith Spencer, who was getting the station set up so he could move out.
I agreed, especially when he told me that while it would be a real effort, he would make sure I got the same money as 2UE was giving me - about fourteen pounds a week.
I went back to Sydney and proposed to Nancy Begg, who was the Announcers' Secretary as well as handling the work of the station's publicity director, Stan Coleman.
We'd been "walking out" as they used to say.
She must have agreed to the proposal: Six months later we were married at St David's Church in Arncliffe. It was her twenty-first birthday, November 3rd, 1951, and after a short honeymoon on the South Coast we headed to Lismore.
("How much should I give you for performing the ceremony?" I asked the minister, conscious from my days at the church in Lismore that ministers relied on such gifts to make ends meet.
"Whatever you think she's worth", he told me.
That was a curly one. What would happen if I undervalued her?
I opted for twenty pounds, which was much more than a week's salary - a small fortune for me - and I suspect for him as well - and later received a very grateful note).
House hunting was new to me: it had until then been confined to getting a room in a boarding house. In spite of this lack of experience, I managed to get a flat, which was in reality half a cottage, built like a real Lismore house - on stilts in case a flood came.
We owned no furniture, but the flat was furnished, in a way. The kitchen, (formerly the verandah, or part of it) had a table and a couple of chairs, the lounge room had two ancient lounge chairs, and the bedroom had a bed and two small wardrobes. There was also an area which might be called a walk-in wardrobe, just behind the bed, where you could hang clothes. Since you couldn't close the door on them because there wasn't one, they had air circulating round them all the time. In that climate, it meant that they didn't get musty as quickly as those locked in the wardrobe.
We were to share the bathroom with the couple in the other flat.
This meant that we had to spy on the other tenants by keeping our door open so we could watch for the bathroom becoming vacant.
Early mornings it was a game of hide and seeks.
I had rented this outstanding piece of real estate the moment it became vacant, moving in straight away, and had time to buy a refrigerator and paint the kitchen.
Since the sink was a red plastic job, I painted the trim to match, and have been reminded of my interesting colour sense regularly ever since.
Jim Hudson, driving his Ford, had taken me to the airport to meet Nan. Jim was to be best man at the wedding, because he and I had been good friends for some years, ever since the Army released him early in 1946. One of the three people on the 2LM engineering team and an astute commentator on the foibles of people behind the microphone, he had a happy outlook on life that allowed him to make friends very easily.
But Nan couldn't stay at the flat on this pre-nuptial visit. . It was 1951, and that sort of thing was frowned upon (and all the Presbyterians would know, anyway).
Nobody had invented a motel; the word had not been coined in Australia at least, so travellers had the choice of a quiet pub or a noisy one. Being only about a hundred yards from the police station, I had figured that all things being equal, the Hotel Ryan was about the best choice I could make.
The Ryan was the pub closest to 2LM, where all the radio people were well and generally favourably known. In fact, we had our own corner of the public bar.
So when Nan and I walked into the foyer of the pub around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, she was the centre of attention. The customers in the public bar had a good view, because that bar looked straight into the foyer. The lady in charge of the private bar got her act together as soon as she heard the message and rushed out to make her assessment.
Nan got the seal of approval and business returned to normal in both bars.
I'm not sure she was favourably impressed with the flat or the radio station. Both were so different from those she had been used to.
Her home in Earlwood was one of those cosy Federation places built to house returned soldiers from the war, with a reasonably large lounge room and in addition to the bedrooms, there was sleeping space on the back verandah, which had been glassed in.
But she accepted it. In fact, Lismore, like most country towns after the Second World War, had a shortage of homes on offer - people took what they could get and were grateful.
She did ask whether the place flooded, and I had to admit that it had a bit of a name for that sort of thing, but I figured the stilts would protect us.
What the city did have going for it was its central shopping area - always clean as a new pin (except at flood times) - and some people who wanted to help newcomers settle in.
The radio station was another thing. It was so small, and constantly in need of cleaning. Nor we did not have offices like they did in the big city stations. The good thing about that was that it didn't take long to meet my colleagues. They were all gathered together in the same small room.
After a few days I put Nan back on Mr. Butler's plane to Sydney where she had her job at 2UE. She also had another job, taken to earn money for the wedding, working at a place that staged and catered for wedding receptions
We had our reception there, on one of Sydney's hottest November days in years.
Norman Blackler was master of ceremonies. He was almost the star attraction because so many of the women were his devoted fans. It was not fashionable to swoon or faint, so they just gazed at him, bovine-like, as they busily fanned
themselves.
Most of the younger members of the 2UE staff were wedding guests. While I was working in Sydney, we had started a series of Sunday outings to places like National Park, and the near South Coast. Several office romances blossomed on these innocently healthful walking and picnic expeditions.
Everyone was welcome to go on these outings, in company or solo. And because the girls were there, we were quite a well-behaved bunch. Just about the only time we ever got ourselves in the spotlight was as we were returning from Waterfall after dark on a crowded train. Keith Maling, the Romeo of the Record Library, brought a different Juliet with him each time - and on this occasion he decided to serenade the lucky girl of the day in his rather good and very powerful tenor voice.
Some other passengers objected to the noise, so Keith leaned out the window and sang into the night air all the way to Central Station.
The wedding reception ended somewhat later than intended, much to the temporary annoyance of the wedding group following us. We met that couple at Jervis Bay a few days later, and they told of driving around Arncliffe waiting for the guests from the previous wedding to get out of the place.
When I asked whether they knew anything about the previous wedding, the new groom told me that it was some bloody 2UE announcer. We quickly confessed. We had left on time in the car belonging to my new father in law and were well out of it by the time the last of the guests left the function room.
Two weeks later, best man Jim Hudson drove us all the way back to Lismore - he had taken a holiday in the Big Smoke - and we arrived late in the afternoon of another typical summer's day. Our little flat was sadly in need of a rush of air, but some kind person had come in and made sure it was clean and tidy.
That kind person was Marie Charley, She and Phil lived half a minute away in the next street, although a narrow lane ran between the streets and made visiting very easy. Marie made sure that my housekeeping sins were not visited on the new bride.
A few days later, Nan had a visitor while I was at work.
The visitor explained that she was married to a man who ran an electrical store in town. I had become friendly with Roy Furrow who was a sponsor on 2LM. Part of my job was to get the copy from each advertiser early enough to ensure there was time to put it into an advertising message.
Roy had suggested to his wife that she might make a friendly call.
Sadie Furrow and Roy became our best friends in town. When they went out with their family, we would go with them if there was room in the Furrow car. At Christmas, we were invited to join them. At night, they would arrive for a visit -
especially if they noticed I was on the air and therefore Nan was on her own until 10.30.
The Ferrows had three children. There was Margaret who was just starting out as a dental nurse, Ken, apprenticed to Jim Hudson's brother who was a plumber, and Robert, much younger than the other two, who - after school - liked to sit on the fence and say rude words to passing cars, postmen and casual walkers. Roy, strict disciplinarian that he was, had little success with his youngest son in this matter.
After a couple of months of married bliss, Nan found she was pregnant. She was a thousand kilometres away from her mother in Sydney, but at least she had Sadie to turn to and talk. It also happened that my colleague Peter le Brun's wife became pregnant at the same time.
One of the first signs of pregnancy occurred when I became very nauseous. The doctor decided to take out my appendix, which made very little difference. The shock of discovering I was to be a father was, however, an effective cure.
Gail Susan was born on August l9th 1952 at Lismore Base Hospital and although she was unaware of it became the reason for a party in the three-roomed flat. The party overflowed into the back garden and even into the neighbour's place.
Needless to say, neither mother nor daughter was present.
We were very proud parents, and didn't let on that Gail was pretty independent about when she slept - which was when we were not sleeping.
It was the time when husbands were discouraged from hanging around the hospital and told to go back to work and - in my case - to ring next morning. We had gone up the hill to the hospital around noon the previous day.
Then I was sent away.
That night I was rostered to work, and Keith had counselled me to do so as it would keep me out of the pub. He was very probably right.
About 9.30, I was sure something was happening, so I rang the hospital, and was told not to ring again until the next morning.
I did. Meanwhile, I tried to concentrate on what Randy Stone was doing in his "Night Beat" program without much success.
At six o'clock the next morning I found that Gail was born just a short time after I made that call.
Nan's mother came up to help as soon as mother and baby came home. She bought a stretcher for herself and put it in the lounge room - the only part of the flat where there was some space - and we somehow found the cash for a bassinette for the baby, who slept in our bedroom most nights. On a really hot night, however, she went out on the front porch where there was always a chance of a slight breeze.
It was immediately apparent that the flat was too small, and something would have to be done.
With no money to speak of there didn't seem to be an answer. One of the real estate gentlemen in town suggested we buy a prime piece of land right on top of the big hill around which Lismore was built, and explained that it was a snap at a hundred pounds.
I was dumbfounded. I wondered where he thought we could get a hundred pounds from. The deal died.
Then the General Manager announced that we could buy his house if we wanted to. He was moving to a bigger and better residence in a more interesting area.
We could pay if off at four pounds a week.
We moved quickly. Our furniture by now consisted of a bedroom suite, a bassinette, four kitchen chairs and a table. The latter two items had been given to us by a local furniture maker who asked me what we were going to sit on to eat our meals and I had told him that it would be the bed or the floor.
Our new home was on the side of the hill that contained the hundred pound block of land, still unsold. We could see Roy and Sadie's house from our front porch.
We had three bedrooms, a bathroom recently "modernised" but without a toilet, a lounge room as large itself as the flat we had just left, a kitchen, a separate dining room, and a sleep-out. The laundry and toilet were under cover down some steps from the kitchen.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
While we were in the flat there had been no sign of a flood. But almost as we moved in, Noah's kind of weather started and it stayed with us for many days and nights.
We were now out of flood reach and went on holidays to show off the new baby.
In Lismore, muddy swirling water steadily climbed up around the stilts and entered our old flat. Motor boats chugged along Ballina Street, and tons of rubbish deposited on the front lawn as the waters receded.
Chapter Twenty Six
Another flood had come to Lismore, four years after we arrived.
By this time, we were firmly settled in our rather large house and the furniture situation had improved - we had bought a dining room suite.
It was the brand that was all the range in the early 1950s - Summertone - and bore a mark where one of my colleagues from the station had accidentally put his cigarette down and forgotten about it. He didn't get away with it - words were said.
Each year we took our holidays in the rainy season, which coincided with Christmas, and headed south to join the Beggs at their Gerroa home. Claude, Nan's father, had retired about twelve months after we married, and they had bought an old house that looked out over the ocean.
It was very presentable after they'd had it done up.
Dick Heming had come to Lismore having spent a miserable time at 3DB in Melbourne (now 3TTT) as a panel operator. His father had died so Dick went to join his mother down south for a while. But the station wasn't like 2UE, and he decided to move on.
There was a job at 2LM for an announcer who knew something about operating a panel, so Dick applied and with a little help from a mate, got it.
Where would he stay? He would stay with us of course!
And he was in charge of the house when we went on leave, returning, usually after a flood of some kind had visited the city, to find that half the staff of the radio station had spent flood time in our house.
Even without any explanations, it was easy to tell what had happened. I came back one Sunday afternoon, having left Nan and Gail at Gerroa for an extra week or so until Lismore returned to normal after the flood. That is to say, until milk and other food supplies turned up, and most of the "flood smell" had gone.
I had my front door key in my baggage for some reason, so I went to the back door, got the key from its hiding place, and opened the door into the kitchen C-rr-rr-ash! Clink, clink, clink...clink. The beer bottles stacked against the door
(unfortunately empty ones) bashed against each other and rolled around the floor. There had been a party or three of some size during our absence, and the fellers had not got around to cleaning up any of the mess.
To their credit, just as I was starting to pile up the bottles in the overgrown back yard, they all arrived. They had gone into town to replenish supplies.
One of the great things about working in a country radio station at that time was that we all got along well together, so it was never a surprise to find Des McDonald and Laurie Magee either inside our house, or kicking at the front door (their arms full of food or drink. Mostly, the latter).
It was after one such event that Dick met his Nemesis, or The Dragon, as he later called her.
We had a party. The two ladies of the house - that is, Nan and Gail, went to bed reasonably early, but the lads were very preoccupied with one of their favourite sports - cockroach racing.
Lismore cockroaches were a very rare breed, and there were many of them. They were extremely loyal. When you cleaned them out of the house, they flew right back through the windows. We figured they came in again because they liked the company.
We would prepare signs that were spread around the house, to remind cockroaches where they could and couldn't go.
In the early morning hours, the cockroaches were somewhat tame, and could be encouraged to come into the open. They would be swept into something like a starting line and encouraged with shouts and sticks and brooms to get to the finishing line.
It always ended in total disarray, the cockroaches having only a very distant idea of what was wanted, perhaps because the organisers were not very clear in explaining the rules of the game.
Such sporting activity was not without its after effects, which is why Dick was sleeping in one of our two other new items of furniture, a butterfly chair. It was one that he had made peculiarly his own, for he often went to sleep in it, and the canvas
seat had stretched so much that his backside was almost touching the floor.
Nan had a visitor. It was Margaret Ferrow, Sadie's daughter, who often came to see us, although possibly on this occasion to find out what all the noise had been about the night before.
She hadn't met Dick. So we decided to make the introduction.
Dick opened one eye in one slow and obviously painful movement and said "How", that being a well-known, authentic and favourite Red Indian greeting in vogue at the time. We were always well informed on these things. Well, you had to be, being leaders of opinion, multi-media personalities and all that kind of thing.
Margaret made a smart move back into the kitchen, to confide in Nan that Dick was obnoxious. Not simply obnoxious, but highly, and extremely so. She left quickly and did not darken our doorway for some weeks.
The circumstances were not a harbinger of things to come.
Somehow, by accident or design, they met again, and this time Dick was somewhat more in control of things. Perhaps he was waiting for pay day at the time.
Margaret's parents went back to Sydney, Dick took up residence in a boarding house, and Margaret and her brother Ken came to stay with us for a while.
I knew that Margaret would soon decide that she had to go and join her parents and that would be the cue for Dick to head back to the big smoke, and of course it happened that way, so when I returned once more from holidays and opened the front door, I was greeted by the sounds of silence.
The two girls were still down south because the flood waters were continued to swirl around parts of the Lismore city area.
While we were away on holidays, we had heard all about the floods on the local Wollongong radio station, 2WL, and when they announced they were running a flood appeal, I decided to offer my services, which were accepted. I spent a very long Sunday at the station as their "expert" on what flood conditions were like.
I did not explain that much of my recent experience of Lismore floods was simply that I was away from them most of the time, having a holiday.
I had some graphic descriptions all ready in my mind, based on the contrast during the flood that followed the visit by the Queen of England. That must have torn at some heartstrings because it helped bring in some cash, so I was something of a hit.
2WL was in the elite area of North Wollongong area, surrounded mostly by large old homes. The two-storey brick building had one general announcing studio, a large auditorium type studio, and a control room, all on the first floor. Management was downstairs.
The founder and manager of the station, Russell Yeldon, had retired some four years before, and the "new" manager was Les Mather, a radio time salesman of some reputation in Melbourne. While waiting for retirement, he had been given the job of looking after what a Macquarie director once told me was the "jewel in the crown".
Les and his wife occupied the old Yeldon residence in Church Street Wollongong which was next door to the station, although the station's address was Edward Street. Like many of the other pioneers of radio in Australia, Russell had built his radio station in his own backyard, and when he sold a substantial interest to the Macquarie Network, he had simply made an entranceway in the side street.
The flood appeal came to an end. I had to stay around the station until I was picked up by a Gerroa neighbour, Eric Jamieson, who was spending his Sunday visiting friends in Wollongong. Since it was obvious to Les Mather that I would have a bit of a wait, Les invited me in for dinner in the old Yeldon residence. He was a very good host, so the dinner was excellent.
I thought that after my performance that day (which included a period when all the 2WL announcers left me alone in the studio and visited the Leagues Club for a couple of cold ones) he might suggest that he could find a job for me.
He didn't.
He asked me about myself, and the family, and told me all about himself and his family. Then Eric Jamieson arrived and I took my leave.
It was only when I arrived home on my own and was sitting down to whatever I'd managed to buy in the stock-deprived local shop (Mr Ivey stocked everything, but could rarely remember where anything was) that the telephone rang. It was the Post Office to say they had a telegram for me, deliveries being temporarily out of the question.
The operator read it to me.
She read: "Offering you position production manager 2WL, signed Mother "
I checked the spelling of the last word, but figured they had got it wrong
It was Les Mather, using a sales technique he must have perfected among the critical Melbourne advertisers in his early radio days. He never asked if you wanted to do something. He would always give you the opportunity of a lifetime. I pinched the idea from him later in my career.
I knew the move would be a hit with Nan, because she would be close to her parents again. Added to that was the fact that she was pregnant for the second time, so being near her mother was doubly important.
And it would be a good move for me because 2WL was a very large and influential station. Any hope I cherished of gaining the role of 2LM manager was dashed, because Peter le Brun was firmly in the seat by this time, and he was a friend.
I was 34 years of age, and Wollongong had another advantage. It was close to Sydney should I decide later that I wanted to return there.
And the job title had the word Manager in it.
We caught a Butler DC3 to Sydney where we were met by Nan's family - everyone else to stay overnight in Earlwood while I took a late night train to Wollongong.
I was sad at leaving Lismore, and still have a soft spot for the place. I was leaving some good friends there, like Geoff Ryan with whom I ran Radio Ranch for some years, and Hec Green the engineer who was a master at carpet bowls but later took up golf and became the local champ, and technicians Eric Rowe and Jim Hudson. Jim by now had become a fully qualified paint salesman, having been "Berger-ised".
But it was time to move on.
John Laws once said that a cow that stands around too long in the one place ends up getting milked. I think that's one of the things he got right. That didn't stop me sticking around somewhere else for a very long time. But that comes later.
Had I realised how hard finding a home in Wollongong would be, I would have been considerably less enthusiastic about what the future had in store.
But for now, there were people to meet, a new job to master, and goodness knows what else.
I slept soundly in spite of the excitement.
By this time, we were firmly settled in our rather large house and the furniture situation had improved - we had bought a dining room suite.
It was the brand that was all the range in the early 1950s - Summertone - and bore a mark where one of my colleagues from the station had accidentally put his cigarette down and forgotten about it. He didn't get away with it - words were said.
Each year we took our holidays in the rainy season, which coincided with Christmas, and headed south to join the Beggs at their Gerroa home. Claude, Nan's father, had retired about twelve months after we married, and they had bought an old house that looked out over the ocean.
It was very presentable after they'd had it done up.
Dick Heming had come to Lismore having spent a miserable time at 3DB in Melbourne (now 3TTT) as a panel operator. His father had died so Dick went to join his mother down south for a while. But the station wasn't like 2UE, and he decided to move on.
There was a job at 2LM for an announcer who knew something about operating a panel, so Dick applied and with a little help from a mate, got it.
Where would he stay? He would stay with us of course!
And he was in charge of the house when we went on leave, returning, usually after a flood of some kind had visited the city, to find that half the staff of the radio station had spent flood time in our house.
Even without any explanations, it was easy to tell what had happened. I came back one Sunday afternoon, having left Nan and Gail at Gerroa for an extra week or so until Lismore returned to normal after the flood. That is to say, until milk and other food supplies turned up, and most of the "flood smell" had gone.
I had my front door key in my baggage for some reason, so I went to the back door, got the key from its hiding place, and opened the door into the kitchen C-rr-rr-ash! Clink, clink, clink...clink. The beer bottles stacked against the door
(unfortunately empty ones) bashed against each other and rolled around the floor. There had been a party or three of some size during our absence, and the fellers had not got around to cleaning up any of the mess.
To their credit, just as I was starting to pile up the bottles in the overgrown back yard, they all arrived. They had gone into town to replenish supplies.
One of the great things about working in a country radio station at that time was that we all got along well together, so it was never a surprise to find Des McDonald and Laurie Magee either inside our house, or kicking at the front door (their arms full of food or drink. Mostly, the latter).
It was after one such event that Dick met his Nemesis, or The Dragon, as he later called her.
We had a party. The two ladies of the house - that is, Nan and Gail, went to bed reasonably early, but the lads were very preoccupied with one of their favourite sports - cockroach racing.
Lismore cockroaches were a very rare breed, and there were many of them. They were extremely loyal. When you cleaned them out of the house, they flew right back through the windows. We figured they came in again because they liked the company.
We would prepare signs that were spread around the house, to remind cockroaches where they could and couldn't go.
In the early morning hours, the cockroaches were somewhat tame, and could be encouraged to come into the open. They would be swept into something like a starting line and encouraged with shouts and sticks and brooms to get to the finishing line.
It always ended in total disarray, the cockroaches having only a very distant idea of what was wanted, perhaps because the organisers were not very clear in explaining the rules of the game.
Such sporting activity was not without its after effects, which is why Dick was sleeping in one of our two other new items of furniture, a butterfly chair. It was one that he had made peculiarly his own, for he often went to sleep in it, and the canvas
seat had stretched so much that his backside was almost touching the floor.
Nan had a visitor. It was Margaret Ferrow, Sadie's daughter, who often came to see us, although possibly on this occasion to find out what all the noise had been about the night before.
She hadn't met Dick. So we decided to make the introduction.
Dick opened one eye in one slow and obviously painful movement and said "How", that being a well-known, authentic and favourite Red Indian greeting in vogue at the time. We were always well informed on these things. Well, you had to be, being leaders of opinion, multi-media personalities and all that kind of thing.
Margaret made a smart move back into the kitchen, to confide in Nan that Dick was obnoxious. Not simply obnoxious, but highly, and extremely so. She left quickly and did not darken our doorway for some weeks.
The circumstances were not a harbinger of things to come.
Somehow, by accident or design, they met again, and this time Dick was somewhat more in control of things. Perhaps he was waiting for pay day at the time.
Margaret's parents went back to Sydney, Dick took up residence in a boarding house, and Margaret and her brother Ken came to stay with us for a while.
I knew that Margaret would soon decide that she had to go and join her parents and that would be the cue for Dick to head back to the big smoke, and of course it happened that way, so when I returned once more from holidays and opened the front door, I was greeted by the sounds of silence.
The two girls were still down south because the flood waters were continued to swirl around parts of the Lismore city area.
While we were away on holidays, we had heard all about the floods on the local Wollongong radio station, 2WL, and when they announced they were running a flood appeal, I decided to offer my services, which were accepted. I spent a very long Sunday at the station as their "expert" on what flood conditions were like.
I did not explain that much of my recent experience of Lismore floods was simply that I was away from them most of the time, having a holiday.
I had some graphic descriptions all ready in my mind, based on the contrast during the flood that followed the visit by the Queen of England. That must have torn at some heartstrings because it helped bring in some cash, so I was something of a hit.
2WL was in the elite area of North Wollongong area, surrounded mostly by large old homes. The two-storey brick building had one general announcing studio, a large auditorium type studio, and a control room, all on the first floor. Management was downstairs.
The founder and manager of the station, Russell Yeldon, had retired some four years before, and the "new" manager was Les Mather, a radio time salesman of some reputation in Melbourne. While waiting for retirement, he had been given the job of looking after what a Macquarie director once told me was the "jewel in the crown".
Les and his wife occupied the old Yeldon residence in Church Street Wollongong which was next door to the station, although the station's address was Edward Street. Like many of the other pioneers of radio in Australia, Russell had built his radio station in his own backyard, and when he sold a substantial interest to the Macquarie Network, he had simply made an entranceway in the side street.
The flood appeal came to an end. I had to stay around the station until I was picked up by a Gerroa neighbour, Eric Jamieson, who was spending his Sunday visiting friends in Wollongong. Since it was obvious to Les Mather that I would have a bit of a wait, Les invited me in for dinner in the old Yeldon residence. He was a very good host, so the dinner was excellent.
I thought that after my performance that day (which included a period when all the 2WL announcers left me alone in the studio and visited the Leagues Club for a couple of cold ones) he might suggest that he could find a job for me.
He didn't.
He asked me about myself, and the family, and told me all about himself and his family. Then Eric Jamieson arrived and I took my leave.
It was only when I arrived home on my own and was sitting down to whatever I'd managed to buy in the stock-deprived local shop (Mr Ivey stocked everything, but could rarely remember where anything was) that the telephone rang. It was the Post Office to say they had a telegram for me, deliveries being temporarily out of the question.
The operator read it to me.
She read: "Offering you position production manager 2WL, signed Mother "
I checked the spelling of the last word, but figured they had got it wrong
It was Les Mather, using a sales technique he must have perfected among the critical Melbourne advertisers in his early radio days. He never asked if you wanted to do something. He would always give you the opportunity of a lifetime. I pinched the idea from him later in my career.
I knew the move would be a hit with Nan, because she would be close to her parents again. Added to that was the fact that she was pregnant for the second time, so being near her mother was doubly important.
And it would be a good move for me because 2WL was a very large and influential station. Any hope I cherished of gaining the role of 2LM manager was dashed, because Peter le Brun was firmly in the seat by this time, and he was a friend.
I was 34 years of age, and Wollongong had another advantage. It was close to Sydney should I decide later that I wanted to return there.
And the job title had the word Manager in it.
We caught a Butler DC3 to Sydney where we were met by Nan's family - everyone else to stay overnight in Earlwood while I took a late night train to Wollongong.
I was sad at leaving Lismore, and still have a soft spot for the place. I was leaving some good friends there, like Geoff Ryan with whom I ran Radio Ranch for some years, and Hec Green the engineer who was a master at carpet bowls but later took up golf and became the local champ, and technicians Eric Rowe and Jim Hudson. Jim by now had become a fully qualified paint salesman, having been "Berger-ised".
But it was time to move on.
John Laws once said that a cow that stands around too long in the one place ends up getting milked. I think that's one of the things he got right. That didn't stop me sticking around somewhere else for a very long time. But that comes later.
Had I realised how hard finding a home in Wollongong would be, I would have been considerably less enthusiastic about what the future had in store.
But for now, there were people to meet, a new job to master, and goodness knows what else.
I slept soundly in spite of the excitement.
Chapter Twenty Seven
"We have a new announcer here at 2WL, and he's looking for a house or flat. He's not a bad sort of bloke, and I think he'll pay the rent on time, so if you have accommodation on offer please ring him here".
The announcer was Gordon Bissett. He was the station's studio manager and morning announcer who always gave the impression that was putting absolutely no effort into his work - the mark of a true professional.
He managed to get me several places to look at.
One was a flat reached by an outside two flight staircase. The place looked as though it might blow down the next time a spring zephyr struck, so I kept going. The structure survived all winds for a couple of years after that, but the spring zephyr eventually eventually arrived.
It was miles from anywhere - it seemed as though it was half way between Gerroa and Wollongong.
The next one was not much better. It was a house on the side of Mount Ousley (that's the big hill you have to climb to get out of Wollongong) with a great uninterrupted outlook to the sea, but it, too, had a problem. The owner, an elderly man, was living there and expected that we would feed him and tidy up his room.
I felt that wouldn't work out.
It was becoming obvious that a house like the one we'd had in Lismore was either not within our reach, or more probably, non-existent.
Every time I went to see something, I came away despondent.
Nan and Gail were staying at Gerroa, but I wanted them back as soon as possible, and before Nan had the new baby.
Finally, the best option presented itself. It was a half-finished house, very close to the hospital. The owner had been building it all by himself but decided it was all too hard, so he opted to go to the country for a couple of years. It seemed as though he had lost interest in the project. But it was livable, in spite of its shortcomings.
The plumbing worked - although the bathroom was not complete.
The stove worked too - although work on the kitchen had ceased apparently just after the stove had been pushed into place.
Very little of the niceties had even been attempted. The front porch was concrete waiting for tiles. The back steps - twenty five of them - were concrete without any hand rail; dangerous enough for a pregnant woman trying to cope with a basket of wet nappies, and terrifying with an active three-year-old in the family.
But it would have to do. We moved in our few bits of furniture to mingle with the owner's stuff.
I had arrived to start work in Wollongong on April 1st, 1955.
In later years, I have thought that the date may have had some significance.
My job gave me the opportunity of being on the air and out and about as well. I appeared in the breakfast session reading the local news, and then joined the breakfast announcer John Robertson as we did a double act.
Later in the day I would handle interviews and "actualities", many of which went out over the Macquarie Network as well. 2WL had a direct landline to 2GB. When it wasn't being used for conversations between executives in Sydney and Wollongong, it transferred news interviews and other program features to Sydney.
John Robertson's main aim in life was to break me up on the air, a favourite pastime in radio stations then as now.
He often succeeded.
The general announcing studio was quite small, with a huge desk. When the studio door opened one morning while I was reading the very early news (John often did not turn up until that bulletin was over) I noted that the studio door had opened.
Glancing up from the copy, I saw nothing. There seemed to be nobody else in the room. I continued to read, and began to hear a shuffling noise. I looked up again. Nobody. But the shuffling noise continued.
Curiosity got me, so I did a Heath Burdock. I stood up, continuing to read the local news, and managed to see John and the engineer, Max Frew, marching around in front of the desk on their knees, arms swinging, eyes right in severe military fashion, bumping into each other every second or two as they tried to make a turn in what little space was available.
It was the one time I disappointed John. I did not laugh, but I'm not sure how I managed to keep going.
John Robertson had the skill of being able to misread deliberately a piece of copy at first sight so as to make it ridiculous.
"What's that on the road ahead" often became "What's that on the road? A HEAD?" And was always calculated to stop me in my tracks.
But between us we managed to prove something about radio one morning when other things had failed to amuse us.
We had a batch of "community service" announcements in a folder in the studio. From this John found that there was to be a Fete in Crown Street the very next day, and he and I went into some detail about the stalls that would be offering wares to the public.
One stall in particular caught our fancy. They would be selling HOME MADE JAM. John offered the startling information that he personally hadn't had a pot of home made jam in living memory, and I agreed. It was over and done in a few seconds, but at the close of the shift, as we walked down the stairs to the very small reception desk, we saw that it was covered in pots of home made jam!
The dear ladies of North Wollongong and thereabouts must have dug deep into their cupboards to give those two boys at the local radio station a special treat.
Everyone got a pot or two to take home.
2WL was one of the few non-capital radio stations in 1955 to run a regular local news service. It was one of Les Mather's initiatives. He had hired an English journalist, Leonard Bickel as his new editor, and Len found another go-getting English journalist in Dave Mason. They would work solidly from about 11am through to close on midnight, because Wollongong was a "good news town". That meant that we could have big local news at 6pm and another around 9.30, and a fresh one, written late at night, for the breakfast session.
Len Bickell later made a name for himself as a science correspondent and published several books. David Mason became editor of the prestigious radio, television and marketing trade magazine B&T Weekly.
The news room had probably been Mrs Yeldon's sewing room - it was simply a back room of Les Mather's house. In fact, the Yeldons had only lived in half the house, because the rest of it was taken up by the record library while the station building was being renovated. A complete new studio suite was being built at the back of the original station building, where the record library had been, together with the copy and sales office.
Copy, schedules and sales were now domiciled in the old auditorium style studio. It was almost as "together" as 2LM had been.
Another part of my job, after returning from my breakfast break (I used to go home for breakfast about 8.30) was to prepare quiz questions for a daily quiz show in which we invited listeners to ring in with the answer to a very difficult question to win cash and bottles of soft drink.
It was long before the days of talk-back radio, so we spoke to them on the phone from the studio, but we were not permitted to broadcast their voices. To make sense of the whole conversation for the listeners, it was necessary to repeat the responses that came from the other end of the line in some way; it became a challenge to do this in a way that was not too repetitive. It was a technique I'd become familiar with in my earlier time at 2UE, where Eric Parrant had a program called "A Call from UE" in which he telephoned listeners, played music excerpts to them which they had to name for "a dollar" (five shillings a time). When Eric had gone on his honeymoon, I had taken over the program for a time for a couple of weeks.
The research library at 2WL was non-existent, so the source of my questions was mostly the local newspaper and my trusty Pears Cyclopaedia - the latest edition, of course. I gave Pears away when I found that their nomination for Australia's largest river was the Murray. I found an atlas and a ruler and proved that the Darling beat it by a long way.
Then there was "production", which, according to my letter of appointment, I was "managing".
We had to fill a variety of segments. This was still old-time radio, although television was about to start. The Macquarie Network at that time saw its future only in terms of its past. Locally, we had two or three programs that required interviews - the most important one being a women's news session around three in the afternoon. It fell to my lot to find someone each day to talk to on a topic in which women may be interested. The theory was that women were interested in things about the home, or in matters to do with children, and little else. All the local charities all got a go: the Red Cross, and the Spastic Centre, the Country Womens' Association, the theatre groups - I interviewed virtually anyone who wanted publicity during this women's news program.
There were some exceptions to this general rule.
The ABC was strong in Wollongong, but when they brought a celebrity artist to town, we were always offered an interview. So I had conductors of international renown and musicians of all kinds. My musical skills being somewhat doubtful, these interviews were very hard work. But one wasn't - it turned out to be a gem of a talk with Anna Russell, the lady who made a brilliant career of sending up classical music generally, and Wagner in particular.
Then there was a quota to fill for a new program called "Monitor". The idea for the program came from the United States, and at one time 2GB was sending material to stations all around the world from their own resources.
They had put John Bloody Kingston Pearce in charge of it. John had not returned to Kempsey after the war, but had found himself a job at 2QN Deniliquin, later moving to Hobart's 7HO and from there to 2GB.
Monitor had a special format. All segments were four minutes long - unless you had a really tremendous story, when you could go to eight minutes (but it helped if you had a natural break at the four minute mark so 2GB could fit in more commercials).
I was the South Coast reporter. Regularly I would talk to John Bloody in Sydney about items that were coming up and would be included in the plan.
It gave me the opportunity to try my hand at all kinds of things, but first of all I had to have a portable tape recorder.
There was one on the market, which the station eventually bought, but to start me off engineer Max Frew was called in to make one up from bits and pieces in the technical workshop, which was located in an old garage in the back yard of the station.
This recorder had a motor which came from an old wind-up gramophone, the home-made recording head was bulky, but it worked, and to start the recording process I had to use a toggle switch. The motor needed winding up before recording started, and if it went on for more than a few minutes, it was prudent to give it another turn or two.
The microphone was an old headphone which had been adjusted to make it more sensitive. (Headphones did have a tendency to be microphonic. There was a story around about a young announcer in the bush who spoke in disparaging terms about the station manager while in the studio. He was careful to ensure that the microphone
was switched off, but nonetheless his views were heard distinctly, picked up through the headphones on the desk).
With this marvellous and ingenious device I recorded the opening of a scenic lookout on Mount Keira by the British High Commissioner in Australia (no doubt there was a question in his mind about the bona-fides of the fellow from the radio station. Who would use cast-off junk to record an important interview for the Macquarie Network? Answer: I would: it was all 2WL could afford).
I climbed to the top of a gas tank at the Steelworks to record an interview with the Chief Engineer of the whole enterprise (his idea, not mine) and then handed the contraption to my friend Bill Fancourt and told him I was going back down again. Heights have always worried me, except from the comfort of a Boeing jet.
The machine proved its value, however. I contacted two ornithologists who had been featured in the local newspaper and told them I wanted to record a Lyre bird. They became excited about this, because they had one under observation on top of one of the hills.
Noting the standard of my recording equipment, they volunteered to make a kind of horn, into the base of which the old headphone-microphone would fit snugly. We made arrangements to meet at 4 o'clock the next morning at a roadside location, before making a two-mile trek into the bush. Pitch dark, of course.
The horn and the old headphone worked together brilliantly. It was a superb recording that went on and on, with me carefully giving the winder a surreptitious turn every now and then.
To make sense of it all, I then recorded an interview with the two bird watchers quite some distance from the mound. This all went back to the station, where we had to blend the two segments.
Fortunately, while some of the equipment might have been makeshift, the people skills at 2WL were fairly high, and the young technician who worked with me put it all together brilliantly.
The item not only made Monitor in Australia, but went on distribution to stations around the world.
The young engineer was named Bill Mason, who later joined Reg Grundy organisation and produced many game shows on television, including "Sale of the Century".
One day in conversation with John Pearce I had told him the Port Kembla Steelworks was to stage a mammoth opening ceremony for a new rolling mill. The celebrity performing the opening would be none other than the Australian Prime Minister, then Mr Robert Gordon Menzies.
John decided we should get some material together in advance, and I suggested that he come to Wollongong and together we would record material for broadcast on the opening day.
"Great!" He said.
I arranged for him to talk on the phone to the Public Relations manager at the Steelworks. I warned Bill Fancourt, who had that important job, that John would be telephoning, and it was just as well I did. Bill had never heard of John Bloody Kingston Pearce.
Those who knew John Pearce as a radio personality and those who knew him personally, or worked with him, knew two different people. The opinionated John was on the air, the less bombastic person was outside the studio.
Bill called me the moment he had finished talking to Pearce.
"Where did they get this bastard?" He demanded. "He told me I was talking to
Australia's Number One producer of radio documentaries. Do I have to deal with
him? Why can't you and I do it together?".
John had tried out his on air personna on Bill. And it didn't work.
Bill and John Bloody hit it off well however when we did the advance recording - so
well, in fact, that Bill invited us to lunch.
In those days the PR man at the Port Kembla Steelworks had little in the way of an expense account, so it was off to the Warrawong Hotel, called the "Open Hearth" in honour of the steelworks, which stood next door in all its glory, where the dining room was frequented by several blue-singleted men, a few people who looked like commercial travellers but probably weren't, and the owners of the hotel, in town for the day - the Wentworth family, high up in social and political circles.
John enjoyed the contrast greatly.
There was an advantage in having John Pearce come down before the big event. It meant he wouldn't be there on the day. And since all the material was already on tape (except the Prime Minister's speech) I was able to attend the grand opening luncheon. This was held in a huge marquee right next to the monstrous mill.
It was my first taste of the kind of life celebrities are supposed to enjoy, and I thought it especially good. I thought then it was the way I was meant to live, though I had no evidence that this was so.
I have continued to think this way, to little effect. Thinking doesn't make it so. You have to make it happen, and I didn't.
When a treat was called for from then on, it was back to the Open Hearth Hotel dining room.
The announcer was Gordon Bissett. He was the station's studio manager and morning announcer who always gave the impression that was putting absolutely no effort into his work - the mark of a true professional.
He managed to get me several places to look at.
One was a flat reached by an outside two flight staircase. The place looked as though it might blow down the next time a spring zephyr struck, so I kept going. The structure survived all winds for a couple of years after that, but the spring zephyr eventually eventually arrived.
It was miles from anywhere - it seemed as though it was half way between Gerroa and Wollongong.
The next one was not much better. It was a house on the side of Mount Ousley (that's the big hill you have to climb to get out of Wollongong) with a great uninterrupted outlook to the sea, but it, too, had a problem. The owner, an elderly man, was living there and expected that we would feed him and tidy up his room.
I felt that wouldn't work out.
It was becoming obvious that a house like the one we'd had in Lismore was either not within our reach, or more probably, non-existent.
Every time I went to see something, I came away despondent.
Nan and Gail were staying at Gerroa, but I wanted them back as soon as possible, and before Nan had the new baby.
Finally, the best option presented itself. It was a half-finished house, very close to the hospital. The owner had been building it all by himself but decided it was all too hard, so he opted to go to the country for a couple of years. It seemed as though he had lost interest in the project. But it was livable, in spite of its shortcomings.
The plumbing worked - although the bathroom was not complete.
The stove worked too - although work on the kitchen had ceased apparently just after the stove had been pushed into place.
Very little of the niceties had even been attempted. The front porch was concrete waiting for tiles. The back steps - twenty five of them - were concrete without any hand rail; dangerous enough for a pregnant woman trying to cope with a basket of wet nappies, and terrifying with an active three-year-old in the family.
But it would have to do. We moved in our few bits of furniture to mingle with the owner's stuff.
I had arrived to start work in Wollongong on April 1st, 1955.
In later years, I have thought that the date may have had some significance.
My job gave me the opportunity of being on the air and out and about as well. I appeared in the breakfast session reading the local news, and then joined the breakfast announcer John Robertson as we did a double act.
Later in the day I would handle interviews and "actualities", many of which went out over the Macquarie Network as well. 2WL had a direct landline to 2GB. When it wasn't being used for conversations between executives in Sydney and Wollongong, it transferred news interviews and other program features to Sydney.
John Robertson's main aim in life was to break me up on the air, a favourite pastime in radio stations then as now.
He often succeeded.
The general announcing studio was quite small, with a huge desk. When the studio door opened one morning while I was reading the very early news (John often did not turn up until that bulletin was over) I noted that the studio door had opened.
Glancing up from the copy, I saw nothing. There seemed to be nobody else in the room. I continued to read, and began to hear a shuffling noise. I looked up again. Nobody. But the shuffling noise continued.
Curiosity got me, so I did a Heath Burdock. I stood up, continuing to read the local news, and managed to see John and the engineer, Max Frew, marching around in front of the desk on their knees, arms swinging, eyes right in severe military fashion, bumping into each other every second or two as they tried to make a turn in what little space was available.
It was the one time I disappointed John. I did not laugh, but I'm not sure how I managed to keep going.
John Robertson had the skill of being able to misread deliberately a piece of copy at first sight so as to make it ridiculous.
"What's that on the road ahead" often became "What's that on the road? A HEAD?" And was always calculated to stop me in my tracks.
But between us we managed to prove something about radio one morning when other things had failed to amuse us.
We had a batch of "community service" announcements in a folder in the studio. From this John found that there was to be a Fete in Crown Street the very next day, and he and I went into some detail about the stalls that would be offering wares to the public.
One stall in particular caught our fancy. They would be selling HOME MADE JAM. John offered the startling information that he personally hadn't had a pot of home made jam in living memory, and I agreed. It was over and done in a few seconds, but at the close of the shift, as we walked down the stairs to the very small reception desk, we saw that it was covered in pots of home made jam!
The dear ladies of North Wollongong and thereabouts must have dug deep into their cupboards to give those two boys at the local radio station a special treat.
Everyone got a pot or two to take home.
2WL was one of the few non-capital radio stations in 1955 to run a regular local news service. It was one of Les Mather's initiatives. He had hired an English journalist, Leonard Bickel as his new editor, and Len found another go-getting English journalist in Dave Mason. They would work solidly from about 11am through to close on midnight, because Wollongong was a "good news town". That meant that we could have big local news at 6pm and another around 9.30, and a fresh one, written late at night, for the breakfast session.
Len Bickell later made a name for himself as a science correspondent and published several books. David Mason became editor of the prestigious radio, television and marketing trade magazine B&T Weekly.
The news room had probably been Mrs Yeldon's sewing room - it was simply a back room of Les Mather's house. In fact, the Yeldons had only lived in half the house, because the rest of it was taken up by the record library while the station building was being renovated. A complete new studio suite was being built at the back of the original station building, where the record library had been, together with the copy and sales office.
Copy, schedules and sales were now domiciled in the old auditorium style studio. It was almost as "together" as 2LM had been.
Another part of my job, after returning from my breakfast break (I used to go home for breakfast about 8.30) was to prepare quiz questions for a daily quiz show in which we invited listeners to ring in with the answer to a very difficult question to win cash and bottles of soft drink.
It was long before the days of talk-back radio, so we spoke to them on the phone from the studio, but we were not permitted to broadcast their voices. To make sense of the whole conversation for the listeners, it was necessary to repeat the responses that came from the other end of the line in some way; it became a challenge to do this in a way that was not too repetitive. It was a technique I'd become familiar with in my earlier time at 2UE, where Eric Parrant had a program called "A Call from UE" in which he telephoned listeners, played music excerpts to them which they had to name for "a dollar" (five shillings a time). When Eric had gone on his honeymoon, I had taken over the program for a time for a couple of weeks.
The research library at 2WL was non-existent, so the source of my questions was mostly the local newspaper and my trusty Pears Cyclopaedia - the latest edition, of course. I gave Pears away when I found that their nomination for Australia's largest river was the Murray. I found an atlas and a ruler and proved that the Darling beat it by a long way.
Then there was "production", which, according to my letter of appointment, I was "managing".
We had to fill a variety of segments. This was still old-time radio, although television was about to start. The Macquarie Network at that time saw its future only in terms of its past. Locally, we had two or three programs that required interviews - the most important one being a women's news session around three in the afternoon. It fell to my lot to find someone each day to talk to on a topic in which women may be interested. The theory was that women were interested in things about the home, or in matters to do with children, and little else. All the local charities all got a go: the Red Cross, and the Spastic Centre, the Country Womens' Association, the theatre groups - I interviewed virtually anyone who wanted publicity during this women's news program.
There were some exceptions to this general rule.
The ABC was strong in Wollongong, but when they brought a celebrity artist to town, we were always offered an interview. So I had conductors of international renown and musicians of all kinds. My musical skills being somewhat doubtful, these interviews were very hard work. But one wasn't - it turned out to be a gem of a talk with Anna Russell, the lady who made a brilliant career of sending up classical music generally, and Wagner in particular.
Then there was a quota to fill for a new program called "Monitor". The idea for the program came from the United States, and at one time 2GB was sending material to stations all around the world from their own resources.
They had put John Bloody Kingston Pearce in charge of it. John had not returned to Kempsey after the war, but had found himself a job at 2QN Deniliquin, later moving to Hobart's 7HO and from there to 2GB.
Monitor had a special format. All segments were four minutes long - unless you had a really tremendous story, when you could go to eight minutes (but it helped if you had a natural break at the four minute mark so 2GB could fit in more commercials).
I was the South Coast reporter. Regularly I would talk to John Bloody in Sydney about items that were coming up and would be included in the plan.
It gave me the opportunity to try my hand at all kinds of things, but first of all I had to have a portable tape recorder.
There was one on the market, which the station eventually bought, but to start me off engineer Max Frew was called in to make one up from bits and pieces in the technical workshop, which was located in an old garage in the back yard of the station.
This recorder had a motor which came from an old wind-up gramophone, the home-made recording head was bulky, but it worked, and to start the recording process I had to use a toggle switch. The motor needed winding up before recording started, and if it went on for more than a few minutes, it was prudent to give it another turn or two.
The microphone was an old headphone which had been adjusted to make it more sensitive. (Headphones did have a tendency to be microphonic. There was a story around about a young announcer in the bush who spoke in disparaging terms about the station manager while in the studio. He was careful to ensure that the microphone
was switched off, but nonetheless his views were heard distinctly, picked up through the headphones on the desk).
With this marvellous and ingenious device I recorded the opening of a scenic lookout on Mount Keira by the British High Commissioner in Australia (no doubt there was a question in his mind about the bona-fides of the fellow from the radio station. Who would use cast-off junk to record an important interview for the Macquarie Network? Answer: I would: it was all 2WL could afford).
I climbed to the top of a gas tank at the Steelworks to record an interview with the Chief Engineer of the whole enterprise (his idea, not mine) and then handed the contraption to my friend Bill Fancourt and told him I was going back down again. Heights have always worried me, except from the comfort of a Boeing jet.
The machine proved its value, however. I contacted two ornithologists who had been featured in the local newspaper and told them I wanted to record a Lyre bird. They became excited about this, because they had one under observation on top of one of the hills.
Noting the standard of my recording equipment, they volunteered to make a kind of horn, into the base of which the old headphone-microphone would fit snugly. We made arrangements to meet at 4 o'clock the next morning at a roadside location, before making a two-mile trek into the bush. Pitch dark, of course.
The horn and the old headphone worked together brilliantly. It was a superb recording that went on and on, with me carefully giving the winder a surreptitious turn every now and then.
To make sense of it all, I then recorded an interview with the two bird watchers quite some distance from the mound. This all went back to the station, where we had to blend the two segments.
Fortunately, while some of the equipment might have been makeshift, the people skills at 2WL were fairly high, and the young technician who worked with me put it all together brilliantly.
The item not only made Monitor in Australia, but went on distribution to stations around the world.
The young engineer was named Bill Mason, who later joined Reg Grundy organisation and produced many game shows on television, including "Sale of the Century".
One day in conversation with John Pearce I had told him the Port Kembla Steelworks was to stage a mammoth opening ceremony for a new rolling mill. The celebrity performing the opening would be none other than the Australian Prime Minister, then Mr Robert Gordon Menzies.
John decided we should get some material together in advance, and I suggested that he come to Wollongong and together we would record material for broadcast on the opening day.
"Great!" He said.
I arranged for him to talk on the phone to the Public Relations manager at the Steelworks. I warned Bill Fancourt, who had that important job, that John would be telephoning, and it was just as well I did. Bill had never heard of John Bloody Kingston Pearce.
Those who knew John Pearce as a radio personality and those who knew him personally, or worked with him, knew two different people. The opinionated John was on the air, the less bombastic person was outside the studio.
Bill called me the moment he had finished talking to Pearce.
"Where did they get this bastard?" He demanded. "He told me I was talking to
Australia's Number One producer of radio documentaries. Do I have to deal with
him? Why can't you and I do it together?".
John had tried out his on air personna on Bill. And it didn't work.
Bill and John Bloody hit it off well however when we did the advance recording - so
well, in fact, that Bill invited us to lunch.
In those days the PR man at the Port Kembla Steelworks had little in the way of an expense account, so it was off to the Warrawong Hotel, called the "Open Hearth" in honour of the steelworks, which stood next door in all its glory, where the dining room was frequented by several blue-singleted men, a few people who looked like commercial travellers but probably weren't, and the owners of the hotel, in town for the day - the Wentworth family, high up in social and political circles.
John enjoyed the contrast greatly.
There was an advantage in having John Pearce come down before the big event. It meant he wouldn't be there on the day. And since all the material was already on tape (except the Prime Minister's speech) I was able to attend the grand opening luncheon. This was held in a huge marquee right next to the monstrous mill.
It was my first taste of the kind of life celebrities are supposed to enjoy, and I thought it especially good. I thought then it was the way I was meant to live, though I had no evidence that this was so.
I have continued to think this way, to little effect. Thinking doesn't make it so. You have to make it happen, and I didn't.
When a treat was called for from then on, it was back to the Open Hearth Hotel dining room.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Kalamazoo System - Ian Grieve Collection
Les Mather was asleep in his office.
Guy Crittenden reported the fact to us all unusually hushed tones. Guy was pretty deaf, and he tended to speak very loudly most of the time.
Les was getting to the stage where he needed a long holiday, but we didn't want him to go.
He was always the gentleman - and anyway, who knew what we'd get if he went?.
Each morning Les would walk out into his very small garden and inspect his flowers. From the studio, John and I would watch him, as he stood there scratching his nose with one hand while he rubbed his backside with the other, deep in thought.
One morning, John and I had the window open. This window was supposed to be closed, and had a lock to make sure of that, but John had discovered could be opened with a small screw driver.
There was a reason for the window being open. The builders had knocked down a substantial part of the old building, which meant that some of the rarely seen occupants had had to move to other places.
One of these was a rat, which had buried itself in the soundproof material behind the studio walls, and died, probably of starvation.
Whatever the cause, the smell was terrible. And you couldn't get away from it.
We tried bottles of room deodorant to no effect.
We did try spraying Mortein around in the hope that its aroma would cover that of the rat, but it didn't, and the combination was not then decently describable.
So as Les looked at the roses and scratched, John opened the microphone and told the listeners "Here is the News. Our manager Mr Mather is looking at his roses". Then he yelled "Good morning Mr Mather", and because I was there, I joined in.
Pleased as punch, Les looked up at us, oblivious to the fact that we should not have had the window open at all, and returned the greetings. John wound up the level on the microphone so that the listeners might catch the dulcet tones of the Manager.
That we could get away with this nonsense made us realise that Les might be doing his long holiday sooner rather than later.
It came as no surprise then that shortly after that time when Les had forgotten to close his office door before taking a morning nap, we had a visit from the Managing Director of the Macquarie Network.
He was Mr Clive Ogilvy, and while he was based in Sydney, he lived on the Southern Highlands, and he could pick up 2WL better than 2GB. We were, so to speak, his local Macquarie station, and we were in his sights at all times.
We were all told that our presence was required in the record library at 11am.
Clive Ogilvy had visited the station once before in my time there. It was to tell us all to go on strike.
One of the announcers, not universally admired by us, had got himself the nomination as the Liberal Party candidate for one of the local seats in Parliament.
We all thought that this was a terrible case of mistaken identity by the local Liberals, but since the nomination had been proceeded with, and the election was upon us, we had to accept the facts as they stood.
Les, however, thought him to be the most talented person of all time. The man himself agreed, so there was some consensus.
Les decided that he should come off the air for the duration of the campaign. After all, 2WL was in the heart of Labor territory, and here was our personality waving inappropriate political colours. What's more, Les decided that he should not draw any payment during his time away from the microphone.
This didn't suit Liberal candidate, who appealed to the union - Actors Equity.
Actors Equity advised us that we should go on strike until he was reinstated. As some of the announcing team were members, it was a problem, so Les brought him back and gave him a job entering records in the Kalamazoo system in the record library.
To the uninitiated, the Kalamazoo system was a nightmare - putting little strips of card into the heavy Kalamazoo files, having first typed the name of the record, the artist, and its location on the card.
He quite rightly refused to do it, as we suspected Les knew... He was suspended.
Guy Crittenden reported the fact to us all unusually hushed tones. Guy was pretty deaf, and he tended to speak very loudly most of the time.
Les was getting to the stage where he needed a long holiday, but we didn't want him to go.
He was always the gentleman - and anyway, who knew what we'd get if he went?.
Each morning Les would walk out into his very small garden and inspect his flowers. From the studio, John and I would watch him, as he stood there scratching his nose with one hand while he rubbed his backside with the other, deep in thought.
One morning, John and I had the window open. This window was supposed to be closed, and had a lock to make sure of that, but John had discovered could be opened with a small screw driver.
There was a reason for the window being open. The builders had knocked down a substantial part of the old building, which meant that some of the rarely seen occupants had had to move to other places.
One of these was a rat, which had buried itself in the soundproof material behind the studio walls, and died, probably of starvation.
Whatever the cause, the smell was terrible. And you couldn't get away from it.
We tried bottles of room deodorant to no effect.
We did try spraying Mortein around in the hope that its aroma would cover that of the rat, but it didn't, and the combination was not then decently describable.
So as Les looked at the roses and scratched, John opened the microphone and told the listeners "Here is the News. Our manager Mr Mather is looking at his roses". Then he yelled "Good morning Mr Mather", and because I was there, I joined in.
Pleased as punch, Les looked up at us, oblivious to the fact that we should not have had the window open at all, and returned the greetings. John wound up the level on the microphone so that the listeners might catch the dulcet tones of the Manager.
That we could get away with this nonsense made us realise that Les might be doing his long holiday sooner rather than later.
It came as no surprise then that shortly after that time when Les had forgotten to close his office door before taking a morning nap, we had a visit from the Managing Director of the Macquarie Network.
He was Mr Clive Ogilvy, and while he was based in Sydney, he lived on the Southern Highlands, and he could pick up 2WL better than 2GB. We were, so to speak, his local Macquarie station, and we were in his sights at all times.
We were all told that our presence was required in the record library at 11am.
Clive Ogilvy had visited the station once before in my time there. It was to tell us all to go on strike.
One of the announcers, not universally admired by us, had got himself the nomination as the Liberal Party candidate for one of the local seats in Parliament.
We all thought that this was a terrible case of mistaken identity by the local Liberals, but since the nomination had been proceeded with, and the election was upon us, we had to accept the facts as they stood.
Les, however, thought him to be the most talented person of all time. The man himself agreed, so there was some consensus.
Les decided that he should come off the air for the duration of the campaign. After all, 2WL was in the heart of Labor territory, and here was our personality waving inappropriate political colours. What's more, Les decided that he should not draw any payment during his time away from the microphone.
This didn't suit Liberal candidate, who appealed to the union - Actors Equity.
Actors Equity advised us that we should go on strike until he was reinstated. As some of the announcing team were members, it was a problem, so Les brought him back and gave him a job entering records in the Kalamazoo system in the record library.
To the uninitiated, the Kalamazoo system was a nightmare - putting little strips of card into the heavy Kalamazoo files, having first typed the name of the record, the artist, and its location on the card.
He quite rightly refused to do it, as we suspected Les knew... He was suspended.
Equity demanded that we strike. Hal Alexander, the head of Equity himself, came to encourage us. But we held a meeting in the sales office and decided that we didn't want to strike for someone none of us had a great fondness for. Jealousy, perhaps.
So Mr Ogilvy came to talk to us. This made no difference to our decision, and the station told Equity they couldn't get us to go out.
Equity put it in the too hard basket. The busy candidate stayed away until he lost the election, and then resigned, to show up a little later as a partner in a small advertising agency in Sydney.
But that little episode and our brief brush with fame (the confrontation made the local newspaper) was transient. It had been some twelve months ago. Now Clive Ogilvy had something else on his mind.
It was as forecast.
Les had gathered all of us together. We were standing in the record library at the back of his home with Clive Ogilvy, looking very dapper as usual. The Assistant Manager and Company Secretary, Alex Byron, was standing next to him. He had perhaps good reason for his smile, for he could see his work load easing a bit.
But what would the future hold? Who would the new manager be and would our jobs be safe?
We were soon to get two of the answers. We took the message about Les in our stride. He was going on long service leave before he retired.
The Network intended that everything would run as before. And our new manager would take over this week. His name? Bob Jackson.
Bob just happened to be in the room, screened until the appropriate time by one of the record bays.
Suddenly he appeared, all smiles and waves, to a round of faint, perhaps bemused applause.
He had been a sales executive at 2GB-Macquarie, he was a lot younger than Les, and the worry was that he might have a good idea about how radio people ought to behave.
Bob got down to business next day, finding out all he could about us, and promptly informed me there was a job in Sydney that he thought I should take.
It was a better way of getting rid of me than Jack Ridley's at 2GZ all those years ago. Jack offered me the opportunity of going to a station he regarded as highly inferior to his own 2GZ; Bob was suggesting I should go to the big city station he had lots of respect for.
In spite of the accommodation worries, I decided I'd rather stay, which put something of a damper on Bob's reforming zeal, but he accepted it, and moved someone else.
I soon found I was going to have to do more in future, and the first new job was to contribute information to the Macquarie News Service.
Up till that time, the journalists in Sydney could ring 2WL and get the facts. Now I was going to get them the interviews - the "grabs" as they're called in television today.
That sounded OK to me. An hour or so every now and then getting someone to say onto tape whatever it was they'd already told the news writers.
But one morning I arrived back at work around 10 to find that the Director of Macquarie Newsreel, a half-hour mid-day program about the "news of the day and the people who make the news", wanted a piece about a freak storm that had hit the Wollongong suburb of Warrawong during the night.
Not a quick "grab: that was not the Macquarie Newsreel style.
We hadn't heard about the storm. Warrawong, to the south of the city, apparently kept to itself. However, the Sydney Morning Herald's Wollongong correspondent had sent in a story (we were all part of the Herald Empire) and there was no way I could tell Bill Weir, the Director of Macquarie Newsreel that it wasn't worth much.
He probably would not have cared, but he would have locked it into his mid-day plan. We had to cover it.
Today that would be easy. You could do most of it with a mobile phone. But in the early 1950s we hadn't heard of them, and anyway we wouldn't have bought one at 2WL. Our Assistant Manager was tighter-fisted than Scrooge, and mostly, just as even-tempered.
For moral support, and to help carry the big tape recorder we needed so that we could do most of the tape editing on location, one of the engineers came along. I had a Morris Minor which had been re-built from a wreck, and painted a non-standard bright blue. It had an advantage in being different - police recognised it. Steelworks security guards knew it. It broke down monotonously, so the NRMA recognised it, but over the time I had it, I learned most of its tricks and how to combat them.
Frantically we searched Warrawong for evidence of the storm. There was minor confirmation that some rain had fallen, there was a tree (a rare commodity in Warrawong) that had fallen but caused no damage. Apart from that, there wasn't anything doing - we couldn't find anything to work on.
By eleven o'clock we had nothing, yet we had to find the story, take it back to the station, and then send it up the landline to Sydney in time for the program.
It was up to me to get "an angle". Since we didn't have a clue what had happened, we started asking people "What happened in Warrawong last night" and recording their answers - the most regular response was "I don't know".
It started that way, and ended with me saying "So what DID happen in Warrawong last night? Perhaps we'll never know". I did get someone who said he had heard a roaring sound like a fierce wind, and he featured strongly in the item, but to this day I have as much idea as to what it was all about as did the stunned listeners to the 12 noon Macquarie Newsreel.
Les Mather did not leave without calling his team of announcers to a short meeting.
He told us, in essence, that he would be in England for about a year, and that when he returned to Australia he would visit Wollongong.
"If I see any one of you six fellers doing exactly the same job you're doing now, I'll give you a good kick up the backside with some pointy Italian shoes".
Some of us took him at his word.
Guy Crittenden went into an advertising agency in Brisbane, later to move to Sydney (where, long years before he had been an announcer on 2UW) as Media Director of a major agency; Jeff Soper took off to 2UE to do sporting programs, then to Channel 7 in its early years, and finally to the ABC as a newsreader; Friel Smith, our totally reliable and multi-talented night announcer, found 2CH to his liking; Bruce Etheridge went out and founded his successful record bar in Wollongong, moonlighting on the local ABC station.
Gordon Bissett and I stuck it out.
Clive Ogilvy came back some months later. I saw him come in and closet himself with Bob Jackson.
Then my phone rang.
"Tom", said Bob, "come down and see Mr Ogilvy".
I would like to lead you up the garden path and have you think I thought he was going to send me on my way.
The way I figured it, he might want to offer me a big job in the Network, and he might simply announce that I was getting a nice raise in pay, or he might want to see how I liked living in Wollongong.
It was none of the above.
He was offering me a house. The one thing we really needed. It was the house Les had just left.
So Mr Ogilvy came to talk to us. This made no difference to our decision, and the station told Equity they couldn't get us to go out.
Equity put it in the too hard basket. The busy candidate stayed away until he lost the election, and then resigned, to show up a little later as a partner in a small advertising agency in Sydney.
But that little episode and our brief brush with fame (the confrontation made the local newspaper) was transient. It had been some twelve months ago. Now Clive Ogilvy had something else on his mind.
It was as forecast.
Les had gathered all of us together. We were standing in the record library at the back of his home with Clive Ogilvy, looking very dapper as usual. The Assistant Manager and Company Secretary, Alex Byron, was standing next to him. He had perhaps good reason for his smile, for he could see his work load easing a bit.
But what would the future hold? Who would the new manager be and would our jobs be safe?
We were soon to get two of the answers. We took the message about Les in our stride. He was going on long service leave before he retired.
The Network intended that everything would run as before. And our new manager would take over this week. His name? Bob Jackson.
Bob just happened to be in the room, screened until the appropriate time by one of the record bays.
Suddenly he appeared, all smiles and waves, to a round of faint, perhaps bemused applause.
He had been a sales executive at 2GB-Macquarie, he was a lot younger than Les, and the worry was that he might have a good idea about how radio people ought to behave.
Bob got down to business next day, finding out all he could about us, and promptly informed me there was a job in Sydney that he thought I should take.
It was a better way of getting rid of me than Jack Ridley's at 2GZ all those years ago. Jack offered me the opportunity of going to a station he regarded as highly inferior to his own 2GZ; Bob was suggesting I should go to the big city station he had lots of respect for.
In spite of the accommodation worries, I decided I'd rather stay, which put something of a damper on Bob's reforming zeal, but he accepted it, and moved someone else.
I soon found I was going to have to do more in future, and the first new job was to contribute information to the Macquarie News Service.
Up till that time, the journalists in Sydney could ring 2WL and get the facts. Now I was going to get them the interviews - the "grabs" as they're called in television today.
That sounded OK to me. An hour or so every now and then getting someone to say onto tape whatever it was they'd already told the news writers.
But one morning I arrived back at work around 10 to find that the Director of Macquarie Newsreel, a half-hour mid-day program about the "news of the day and the people who make the news", wanted a piece about a freak storm that had hit the Wollongong suburb of Warrawong during the night.
Not a quick "grab: that was not the Macquarie Newsreel style.
We hadn't heard about the storm. Warrawong, to the south of the city, apparently kept to itself. However, the Sydney Morning Herald's Wollongong correspondent had sent in a story (we were all part of the Herald Empire) and there was no way I could tell Bill Weir, the Director of Macquarie Newsreel that it wasn't worth much.
He probably would not have cared, but he would have locked it into his mid-day plan. We had to cover it.
Today that would be easy. You could do most of it with a mobile phone. But in the early 1950s we hadn't heard of them, and anyway we wouldn't have bought one at 2WL. Our Assistant Manager was tighter-fisted than Scrooge, and mostly, just as even-tempered.
For moral support, and to help carry the big tape recorder we needed so that we could do most of the tape editing on location, one of the engineers came along. I had a Morris Minor which had been re-built from a wreck, and painted a non-standard bright blue. It had an advantage in being different - police recognised it. Steelworks security guards knew it. It broke down monotonously, so the NRMA recognised it, but over the time I had it, I learned most of its tricks and how to combat them.
Frantically we searched Warrawong for evidence of the storm. There was minor confirmation that some rain had fallen, there was a tree (a rare commodity in Warrawong) that had fallen but caused no damage. Apart from that, there wasn't anything doing - we couldn't find anything to work on.
By eleven o'clock we had nothing, yet we had to find the story, take it back to the station, and then send it up the landline to Sydney in time for the program.
It was up to me to get "an angle". Since we didn't have a clue what had happened, we started asking people "What happened in Warrawong last night" and recording their answers - the most regular response was "I don't know".
It started that way, and ended with me saying "So what DID happen in Warrawong last night? Perhaps we'll never know". I did get someone who said he had heard a roaring sound like a fierce wind, and he featured strongly in the item, but to this day I have as much idea as to what it was all about as did the stunned listeners to the 12 noon Macquarie Newsreel.
Les Mather did not leave without calling his team of announcers to a short meeting.
He told us, in essence, that he would be in England for about a year, and that when he returned to Australia he would visit Wollongong.
"If I see any one of you six fellers doing exactly the same job you're doing now, I'll give you a good kick up the backside with some pointy Italian shoes".
Some of us took him at his word.
Guy Crittenden went into an advertising agency in Brisbane, later to move to Sydney (where, long years before he had been an announcer on 2UW) as Media Director of a major agency; Jeff Soper took off to 2UE to do sporting programs, then to Channel 7 in its early years, and finally to the ABC as a newsreader; Friel Smith, our totally reliable and multi-talented night announcer, found 2CH to his liking; Bruce Etheridge went out and founded his successful record bar in Wollongong, moonlighting on the local ABC station.
Gordon Bissett and I stuck it out.
Clive Ogilvy came back some months later. I saw him come in and closet himself with Bob Jackson.
Then my phone rang.
"Tom", said Bob, "come down and see Mr Ogilvy".
I would like to lead you up the garden path and have you think I thought he was going to send me on my way.
The way I figured it, he might want to offer me a big job in the Network, and he might simply announce that I was getting a nice raise in pay, or he might want to see how I liked living in Wollongong.
It was none of the above.
He was offering me a house. The one thing we really needed. It was the house Les had just left.
Chapter Twenty Nine
We needed some better place to live because now we were four.
Vicki Anne had arrived on November 4th, the day after her mother's birthday, the day after our fifth wedding anniversary, and she was doing well, except that she seemed to wake up regularly in competition with my alarm clock which got me up on time for the breakfast program.
I had arrived back from work around 4 in the afternoon (the hours at 2WL were somewhat shorter than at 2LM), to find that my very calm wife said she'd be going to the hospital soon. When I asked how soon that might be, I was told it would be when she was ready.
That seemed like simple logic to me, and so around sunset we headed off to the hospital. It was just a few streets away.
Again, they told me to disappear, and I was quite ready to do so. Based on my one previous experience I expected to wait several hours at least but by nine o'clock the hospital had rung to tell me that it was a girl and both were well.
Excitement reigned, but it was somewhat subdued. There was no big party in the ramshackle house. There wasn't even a bottle of beer in the fridge. We were pretty short of cash - the small amount of capital we had was tied up in the house in Lismore which had just been sold. (We were planning to buy a car with what was ours after the agents and solicitors had taken their cut).
It was a very sedate time.
Gail had gone to be with her grandparents at Gerroa for the week or so before the birth, and now she and her Nanna came to the house to await the return home of mother and child.
The new house in Church Street was waiting, at four pounds a week rental, to be paid weekly in cash to Mr Byron, who would promptly bank it in the station's account with the Illawarra Building Society.
We moved in as soon as we could. Our moves so far had always been on wet days, and this move kept the record intact. The removalist van (we actually needed one - we had just enough furniture to make it necessary) bogged down in the mud on the un-made driveway, so in spite of an early start, we didn't make it to Church Street until late in the afternoon.
There was less clutter: in Church Street, next door to 2WL, we didn't have the other people's furniture.
There was a huge front bedroom and a second bedroom, a lounge room, kitchen, laundry and bathroom. The rooms ran down one side of the house - the other side had been partitioned off to accommodate 2WL's record library with its many thousands of vinyl discs, and the newsroom where one room housed three people.
The place was carpeted, it was in one of the "good" streets of Wollongong and it was just a short walk to North Wollongong beach. We could use the garage, too, so long as the car was taken out when the regular petrol delivery arrived. The station had its own fuel tank, underneath the garage, and occasionally a tanker would come to fill it up. I never wondered what might happen if something went wrong, and one of my mates who worked in the oil business was sceptical when I told him that petrol was stored there. "It's not legal", he said.
Not that I got a share of the petrol - that was not part of the deal, and the Chief Engineer had it carefully locked away so nobody could help themselves.
There was only one problem with the house. It was very close to the radio station, and as time went by I found myself fairly often doing the breakfast session unexpectedly following a late night shift.
The telephone would ring at 5.30. It would be the control room operator letting me know that while the breakfast announcer had certainly arrived, he was in no fit condition to do the program, and that he had called for a taxi to get rid of the body.
I ran several breakfast shows trying to ignore the unmistakable aroma of the regurgitation that had happened there a short while before. This particular announcer was a stickler for being on time: he always made it to the studio, whether he was conscious or not.
Fortunately he went away at management's suggestion, conquered his addiction and became an ABC announcer interstate. Years later I thought I recognised his voice as I turned the dial in a hotel room, and kept listening until he gave his name. But I didn't contact him. It didn't seem wise.
By this time, Gail was attending a kindergarten and just loved to talk to people.
She had some friends who were invisible to anyone else - they were "dancing ladies", and apparently they were all around the house, and went everywhere with her. You couldn't take a step without tripping over them.
She would often wait for me to come out of the building at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. I would emerge to see her deep in conversation with the office girls, who were asking questions about the dancing ladies. They were nice people who took Gail's answers very seriously and treated her news with great interest.
It was a very happy time.
The four of us would often take off to Gerroa at weekends, and we had started a pattern of spending holidays there each year.
My job was varied and involving.
I had taken over the station's publicity, and wrote a column for the bi-weekly "South Coast Times, mostly based on publicity material that came from Leicester Warburton, the big Public Relations man at 2GB-Macquarie in Sydney. Leicester's advice was always to use the material by all means, but try to find a local angle.
Well said, of course, but difficult to fit between the interviews, announcing shifts, organising the children's program which was a junior version of the old "smell and yells" from Lismore days. I produced it but a much younger fellow, Ron Ross, compared it with great enthusiasm. This one ran five days a week. And there was a variety of other tasks which I gladly shouldered. For a time, I even had an involvement with the sales department, but definitely had not recognised it as an area in which I would normally be interested.
I'll find someone to help out with the publicity", said Bob. And he did.
The man we got was Flip van Ewyk, a volatile Dutch broadcaster who had arrived in Australia from Java (Indonesia) as a by-product of independence in that country. He had been sent to the Dutch East Indies by Radio Nederland, just as Independence was about to be declared, but found it eventually impossible to work there.
I had met him some years back when I visited 2KM Kempsey from Lismore. Our Radio Ranch program had grown in impact, and was relayed to Kempsey every Saturday morning, and 2KM thought it might be a good idea for Geoff Ryan and me to turn up and run a Talent Quest in favour of one of THEIR favourite charities.
2KM had moved from the location I remembered in Belgrave Street and was located out of town at a place called Greenhill. When Geoff and I arrived around noon, Flip was in the studio running the program. His accent was so thick that we could barely understand what he was saying.
The station was one big house in a corner of a cow paddock, with the transmitting aerial down the back. The studio was a big room, probably the lounge room, with long, wide windows giving a perfect view of the milkers outside. It was possible, and I was told it had happened several times, for a cow to put its head through the window and offer a comment on the proceedings.
I noticed that little else had changed about 2KM, although it was ten or twelve years since I had left the place.
The equipment was meagre, even by the standards of most country radio stations in the post-war years. As Flip introduced the Macquarie News, which came by landline from Sydney at 12.30, he closed the microphone, and grabbing it from its stand, raced to the loudspeaker set into a wall. He hung the microphone from a hook above the speaker, and plugged the mike lead into a tape recorder. This very basic recording technique ensured that the 12.30 news was available to be repeated at 1.15.
For any further conversation, we had to tip-toe out of the room.
Flip left Kempsey soon after we met. Eventually everyone realised that they couldn't understand his accent, and he arrived in Wollongong to take a job at the Steelworks. I had met him in the street, told him about 2WL and somehow he made Bob understand that he wanted a job.
Bob did not put him in the studio at once. Wisely, I thought. Instead, Flip became my publicity assistant, as well as helping develop a late night program designed to appeal to people we used to call "New Australians". The program, called "Continental Cabaret" featured what might have been regarded as "foreign" music, which Flip would select.
We had two sponsors - one of them was a product I had never heard of - Leggo's Tomaten Pasten. Since the program was aimed at people who as yet had little English, we needed to make sure that the announcements were in a language they might understand.
We found a former German guard from a prisoner of war camp who translated the copy into reasonable German, with an Italian man who re-translated it into his language. By law, the English version had also to be read - and I did that. The thirty- second spot took one and a half minutes by the time we added the compulsory English version.
Flip later took over the program as his English became more understandable (or perhaps it was that we began to get used to it) but we made sure his narrations were short and to the point.
And while Flip and I liked each other, I was never able to say "thank you" sincerely to Bob for his decision.
Flip later gained a little fame in Wollongong as a producer with the local little theatre group, although the members were somewhat in awe of him, for he had the ability to make himself heard, if not understood. And when he was unable to get a performer to do what he wanted, he could storm and rant and rave better than anyone I had ever
met.
I remember that whenever he and I had a disagreement at 2WL, everyone knew about it, and could more or less follow it, no matter where they were in the building.
We met again in Sydney some years later, when SBS radio was getting its "ethnic" programs ready, and Flip needed some assistance to get a tape together. I was pleased to be able to help.
2WL's new building was complete, but there was still not enough room for everything. Television was coming to Wollongong, but 2WL was taking the positive approach with the dramatic positioning statement "Radio Host to the Whole South Coast". To accommodate this extra aggression, our residence was going to provide extra space. That meant the Croziers had to find somewhere else to live.
The only option was a Housing Commission home. These fibro buildings were going up all around the city, but getting one of them was not easy. They were allocated almost before they were built.
I had spent some time trying to find accommodation when we had first arrived in Wollongong, and one of my contacts was the Mayor himself. John Robertson introduced us. John knew everyone who drank at the Wollongong Hotel, and the Mayor was one of them. The Mayor also drank in his Mayoral office (I'm sure he was not the only Mayor to do so in those days, or now) and he put me in touch with a member of parliament. I contacted him right away.
Back I went to the Mayor, and made a return visit to the MP's office.
Whether any political representations bore fruit I can't say, but in response to my application to the Housing Commission I was advised that a house would be made available.
And in spite of the fact that Nan was pregnant again, the best we were offered was a two-bedroom home in Corrimal, about three or four miles from Wollongong.
We would have to take it but as Nan was nearly ready to go to the hospital again, we could wait a few weeks.
Fate was about to humble us.
Vicki Anne had arrived on November 4th, the day after her mother's birthday, the day after our fifth wedding anniversary, and she was doing well, except that she seemed to wake up regularly in competition with my alarm clock which got me up on time for the breakfast program.
I had arrived back from work around 4 in the afternoon (the hours at 2WL were somewhat shorter than at 2LM), to find that my very calm wife said she'd be going to the hospital soon. When I asked how soon that might be, I was told it would be when she was ready.
That seemed like simple logic to me, and so around sunset we headed off to the hospital. It was just a few streets away.
Again, they told me to disappear, and I was quite ready to do so. Based on my one previous experience I expected to wait several hours at least but by nine o'clock the hospital had rung to tell me that it was a girl and both were well.
Excitement reigned, but it was somewhat subdued. There was no big party in the ramshackle house. There wasn't even a bottle of beer in the fridge. We were pretty short of cash - the small amount of capital we had was tied up in the house in Lismore which had just been sold. (We were planning to buy a car with what was ours after the agents and solicitors had taken their cut).
It was a very sedate time.
Gail had gone to be with her grandparents at Gerroa for the week or so before the birth, and now she and her Nanna came to the house to await the return home of mother and child.
The new house in Church Street was waiting, at four pounds a week rental, to be paid weekly in cash to Mr Byron, who would promptly bank it in the station's account with the Illawarra Building Society.
We moved in as soon as we could. Our moves so far had always been on wet days, and this move kept the record intact. The removalist van (we actually needed one - we had just enough furniture to make it necessary) bogged down in the mud on the un-made driveway, so in spite of an early start, we didn't make it to Church Street until late in the afternoon.
There was less clutter: in Church Street, next door to 2WL, we didn't have the other people's furniture.
There was a huge front bedroom and a second bedroom, a lounge room, kitchen, laundry and bathroom. The rooms ran down one side of the house - the other side had been partitioned off to accommodate 2WL's record library with its many thousands of vinyl discs, and the newsroom where one room housed three people.
The place was carpeted, it was in one of the "good" streets of Wollongong and it was just a short walk to North Wollongong beach. We could use the garage, too, so long as the car was taken out when the regular petrol delivery arrived. The station had its own fuel tank, underneath the garage, and occasionally a tanker would come to fill it up. I never wondered what might happen if something went wrong, and one of my mates who worked in the oil business was sceptical when I told him that petrol was stored there. "It's not legal", he said.
Not that I got a share of the petrol - that was not part of the deal, and the Chief Engineer had it carefully locked away so nobody could help themselves.
There was only one problem with the house. It was very close to the radio station, and as time went by I found myself fairly often doing the breakfast session unexpectedly following a late night shift.
The telephone would ring at 5.30. It would be the control room operator letting me know that while the breakfast announcer had certainly arrived, he was in no fit condition to do the program, and that he had called for a taxi to get rid of the body.
I ran several breakfast shows trying to ignore the unmistakable aroma of the regurgitation that had happened there a short while before. This particular announcer was a stickler for being on time: he always made it to the studio, whether he was conscious or not.
Fortunately he went away at management's suggestion, conquered his addiction and became an ABC announcer interstate. Years later I thought I recognised his voice as I turned the dial in a hotel room, and kept listening until he gave his name. But I didn't contact him. It didn't seem wise.
By this time, Gail was attending a kindergarten and just loved to talk to people.
She had some friends who were invisible to anyone else - they were "dancing ladies", and apparently they were all around the house, and went everywhere with her. You couldn't take a step without tripping over them.
She would often wait for me to come out of the building at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. I would emerge to see her deep in conversation with the office girls, who were asking questions about the dancing ladies. They were nice people who took Gail's answers very seriously and treated her news with great interest.
It was a very happy time.
The four of us would often take off to Gerroa at weekends, and we had started a pattern of spending holidays there each year.
My job was varied and involving.
I had taken over the station's publicity, and wrote a column for the bi-weekly "South Coast Times, mostly based on publicity material that came from Leicester Warburton, the big Public Relations man at 2GB-Macquarie in Sydney. Leicester's advice was always to use the material by all means, but try to find a local angle.
Well said, of course, but difficult to fit between the interviews, announcing shifts, organising the children's program which was a junior version of the old "smell and yells" from Lismore days. I produced it but a much younger fellow, Ron Ross, compared it with great enthusiasm. This one ran five days a week. And there was a variety of other tasks which I gladly shouldered. For a time, I even had an involvement with the sales department, but definitely had not recognised it as an area in which I would normally be interested.
I'll find someone to help out with the publicity", said Bob. And he did.
The man we got was Flip van Ewyk, a volatile Dutch broadcaster who had arrived in Australia from Java (Indonesia) as a by-product of independence in that country. He had been sent to the Dutch East Indies by Radio Nederland, just as Independence was about to be declared, but found it eventually impossible to work there.
I had met him some years back when I visited 2KM Kempsey from Lismore. Our Radio Ranch program had grown in impact, and was relayed to Kempsey every Saturday morning, and 2KM thought it might be a good idea for Geoff Ryan and me to turn up and run a Talent Quest in favour of one of THEIR favourite charities.
2KM had moved from the location I remembered in Belgrave Street and was located out of town at a place called Greenhill. When Geoff and I arrived around noon, Flip was in the studio running the program. His accent was so thick that we could barely understand what he was saying.
The station was one big house in a corner of a cow paddock, with the transmitting aerial down the back. The studio was a big room, probably the lounge room, with long, wide windows giving a perfect view of the milkers outside. It was possible, and I was told it had happened several times, for a cow to put its head through the window and offer a comment on the proceedings.
I noticed that little else had changed about 2KM, although it was ten or twelve years since I had left the place.
The equipment was meagre, even by the standards of most country radio stations in the post-war years. As Flip introduced the Macquarie News, which came by landline from Sydney at 12.30, he closed the microphone, and grabbing it from its stand, raced to the loudspeaker set into a wall. He hung the microphone from a hook above the speaker, and plugged the mike lead into a tape recorder. This very basic recording technique ensured that the 12.30 news was available to be repeated at 1.15.
For any further conversation, we had to tip-toe out of the room.
Flip left Kempsey soon after we met. Eventually everyone realised that they couldn't understand his accent, and he arrived in Wollongong to take a job at the Steelworks. I had met him in the street, told him about 2WL and somehow he made Bob understand that he wanted a job.
Bob did not put him in the studio at once. Wisely, I thought. Instead, Flip became my publicity assistant, as well as helping develop a late night program designed to appeal to people we used to call "New Australians". The program, called "Continental Cabaret" featured what might have been regarded as "foreign" music, which Flip would select.
We had two sponsors - one of them was a product I had never heard of - Leggo's Tomaten Pasten. Since the program was aimed at people who as yet had little English, we needed to make sure that the announcements were in a language they might understand.
We found a former German guard from a prisoner of war camp who translated the copy into reasonable German, with an Italian man who re-translated it into his language. By law, the English version had also to be read - and I did that. The thirty- second spot took one and a half minutes by the time we added the compulsory English version.
Flip later took over the program as his English became more understandable (or perhaps it was that we began to get used to it) but we made sure his narrations were short and to the point.
And while Flip and I liked each other, I was never able to say "thank you" sincerely to Bob for his decision.
Flip later gained a little fame in Wollongong as a producer with the local little theatre group, although the members were somewhat in awe of him, for he had the ability to make himself heard, if not understood. And when he was unable to get a performer to do what he wanted, he could storm and rant and rave better than anyone I had ever
met.
I remember that whenever he and I had a disagreement at 2WL, everyone knew about it, and could more or less follow it, no matter where they were in the building.
We met again in Sydney some years later, when SBS radio was getting its "ethnic" programs ready, and Flip needed some assistance to get a tape together. I was pleased to be able to help.
2WL's new building was complete, but there was still not enough room for everything. Television was coming to Wollongong, but 2WL was taking the positive approach with the dramatic positioning statement "Radio Host to the Whole South Coast". To accommodate this extra aggression, our residence was going to provide extra space. That meant the Croziers had to find somewhere else to live.
The only option was a Housing Commission home. These fibro buildings were going up all around the city, but getting one of them was not easy. They were allocated almost before they were built.
I had spent some time trying to find accommodation when we had first arrived in Wollongong, and one of my contacts was the Mayor himself. John Robertson introduced us. John knew everyone who drank at the Wollongong Hotel, and the Mayor was one of them. The Mayor also drank in his Mayoral office (I'm sure he was not the only Mayor to do so in those days, or now) and he put me in touch with a member of parliament. I contacted him right away.
Back I went to the Mayor, and made a return visit to the MP's office.
Whether any political representations bore fruit I can't say, but in response to my application to the Housing Commission I was advised that a house would be made available.
And in spite of the fact that Nan was pregnant again, the best we were offered was a two-bedroom home in Corrimal, about three or four miles from Wollongong.
We would have to take it but as Nan was nearly ready to go to the hospital again, we could wait a few weeks.
Fate was about to humble us.
Chapter Thirty
It was a very quiet Sunday night. We listened to the radio play at 8 o'clock.
It was a normal evening.
But by 10 o'clock the crisis happened.
Nan was rushed to hospital by Ambulance.
I had called her doctor and he had come around to the house, ordered the Ambulance, and gave me the usual advice not to worry.
And while Nan went into the hospital, I called to our good neighbours across the street, the Leonards.
Just as had happened in Lismore, as we arrived in Church Street, Myra Leonard made herself known to us. We became firm friends with Myra and her husband, Phil, who worked on the wharves at Port Kembla.
Myra got the message about the emergency right away, and took charge, which gave me time to follow the advice of the doctor, a process that mainly consisted of telephone calls to the hospital throughout the night, and looking into the second bedroom to see if Gail and Vicki were still sleeping soundly.
The hospital, like all hospitals until recent times, would only give the line "as well as can be expected. Ring back after the doctor's been".
At six o'clock in the morning, that being a reasonable time, I rang him. He told me not to worry, that the hospital was looking after her, and he was sure all would be well.
He was right only in one respect. The hospital was looking after her, but what I did not yet know was that there were two babies, two girls. Neither survived, and Nan needed all the looking after she could take.
I had always thought of myself as being reasonably responsible and I suppose I thought I was well-adjusted, but I did not cope with this at all well.
For the first time in my life, I was faced with the fact of death, and it troubled me greatly.
I couldn't concentrate on anything except making sure that Nan recovered. Nanna arrived to shepherd Gail and Vicki back to Gerroa, leaving me free for hospital visits.
Much of the time I simply cannot remember. At the time, it all seemed unreal - something that should not happen to us.
Alex Byron, the station's controller of finances, stationery ("what do you want typing paper for? I gave Friel half a ream two weeks ago") and anything else that might protect the shareholders' interests, as well as being assistant manager, knocked at the door and suggested that he and his wife would wait dinner if I would call in after evening visiting time.
I did so, with some trepidation, but it was not warranted. The last thing I wanted was a meal, or a drink.
I got both.
Alex gave me a stiff shot of something (I was not a drinker of spirits at the time) and he and his wife helped me to come to terms with the tragedy.
I got to know the inside of the maternity section of the Wollongong hospital like the back of my hand, waiting to see how Nan would recover from the whole ordeal.
The Leonards constantly watched over our interests as well, and there was tremendous concern from the great gang of co-workers. Radio, after all, was just a medium-sized club in those times, which meant that everyone seemed to become involved in our own private sorrow.
It was a time when I began to believe that living next door to the station had its advantages after all. There was someone around whenever you needed them.
This traumatic time took a while to pass, but eventually Nan came home from hospital, and after a week or so, Gail and Vicki came home to Wollongong.
We mustered up the courage to tell the Housing Commission that we were ready to move to Corrimal.
It was a normal evening.
But by 10 o'clock the crisis happened.
Nan was rushed to hospital by Ambulance.
I had called her doctor and he had come around to the house, ordered the Ambulance, and gave me the usual advice not to worry.
And while Nan went into the hospital, I called to our good neighbours across the street, the Leonards.
Just as had happened in Lismore, as we arrived in Church Street, Myra Leonard made herself known to us. We became firm friends with Myra and her husband, Phil, who worked on the wharves at Port Kembla.
Myra got the message about the emergency right away, and took charge, which gave me time to follow the advice of the doctor, a process that mainly consisted of telephone calls to the hospital throughout the night, and looking into the second bedroom to see if Gail and Vicki were still sleeping soundly.
The hospital, like all hospitals until recent times, would only give the line "as well as can be expected. Ring back after the doctor's been".
At six o'clock in the morning, that being a reasonable time, I rang him. He told me not to worry, that the hospital was looking after her, and he was sure all would be well.
He was right only in one respect. The hospital was looking after her, but what I did not yet know was that there were two babies, two girls. Neither survived, and Nan needed all the looking after she could take.
I had always thought of myself as being reasonably responsible and I suppose I thought I was well-adjusted, but I did not cope with this at all well.
For the first time in my life, I was faced with the fact of death, and it troubled me greatly.
I couldn't concentrate on anything except making sure that Nan recovered. Nanna arrived to shepherd Gail and Vicki back to Gerroa, leaving me free for hospital visits.
Much of the time I simply cannot remember. At the time, it all seemed unreal - something that should not happen to us.
Alex Byron, the station's controller of finances, stationery ("what do you want typing paper for? I gave Friel half a ream two weeks ago") and anything else that might protect the shareholders' interests, as well as being assistant manager, knocked at the door and suggested that he and his wife would wait dinner if I would call in after evening visiting time.
I did so, with some trepidation, but it was not warranted. The last thing I wanted was a meal, or a drink.
I got both.
Alex gave me a stiff shot of something (I was not a drinker of spirits at the time) and he and his wife helped me to come to terms with the tragedy.
I got to know the inside of the maternity section of the Wollongong hospital like the back of my hand, waiting to see how Nan would recover from the whole ordeal.
The Leonards constantly watched over our interests as well, and there was tremendous concern from the great gang of co-workers. Radio, after all, was just a medium-sized club in those times, which meant that everyone seemed to become involved in our own private sorrow.
It was a time when I began to believe that living next door to the station had its advantages after all. There was someone around whenever you needed them.
This traumatic time took a while to pass, but eventually Nan came home from hospital, and after a week or so, Gail and Vicki came home to Wollongong.
We mustered up the courage to tell the Housing Commission that we were ready to move to Corrimal.
Chapter Thirty One
2UE Fan - Ian Grieve Collection - Sadly no autographs
Forty quid a week! I thought.
It was more money than I had ever earned in my life, and I was going to get that much as an announcer at 2UE - back in the same sort of job I had left ten years earlier. And thirty quid better!
2UE's new star announcer (well, he'd been there for a couple of years) was Bob Rogers, who was rumoured to be earning a hundred pounds a week - an unheard of sum.
I had answered many Sydney Morning Herald ads from 2UE, including those for which I had no qualifications, and at last here was a letter asking me to let them know what was the soonest I could start.
I soon found out some of the reasons for the vacancy.
Tony Withers had left for 2GB, and later to go to the Greek Islands - he prematurely anticipated his death. The replacement was Ward Austin, fresh from 2KA, but there was room for someone else. The new owners had a plan (something none of the other Sydney stations seem to have had at the time) and they needed people.
In spite of the publicity Tony gave to his demise, it failed to happen as forecast, so he took off for London and made a name for himself even bigger than the one he'd had in Sydney.
The Lamb family, had just been awarded the first television licence for Newcastle, and some of their most trusted people had been moved to Newcastle to help get it off the ground. One of them was Ken Stone, who had been program manager at 2UE, and whom I had known since my first sojourn there, when he was at 2GZ's Sydney studios, just along the street. He had joined 2UE ten years earlier, just as I was leaving for the experience I had hoped would put me into an executive role.
Bob Jackson thought I had rocks in my head, leaving the Network to work for those people who were bastardising radio as we knew it - but then, he was the Manager of 2WL and that was the Macquarie company line.
At my farewell function - everyone was gathered in the main studio from which we did the smell and yell each afternoon - he presented me with, among other things, a souvenir from the Royal Easter Show which one of his children had brought home. It was a piece of cardboard on a paddle-pop stick, saying "I'm a 2UE fan", and it had
the autographs of as many of the 2WL staff as he could muster. Then he took me to the businessmen's club and bought me a couple of scotches. These hit the pit of my stomach and had their renowned warming effect, but later I felt weak and ended up in bed, wondering if I would make it to the new job at all.
It was more money than I had ever earned in my life, and I was going to get that much as an announcer at 2UE - back in the same sort of job I had left ten years earlier. And thirty quid better!
2UE's new star announcer (well, he'd been there for a couple of years) was Bob Rogers, who was rumoured to be earning a hundred pounds a week - an unheard of sum.
I had answered many Sydney Morning Herald ads from 2UE, including those for which I had no qualifications, and at last here was a letter asking me to let them know what was the soonest I could start.
I soon found out some of the reasons for the vacancy.
Tony Withers had left for 2GB, and later to go to the Greek Islands - he prematurely anticipated his death. The replacement was Ward Austin, fresh from 2KA, but there was room for someone else. The new owners had a plan (something none of the other Sydney stations seem to have had at the time) and they needed people.
In spite of the publicity Tony gave to his demise, it failed to happen as forecast, so he took off for London and made a name for himself even bigger than the one he'd had in Sydney.
The Lamb family, had just been awarded the first television licence for Newcastle, and some of their most trusted people had been moved to Newcastle to help get it off the ground. One of them was Ken Stone, who had been program manager at 2UE, and whom I had known since my first sojourn there, when he was at 2GZ's Sydney studios, just along the street. He had joined 2UE ten years earlier, just as I was leaving for the experience I had hoped would put me into an executive role.
Bob Jackson thought I had rocks in my head, leaving the Network to work for those people who were bastardising radio as we knew it - but then, he was the Manager of 2WL and that was the Macquarie company line.
At my farewell function - everyone was gathered in the main studio from which we did the smell and yell each afternoon - he presented me with, among other things, a souvenir from the Royal Easter Show which one of his children had brought home. It was a piece of cardboard on a paddle-pop stick, saying "I'm a 2UE fan", and it had
the autographs of as many of the 2WL staff as he could muster. Then he took me to the businessmen's club and bought me a couple of scotches. These hit the pit of my stomach and had their renowned warming effect, but later I felt weak and ended up in bed, wondering if I would make it to the new job at all.
The Morris Minor had been in need of substantial repairs since we bought it. It was a fine, warm weather car... If it started in other conditions, it was odds on that the petrol pump would give up the ghost in the middle of a busy main road. Of course the tyres needed replacing too. It was time to take a drastic step.
Around this time, the Chrysler Corporation had a vehicle on the market which was not selling well. They reduced its price hugely about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave 2WL. I managed to get the Morris Minor to go, drove up to the local dealer and asked him what trade-in I could have on a new Triumph Herald.
He glanced at the blue wreck and told me the best he could do was a hundred pounds, and by a strange coincidence, that was the deposit he needed. I accepted, and insisted he take the Morris Minor there and then, although the new vehicle would not be there for a couple of weeks. I had worked it out that I could easily pay for the new car from my new, much bigger, salary.
Back at the office, I received a phone call from one of his mechanics, who asked "What do you have to do to get this thing started?" I gave him some expert advice, ending with the recommendation: "If all else fails, kick it and call it a couple of names". Whatever he did, it must have worked, for a week later someone rang me with the same question. This optimist had just bought the car for two hundred pounds.
The new Triumph Herald arrived the day I left 2WL, and very smart and important it looked too. The old Morris had little in the way of warning lights, so I did not understand that the red light that was showing on the Triumph's dashboard may have some significance.
A week later, the new car stopped and refused to start as I picked Gail up from a Saturday party. The generator had not been working since we got it. The dealer fixed it quickly and permanently.
I was due to start at 2UE on the Monday after I picked up the car. I was going to commute until we found somewhere to live in Sydney. So the new car did service - Nan drove me to Wollongong railway station so I could get the 7am train to Sydney.
I had to present myself at 29 Bligh Street at 9am, but the train was delayed somewhere between Coledale and Waterfall, so all I could do was peer through the carriage window miserably, wondering what impact this might have on my image with the management.
I needn't have worried. Their effervescent breakfast announcer, Gary O'Callaghan, had included the train delay in his service information, and the General Manager had noted it, rightly putting my delayed arrival down as a black mark against the Railways Department. It was said that Allan Faulkner, an accountant by profession, had a "good ear for a broadcaster". I hoped I met the mark.
I was taken down to the main announcing studio. The cord on which the microphone hung from the ceiling had gathered a little more dust, perhaps, otherwise it had not changed in ten years. The same faces peered at me through the control room window.
But the similarities ended right there. It was a different place to the one I'd left ten years before, even if the equipment was virtually the same. None of my old friends on the air staff were there any more. Norm Blackler had gone, Peter Bergin and Eric Wright were at 2KY, and Bob Pollard was running chain of discount stores under his name. There was a new breed of panel operators - they were younger, they were music enthusiasts, they had great skills with tape, and could find a spot on a program insert track almost as soon as you wanted it.
They were experts on the local pop music scene. They tended to take over the program.
I met the stars of the station. Bob Rogers was working on the Top 40 chart, which was published each week. He and Pat Barton, who was the breakfast announcer at 2KO, a station the Lamb family had owned for several years, were with him. Together they listened to all the new tracks and made decisions on which ones would be played. As far as I could tell, their only outside help was the weekly vote by listeners through record stores and the American music magazine Billboard, but they were on their own when it came to picking the likely chart-toppers for the Australian scene.
Brian Henderson was there. He ran a Top 40 segment in the late afternoon as prelude to "Bob Rogers at 6".
Apart from me, and my new duties had not yet been assigned, there was another new man there. His name was Ward Gargan, but Ken Stone who had hired him, fresh from 2KA (my first station) had decided that Ward ought to use his second name as his surname. So Ward Austin it was. It was some time before Ward "Pally" Austin became a kids-world name, and that was when he arrived at 2UW, via a short stint at 2GB, donned white gear and adopted some interesting expressions. One of these was "fandooglie" but the others were less intelligent. He was one of the mob and we got along well - in spite of my lack of education in rock and roll.
Len London was popular with everyone, co-workers and listeners as well. He ran the evening program, in which the music was totally different from the Top 40 that preceded his eight o'clock act.
To complement the Top 40, or more likely, to attract those listeners who couldn't stand Top 40, 2UE had introduced another music chart - the Sound Chart. This listed the popular classics of the time, show music, virtuoso performers like Ferrante and Teicher, the pianists, and some of what became known later as "Beautiful" Music and even later, "Easy Listening" music. To some extent, it helped to hold the older audience on which 2UE had depended until then.
Len's program helped 2UE's numbers enormously, even if most of the advertisers were promoting installation of your new television set tomorrow morning - "no deposit, nothing to pay for three months".
Geoff Marshall, with one of the most distinguished voices in commercial radio, ran the afternoon Soundabout Show, which featured "Sound" music with grabs from news interviews, Hollywood Reports, listeners' opinions and lots more, none of which exceeded 60 seconds or so.
Bob Logie was on the announcing team, and was also one of the two copywriters employed on staff. He and I were to work closely together for a great number of years - first, at 2UE and later at Radio Marketing Bureau.
Saturday afternoons were for sport. Sport really meant racing, for while we covered a great deal of field sport, racing took priority. St George might be on the way to the critical try of the match, but if Des Hoysted yelled down the line from Randwick that "they're at the barrier - HURRY UP IN THERE!" we would cut the Rugby League as soon as we dared and go straight to Des.
Des had come to 2UE from 2GB at a time when 2GB stole Clif Cary, a renowned sporting journalist who had run 2UE's Associated Sports Broadcasts for many years. For good measure, 2GB completed the plot by also stealing top race caller Ken Howard. In doing so, they grabbed a lot of the racing audience, for Associated Sports Broadcasts were heard on both 2UE and 2KY.
Des had little alternative than to take up the vacancy. And apart from a little impatience with the studio team when he was at the course, he was a great person to work with.
The question was - what would I be doing? Very soon I was given the afternoon Soundabout program, as Geoff Marshall became "Geoff The Marshall" and ran a country music program two or three times a day.
The Soundabout program was five hours of air time each weekday from noon. It was hard work, because Soundabout was fast-moving, with a different short topic followed by brief music with about seven or eight segments each hour. Then I would hand over to Bob Rogers (Brian Henderson had quit) for what had now become the Bob Rogers at 5 program. Then I would work the Sunday breakfast program.
It was the Beatle era, and although they had not yet been to Australia, the Top 40 revolved around them. The Sunday morning program from 6 o'clock would have six or eight Beatles records, many of them recorded on to acetate (the soft recording material used to create master recordings in those days) which was an indication that, perhaps, the record was not really one the station owned, but had been borrowed for copying purposes.
If I didn't do the Sunday program, it would be because I had had to do the anchor job on the Saturday afternoon sport, but the seven-day week meant that I got paid for one of the extra shifts - at the princely sum of five pounds a time. For a time, Bob Logie and I worked together on Saturday afternoons.
Bob could actually understand what was written in the sporting pages of the Herald, whereas I was only just able to read what was put in front of me with intelligence, if not authority.
I began to let it be known that I was interested in things other than sitting in a studio for a few hours a day, so perhaps it should not have been a surprise when Alan Faulkner called me to his office as my first twelve months ended..
He made all the decisions at the station. For an accountant, he had a remarkable understanding of what made radio effective. He had given John Laws his first city radio job, and was upset when Laws decided to leave and go to another station - a tactic that Lawsie maintained for many years, always returning to 2UE, or perhaps using it as a base station from which to jump off to see what life was like in the real world.
If he had an ear for a good broadcaster, he had some bad news for me.
"You're a rotten breakfast announcer", he said in his matter-of-fact way. He'd obviously been listening on weekend mornings.
"How'd you like to try out in the sales department? You can do some shifts at weekends if you want to stay on the air".
There was a vacancy, I knew. One of the salesmen had just left, quite unexpectedly on his part, and it was a busy office. I had had only the 2LM sales experience to go on, but I didn't think it a wise idea to turn the offer down. After all, I had the Triumph Herald to pay for, and we had only just bought a house.
"I'll pay you your current salary for a few weeks while you get settled, then you'll go on the standard arrangement - a retainer and commission", he stipulated. The conversation was over.
I went to the sales manager's office, which overlooked Bligh Street, and was reached by inching behind the reception desk to a doorway invisible to the casual observer.
I had met the sales manager on my arrival, when he had been marking time as production manager. His name was Bruce Rogerson, who later went to 2CH, introduced "Beautiful" music and made the long time also-ran station one of the top performers in Sydney.
But now I looked at him in a new light. How would I get along with this new boss? What did he expect?
"You don't remember me, do you?" he asked.
I didn't quite know what he was talking about.
"I've been waiting for the penny to drop", he told me. "Remember when you were in Lismore a few years back and that smart city salesman came to sell ready-made commercials to your advertisers?"
I looked at him. Of course, it was Bruce, whose sales pitch I had admired, even to the extent of tossing a vinyl disc, valued at twenty pounds, to the floor and fracturing it into hundreds of tiny pieces.
"Here", he said, handing me a heavy folder. "This is a course I once studied on sales techniques. See what you make of it".
"Oh", he added. "Here's a copy of the latest survey too. Better get to know what's in it".
Survey? We didn't have those in Lismore, and the single survey we had during six years in Wollongong had never been revealed to us.
I took them both home and read them, two or three times. They didn't make a lot of sense to me. It occurred to me that I might have made a wrong turn, and that this job was going to he harder than I thought. Maybe Peter le Brun's Lismore techniques would not work in Sydney.
I had some catching up to do, I really did.
Around this time, the Chrysler Corporation had a vehicle on the market which was not selling well. They reduced its price hugely about two weeks before I was scheduled to leave 2WL. I managed to get the Morris Minor to go, drove up to the local dealer and asked him what trade-in I could have on a new Triumph Herald.
He glanced at the blue wreck and told me the best he could do was a hundred pounds, and by a strange coincidence, that was the deposit he needed. I accepted, and insisted he take the Morris Minor there and then, although the new vehicle would not be there for a couple of weeks. I had worked it out that I could easily pay for the new car from my new, much bigger, salary.
Back at the office, I received a phone call from one of his mechanics, who asked "What do you have to do to get this thing started?" I gave him some expert advice, ending with the recommendation: "If all else fails, kick it and call it a couple of names". Whatever he did, it must have worked, for a week later someone rang me with the same question. This optimist had just bought the car for two hundred pounds.
The new Triumph Herald arrived the day I left 2WL, and very smart and important it looked too. The old Morris had little in the way of warning lights, so I did not understand that the red light that was showing on the Triumph's dashboard may have some significance.
A week later, the new car stopped and refused to start as I picked Gail up from a Saturday party. The generator had not been working since we got it. The dealer fixed it quickly and permanently.
I was due to start at 2UE on the Monday after I picked up the car. I was going to commute until we found somewhere to live in Sydney. So the new car did service - Nan drove me to Wollongong railway station so I could get the 7am train to Sydney.
I had to present myself at 29 Bligh Street at 9am, but the train was delayed somewhere between Coledale and Waterfall, so all I could do was peer through the carriage window miserably, wondering what impact this might have on my image with the management.
I needn't have worried. Their effervescent breakfast announcer, Gary O'Callaghan, had included the train delay in his service information, and the General Manager had noted it, rightly putting my delayed arrival down as a black mark against the Railways Department. It was said that Allan Faulkner, an accountant by profession, had a "good ear for a broadcaster". I hoped I met the mark.
I was taken down to the main announcing studio. The cord on which the microphone hung from the ceiling had gathered a little more dust, perhaps, otherwise it had not changed in ten years. The same faces peered at me through the control room window.
But the similarities ended right there. It was a different place to the one I'd left ten years before, even if the equipment was virtually the same. None of my old friends on the air staff were there any more. Norm Blackler had gone, Peter Bergin and Eric Wright were at 2KY, and Bob Pollard was running chain of discount stores under his name. There was a new breed of panel operators - they were younger, they were music enthusiasts, they had great skills with tape, and could find a spot on a program insert track almost as soon as you wanted it.
They were experts on the local pop music scene. They tended to take over the program.
I met the stars of the station. Bob Rogers was working on the Top 40 chart, which was published each week. He and Pat Barton, who was the breakfast announcer at 2KO, a station the Lamb family had owned for several years, were with him. Together they listened to all the new tracks and made decisions on which ones would be played. As far as I could tell, their only outside help was the weekly vote by listeners through record stores and the American music magazine Billboard, but they were on their own when it came to picking the likely chart-toppers for the Australian scene.
Brian Henderson was there. He ran a Top 40 segment in the late afternoon as prelude to "Bob Rogers at 6".
Apart from me, and my new duties had not yet been assigned, there was another new man there. His name was Ward Gargan, but Ken Stone who had hired him, fresh from 2KA (my first station) had decided that Ward ought to use his second name as his surname. So Ward Austin it was. It was some time before Ward "Pally" Austin became a kids-world name, and that was when he arrived at 2UW, via a short stint at 2GB, donned white gear and adopted some interesting expressions. One of these was "fandooglie" but the others were less intelligent. He was one of the mob and we got along well - in spite of my lack of education in rock and roll.
Len London was popular with everyone, co-workers and listeners as well. He ran the evening program, in which the music was totally different from the Top 40 that preceded his eight o'clock act.
To complement the Top 40, or more likely, to attract those listeners who couldn't stand Top 40, 2UE had introduced another music chart - the Sound Chart. This listed the popular classics of the time, show music, virtuoso performers like Ferrante and Teicher, the pianists, and some of what became known later as "Beautiful" Music and even later, "Easy Listening" music. To some extent, it helped to hold the older audience on which 2UE had depended until then.
Len's program helped 2UE's numbers enormously, even if most of the advertisers were promoting installation of your new television set tomorrow morning - "no deposit, nothing to pay for three months".
Geoff Marshall, with one of the most distinguished voices in commercial radio, ran the afternoon Soundabout Show, which featured "Sound" music with grabs from news interviews, Hollywood Reports, listeners' opinions and lots more, none of which exceeded 60 seconds or so.
Bob Logie was on the announcing team, and was also one of the two copywriters employed on staff. He and I were to work closely together for a great number of years - first, at 2UE and later at Radio Marketing Bureau.
Saturday afternoons were for sport. Sport really meant racing, for while we covered a great deal of field sport, racing took priority. St George might be on the way to the critical try of the match, but if Des Hoysted yelled down the line from Randwick that "they're at the barrier - HURRY UP IN THERE!" we would cut the Rugby League as soon as we dared and go straight to Des.
Des had come to 2UE from 2GB at a time when 2GB stole Clif Cary, a renowned sporting journalist who had run 2UE's Associated Sports Broadcasts for many years. For good measure, 2GB completed the plot by also stealing top race caller Ken Howard. In doing so, they grabbed a lot of the racing audience, for Associated Sports Broadcasts were heard on both 2UE and 2KY.
Des had little alternative than to take up the vacancy. And apart from a little impatience with the studio team when he was at the course, he was a great person to work with.
The question was - what would I be doing? Very soon I was given the afternoon Soundabout program, as Geoff Marshall became "Geoff The Marshall" and ran a country music program two or three times a day.
The Soundabout program was five hours of air time each weekday from noon. It was hard work, because Soundabout was fast-moving, with a different short topic followed by brief music with about seven or eight segments each hour. Then I would hand over to Bob Rogers (Brian Henderson had quit) for what had now become the Bob Rogers at 5 program. Then I would work the Sunday breakfast program.
It was the Beatle era, and although they had not yet been to Australia, the Top 40 revolved around them. The Sunday morning program from 6 o'clock would have six or eight Beatles records, many of them recorded on to acetate (the soft recording material used to create master recordings in those days) which was an indication that, perhaps, the record was not really one the station owned, but had been borrowed for copying purposes.
If I didn't do the Sunday program, it would be because I had had to do the anchor job on the Saturday afternoon sport, but the seven-day week meant that I got paid for one of the extra shifts - at the princely sum of five pounds a time. For a time, Bob Logie and I worked together on Saturday afternoons.
Bob could actually understand what was written in the sporting pages of the Herald, whereas I was only just able to read what was put in front of me with intelligence, if not authority.
I began to let it be known that I was interested in things other than sitting in a studio for a few hours a day, so perhaps it should not have been a surprise when Alan Faulkner called me to his office as my first twelve months ended..
He made all the decisions at the station. For an accountant, he had a remarkable understanding of what made radio effective. He had given John Laws his first city radio job, and was upset when Laws decided to leave and go to another station - a tactic that Lawsie maintained for many years, always returning to 2UE, or perhaps using it as a base station from which to jump off to see what life was like in the real world.
If he had an ear for a good broadcaster, he had some bad news for me.
"You're a rotten breakfast announcer", he said in his matter-of-fact way. He'd obviously been listening on weekend mornings.
"How'd you like to try out in the sales department? You can do some shifts at weekends if you want to stay on the air".
There was a vacancy, I knew. One of the salesmen had just left, quite unexpectedly on his part, and it was a busy office. I had had only the 2LM sales experience to go on, but I didn't think it a wise idea to turn the offer down. After all, I had the Triumph Herald to pay for, and we had only just bought a house.
"I'll pay you your current salary for a few weeks while you get settled, then you'll go on the standard arrangement - a retainer and commission", he stipulated. The conversation was over.
I went to the sales manager's office, which overlooked Bligh Street, and was reached by inching behind the reception desk to a doorway invisible to the casual observer.
I had met the sales manager on my arrival, when he had been marking time as production manager. His name was Bruce Rogerson, who later went to 2CH, introduced "Beautiful" music and made the long time also-ran station one of the top performers in Sydney.
But now I looked at him in a new light. How would I get along with this new boss? What did he expect?
"You don't remember me, do you?" he asked.
I didn't quite know what he was talking about.
"I've been waiting for the penny to drop", he told me. "Remember when you were in Lismore a few years back and that smart city salesman came to sell ready-made commercials to your advertisers?"
I looked at him. Of course, it was Bruce, whose sales pitch I had admired, even to the extent of tossing a vinyl disc, valued at twenty pounds, to the floor and fracturing it into hundreds of tiny pieces.
"Here", he said, handing me a heavy folder. "This is a course I once studied on sales techniques. See what you make of it".
"Oh", he added. "Here's a copy of the latest survey too. Better get to know what's in it".
Survey? We didn't have those in Lismore, and the single survey we had during six years in Wollongong had never been revealed to us.
I took them both home and read them, two or three times. They didn't make a lot of sense to me. It occurred to me that I might have made a wrong turn, and that this job was going to he harder than I thought. Maybe Peter le Brun's Lismore techniques would not work in Sydney.
I had some catching up to do, I really did.
Chapter Thirty Two
"Fifteen pounds over there! Do I hear sixteen? Sixteen and a half - DONE".
It was late afternoon, around 4 o'clock, and the best entertainment I could find was a so-called "auction room" in the centre of the city, where they bid the price of trinkets way up to three times their value, and offered the onlookers the remarkable opportunity of buying the same product at the same fantastic price paid by the lucky bidder.
Business was brisk for them. Not so much for me. I was studying the raw end of the selling business.
The training program Bruce had loaned me eventually gave me some clues, but at the end of those many days when the "NO SALE" sign hung round my neck and I didn't want to get back to the sales office too early, this extra study course provided mild amusement and allowed me to see the techniques they used to get a sale.
When I first went to Lismore in the nineteen forties, I confided to mum in one of my too few letters home that I was having some trouble getting along with one of my colleagues. Her response was to go to a bookshop to buy a book she'd heard about but never read.
I read it and while I thought it pretty "smart" by half, I used it to good effect. My colleague and I became friends.
It was called "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
It had everything I always wanted to know but was too dumb to figure out for myself.
There were things to do that would make you welcome anywhere. It told how to win people to your way of thinking. It suggested that there were ways by which you could actually change people.
Now, in the sixties, the instructions in that book were starting to come back to me.
I still had my old copy, so I dug it out and began to read. I had a sneaking feeling that if I tried many of the ideas, the person copping it from me might start to laugh, or at least raise a smile.
For me, the would-be sales person, I eventually saw much significance in the suggestion that "if you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive", although on my first perusal the directive did not seem to say much. The man who wrote the book in 1936, Dale Carnegie, was a salesman of the old school, and he had answers for just about every question a salesman ever had.
He had some answers that might help my cash flow, which was pretty sluggish.
We had a saying in the 2UE sales office. "We need the money". It was used with great success on all our friends in advertising land, who knew well enough that 2UE did NOT need the money. The station was getting more than half the radio expenditure in Sydney and the Herald had run a story about the station having "one million pounds cash in the bank".
It must have been true. It was in the "Herald". But so what? It wasn't my money.
I was now on a small retainer and commission, paid each month. The payments on the car were still a worry - in fact, we were to hand back the car eventually - and there was another Crozier coming along.
After a long, hard search, we had found a house. For a time, I had commuted between Corrimal and Sydney, but then we found a house to rent in Caringbah. So we put our Corrimal house on the market while we still paid it off. There was another tedious commitment - we had, at some time, decided to buy a block of land on a new subdivision at Thirroul, a few kilometres from our Corrimal home, and that was also on the market but still a drain on resources as we continued paying it off as well.
The house we finally bought was a few doors along from the one we rented, although we'd covered a lot of Sydney in our search. It was six thousand five hundred pounds. But what the hell, the man at the building society believed I had a "substantial salary" (he was a friend of one of my new colleagues, Tom Haysom, known professionally as Tom Jacobs, and Tom had made the introductions).
But with everyone getting a cut of the Crozier millions, the budget was pretty tight.
I was given a client list to work from - it was simply a menu of all the prospects everyone else had failed to convert. While I worked diligently, the results were poor, and until I re-read Mr Carnegie, they were getting poorer. The likelihood that I would become the star salesman of the year was growing dimmer by the day.
Then I met Sam Terley.
Sam recognised the Dale Carnegie touch. He was much amused by it, and told me so. He was in the rag trade up to his balding pate. He told me, as if he had to in his broad accent that he was a Scottish Jew, and that I should therefore beware of him. They were, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, "the wurrrst kind".
It got so that if I was having a bad week, I would head for his George Street emporium, where you could buy a suit for twenty pounds and a shirt for ten shillings, neither of which I wanted to buy. We just exchanged Carnegie-isms.
Amid a lot of laughter, I sometimes sold him. But if I failed, he would tell me why.
He told me that the most powerful suggestion anyone in sales can make is that the customer should BUY. Why hadn't I thought of that?
"Tell me to BUY, Thomas", he would say. "Just tell me to BUY".
As he taught me, I found that he gradually began to buy. Equally gradually my sales figures began to rise, and as they did so, I began to rate a share of the agency business.
The good thing about agency business in radio was that a highly-rated station had an automatic start. You might not get the business eventually unless you worked at it, but you were first to know if something was waiting in the wings.
It was like starting at the top when I was allocated Hansen Rubensohn, before the American McCann agency became involved.
I was pretty raw, in spite of my leanings towards American sales techniques. The Hansen Rhubensohn Media Director must have decided I needed training. Her name was Joy Young. She was responsible for the buying of many millions of pounds worth of advertising, yet she was always willing to hear whatever it was the station wanted her to know.
"Don't come in here looking for money", she would say. "Come in here with an IDEA I can put to my clients. Or come in here and tell me why you're going to beat your competitors. Just don't waste my time".
She added: "And don't go through my client list with me. I know who they are!"
She had a particular art of asking the same questions two or three times in a discussion - and woe betide Tom if he changed the answer!
Every time I left her office I felt as though I'd been through a wringer. She was a friend of Allan Faulkner, and I've often wondered if it was his idea that I should get this treatment.
And why did she bother? She was terminally ill at the time.
But between Sam Terley and Joy Young, I learned quicker than I had ever learned before in my life, and as a result I was getting good figures.
There was another influence. It was another book. This one I found for myself, and much to my surprise, came to realise that everyone else from the Amway Corporation down, had also found it. Well, they'd had time to locate it: it was first published in 1949.
It had a strange title: "How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling". I could relate to the first part of the title.
Mr Frank Bettcher, another American old-school salesman, made as much sense as Dale Carnegie - maybe more. He confessed that he had rated himself a failure, that he couldn't make a sale, until one day it all started to happen. He found that the secret of success boiled down to one thing: making the sales calls. He made the point that you
have to discipline yourself to make the calls. He kept a record over twelve months, found he had made 1800 calls, obtained 65 orders, and that meant that every call he made earned him over $2, regardless of whether he made the sale or not.
I wore out a lot of shoe leather.
Meanwhile, Len London, who had been compering "The National Old Time Dance" decided to give himself six months off that chore. There's no doubt he enjoyed it, but he felt he was getting a little jaded.
The National Old Time Dance was broadcast throughout a network of stations around the country, featuring Jack Papworth and his Old Time Dance Band, a group that had a huge following because of their record albums. The program was recorded on Friday nights at the Albert Palais at Leichhardt, at a dance Jack himself organised with his wife, Min.
Min was in charge of the finances. She sat in the box office and sold the tickets between cigarettes, while Jack put his band through their paces.
I knew them both well, because I had taken a job with them at their gig at the Kogarah RSL Club each Wednesday night for which I received seven pounds as compere, and again on Saturday nights at the Auburn Dance Centre, where Jack was the employer and Min valued me at five pounds.
Lots of money! It was all going to pay off both mum and Nan's father, Claude, who had helped us get the deposit together for our house.
So I took on Len's role at the National Old Time Dance - a fairly testing one, because as it was being broadcast you had to fill in the gaps between dances, which meant you had to have something interesting to say. Preparation had to be done. There was no "producer" to help.
Six months of Old Time Dances at night and sales calls on the Frank Bettger "make the calls" principle from 9 to 5 finally caught up with me. There came a day when I had been called in to do the Sunday breakfast program, for a five pound fee, because someone was on holidays.
Right after I got to the studio I knew I shouldn't have come, but there was nothing for it. I was there, and I had to keep going until finishing time at nine o'clock.
Bob Rogers was there preparing for his Sunday morning show, and the final hour of the breakfast program from 8 to 9 included two 25-minute sessions which Bob always pre-recorded. When he looked into the studio he said "What's the matter with you? Go on - get on home".
I did, not knowing whether I would make it or not.
I slept the day through and felt better for it. The next day I told the program manager that I was not available for any fill-in shifts, Len went back to his Old Time Dance, and Jack Papworth was looking for comperes for his other dances.
Now I had to depend on the income from sales alone.
I had to become the honey gatherer that I'd read about, and that meant taking care of the honey pots.
Just what were the honey pots?
Frank Bettger and Dale Carnegie had better come up with the goods.
It was late afternoon, around 4 o'clock, and the best entertainment I could find was a so-called "auction room" in the centre of the city, where they bid the price of trinkets way up to three times their value, and offered the onlookers the remarkable opportunity of buying the same product at the same fantastic price paid by the lucky bidder.
Business was brisk for them. Not so much for me. I was studying the raw end of the selling business.
The training program Bruce had loaned me eventually gave me some clues, but at the end of those many days when the "NO SALE" sign hung round my neck and I didn't want to get back to the sales office too early, this extra study course provided mild amusement and allowed me to see the techniques they used to get a sale.
When I first went to Lismore in the nineteen forties, I confided to mum in one of my too few letters home that I was having some trouble getting along with one of my colleagues. Her response was to go to a bookshop to buy a book she'd heard about but never read.
I read it and while I thought it pretty "smart" by half, I used it to good effect. My colleague and I became friends.
It was called "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
It had everything I always wanted to know but was too dumb to figure out for myself.
There were things to do that would make you welcome anywhere. It told how to win people to your way of thinking. It suggested that there were ways by which you could actually change people.
Now, in the sixties, the instructions in that book were starting to come back to me.
I still had my old copy, so I dug it out and began to read. I had a sneaking feeling that if I tried many of the ideas, the person copping it from me might start to laugh, or at least raise a smile.
For me, the would-be sales person, I eventually saw much significance in the suggestion that "if you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive", although on my first perusal the directive did not seem to say much. The man who wrote the book in 1936, Dale Carnegie, was a salesman of the old school, and he had answers for just about every question a salesman ever had.
He had some answers that might help my cash flow, which was pretty sluggish.
We had a saying in the 2UE sales office. "We need the money". It was used with great success on all our friends in advertising land, who knew well enough that 2UE did NOT need the money. The station was getting more than half the radio expenditure in Sydney and the Herald had run a story about the station having "one million pounds cash in the bank".
It must have been true. It was in the "Herald". But so what? It wasn't my money.
I was now on a small retainer and commission, paid each month. The payments on the car were still a worry - in fact, we were to hand back the car eventually - and there was another Crozier coming along.
After a long, hard search, we had found a house. For a time, I had commuted between Corrimal and Sydney, but then we found a house to rent in Caringbah. So we put our Corrimal house on the market while we still paid it off. There was another tedious commitment - we had, at some time, decided to buy a block of land on a new subdivision at Thirroul, a few kilometres from our Corrimal home, and that was also on the market but still a drain on resources as we continued paying it off as well.
The house we finally bought was a few doors along from the one we rented, although we'd covered a lot of Sydney in our search. It was six thousand five hundred pounds. But what the hell, the man at the building society believed I had a "substantial salary" (he was a friend of one of my new colleagues, Tom Haysom, known professionally as Tom Jacobs, and Tom had made the introductions).
But with everyone getting a cut of the Crozier millions, the budget was pretty tight.
I was given a client list to work from - it was simply a menu of all the prospects everyone else had failed to convert. While I worked diligently, the results were poor, and until I re-read Mr Carnegie, they were getting poorer. The likelihood that I would become the star salesman of the year was growing dimmer by the day.
Then I met Sam Terley.
Sam recognised the Dale Carnegie touch. He was much amused by it, and told me so. He was in the rag trade up to his balding pate. He told me, as if he had to in his broad accent that he was a Scottish Jew, and that I should therefore beware of him. They were, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, "the wurrrst kind".
It got so that if I was having a bad week, I would head for his George Street emporium, where you could buy a suit for twenty pounds and a shirt for ten shillings, neither of which I wanted to buy. We just exchanged Carnegie-isms.
Amid a lot of laughter, I sometimes sold him. But if I failed, he would tell me why.
He told me that the most powerful suggestion anyone in sales can make is that the customer should BUY. Why hadn't I thought of that?
"Tell me to BUY, Thomas", he would say. "Just tell me to BUY".
As he taught me, I found that he gradually began to buy. Equally gradually my sales figures began to rise, and as they did so, I began to rate a share of the agency business.
The good thing about agency business in radio was that a highly-rated station had an automatic start. You might not get the business eventually unless you worked at it, but you were first to know if something was waiting in the wings.
It was like starting at the top when I was allocated Hansen Rubensohn, before the American McCann agency became involved.
I was pretty raw, in spite of my leanings towards American sales techniques. The Hansen Rhubensohn Media Director must have decided I needed training. Her name was Joy Young. She was responsible for the buying of many millions of pounds worth of advertising, yet she was always willing to hear whatever it was the station wanted her to know.
"Don't come in here looking for money", she would say. "Come in here with an IDEA I can put to my clients. Or come in here and tell me why you're going to beat your competitors. Just don't waste my time".
She added: "And don't go through my client list with me. I know who they are!"
She had a particular art of asking the same questions two or three times in a discussion - and woe betide Tom if he changed the answer!
Every time I left her office I felt as though I'd been through a wringer. She was a friend of Allan Faulkner, and I've often wondered if it was his idea that I should get this treatment.
And why did she bother? She was terminally ill at the time.
But between Sam Terley and Joy Young, I learned quicker than I had ever learned before in my life, and as a result I was getting good figures.
There was another influence. It was another book. This one I found for myself, and much to my surprise, came to realise that everyone else from the Amway Corporation down, had also found it. Well, they'd had time to locate it: it was first published in 1949.
It had a strange title: "How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling". I could relate to the first part of the title.
Mr Frank Bettcher, another American old-school salesman, made as much sense as Dale Carnegie - maybe more. He confessed that he had rated himself a failure, that he couldn't make a sale, until one day it all started to happen. He found that the secret of success boiled down to one thing: making the sales calls. He made the point that you
have to discipline yourself to make the calls. He kept a record over twelve months, found he had made 1800 calls, obtained 65 orders, and that meant that every call he made earned him over $2, regardless of whether he made the sale or not.
I wore out a lot of shoe leather.
Meanwhile, Len London, who had been compering "The National Old Time Dance" decided to give himself six months off that chore. There's no doubt he enjoyed it, but he felt he was getting a little jaded.
The National Old Time Dance was broadcast throughout a network of stations around the country, featuring Jack Papworth and his Old Time Dance Band, a group that had a huge following because of their record albums. The program was recorded on Friday nights at the Albert Palais at Leichhardt, at a dance Jack himself organised with his wife, Min.
Min was in charge of the finances. She sat in the box office and sold the tickets between cigarettes, while Jack put his band through their paces.
I knew them both well, because I had taken a job with them at their gig at the Kogarah RSL Club each Wednesday night for which I received seven pounds as compere, and again on Saturday nights at the Auburn Dance Centre, where Jack was the employer and Min valued me at five pounds.
Lots of money! It was all going to pay off both mum and Nan's father, Claude, who had helped us get the deposit together for our house.
So I took on Len's role at the National Old Time Dance - a fairly testing one, because as it was being broadcast you had to fill in the gaps between dances, which meant you had to have something interesting to say. Preparation had to be done. There was no "producer" to help.
Six months of Old Time Dances at night and sales calls on the Frank Bettger "make the calls" principle from 9 to 5 finally caught up with me. There came a day when I had been called in to do the Sunday breakfast program, for a five pound fee, because someone was on holidays.
Right after I got to the studio I knew I shouldn't have come, but there was nothing for it. I was there, and I had to keep going until finishing time at nine o'clock.
Bob Rogers was there preparing for his Sunday morning show, and the final hour of the breakfast program from 8 to 9 included two 25-minute sessions which Bob always pre-recorded. When he looked into the studio he said "What's the matter with you? Go on - get on home".
I did, not knowing whether I would make it or not.
I slept the day through and felt better for it. The next day I told the program manager that I was not available for any fill-in shifts, Len went back to his Old Time Dance, and Jack Papworth was looking for comperes for his other dances.
Now I had to depend on the income from sales alone.
I had to become the honey gatherer that I'd read about, and that meant taking care of the honey pots.
Just what were the honey pots?
Frank Bettger and Dale Carnegie had better come up with the goods.
Chapter Thirty Three
Begin in a friendly way, Dale Carnegie told me.
"Know your business - and keep on knowing your business", said Frank Bettger.
"I can do all things through Christ", said St Paul. Most people read this in the Bible, but I got it via Norman Vincent Peale.
I didn't know Dale or Frank or even Norman Vincent Peale, but their books were telling me what I had to do if I was going to make any impression on the honey-pots, which had now been defined as anyone with money to spend on advertising. That included their representatives, the advertising agencies.
Dale and Frank and even Norman Vincent Peale became my close associates, although I did not widely advertise the fact. I was the new recruit, I needed all the help I could get.
My colleagues were all well advanced in their selling careers.
There was Norm Stevenson, whose dad had founded the station way back in 1925. He'd seen most of what had happened at 2UE since it first went on the air. He also owned a home at Sylvania, and we took it for granted that he only worked because he enjoyed the job.
I soon discovered that he owned another home, far away down the South Coast at Pretty Beach. He could see that I was having a tough time early in my sales career and he suggested that if we wanted to take a holiday, we could borrow the South Coast house for a week or so. He was the first person in Sydney to show me real kindness.
Norm was a quiet soul and very much liked by his clients, one of whom was Jack Allison, a jeweller. Some years before, Jack had started up a business selling engagement rings in a large building close to Sydney Town Hall. He had decided to advertise on the local radio stations, and 2UE was the major logical choice.
One of the problems his advertising had to address was the fact that there were maybe twenty other people doing exactly the same thing in the same building - making and selling diamond rings.
For years, Jack ran the same announcement (I'm sure he wrote it himself) and even when he hired agencies from time to time, they were not allowed to change the copy. It told the customers that they would get their diamond rings at the lowest possible price, because Jack's business was "right in the heart of the wholesale diamond business".
Later, on the advice of an advertising agent, he used a jingle, and the customers kept rolling in the door.
Diamond Traders, Jack's trading name, became one of the great success stories for commercial radio.
Some years later, when Jack was about to sell the business, the Sydney Time Club (a luncheon club which in those days was exclusive to people who sold radio time and who were encouraged to bring their clients) wanted to make a presentation to him, and asked me to see if I could find an old tape of his commercial, read by one of the original announcers.
I couldn't find one, but I asked breakfast announcer, the top-rated Gary O'Callaghan, if he could remember the copy exactly as it had been. After about thirty seconds' thought, he came up with it, word for word, as far as I could tell. I asked him to record it, and it was played as the introduction to the presentation. Jack turned to me and wanted to know where I'd got it from, and couldn't believe that it had come straight out of Gary's memory.
Moss Robinson was the Lothario of the sales team. He was the female connoisseur supreme although most of the women at the station lived in fear of attracting his earnest attention. It was a rare morning when Moss did not regale us with his meeting with the girl of his dreams the night before.
The sales manager had allocated agencies according to the perceived skills of the sales talent. Moss got lots of the good-looking ladies who handled radio bookings, treated them with great style, and brought in a lot of money. His great frustration was that, in a Melbourne station he'd worked at previously, he had the right to "do a deal" to make sure he got the lion's share of the budget. At 2UE in Sydney, that wasn't part of the arrangement. There were no "deals", we had a rate card and that's what determined how much the customers paid.
We always knew when last night's adventure stories (or misadventures) were ending. Moss, still dramatising his story, would pull his shoe-cleaning outfit from his desk drawer, prop a foot on his desk, and begin the process of honing his shoes to a salesman's sparkle. The day's business was about to begin.
The real "character" of the sales department was a friendly, tubby character who signed himself E. John Stevens, quickly christened "E-John". Even his messages in the sales log book were made out to E-John. He was a little deaf, a fact that he used to his advantage. He reminded me of Peter le Brun somewhat because he had a few little trade-mark tricks.
E-John specialised in "direct" clients, although he handled quite a few agencies as well. Talking face to face with a client who was shaking his head and saying "I don't think so", E-John would look somewhat puzzled. "I'm sorry", he would say, "I missed that. I'm a little deaf, you understand".
He would then turn his other, but equally deaf, ear towards the client and start his sales pitch all over again.
Eavesdropping in the office, we always knew when the client he had "left an idea with" the day before was saying "NO". E-John would say "Eh - what's that? Just a minute while I put the phone to the other ear".
The strategy gave him time to find another reason why his prospect ought to buy. It usually worked.
He was also intensely curious. If a strange looking, bulky envelope arrived for one of us, E-John always wanted to know what was in it.
If one of us received a package containing sponsor's products, E-John would be looking over his colleague's shoulder asking "Do we all get one?"
Sometimes we would create our own talking pieces - much to E-John's eventual disgust. We would find some wrapping paper, make a parcel of an empty bottle or scraps of paper, and tie it neatly with coloured string. E-John would spy it as he walked in, and immediately ask about it.
"It's for you", someone would tell him in a disinterested tone of voice.
Avidly he would unwrap it, but his glee would turn to indignantion, and the office camaraderie would be sadly lacking for some time.
His father had been a radio personality and story teller in the very early days. Captain Stevens, as he was called, was a popular favourite who encouraged his son to follow him into broadcasting.
E-John left 2UE to run a pub in Campbelltown, then sold the pub and went back to selling radio at 2CH when Bruce Rogerson took over the management of the AWA stations. We were in competition with him, but we often met for lunch at the Cole's cafeteria in the centre of the city, where a steak cost a couple of dollars, and where the ladies who cooked it all knew him and greeted him. We suspected he spent many other lunch-times there.
Jim Davis had come to 2UE about twelve months before I became a salesman. He had been media manager of an advertising agency, and Norman Stevenson had talked him into the move. The fact was that Jim was missing radio a lot, because, right after he left the Navy at the end of World War 2, he got himself a job as an announcer at 2GF Grafton. Like me, he had an ambition to be a broadcaster. Somewhat unimpressed at the wage rates, he decided he would rather have an advertising career, and quickly found himself buying media in Sydney.
Norman rescued him from that.
"At these prices", Jim would say, looking carefully at his pay envelope, "they could tell me to wash the windows and I'd do it!"
The other member of the team was someone I knew very well from my first sojourn at 2UE - John Hansberry. John had been stolen away from a station in Adelaide in the late 1940s by Ron R Beck to compere the Mr and Mrs Australia program - the one that made its historic surprise debut on 2UE's 25th anniversary. He had stayed with Beck and 2UE over the years, and when he decided that Top 40 wasn't what he wanted to do, he became the sales department's retail expert.
He applied all the zeal he'd used in his radio programs to succeed in this new endeavour.
John would sit at his desk all day, talking to clients on the telephone - and then writing their copy. He wrote his copy in longhand, and was always running late - to the constant great despair of the copy department. "Tell Hanso he can type the bloody stuff himself" they'd tell me.
Having created his masterpiece, John would then telephone the client, read it to him in his best "on the air" voice, re-write the bits that didn't quite work, and hand the almost illegible result to the copy manager whose job it was to make sure it was readable.
The sales department was now located in a double office on the fifth floor of the Bligh Street building. Harry Yates would not have been impressed. There was no room in it for the traditional Christmas keg. There were six or eight "cubby holes" as we identified them, each fenced in with a half-partition in which was a desk and telephone, a chair, and a small filing cabinet.
By standing up at my desk, I could see and talk to any one of the other members of the team.
Our sales secretary sat at a small desk just inside the door, where she spent her day taking telephone calls and devising excuses for the recalcitrant salesman who hadn't remembered to do what he'd promised his clients. She was the conscience of the department.
She also typed all proposals, which we wrote by hand. This in turn made her an expert in deciphering our scrawls, and a skilful corrector of spelling, syntax, and cost estimates. This was the era before word processors came into being, and photo-copying was in its messy infancy, so there was a lot of typing to do. But since all of us (except John Hansberry) got out of the office by 10 at the latest and didn't return until after 4, she had plenty of time to do it.
The fifth floor was the executive floor. It was where Alan Faulkner, as general manager, had his office, and where our Managing Director, Stewart Lamb, also had his suite. Brian McClenaughan was the station manager, and had an office that looked out onto the corridor so he could see the movement from office to office.
Brian was later to become a special mate. After world war two ended (he had a distinguished Air Force career as one of the Pathfinders), he came back to Australia and found a job at the ABC as a sports commentator. He later joined 2UE - he started as sports editor but he soon became sales manager and later station manager.
E-John was the salesman who intrigued me most of all. I remember seeing a Bristow cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald which always brought him to mind. The cartoon showed Bristow, balanced precariously on an office chair, moving the hands of the wall clock forward to 5 o'clock, so he could leave early with a clear conscience.
E-John had some of the Bristow characteristics.
One very wet afternoon, when we had all come back a little earlier than usual, E-John was anxious to go home. But the problem was he didn't want to walk past Brian's office with his coat and umbrella at 4.30 in the afternoon.
He came up with an idea.
E-John's cubby-hole had a window that looked out onto the stairwell leading downstairs to where the studios shared the space with the men's toilet. It was a puzzlement as to why that window was there in the first place, as, being glazed, it gave no view of anything.
And as the window swung out from its centre, it could do some damage to anyone using the stairs if it were to be opened suddenly.
David News, the Sydney representative for 2KO, our sister station, whose offices were across the street, had called in for a visit. E-John asked David to go outside to the stairs and wait so that E-John could hand out his coat and umbrella through the window. The problem was solved.
David agreed, and was standing outside the window to receive the incriminating items, when he noticed the General Manager making his way up the stairs. David quickly tried to give E-John the drum: he said "Hello, Mr Faulkner" in his loudest voice and continued on down the stairs, knowing that E-John would hear and get the message.
Unfortunately E-John was using his wrong ear so the astonished General Manager suddenly saw a coat and umbrella materialise through the widow ahead of him.
Without pausing in his progress up the stairs, he said "No thanks, John".
Fortunately, although he was an authoritarian as General Manager, Alan Faulkner had a sense of humour and privately would have appreciated the fun of the whole thing, as he did one day when he wanted an important message hand-delivered by someone senior.
He strode into the Sales Department right on nine o'clock one morning, asking the question "Who's not busy?"
There was dead silence for a second or two before Moss spoke up. "You're not catching me with that one, sir", he said as he made for the door.
We were able to catch up with Moss a few minutes later. We knew where he would be: downstairs in the basement at the Green Parrot coffee shop, where we sometimes adjourned if things were a bit slack. (John Hansberry got the assignment).
There was a lot of fun in that office, but it was serious too. Bruce, as sales manager, wanted to know just what we were doing, and if we didn't have anything planned, we had to make something up in a hurry - otherwise he would have some ideas. "Why don't you go and see so-and-so", he'd say. "Put this idea up to him..." and out would come a promotion, or a slogan, or something that Bruce's fertile mind had only just that moment produced.
Bruce was renowned for his "ideas". Some of them were outstanding, and all of them were workable. The trouble was when you sold something it was your job to do all the things that were necessary to make it work properly.
Many of Bruce's ideas were borrowed by the clients for use in other media. One of his most successful was very simple - a precocious little girl saying "My mother says --- Flemings are Fabulous!" which annoyed radio and television audiences for ten years or more, but made that simple grocer man Mr Jim Fleming very happy indeed.
Long-winded sales reports were frowned upon, and Bruce had designed a simple sheet of A4-sized paper, landscape format to accommodate five columns for the five week days, on which we wrote our daily appointments and calls, with ruled lines on the back in which we had to summarise the results of each call for later discussion at
the weekly sales meeting. This piece of paper was popular with us, because like all sales people, we loathed having to write reports.
By the time I'd been in the sales department for a couple of months, I was starting to get the hang of things. I started to make a lot of calls on my list of prospects, and on other people whose ads appeared in the newspaper I read on the train.
Most of those calls did not produce any business, but I was heartened because both Dale and Frank said that would happen. I remember Frank had a chart in his book that showed he'd made 44 calls in one week, out of which he got 22 interviews. And he was a professional.
My trouble was that if I made 44 calls, I was lucky to get three or four interviews, and out of those, maybe one sale, and maybe none.
Furiously I read Dale Carnegie and Frank Betcher and Norman Vincent Peale, and gradually I started to write more and more contracts.
I started to complain about the paper work! So Bruce gave me some more prospects, including various advertising agencies. I felt that at last I had made the switch from on-air to sales executive, although I was still called on for a while to do various air shifts and to give reports on the state of play from sporting events at weekends.
One day I was called at very short notice to give half-hourly reports on a soccer match. I had never seen a game of soccer, so I hot-footed it down to Dymocks book shop in George Street and picked up a handy volume entitled The Game of Soccer, on the principle that if you knew some of the expressions you could sound like an authority.
Especially when you could hear Martin Royal on the ABC doing his description from the broadcasting box next door, and could pinch the score and some commentary ideas from him.
Given my outstanding lack of knowledge, and obvious lack of interest in these assignments apart from the money they generated, they became fewer and fewer.
But my sales became more frequent, and for larger amounts of money, because I had adopted one of Dale's major principles.
"Be sincere", he said, "and don't promise anything you can't deliver".
That last bit was easy, because 2UE was the top station in the market by a huge margin. The only thing people asked about was the number of listeners, and I could promise them legions.
There was a 2UE tradition that helped me too: always ask for all the budget. You didn't always get it, but you surely got more because you opened your mouth wide. We could ask for as much as we dared because we had the audience - one survey showed us with precisely a million listeners. I showed that survey to Alan Faulkner as he was on his way out to lunch.
"That'll do", he said as he headed for the car park. A man of few words.
And there was Norman Vincent Peale's reminder that gave me confidence in myself. I used to repeat it silently to myself as I walked into a client's office.
My salary package started to grow.
I didn't know it, but I had found my forte, after twenty one years in a quandary.
"Know your business - and keep on knowing your business", said Frank Bettger.
"I can do all things through Christ", said St Paul. Most people read this in the Bible, but I got it via Norman Vincent Peale.
I didn't know Dale or Frank or even Norman Vincent Peale, but their books were telling me what I had to do if I was going to make any impression on the honey-pots, which had now been defined as anyone with money to spend on advertising. That included their representatives, the advertising agencies.
Dale and Frank and even Norman Vincent Peale became my close associates, although I did not widely advertise the fact. I was the new recruit, I needed all the help I could get.
My colleagues were all well advanced in their selling careers.
There was Norm Stevenson, whose dad had founded the station way back in 1925. He'd seen most of what had happened at 2UE since it first went on the air. He also owned a home at Sylvania, and we took it for granted that he only worked because he enjoyed the job.
I soon discovered that he owned another home, far away down the South Coast at Pretty Beach. He could see that I was having a tough time early in my sales career and he suggested that if we wanted to take a holiday, we could borrow the South Coast house for a week or so. He was the first person in Sydney to show me real kindness.
Norm was a quiet soul and very much liked by his clients, one of whom was Jack Allison, a jeweller. Some years before, Jack had started up a business selling engagement rings in a large building close to Sydney Town Hall. He had decided to advertise on the local radio stations, and 2UE was the major logical choice.
One of the problems his advertising had to address was the fact that there were maybe twenty other people doing exactly the same thing in the same building - making and selling diamond rings.
For years, Jack ran the same announcement (I'm sure he wrote it himself) and even when he hired agencies from time to time, they were not allowed to change the copy. It told the customers that they would get their diamond rings at the lowest possible price, because Jack's business was "right in the heart of the wholesale diamond business".
Later, on the advice of an advertising agent, he used a jingle, and the customers kept rolling in the door.
Diamond Traders, Jack's trading name, became one of the great success stories for commercial radio.
Some years later, when Jack was about to sell the business, the Sydney Time Club (a luncheon club which in those days was exclusive to people who sold radio time and who were encouraged to bring their clients) wanted to make a presentation to him, and asked me to see if I could find an old tape of his commercial, read by one of the original announcers.
I couldn't find one, but I asked breakfast announcer, the top-rated Gary O'Callaghan, if he could remember the copy exactly as it had been. After about thirty seconds' thought, he came up with it, word for word, as far as I could tell. I asked him to record it, and it was played as the introduction to the presentation. Jack turned to me and wanted to know where I'd got it from, and couldn't believe that it had come straight out of Gary's memory.
Moss Robinson was the Lothario of the sales team. He was the female connoisseur supreme although most of the women at the station lived in fear of attracting his earnest attention. It was a rare morning when Moss did not regale us with his meeting with the girl of his dreams the night before.
The sales manager had allocated agencies according to the perceived skills of the sales talent. Moss got lots of the good-looking ladies who handled radio bookings, treated them with great style, and brought in a lot of money. His great frustration was that, in a Melbourne station he'd worked at previously, he had the right to "do a deal" to make sure he got the lion's share of the budget. At 2UE in Sydney, that wasn't part of the arrangement. There were no "deals", we had a rate card and that's what determined how much the customers paid.
We always knew when last night's adventure stories (or misadventures) were ending. Moss, still dramatising his story, would pull his shoe-cleaning outfit from his desk drawer, prop a foot on his desk, and begin the process of honing his shoes to a salesman's sparkle. The day's business was about to begin.
The real "character" of the sales department was a friendly, tubby character who signed himself E. John Stevens, quickly christened "E-John". Even his messages in the sales log book were made out to E-John. He was a little deaf, a fact that he used to his advantage. He reminded me of Peter le Brun somewhat because he had a few little trade-mark tricks.
E-John specialised in "direct" clients, although he handled quite a few agencies as well. Talking face to face with a client who was shaking his head and saying "I don't think so", E-John would look somewhat puzzled. "I'm sorry", he would say, "I missed that. I'm a little deaf, you understand".
He would then turn his other, but equally deaf, ear towards the client and start his sales pitch all over again.
Eavesdropping in the office, we always knew when the client he had "left an idea with" the day before was saying "NO". E-John would say "Eh - what's that? Just a minute while I put the phone to the other ear".
The strategy gave him time to find another reason why his prospect ought to buy. It usually worked.
He was also intensely curious. If a strange looking, bulky envelope arrived for one of us, E-John always wanted to know what was in it.
If one of us received a package containing sponsor's products, E-John would be looking over his colleague's shoulder asking "Do we all get one?"
Sometimes we would create our own talking pieces - much to E-John's eventual disgust. We would find some wrapping paper, make a parcel of an empty bottle or scraps of paper, and tie it neatly with coloured string. E-John would spy it as he walked in, and immediately ask about it.
"It's for you", someone would tell him in a disinterested tone of voice.
Avidly he would unwrap it, but his glee would turn to indignantion, and the office camaraderie would be sadly lacking for some time.
His father had been a radio personality and story teller in the very early days. Captain Stevens, as he was called, was a popular favourite who encouraged his son to follow him into broadcasting.
E-John left 2UE to run a pub in Campbelltown, then sold the pub and went back to selling radio at 2CH when Bruce Rogerson took over the management of the AWA stations. We were in competition with him, but we often met for lunch at the Cole's cafeteria in the centre of the city, where a steak cost a couple of dollars, and where the ladies who cooked it all knew him and greeted him. We suspected he spent many other lunch-times there.
Jim Davis had come to 2UE about twelve months before I became a salesman. He had been media manager of an advertising agency, and Norman Stevenson had talked him into the move. The fact was that Jim was missing radio a lot, because, right after he left the Navy at the end of World War 2, he got himself a job as an announcer at 2GF Grafton. Like me, he had an ambition to be a broadcaster. Somewhat unimpressed at the wage rates, he decided he would rather have an advertising career, and quickly found himself buying media in Sydney.
Norman rescued him from that.
"At these prices", Jim would say, looking carefully at his pay envelope, "they could tell me to wash the windows and I'd do it!"
The other member of the team was someone I knew very well from my first sojourn at 2UE - John Hansberry. John had been stolen away from a station in Adelaide in the late 1940s by Ron R Beck to compere the Mr and Mrs Australia program - the one that made its historic surprise debut on 2UE's 25th anniversary. He had stayed with Beck and 2UE over the years, and when he decided that Top 40 wasn't what he wanted to do, he became the sales department's retail expert.
He applied all the zeal he'd used in his radio programs to succeed in this new endeavour.
John would sit at his desk all day, talking to clients on the telephone - and then writing their copy. He wrote his copy in longhand, and was always running late - to the constant great despair of the copy department. "Tell Hanso he can type the bloody stuff himself" they'd tell me.
Having created his masterpiece, John would then telephone the client, read it to him in his best "on the air" voice, re-write the bits that didn't quite work, and hand the almost illegible result to the copy manager whose job it was to make sure it was readable.
The sales department was now located in a double office on the fifth floor of the Bligh Street building. Harry Yates would not have been impressed. There was no room in it for the traditional Christmas keg. There were six or eight "cubby holes" as we identified them, each fenced in with a half-partition in which was a desk and telephone, a chair, and a small filing cabinet.
By standing up at my desk, I could see and talk to any one of the other members of the team.
Our sales secretary sat at a small desk just inside the door, where she spent her day taking telephone calls and devising excuses for the recalcitrant salesman who hadn't remembered to do what he'd promised his clients. She was the conscience of the department.
She also typed all proposals, which we wrote by hand. This in turn made her an expert in deciphering our scrawls, and a skilful corrector of spelling, syntax, and cost estimates. This was the era before word processors came into being, and photo-copying was in its messy infancy, so there was a lot of typing to do. But since all of us (except John Hansberry) got out of the office by 10 at the latest and didn't return until after 4, she had plenty of time to do it.
The fifth floor was the executive floor. It was where Alan Faulkner, as general manager, had his office, and where our Managing Director, Stewart Lamb, also had his suite. Brian McClenaughan was the station manager, and had an office that looked out onto the corridor so he could see the movement from office to office.
Brian was later to become a special mate. After world war two ended (he had a distinguished Air Force career as one of the Pathfinders), he came back to Australia and found a job at the ABC as a sports commentator. He later joined 2UE - he started as sports editor but he soon became sales manager and later station manager.
E-John was the salesman who intrigued me most of all. I remember seeing a Bristow cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald which always brought him to mind. The cartoon showed Bristow, balanced precariously on an office chair, moving the hands of the wall clock forward to 5 o'clock, so he could leave early with a clear conscience.
E-John had some of the Bristow characteristics.
One very wet afternoon, when we had all come back a little earlier than usual, E-John was anxious to go home. But the problem was he didn't want to walk past Brian's office with his coat and umbrella at 4.30 in the afternoon.
He came up with an idea.
E-John's cubby-hole had a window that looked out onto the stairwell leading downstairs to where the studios shared the space with the men's toilet. It was a puzzlement as to why that window was there in the first place, as, being glazed, it gave no view of anything.
And as the window swung out from its centre, it could do some damage to anyone using the stairs if it were to be opened suddenly.
David News, the Sydney representative for 2KO, our sister station, whose offices were across the street, had called in for a visit. E-John asked David to go outside to the stairs and wait so that E-John could hand out his coat and umbrella through the window. The problem was solved.
David agreed, and was standing outside the window to receive the incriminating items, when he noticed the General Manager making his way up the stairs. David quickly tried to give E-John the drum: he said "Hello, Mr Faulkner" in his loudest voice and continued on down the stairs, knowing that E-John would hear and get the message.
Unfortunately E-John was using his wrong ear so the astonished General Manager suddenly saw a coat and umbrella materialise through the widow ahead of him.
Without pausing in his progress up the stairs, he said "No thanks, John".
Fortunately, although he was an authoritarian as General Manager, Alan Faulkner had a sense of humour and privately would have appreciated the fun of the whole thing, as he did one day when he wanted an important message hand-delivered by someone senior.
He strode into the Sales Department right on nine o'clock one morning, asking the question "Who's not busy?"
There was dead silence for a second or two before Moss spoke up. "You're not catching me with that one, sir", he said as he made for the door.
We were able to catch up with Moss a few minutes later. We knew where he would be: downstairs in the basement at the Green Parrot coffee shop, where we sometimes adjourned if things were a bit slack. (John Hansberry got the assignment).
There was a lot of fun in that office, but it was serious too. Bruce, as sales manager, wanted to know just what we were doing, and if we didn't have anything planned, we had to make something up in a hurry - otherwise he would have some ideas. "Why don't you go and see so-and-so", he'd say. "Put this idea up to him..." and out would come a promotion, or a slogan, or something that Bruce's fertile mind had only just that moment produced.
Bruce was renowned for his "ideas". Some of them were outstanding, and all of them were workable. The trouble was when you sold something it was your job to do all the things that were necessary to make it work properly.
Many of Bruce's ideas were borrowed by the clients for use in other media. One of his most successful was very simple - a precocious little girl saying "My mother says --- Flemings are Fabulous!" which annoyed radio and television audiences for ten years or more, but made that simple grocer man Mr Jim Fleming very happy indeed.
Long-winded sales reports were frowned upon, and Bruce had designed a simple sheet of A4-sized paper, landscape format to accommodate five columns for the five week days, on which we wrote our daily appointments and calls, with ruled lines on the back in which we had to summarise the results of each call for later discussion at
the weekly sales meeting. This piece of paper was popular with us, because like all sales people, we loathed having to write reports.
By the time I'd been in the sales department for a couple of months, I was starting to get the hang of things. I started to make a lot of calls on my list of prospects, and on other people whose ads appeared in the newspaper I read on the train.
Most of those calls did not produce any business, but I was heartened because both Dale and Frank said that would happen. I remember Frank had a chart in his book that showed he'd made 44 calls in one week, out of which he got 22 interviews. And he was a professional.
My trouble was that if I made 44 calls, I was lucky to get three or four interviews, and out of those, maybe one sale, and maybe none.
Furiously I read Dale Carnegie and Frank Betcher and Norman Vincent Peale, and gradually I started to write more and more contracts.
I started to complain about the paper work! So Bruce gave me some more prospects, including various advertising agencies. I felt that at last I had made the switch from on-air to sales executive, although I was still called on for a while to do various air shifts and to give reports on the state of play from sporting events at weekends.
One day I was called at very short notice to give half-hourly reports on a soccer match. I had never seen a game of soccer, so I hot-footed it down to Dymocks book shop in George Street and picked up a handy volume entitled The Game of Soccer, on the principle that if you knew some of the expressions you could sound like an authority.
Especially when you could hear Martin Royal on the ABC doing his description from the broadcasting box next door, and could pinch the score and some commentary ideas from him.
Given my outstanding lack of knowledge, and obvious lack of interest in these assignments apart from the money they generated, they became fewer and fewer.
But my sales became more frequent, and for larger amounts of money, because I had adopted one of Dale's major principles.
"Be sincere", he said, "and don't promise anything you can't deliver".
That last bit was easy, because 2UE was the top station in the market by a huge margin. The only thing people asked about was the number of listeners, and I could promise them legions.
There was a 2UE tradition that helped me too: always ask for all the budget. You didn't always get it, but you surely got more because you opened your mouth wide. We could ask for as much as we dared because we had the audience - one survey showed us with precisely a million listeners. I showed that survey to Alan Faulkner as he was on his way out to lunch.
"That'll do", he said as he headed for the car park. A man of few words.
And there was Norman Vincent Peale's reminder that gave me confidence in myself. I used to repeat it silently to myself as I walked into a client's office.
My salary package started to grow.
I didn't know it, but I had found my forte, after twenty one years in a quandary.
Chapter Thirty Four
The boss wants to see you! Where have you been all day?" asked Bruce, as I walked into the sales office around 4 in the afternoon.
While my piece of paper said I'd been in the suburbs all day calling on new prospects, I'd actually been with Nan looking for curtain material around the warehouses in Mascot.
A little guilty, I presented myself to Anne, Alan Faulkner's secretary.
"Where HAVE you been?" she asked. "He's anxious to talk to you. Go on, get in there now".
Did he know what I'd been up to? Was he going to give me a lecture? No, that would be the job of the sales manager. But maybe he wanted to sack me himself. He had done that sort of thing before.
"Ah, there you are Tom", he said. "Did you have a good day?"
It sounded OK, but - could this be some ploy to put me at a disadvantage? I told him that I had had a good day.
He came to the point. He was always good at that.
"What would you say if I asked you to look after the sales department for a while?" And without waiting for the answer (just as well because I didn't have one) he told me that Bruce had asked for leave of absence for a couple of months. Bruce had been invited to join a group of people who were applying for the new Gold Coast radio licence. Everyone wanted to have their own radio station. Leave had been granted, but someone had to take over his job.
It was me. I found it hard to believe because I was the new recruit.
I have always had trouble in keeping my thoughts to myself - my face will always show what I think. I must have looked a trifle uncertain - I'd forgotten for the moment what Dale and Frank and Norman Vincent Peale had been telling me.
"Oh", he said, "you can do this job standing on your head".
I thought that maybe he had the wrong idea about how my anatomy was laid out, but I was prepared to give it a go.
It had all been arranged while I was cruising around Mascot looking into warehouses. I was to have a crash course in sales management by sitting in with Bruce for a week or two before he headed off to the Gold Coast for the hearing by the then Australian Broadcasting Control Board.
It struck me later that this leave of absence for Bruce was a remarkably generous concession. Most people in that situation would have been reminded that the door was open, and they could leave at any time. Unless, of course, the old company felt that they might be able to buy in to the new Gold Coast Gold Mine sometime in the future.
Our Melbourne representative, Peter Anderson, from his father's firm Hugh Anderson, came up to take part in my lightning transformation from humble sales executive to manager, when I would have to try, as Bruce told me, to "think for the whole bloody team". Peter kept me on my toes as he shot questions at me to which I had no answers, and he would keep on asking the questions until I thought of something.
Peter and I became pretty good mates out of that little exercise, a friendship that we have worked at ever since. He never lost the habit of asking difficult questions, however.
By this time, 2UE had moved from the Bligh Street premlses (later briefly occupied after the move by a lawn cemetery company, a fact that highly amused our competitors), to the then state-of-the-art premises in Miller Street North Sydney. The sales room was a large one. There were no cubicles, but the desks in orderly array made it look something like a schoolroom.
But the Sales Manager's office - that was something else. It was large. The desk was large. There was a cupboard to hang up your jacket, with a hat rack in it. There were two doors to the office - one to come and go by, another leading straight into the sales room.
My first day had me sitting at the large and very clean desk wondering what it was I was supposed to do. ("Just mind the office", said the Program Manager Ron Hurst, "and things will happen soon enough". He was right).
The sales team, my good mates, tried me out. They did it with great humour and goodwill, and as far as I am aware, there was no malice at all. Could it be, I wondered three weeks later, that maybe they'd all been offered the job first - and declined?
They trooped in one by one with a variety of "problems", to which I gave serious attention before giving my considered answer: "why don't you do what you always do?"
The hardest part of the job was running the sales meeting. It was the first item on the agenda every Monday morning, starting at 8.30, finishing at 9 o'clock. On the first few occasions I simply asked for reports, seizing on anything that might take up a minute or two, but as I grew comfortable and knew what I might expect, I started to prepare for an "exchange of views".
Then I had to write the Sales Report.
This went to the Manager, the General Manager, and the Chairman of Directors, and had to be concise, and full of good numbers.
It was supposed to have an estimate of what the market was like, and a comparison with budget estimates.
I read through some of Bruce's reports. They were good, and found that Bruce had a special technique to sell the sales department to management every week - he would heap praise on the sales executives. To read these reports, you'd have thought he never criticised or carped or collaborated: we did it all by ourselves. I knew better, but I thought I should not change from the style they'd got used to in the upper reaches of the Green Valley.
(The carpet in the executive area was green, and one of the engineers had coined the term "Green Valley" to stress the fact that the executive were so far away from the workers they never knew what happened in the rest of the building).
The novelty soon wore off, and I missed the freedom of being able to move in and out of the building as I had done when going about the business of contacting clients. But I had been given an instruction: 'YOU MANAGE THE SALES" - that being the reason a Sales Manager is called by that name.
In order to take over, I had had to cancel our holidays on the Gold Coast. We had taken to going there a year or so before - a foolishness we quickly grew out of - and there was a deposit which had to be forfeited.
Within a few minutes of making mention of the fact to Brian McClenaughan, there was a cheque on my desk for the amount lost.
I wondered how long this sort of thing had been going on.
There was a dream-like quality about the days I spent "managing" the sales, except for the fact that I was conscious of a degree of pressure to ensure that the revenue stayed up. The pressure was somewhat restrained, but it was there, and I became convinced that I would not be able to live with that kind of mental burden for very long..
So when we got the news that the Gold Coast hearing was over and that Bruce would be returning, I breathed a sigh of relief.
On the Friday afternoon before I went back to being a sales executive, with freedom to come and go as I wanted, I tidied everything up, finished a detailed account of my stewardship so Bruce would know what I had (and hadn't done) and sat down to wait for five o'clock.
At two minutes to five, Brian appeared in the doorway.
Like a predecessor of Mr Grace in "Are You Being Served?" he announced "Mr Crozier, you've done VERY WELL. Congratulations!" and he handed me an envelope. It contained a bonus from the Chairman of Directors.
If I hadn't been hooked before, I certainly was now, and I began to hope that Bruce and his friends would get the licence and go to the Gold Coast so I could take his job.
The sad truth was that Bruce and his mates did not get the licence, and there he was back in the chair writing complimentary reports on his sales boys.
But not for long. He took the view that there were other things in life than working for 2UE, and quite soon announced he had formed a company called Sound Ideas, selling ideas to sponsors and other radio stations (a company that was very successful and must have reminded him of his days selling pre-recorded commercials to country advertisers so their friends in radio stations could imitate Bruce and break the records).
The ad was in B&T, the trade magazine.
Sales Manager wanted for 2UE.
I rushed to apply. After all, I had done VERY WELL, and the Chairman had given of his bounty to express his thanks. That should get me on the short list, surely?
Meantime, as Bruce had left, I was asked to take over the office again. There was a tradition at the station, brought about we thought by the fact that the Lambs were retailers by tradition, that the "shop must be seen to be open during trading hours" - and an empty office was a dead give away that we weren't interested in anyone's business. Hence my occupation of the office, which by now looked less large than before.
I had the advantage (or disadvantage) of being able to see my competitors in the job stakes going up for their interviews.
Some I knew, but most I had never seen in my life before. The Company had an idea that they should try to get a country station manager. As soon as I realised this, I put through an addition to my formal application, in which I stressed my management experience in the bush.
It must have worked.
After three or four weeks I was called up for my interview. In fact, it was now so long since I'd applied that I was beginning to think I'd made it to the also-ran list.
My phone rang. It was Anne, the boss' secretary.
"He wants to see you", she said.
I took a deep breath. This was the one interview in which I must look good and say the right thing. But what was the right thing? My mind was a complete blank as I walked into his office.
"You'll do it standing on your head", was all he said. "Get going - we've messed around with this for too long".
While my piece of paper said I'd been in the suburbs all day calling on new prospects, I'd actually been with Nan looking for curtain material around the warehouses in Mascot.
A little guilty, I presented myself to Anne, Alan Faulkner's secretary.
"Where HAVE you been?" she asked. "He's anxious to talk to you. Go on, get in there now".
Did he know what I'd been up to? Was he going to give me a lecture? No, that would be the job of the sales manager. But maybe he wanted to sack me himself. He had done that sort of thing before.
"Ah, there you are Tom", he said. "Did you have a good day?"
It sounded OK, but - could this be some ploy to put me at a disadvantage? I told him that I had had a good day.
He came to the point. He was always good at that.
"What would you say if I asked you to look after the sales department for a while?" And without waiting for the answer (just as well because I didn't have one) he told me that Bruce had asked for leave of absence for a couple of months. Bruce had been invited to join a group of people who were applying for the new Gold Coast radio licence. Everyone wanted to have their own radio station. Leave had been granted, but someone had to take over his job.
It was me. I found it hard to believe because I was the new recruit.
I have always had trouble in keeping my thoughts to myself - my face will always show what I think. I must have looked a trifle uncertain - I'd forgotten for the moment what Dale and Frank and Norman Vincent Peale had been telling me.
"Oh", he said, "you can do this job standing on your head".
I thought that maybe he had the wrong idea about how my anatomy was laid out, but I was prepared to give it a go.
It had all been arranged while I was cruising around Mascot looking into warehouses. I was to have a crash course in sales management by sitting in with Bruce for a week or two before he headed off to the Gold Coast for the hearing by the then Australian Broadcasting Control Board.
It struck me later that this leave of absence for Bruce was a remarkably generous concession. Most people in that situation would have been reminded that the door was open, and they could leave at any time. Unless, of course, the old company felt that they might be able to buy in to the new Gold Coast Gold Mine sometime in the future.
Our Melbourne representative, Peter Anderson, from his father's firm Hugh Anderson, came up to take part in my lightning transformation from humble sales executive to manager, when I would have to try, as Bruce told me, to "think for the whole bloody team". Peter kept me on my toes as he shot questions at me to which I had no answers, and he would keep on asking the questions until I thought of something.
Peter and I became pretty good mates out of that little exercise, a friendship that we have worked at ever since. He never lost the habit of asking difficult questions, however.
By this time, 2UE had moved from the Bligh Street premlses (later briefly occupied after the move by a lawn cemetery company, a fact that highly amused our competitors), to the then state-of-the-art premises in Miller Street North Sydney. The sales room was a large one. There were no cubicles, but the desks in orderly array made it look something like a schoolroom.
But the Sales Manager's office - that was something else. It was large. The desk was large. There was a cupboard to hang up your jacket, with a hat rack in it. There were two doors to the office - one to come and go by, another leading straight into the sales room.
My first day had me sitting at the large and very clean desk wondering what it was I was supposed to do. ("Just mind the office", said the Program Manager Ron Hurst, "and things will happen soon enough". He was right).
The sales team, my good mates, tried me out. They did it with great humour and goodwill, and as far as I am aware, there was no malice at all. Could it be, I wondered three weeks later, that maybe they'd all been offered the job first - and declined?
They trooped in one by one with a variety of "problems", to which I gave serious attention before giving my considered answer: "why don't you do what you always do?"
The hardest part of the job was running the sales meeting. It was the first item on the agenda every Monday morning, starting at 8.30, finishing at 9 o'clock. On the first few occasions I simply asked for reports, seizing on anything that might take up a minute or two, but as I grew comfortable and knew what I might expect, I started to prepare for an "exchange of views".
Then I had to write the Sales Report.
This went to the Manager, the General Manager, and the Chairman of Directors, and had to be concise, and full of good numbers.
It was supposed to have an estimate of what the market was like, and a comparison with budget estimates.
I read through some of Bruce's reports. They were good, and found that Bruce had a special technique to sell the sales department to management every week - he would heap praise on the sales executives. To read these reports, you'd have thought he never criticised or carped or collaborated: we did it all by ourselves. I knew better, but I thought I should not change from the style they'd got used to in the upper reaches of the Green Valley.
(The carpet in the executive area was green, and one of the engineers had coined the term "Green Valley" to stress the fact that the executive were so far away from the workers they never knew what happened in the rest of the building).
The novelty soon wore off, and I missed the freedom of being able to move in and out of the building as I had done when going about the business of contacting clients. But I had been given an instruction: 'YOU MANAGE THE SALES" - that being the reason a Sales Manager is called by that name.
In order to take over, I had had to cancel our holidays on the Gold Coast. We had taken to going there a year or so before - a foolishness we quickly grew out of - and there was a deposit which had to be forfeited.
Within a few minutes of making mention of the fact to Brian McClenaughan, there was a cheque on my desk for the amount lost.
I wondered how long this sort of thing had been going on.
There was a dream-like quality about the days I spent "managing" the sales, except for the fact that I was conscious of a degree of pressure to ensure that the revenue stayed up. The pressure was somewhat restrained, but it was there, and I became convinced that I would not be able to live with that kind of mental burden for very long..
So when we got the news that the Gold Coast hearing was over and that Bruce would be returning, I breathed a sigh of relief.
On the Friday afternoon before I went back to being a sales executive, with freedom to come and go as I wanted, I tidied everything up, finished a detailed account of my stewardship so Bruce would know what I had (and hadn't done) and sat down to wait for five o'clock.
At two minutes to five, Brian appeared in the doorway.
Like a predecessor of Mr Grace in "Are You Being Served?" he announced "Mr Crozier, you've done VERY WELL. Congratulations!" and he handed me an envelope. It contained a bonus from the Chairman of Directors.
If I hadn't been hooked before, I certainly was now, and I began to hope that Bruce and his friends would get the licence and go to the Gold Coast so I could take his job.
The sad truth was that Bruce and his mates did not get the licence, and there he was back in the chair writing complimentary reports on his sales boys.
But not for long. He took the view that there were other things in life than working for 2UE, and quite soon announced he had formed a company called Sound Ideas, selling ideas to sponsors and other radio stations (a company that was very successful and must have reminded him of his days selling pre-recorded commercials to country advertisers so their friends in radio stations could imitate Bruce and break the records).
The ad was in B&T, the trade magazine.
Sales Manager wanted for 2UE.
I rushed to apply. After all, I had done VERY WELL, and the Chairman had given of his bounty to express his thanks. That should get me on the short list, surely?
Meantime, as Bruce had left, I was asked to take over the office again. There was a tradition at the station, brought about we thought by the fact that the Lambs were retailers by tradition, that the "shop must be seen to be open during trading hours" - and an empty office was a dead give away that we weren't interested in anyone's business. Hence my occupation of the office, which by now looked less large than before.
I had the advantage (or disadvantage) of being able to see my competitors in the job stakes going up for their interviews.
Some I knew, but most I had never seen in my life before. The Company had an idea that they should try to get a country station manager. As soon as I realised this, I put through an addition to my formal application, in which I stressed my management experience in the bush.
It must have worked.
After three or four weeks I was called up for my interview. In fact, it was now so long since I'd applied that I was beginning to think I'd made it to the also-ran list.
My phone rang. It was Anne, the boss' secretary.
"He wants to see you", she said.
I took a deep breath. This was the one interview in which I must look good and say the right thing. But what was the right thing? My mind was a complete blank as I walked into his office.
"You'll do it standing on your head", was all he said. "Get going - we've messed around with this for too long".
Chapter Thirty Five
There were times when you needed top work just a bit harder than others to keep the sales figures up.
It was hard work getting business in January in the nineteen seventies, but 3UZ in Melbourne (which had a similar format to 2UE) had been doing well with a series of summer promotions.
"You've got to get out to where the people are" was the catch-cry.
So Bruce Rogerson had dreamed up a whole batch of ideas, all of which could be adapted to meet the needs of even the most discerning sponsor.
All these ideas required were some willing volunteers and a bit of hard selling during the last three months of the previous year.
It was a case of everyone lending a hand, and I continued to do my bit when I became Sales Manager, although there were some who felt that some of the work was beneath the dignity of such an exalted executive.
We would sell sponsors a schedule with "added value" - some activity at beaches, or retail outlets, matching whatever the nature of the business was.
Often there would be several of the sales executives out and about on these exercises on the one day.
If we were going to a beach, there'd be announcements on the air to make sure a crowd was waiting for us, where we would run a quiz or introduce a band, give away sponsor's product, and then, like the moving finger, move on. The schedule was often very tight, and never took account little things like traffic snarls or toilet breaks.
Often we would take someone along to look after the public address system, which was mounted on the truck. That someone was often Sid O'Keefe, a doughty fellow who was much more at home in the recording room. He didn't mind the outdoors thing for a while, and he and I would hang on to our seats on the back of the truck for dear life as we raced from one beach to another to keep the next appointment with the screaming fans - most of who had come only for the free ice cream or soft drink.
As we sped to the last stand of the day, Sid would dream out loud of the recreational break he would allow himself (and hopefully would encourage company) by uttering the words "Reschs Refreshes" as our progress came to another temporary halt.
There were times other than summer when extra activity was needed, although on those occasions the sponsors were up for lots more money. We adapted our "survey promotion" from the late 1950s and early 1960s for a variety of clients.
Termed "Money on the Spot" it was a simple idea.
All we did was to announce the location of the 2UE Man (no women on the sales staff, so no 2UE Woman) and wait for the reaction. The location was always carefully chosen to ensure that it would be well known to the people living in the area. The general area was pre-selected, but the 2UE Man was expected to make sure that it was truly a good place to do business: arrive early, check it out, make sure there was plenty of parking, select a landmark. A lack of through-traffic was also important, because people would run across the road to be first to claim a prize.
It was important to be near a public telephone too, because mobiles weren't heard of, and two-way radio was reserved for news only.
The announcer would call the location and whether it was five thirty in the morning or ten to midnight, things would start to happen. Almost always in the first half minute someone would arrive to claim the main prize (usually ten pounds), while there'd be tens and sometimes hundreds of others following, some of whom got ten shillings for their trouble. One of my colleagues had an interesting experience. David News was right outside an apartment building, it was half past five and the sun was not due to rise for another hour, when a door banged open in a downstairs flat, and a woman rushed over to him, hand out for the tenner. She wore nothing at all, but she got the money, and she still lives in David's memory.
I had nothing like that, fortunately or unfortunately. On one of my locations, I'd chosen a good one and the call went out. There was immediate response, and within seconds I had twenty or thirty people clamouring for the money. At the same time I realised I has made a bad choice. We were all drenched in heavy rain. I'd forgotten that on cloudy days one should always make sure there was shelter available.
We sold that idea many times to sponsors with the "respondents" being required to have proof of purchase of product - the best proof of purchase being the product itself. One margarine company took it up and ran it often. Then the marketing manager went over to the opposition, and took it up for his new employers.
Sometimes our special earners came from ideas factories other than our own humble Bruce.
One of these was a promotion dreamed up by a Melbourne advertising agency, which was aided and abetted by Peter Anderson. It was for a manufacturer of school shoes, and not only did we take a band, but a compere as well - so the job of running the promotion was made easy. I was the one who had it easy.
The person who didn't was a new recruit at 2UE. He had won the 2UE sponsored "radio voice" competition at the City of Sydney Eisteddfod, for which the prize was a short engagement at 2UE. He was on air from 7pm to midnight, and during daytime in this summer season, he was on stage with a band at Farmers, David Jones and other retailers wherever they might be around Sydney. His name was Roger Summerill, and his willingness to give anything a go ensured that his short stay lengthened quite considerably. It might have been good experience for his later career with 2UW and as a General Manager in Perth and other places before settling down to run commercial radio on the South Coast of NSW.
Just after I became Sales Manager, we won the contract for Battle of the Sounds - a promotion that had been devised in Melbourne by 3UZ for Hoadley's Violet Crumble Bars. Peter Anderson's silver tongue had convinced that client that 2UE would be the better station, even though 2SM had handled it previously, and they still had a substantial audience in the younger age groups. (We certainly had some of those people listening, but our hold on them was tenuous).
We held the first of these events at the old Sydney Tivoli Theatre. It had just closed after a long period as a variety house and was in some disrepair. It became the task of our Program Manager Ron Hurst to make sure that everything went off well. It did, but it was the noisiest event the poor old Tivoli had ever been involved with.
The second (and final year) had another location. Sydney's first community shopping centre, Roselands, had just opened. It had been my client, although I didn't have to do much work on it as John Hansberry, who'd left 2UE to join Grace Bros, was in charge of the promotion of the Centre. I had helped him by writing some of the radio spots, but now I went to him with the suggestion that the Grand Finale of the Battle of the Sounds should take place on the main level of this big shopping centre.
He thought it a marvellous concept, so several stages were built and we took over the joint on a Sunday.
The noise was even greater than it had been at the Tivoli, as the music echoed and re-echoed around the centre's glossy walls and marble floors.
The next day John rang me to tell me that there was a major clean-up job that had to be done, and that he reckoned the sponsor had to come to the party.
Roselands had ensured that there were ample supplies of a very well-known soft drink without realising that the product, when spilt, would leave a dark brown stain that would require to be ground out of the marble floor at considerable cost.
We did not fight for the next round of Battle of the Sounds. There was some lack of enthusiasm from Roselands, who paid the cleaning bill themselves, and our Directors felt that the promotion had a lack of class. It wasn't in the 2UE mould. I felt I had to agree.
We had proved that we could do the Battle as noisily as 2SM, so we allowed them to win it back - where it should have been all the time, anyway.
It was hard work getting business in January in the nineteen seventies, but 3UZ in Melbourne (which had a similar format to 2UE) had been doing well with a series of summer promotions.
"You've got to get out to where the people are" was the catch-cry.
So Bruce Rogerson had dreamed up a whole batch of ideas, all of which could be adapted to meet the needs of even the most discerning sponsor.
All these ideas required were some willing volunteers and a bit of hard selling during the last three months of the previous year.
It was a case of everyone lending a hand, and I continued to do my bit when I became Sales Manager, although there were some who felt that some of the work was beneath the dignity of such an exalted executive.
We would sell sponsors a schedule with "added value" - some activity at beaches, or retail outlets, matching whatever the nature of the business was.
Often there would be several of the sales executives out and about on these exercises on the one day.
If we were going to a beach, there'd be announcements on the air to make sure a crowd was waiting for us, where we would run a quiz or introduce a band, give away sponsor's product, and then, like the moving finger, move on. The schedule was often very tight, and never took account little things like traffic snarls or toilet breaks.
Often we would take someone along to look after the public address system, which was mounted on the truck. That someone was often Sid O'Keefe, a doughty fellow who was much more at home in the recording room. He didn't mind the outdoors thing for a while, and he and I would hang on to our seats on the back of the truck for dear life as we raced from one beach to another to keep the next appointment with the screaming fans - most of who had come only for the free ice cream or soft drink.
As we sped to the last stand of the day, Sid would dream out loud of the recreational break he would allow himself (and hopefully would encourage company) by uttering the words "Reschs Refreshes" as our progress came to another temporary halt.
There were times other than summer when extra activity was needed, although on those occasions the sponsors were up for lots more money. We adapted our "survey promotion" from the late 1950s and early 1960s for a variety of clients.
Termed "Money on the Spot" it was a simple idea.
All we did was to announce the location of the 2UE Man (no women on the sales staff, so no 2UE Woman) and wait for the reaction. The location was always carefully chosen to ensure that it would be well known to the people living in the area. The general area was pre-selected, but the 2UE Man was expected to make sure that it was truly a good place to do business: arrive early, check it out, make sure there was plenty of parking, select a landmark. A lack of through-traffic was also important, because people would run across the road to be first to claim a prize.
It was important to be near a public telephone too, because mobiles weren't heard of, and two-way radio was reserved for news only.
The announcer would call the location and whether it was five thirty in the morning or ten to midnight, things would start to happen. Almost always in the first half minute someone would arrive to claim the main prize (usually ten pounds), while there'd be tens and sometimes hundreds of others following, some of whom got ten shillings for their trouble. One of my colleagues had an interesting experience. David News was right outside an apartment building, it was half past five and the sun was not due to rise for another hour, when a door banged open in a downstairs flat, and a woman rushed over to him, hand out for the tenner. She wore nothing at all, but she got the money, and she still lives in David's memory.
I had nothing like that, fortunately or unfortunately. On one of my locations, I'd chosen a good one and the call went out. There was immediate response, and within seconds I had twenty or thirty people clamouring for the money. At the same time I realised I has made a bad choice. We were all drenched in heavy rain. I'd forgotten that on cloudy days one should always make sure there was shelter available.
We sold that idea many times to sponsors with the "respondents" being required to have proof of purchase of product - the best proof of purchase being the product itself. One margarine company took it up and ran it often. Then the marketing manager went over to the opposition, and took it up for his new employers.
Sometimes our special earners came from ideas factories other than our own humble Bruce.
One of these was a promotion dreamed up by a Melbourne advertising agency, which was aided and abetted by Peter Anderson. It was for a manufacturer of school shoes, and not only did we take a band, but a compere as well - so the job of running the promotion was made easy. I was the one who had it easy.
The person who didn't was a new recruit at 2UE. He had won the 2UE sponsored "radio voice" competition at the City of Sydney Eisteddfod, for which the prize was a short engagement at 2UE. He was on air from 7pm to midnight, and during daytime in this summer season, he was on stage with a band at Farmers, David Jones and other retailers wherever they might be around Sydney. His name was Roger Summerill, and his willingness to give anything a go ensured that his short stay lengthened quite considerably. It might have been good experience for his later career with 2UW and as a General Manager in Perth and other places before settling down to run commercial radio on the South Coast of NSW.
Just after I became Sales Manager, we won the contract for Battle of the Sounds - a promotion that had been devised in Melbourne by 3UZ for Hoadley's Violet Crumble Bars. Peter Anderson's silver tongue had convinced that client that 2UE would be the better station, even though 2SM had handled it previously, and they still had a substantial audience in the younger age groups. (We certainly had some of those people listening, but our hold on them was tenuous).
We held the first of these events at the old Sydney Tivoli Theatre. It had just closed after a long period as a variety house and was in some disrepair. It became the task of our Program Manager Ron Hurst to make sure that everything went off well. It did, but it was the noisiest event the poor old Tivoli had ever been involved with.
The second (and final year) had another location. Sydney's first community shopping centre, Roselands, had just opened. It had been my client, although I didn't have to do much work on it as John Hansberry, who'd left 2UE to join Grace Bros, was in charge of the promotion of the Centre. I had helped him by writing some of the radio spots, but now I went to him with the suggestion that the Grand Finale of the Battle of the Sounds should take place on the main level of this big shopping centre.
He thought it a marvellous concept, so several stages were built and we took over the joint on a Sunday.
The noise was even greater than it had been at the Tivoli, as the music echoed and re-echoed around the centre's glossy walls and marble floors.
The next day John rang me to tell me that there was a major clean-up job that had to be done, and that he reckoned the sponsor had to come to the party.
Roselands had ensured that there were ample supplies of a very well-known soft drink without realising that the product, when spilt, would leave a dark brown stain that would require to be ground out of the marble floor at considerable cost.
We did not fight for the next round of Battle of the Sounds. There was some lack of enthusiasm from Roselands, who paid the cleaning bill themselves, and our Directors felt that the promotion had a lack of class. It wasn't in the 2UE mould. I felt I had to agree.
We had proved that we could do the Battle as noisily as 2SM, so we allowed them to win it back - where it should have been all the time, anyway.
Chapter Thirty Six
How much is radio advertising worth?
That was the big question I had to address at least once a year, when the budget was being set up for the next twelve months. It was up to me to estimate what advertisers would accept as fair and reasonable, balancing that with the station's expectations.
By now, the Sales Manager's office looked much less large than it had ever been.
When I took over the job, we had already established a market position which met the basic criteria: it was credible, easy to remember, and was verified each time the survey company results came out.
"Always at or near the top" was a line borrowed from an American radio group which Allan Faulkner had seen in a magazine (or possibly Ross Mullins saw it. Ross worked for the Major Network's national sales representatives to present the Network sales story. Ross used to moonlight a bit with 2UE, preparing the trade magazine advertising where this statement got very high exposure).
The line looked good to me from the time I paid an official visit to our then most important rival, 2GB. The Managing Director saw me in the corridor and referred to me as "Mr At or Near the Top". I figured if the line had such an impact on him, it had a lot going for it.
Obviously, if you were seen to be always at or near the top of surveys, you could charge more for your time than if you were always at or near the other end of surveys. A lot more.
So the first consideration was always "What are they asking?" And then, "What are they actually getting?" because the two were rarely equal. We had several guides - the published rates, a monitoring service by Bruce Tart which estimated the value of each radio schedule on each station, and the advice of some of the top media buyers.
The idea was to make the price as valuable to us as possible, without alienating those who laid the Golden Eggs.
The 2UE rate card was not just a showpiece - it was a serious document, and the rates could not be changed. On one occasion a prospect who had been advertising on another station but had a disagreement with them, came to me and wanted to place the business with us. I was delighted, because it worked out as quite a substantial schedule.
When he checked the cost, he was not impressed. He was up for a lot more, and demanded that we cut our rates to get his business. He knew the Chairman, he said, and if I wouldn't change the rates, he'd talk to him.
I was happy to let him do this because I knew that the rule of holding to the rate card applied throughout the Company, and the prospect rang me a few days later to admit defeat and to add that "anyway, I'll come along for the ride".
One of the most important guide lines in establishing a rate was the "cost per thousand". In its simplest form, this was calculated by dividing the rate per announcement by the average listening for that time period, which the survey showed in thousands. If you wanted to be more specific to a particular schedule, you needed to go to the survey company who would run a reach and frequency study.
All this planning and calculating, which I never enjoyed doing, seemed to me to be a mechanical process and I hoped to find another way of going about setting up a rate card at some future time.
It happened a little sooner than I expected.
I went to the United States (it was an essential ingredient of being a Sales Manager in Sydney radio that one should visit the USA from time to time to see if they'd picked up any new ideas). Quite often they hadn't, but it was important to come back with something in order to keep the momentum going. Otherwise there would be a dearth of first-class flights across the Pacific, staying in first-class hotels, and meeting other broadcasters over there who wanted to know what we had come up with in Australia.
In a San Francisco station I found one of the most interesting rate cards I'd ever seen. Interesting because it was based on a totally different concept.
A rate card obviously shows how much a station wants to charge for its time, and at 2UE we took great pride in making sure that everyone knew that those were the rates we were offering (they were not there as the basis for negotiation). No salesman had authority to change those rates, and as commission sales people, they certainly didn't want to do anything that might affect the viability of the rate card.
However, this San Francisco station took the concept one step further. As soon as they sold all their time at their printed rates, they issued a new rate card, naturally at a higher price. The result was a "base" rate about fifty times the figure we were charging in Sydney, for about the same kind of audience. When I asked the Sales Director what might happen if they lost audience share - in other words, would they drop the rates if the ratings went down - he looked offended, surprised and horrified. "It hasn't happened yet", was his response.
In Sydney, we actually printed a new rate card on July 1st each year and whether our ratings had gone up or down, the idea was that the rates would go up anyway. There was some compensation for this in that contract advertisers who had a schedule running for a twelve month period got the "old rate" to the end of their schedule.
I brought the American idea back to Sydney and it was promptly squashed. The ethics of the Company would not allow the Directors to indulge in such brutal practices. The advertisers bought us in good faith, we had established a principle of annual rate
increases, and that was the way it would stay. "Put the rate up as the market grows by all means, but once the card is published people need to know the charges will stay that way for twelve months so they can make their plans".
I had to admit that Sydney wasn't San Francisco.
That idea died, at least for the time being. But the need for something better stayed in my mind.
A few weeks later I put another idea forward. It had come as a result of a talk I'd had with Peter Anderson, probably over beer (for me) and champagne (for Peter) at the Tok H Hotel, where he and his mates gathered at the end of a long day's toil, and where I was quite a welcome guest on my visits to Melbourne.
For some time it had worried me that rate cards (all rate cards in radio at the time) did not take into account that it takes a certain frequency of impact to make any advertising campaign effective - radio, television, newspapers, billboards - all of it). Yet all radio stations had on their rate cards a series of packages (they started out
being called "saturations" but they were anything but that).
These were based on money value: For $100 you can buy three sixty seconds, five thirty second spots, or eight twenty seconds, and so on down the list of commercial categories on offer.
We came to the conclusion that the whole thing had to be turned around by putting the emphasis on the number of announcements required to do the job, rather than on the amount of money a client might have to spend.
A discussion with Don Neely, who had given up panel operating in favour of running McNair Anderson's radio and television surveys, elicited the information that you'd need around three announcements in a session to create any sort of awareness (figures that were later confirmed during my time at Radio Marketing Bureau) and that for impact's sake, you'd need to run thirty spots a week.
These announcements could be discounted to make the package more attractive.
The Directors saw this as a real innovation, which could be incorporated in our next rate card without contravening the company's strict ethics.
It came into being and immediately became successful. By their nature packages are discounted against normal rate card figures, and clever media buyers were greatly interested. My friend Phil Harris was at McCann's and picked up the idea with genuine enthusiasm - perhaps because he was one of the people consulted before the directors even heard about the idea. They had no doubt that the principle was right, and that these new packages could be used to justify additional expenditure on the station.
All of this brought about a change in the way agencies bought 2UE - reducing the number of session spots (these were now much more expensive than the package spots) and concentrating on the use of packages. The new idea was successful, but it was too successful. The idea was to increase revenue all round without affecting the excellent income coming from the Gary O'Callaghan, Bob Rogers and John Laws shows.
But it wasn't working quite that way - we had to get the thing into the proper perspective.
The next time around the session rates went up substantially, and the discounts on packages came down significantly, but not to such an extent that the packages went out of favour - just a means of redressing the balance.
It was a classic application of the swings and roundabouts principle to ensure that the Directors continued to live in the manner to which they'd grown accustomed.
It also helped the Sales Manager's income somewhat.
I felt we had all done very well.
That success was confirmed when the other stations in Sydney, who stood by and watched for a month or two, enthusiastically took up the new package idea - and so did our associate stations nationally in the Major Network. So the concept eventually became the industry standard.
That was the big question I had to address at least once a year, when the budget was being set up for the next twelve months. It was up to me to estimate what advertisers would accept as fair and reasonable, balancing that with the station's expectations.
By now, the Sales Manager's office looked much less large than it had ever been.
When I took over the job, we had already established a market position which met the basic criteria: it was credible, easy to remember, and was verified each time the survey company results came out.
"Always at or near the top" was a line borrowed from an American radio group which Allan Faulkner had seen in a magazine (or possibly Ross Mullins saw it. Ross worked for the Major Network's national sales representatives to present the Network sales story. Ross used to moonlight a bit with 2UE, preparing the trade magazine advertising where this statement got very high exposure).
The line looked good to me from the time I paid an official visit to our then most important rival, 2GB. The Managing Director saw me in the corridor and referred to me as "Mr At or Near the Top". I figured if the line had such an impact on him, it had a lot going for it.
Obviously, if you were seen to be always at or near the top of surveys, you could charge more for your time than if you were always at or near the other end of surveys. A lot more.
So the first consideration was always "What are they asking?" And then, "What are they actually getting?" because the two were rarely equal. We had several guides - the published rates, a monitoring service by Bruce Tart which estimated the value of each radio schedule on each station, and the advice of some of the top media buyers.
The idea was to make the price as valuable to us as possible, without alienating those who laid the Golden Eggs.
The 2UE rate card was not just a showpiece - it was a serious document, and the rates could not be changed. On one occasion a prospect who had been advertising on another station but had a disagreement with them, came to me and wanted to place the business with us. I was delighted, because it worked out as quite a substantial schedule.
When he checked the cost, he was not impressed. He was up for a lot more, and demanded that we cut our rates to get his business. He knew the Chairman, he said, and if I wouldn't change the rates, he'd talk to him.
I was happy to let him do this because I knew that the rule of holding to the rate card applied throughout the Company, and the prospect rang me a few days later to admit defeat and to add that "anyway, I'll come along for the ride".
One of the most important guide lines in establishing a rate was the "cost per thousand". In its simplest form, this was calculated by dividing the rate per announcement by the average listening for that time period, which the survey showed in thousands. If you wanted to be more specific to a particular schedule, you needed to go to the survey company who would run a reach and frequency study.
All this planning and calculating, which I never enjoyed doing, seemed to me to be a mechanical process and I hoped to find another way of going about setting up a rate card at some future time.
It happened a little sooner than I expected.
I went to the United States (it was an essential ingredient of being a Sales Manager in Sydney radio that one should visit the USA from time to time to see if they'd picked up any new ideas). Quite often they hadn't, but it was important to come back with something in order to keep the momentum going. Otherwise there would be a dearth of first-class flights across the Pacific, staying in first-class hotels, and meeting other broadcasters over there who wanted to know what we had come up with in Australia.
In a San Francisco station I found one of the most interesting rate cards I'd ever seen. Interesting because it was based on a totally different concept.
A rate card obviously shows how much a station wants to charge for its time, and at 2UE we took great pride in making sure that everyone knew that those were the rates we were offering (they were not there as the basis for negotiation). No salesman had authority to change those rates, and as commission sales people, they certainly didn't want to do anything that might affect the viability of the rate card.
However, this San Francisco station took the concept one step further. As soon as they sold all their time at their printed rates, they issued a new rate card, naturally at a higher price. The result was a "base" rate about fifty times the figure we were charging in Sydney, for about the same kind of audience. When I asked the Sales Director what might happen if they lost audience share - in other words, would they drop the rates if the ratings went down - he looked offended, surprised and horrified. "It hasn't happened yet", was his response.
In Sydney, we actually printed a new rate card on July 1st each year and whether our ratings had gone up or down, the idea was that the rates would go up anyway. There was some compensation for this in that contract advertisers who had a schedule running for a twelve month period got the "old rate" to the end of their schedule.
I brought the American idea back to Sydney and it was promptly squashed. The ethics of the Company would not allow the Directors to indulge in such brutal practices. The advertisers bought us in good faith, we had established a principle of annual rate
increases, and that was the way it would stay. "Put the rate up as the market grows by all means, but once the card is published people need to know the charges will stay that way for twelve months so they can make their plans".
I had to admit that Sydney wasn't San Francisco.
That idea died, at least for the time being. But the need for something better stayed in my mind.
A few weeks later I put another idea forward. It had come as a result of a talk I'd had with Peter Anderson, probably over beer (for me) and champagne (for Peter) at the Tok H Hotel, where he and his mates gathered at the end of a long day's toil, and where I was quite a welcome guest on my visits to Melbourne.
For some time it had worried me that rate cards (all rate cards in radio at the time) did not take into account that it takes a certain frequency of impact to make any advertising campaign effective - radio, television, newspapers, billboards - all of it). Yet all radio stations had on their rate cards a series of packages (they started out
being called "saturations" but they were anything but that).
These were based on money value: For $100 you can buy three sixty seconds, five thirty second spots, or eight twenty seconds, and so on down the list of commercial categories on offer.
We came to the conclusion that the whole thing had to be turned around by putting the emphasis on the number of announcements required to do the job, rather than on the amount of money a client might have to spend.
A discussion with Don Neely, who had given up panel operating in favour of running McNair Anderson's radio and television surveys, elicited the information that you'd need around three announcements in a session to create any sort of awareness (figures that were later confirmed during my time at Radio Marketing Bureau) and that for impact's sake, you'd need to run thirty spots a week.
These announcements could be discounted to make the package more attractive.
The Directors saw this as a real innovation, which could be incorporated in our next rate card without contravening the company's strict ethics.
It came into being and immediately became successful. By their nature packages are discounted against normal rate card figures, and clever media buyers were greatly interested. My friend Phil Harris was at McCann's and picked up the idea with genuine enthusiasm - perhaps because he was one of the people consulted before the directors even heard about the idea. They had no doubt that the principle was right, and that these new packages could be used to justify additional expenditure on the station.
All of this brought about a change in the way agencies bought 2UE - reducing the number of session spots (these were now much more expensive than the package spots) and concentrating on the use of packages. The new idea was successful, but it was too successful. The idea was to increase revenue all round without affecting the excellent income coming from the Gary O'Callaghan, Bob Rogers and John Laws shows.
But it wasn't working quite that way - we had to get the thing into the proper perspective.
The next time around the session rates went up substantially, and the discounts on packages came down significantly, but not to such an extent that the packages went out of favour - just a means of redressing the balance.
It was a classic application of the swings and roundabouts principle to ensure that the Directors continued to live in the manner to which they'd grown accustomed.
It also helped the Sales Manager's income somewhat.
I felt we had all done very well.
That success was confirmed when the other stations in Sydney, who stood by and watched for a month or two, enthusiastically took up the new package idea - and so did our associate stations nationally in the Major Network. So the concept eventually became the industry standard.
Chapter Thirty Seven
Over the years, the then Australian Radio Advertising Bureau (ARAB) had brought from overseas a number of creative gurus who knew how to make radio advertising exciting and good fun. Bob Logie, my 2UE colleague had gone over to what was then called "The Federation" - Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters (later FARB) to work on marketing the industry, and he felt that some of the great creatives from the United States and Great Britain would help alert some advertisers to radio's potential.
Bob and his colleagues used to bring these people to Australia for events such as the Convention of the Association of National Advertisers - a three-day affair usually held at some place where National Advertisers could really unwind. When I was first sales Manager these events were held at places like Hobart (which had the Casino) Thredbo (cold enough in October to get the feel of the place) and Adelaide, where the excitement was limited, although I personally always enjoyed my visits there. Later, the Convention settled on Surfer's Paradise and stayed there throughout its years as the predominant advertising forum.
The advertisers used to enjoy the radio presentation. Clients friends would ask for weeks before the event if there was to be a radio presentation, and who it might be. At that time, the only name that received any recognition in Australia was that of Stan Freberg, who'd come here for Channel 7 in the early TV days, but still they came to the sessions.
Chuck Blore and Don Richman (was that his real name, or simply what he wanted to be?) were not just advertising writers and producers - they were show business. Chuck had been a radio program manager and Don was a writer and what was known as a "voice" - the kind of voice you often heard on commercial radio in the US, deep, gutsy and compelling.
They would stand on the platform and introduce their commercials with a short history - what the client wanted, what they considered he ought to have. The two viewpoints were usually poles apart. They would tell how they came up with the concept, how they made the sound effects - you name it, they had a story about it. They were great persuaders, who sent many an advertising man in search of a creative writer and producer in Australia.
Some of us knew the only real radio specialist in Australian advertising. His name was Street Remley, who had come to Adelaide from America to handle the Chrysler (car) account when manufacturing started in Australia. Street was based at Young and Rubicam Advertising, and their Adelaide branch was opened specifically to handle the Chrysler business, although it very soon took on other accounts.
After a time, Street decided to go it alone,. and opened his own creative business in Adelaide. "Why Adelaide?" he asked in his first ad which appeared in B&T (stands for Broadcasting and Television) which was in those days making the move from a straight magazine about media to one that covered marketing in all its aspects.
Street's question was rhetorical, so he gave the answer. "The talent is here" - and, he added, it's a nice part of the world to live in. He didn't make much of the fact that it was his own writing and producing skills that were going to make his name - it just happened to be true that Adelaide had a huge number of highly skilled actors and singers on whom he could draw for the characters he created for his clients.
I had never heard of Street, but the B&T ad compelled me to telephone him and offer any assistance. I realised that if his business prospered, so would we at 2UE. I didn't know it, but my old friend Bob Logie at Radio Advertising Bureau was talking to him too, and soon had him on a panel at the National Advertisers' Convention.
It wasn't long before Street took me up on my offer. When deadlines came up too quickly (that happened a lot) and the production had to be approved by a Sydney client in a hurry, Street would send the commercial up by landline to 2UE, and we would have it delivered on time to the paying customer. This went on for some time, there being a good reason for us to help - apart from the friendly association that Street and I had built up. Whenever a commercial was produced for use in Sydney, we would know about it and could make our submission before anyone else. It didn't get us all the business of course, but it didn't hurt us either.
As Sales Manager, I had more impact than when I was a common sales Executive. It was my habit to make contact with a number of prospective clients every week, and that's what took me into the Clarence Street headquarters of NRMA. They were starting to promote their Car Insurance business and I reckoned 2UE was a natural for them. Our breakfast announcer Gary O'Callaghan was "Mr Sydney" - his traffic information service, gathered at high speed from just about every obvious source and many not so obvious, was the one all the other stations copied from.
What better association for a Company that, at that time, specialised only in Car Insurance?
I invited myself in to see their Advertising Manager, and since I felt I'd be more likely to be well received if Gary O'Callaghan accompanied me, I invited him, too.
There wasn't any plan to use radio as far as I knew, but by the time the visit had ended, and Gary and I were invited to have lunch with him, I knew that they were at least interested. The problem was that while they were most impressed by their advertising agency, they didn't think they had much of a handle on radio. I thought I had the answer, and suggested they get in touch with Street.
Within a short time, Street gave them an idea which they used for more than ten years.
He created a competitor for NRMA Car Insurance. This one was a company run from the boot of a car by one Happy Joe Happy, who was always out to get the better of NRMA, but always failed to do so. It was the sort of approach that needed new material very regularly, so something like thirty new commercials were written and produced each year, with the NRMA people and their advertising agency travelling to Adelaide to supervise the recording and to enjoy Street's company.
It must have been a sad day when they decided that Happy Joe was ready for retirement.
I was right - we got a large slice of the advertising. But what I should have realised was that my friends Les Hay (who ran 2SM sales), Gene Mann (2GB Macquarie), and Owen Williams (at 2UW) would all be in search of the business as well.
As I write this, about thirty years after it all happened, I am happy to know that Company still uses a substantial radio component in its advertising mix, and that many more stations are involved.
I'm happy to recognise, too, that many of the commercials they produce still seem to carry the Street Remley trade mark. Or is it that Street has taken the role of trainer in a big way, and many of his pupils have adopted his style?
The whole thing whetted my appetite for more "creative" input, just as the Major Network decided to bring out two other American specialists on the recommendation of my boss, Brian McClennaughan. Brian had been on a business trip to Los Angeles and was told of these two people who were breaking new ground. In fact, they'd been breaking this new ground for some years and had just broken up their business partnership, but were prepared to put things back together again for an Australian tour.
After a wild taxi ride through Los Angeles into the Hollywood area, Brian got to meet John Staughan and Alan Barzman, better known as Barz.
John was the get-up-and-go salesman of the pair, while Barz was much more laid back - in fact, he was completely relaxed about just about everything.
They toured the mainland state capitals where national advertising was created and placed - Sydney and Melbourne, of course, and for good measure Brisbane and Adelaide. Their seminars might be called a sell-out; there was standing room only at each of the free presentations.
Like Blore and Richman, they took it in turns to present some of their best work, describing how it came into being, and in John's case, at least one which involved a court action, brought by a national hamburger chain because of John's campaign for a competitor in Anchorage, Alaska, in which the big chain was described as being run by a "clown" named Ronald McDonald. It was settled out of court, no doubt to the joint satisfaction of both parties, as the case was well covered by the news media (big stories were notoriously lacking in Anchorage, according to John).
Barz was well known to Street Remley who was full of admiration for his work. To demonstrate this regard, at the cocktail party which followed the Adelaide presentation, Street did a streak through the room to the unstinted applause of all.
Barz probably never wrote a "serious" commercial in his life. Each commercial he presented sent the audience into gales of laughter.
With Barz, you got all of him. He wrote the ads, and was the main performer in them, although he also used some of the best known names in American radio and television as additional voice talent.
One technique he used was the interview. A Barzman interview would be recorded ad lib, with the cast knowing only what the product was and what image was to be created.
The whole thing might run three quarters of a hour. Then he would sit down and cut it down to sixty seconds.
One of his interview commercials used a regular comic from the American Tonight Show. the product was a well-known fertiliser, and the tag-line (usually used to reinforce the advertising message in other commercials) had the comic saying "On a windy day I toss handfuls of the stuff into the air, and I know that wherever it lands it's gong to do some good".
Barz always named his commercials. That is, he would describe it in such a way that it couldn't later be confused with any others for the same client. One of these was set in a restaurant. It was called "The Wine Waiter".
It was a guessing game between the diner and the waiter, with the diner trying to figure out which wine it was, totally without success. After naming many famous wines, and the waiter (Barz) giving a laconic "Naw" to each of them, the desperate diner grabs at anything: "Root beer?" Naw. "Hot chocolate?" Naw. And just as the diner is about to throttle the waiter, he reveals the secret. "Vino de Table". The commercial ends with more questions from the waiter as to how he knew what the wine was. It was the red chequered tablecloth on the label. Naw. The red labelled checker on the label?. Naw.
Stalemate. So the voice over announcer just said the name of the product.
The demand for Barz and John to talk to advertisers direct was enormous, but they didn't have the time to spare. They had to go home and earn some money, because our offer was to give them a working holiday in Australia, all expenses paid.
The other stations in the Network were not much interested in having them come back, but 2UE was because we could see that we could introduce some new clients (or bring back some old ones) on the basis of the talents of these two people. We decided to set up a small production company in Sydney and have the duo come out and work on a range of Australian clients for three months to see how it went.
It became my job to line up these potential clients, since I had met most of them either at the seminars, or in my regular rounds. To cover the cost of the visit, we asked for a thousand dollars to be charged for the first meeting, which came off the price of the finished product if they accepted it. The price of the finished product, which might be one commercial or a series - depending on the concept - was in the range from $30,000 down to $10,000.
At the time, these were unheard of prices for radio production in Australia, with advertisers believing that radio was cheap to write and produce, that being the sales pitch that radio stations had been pushing ever since television came into being.
It was a bit of a change for me to have to go out and ask for real money, even though the only real commitment was for a thousand dollars, as the actual cost of the campaign could not be estimated accurately until the material had been written and recorded.
So about six months later, John and Barz came back to town.
2UE's Creative Director at the time, Jeff Bach, elected to work with them, and his first job was to find a place for them to live. He found a two bedroom unit at Mosman with a harbour view. John brought out his new wife, Linda; Alan was between marriages and was quite content to share the premises with the newly-marrieds.
We gave them a couple of days to settle in after the long air trip from Los Angeles, and to absorb the information about the twenty or more clients we'd lined up, then Jeff went out to the unit to pick them up for their first day's work in Australia. All was quite in the unit, but after Jeff's continuous knocking, Barz answered the door.
"I've been going to have a look at that stuff" said Barz as he led the way into the kitchen. "But I couldn't".
"Why's that?" asked Jeff.
"Well, look", said Barz, showing off the empty room. "There's no one to make the coffee".
The newly weds were nowhere to be seen.
Work started late that day.
There followed a month or so of visiting the clients with John and Barz in Sydney and Melbourne, and one out of town client in Newcastle. (Since 2UE was owned by a Newcastle family who also owned 2KO, that figured).
Jeff found himself being an accountant and paymaster, skills he had to learn quickly, for John and Barz were not skilled in finance matters. But when actors and musicians were employed by the new company, they wanted to be paid on the spot - and at the appropriate rates. But the enterprise prospered, with campaigns for Ford, the Dairy Corporation, the old-time cure-all Bonnington's Irish Miss, Norman Ross (a firm Allan Bond bought into thus allowing Gerry Harvey to start up Harvey Norman) and a lot more.
The Network was proud of us, and some other stations also shared in the media money generated by these commercials, for having paid what were seen to be horrendous amounts for these commercials, the clients had to get as much exposure for them as possible.
To round off the tour of duty, I thought it would be agood idea to run a seminar in Melbourne and Sydney, so creative people and their clients could hear what had actually been done.
I don't think either Allan or John thought much of the idea - they'd been working non-stop for three months, but John and his wife agreed to go to Melbourne, and Allan said he'd be happy to stick around for the Sydney event. So we allocated the last two days of their tour to these events.
The Melbourne event was a rollicking success. The commercials went down well indeed, and augured well for the second round which we were planning. And the Sydney even was even more successful.
What happened between the two presentations was less than satisfactory.
When we got back to Peter Anderson's office after the Melbourne people had heard the whole story, we discovered that there was an airline strike, and that we would not be able to get back to Sydney that evening - and the next day did not look all that hopeful either..
The Anderson machine went into action, and while we sipped coffee, Peter's people were looking for ways for us to get back to Sydney - the Sydney presentation could not go ahead without us - we had all the tapes.
They eventually got us on a train. The Spirit of Progress had added several extra carriages, and we were just lucky, I guess. At least that's what we thought.
A taxi deposited us at Spencer Street station early in the evening, and we quickly found our seats in an old-style carriage which had separate compartments leading off a hall running along the side of the carriage.
We had a travelling companion, who greeted us cheerfully, and then suggested that we could probably improve the shining hour with a drink. He produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and asked me if I'd mind getting two or three paper cups from the water cooler.
I looked at John and his wife. John didn't drink, nor did Linda, but they gave me the nod.
"Just one", said John.
Liberal nips were measured out by our new friend, and I'd taken the precaution of bringing two paper cups of water back to the seats, and we sat back.
"Cheers!" said our host, who promptly downed his drink in one gulp, and began to re-load the paper cup. "Cheers!" he said again.
When he discovered that we did not intend to join him drink for drink, the good humour disappeared, his face turned sour, and he huddled in the corner seat, pouring Johnny Walker into the paper cup and tossing it off, although the pace abated somewhat.
John got up from his seat, to see if he could find other seats, but he came back with a sad expression. ("It's packed like a sardine can", he ruefully observed).
By this time our companion had run out of Johnny Walker and had left unsteadily to see if he could find a bar. He did, and stayed there until it closed, and after. He confused the staff and to keep him quiet, as they thought, they allowed him to sit on a stool (though how he kept his balance was truly wonderful to see) in front of the closed bar, with a small bottle of whisky, some water, and a real tumbler.
He came back to his seat as we steamed into Albury in the middle of the night. As he was settling in, a young soldier came aboard, checked the seat number, dumped his gear on the luggage rack, and sat down next to our friend. This was too much for our drunk, who had thought he would have the two seats for the whole trip, and he proceeded to complain to the soldier, asking him if he'd checked his seat number carefully, then suggesting that he take a look along the carriage in case there was a better seat, and finally, as if in acceptance, asking whether he happened to have a drink on him.
This was too much for John and Linda. They left the carriage, explained to the conductor what the problem was, and got themselves seats which had mysteriously materialised in one of the first class carriages.
When the conductor came along to investigate the subject of John's problem, it was sound asleep, slouched over two seats, breathing heavily and snoring loudly but intermittently, so that just as you thought he'd stopped the snoring and you could get some sleep yourself, he'd start again.
The soldier was sitting in Linda's seat.
At six o'clock in the morning, the sleeping beauty arose, produced a razor from his luggage, dry-shaved himself carefully, changed his collar, brushed his jacket and trousers and behaved as if we were all friends together.
At Central Station, he was met by his driver, who took his bags and led the way along the platform, with our friend carrying a cane underneath his arm striding out confidently on his way to work.
Who was he? What did he do for a living that justified a personal driver?
John was of the opinion that he was a member of the legal profession, engaged in some sort of industrial negotiations. He'd deduced this from some of the ramblings of the man during the early part of the evening.
I have never tried to find out whether John's guess was right, so it's still one of life's little mysteries.
The idea of having a top-line radio writing and production organisation in Sydney was right, but it didn't last. Maybe it was John's experience on the Spirit of Progress, or the jet lag, or maybe the fact that American sponsors didn't argue so much about up-front fees; in any case the enterprise folded about six months later. Nothing quite like it has ever been established in Sydney since. Perhaps no other radio station was prepared to take the risk and finance such an idea the way 2UE did.
Some years later, I met up again with John Strahan and Alan Barzman in Los Angeles. John had transferred his wild enthusiasm into the making of commercial film documentaries, Alan was bigger than ever in radio commercials. Both of them remembered the "Australian caper" with a great deal of pleasure.
Bob and his colleagues used to bring these people to Australia for events such as the Convention of the Association of National Advertisers - a three-day affair usually held at some place where National Advertisers could really unwind. When I was first sales Manager these events were held at places like Hobart (which had the Casino) Thredbo (cold enough in October to get the feel of the place) and Adelaide, where the excitement was limited, although I personally always enjoyed my visits there. Later, the Convention settled on Surfer's Paradise and stayed there throughout its years as the predominant advertising forum.
The advertisers used to enjoy the radio presentation. Clients friends would ask for weeks before the event if there was to be a radio presentation, and who it might be. At that time, the only name that received any recognition in Australia was that of Stan Freberg, who'd come here for Channel 7 in the early TV days, but still they came to the sessions.
Chuck Blore and Don Richman (was that his real name, or simply what he wanted to be?) were not just advertising writers and producers - they were show business. Chuck had been a radio program manager and Don was a writer and what was known as a "voice" - the kind of voice you often heard on commercial radio in the US, deep, gutsy and compelling.
They would stand on the platform and introduce their commercials with a short history - what the client wanted, what they considered he ought to have. The two viewpoints were usually poles apart. They would tell how they came up with the concept, how they made the sound effects - you name it, they had a story about it. They were great persuaders, who sent many an advertising man in search of a creative writer and producer in Australia.
Some of us knew the only real radio specialist in Australian advertising. His name was Street Remley, who had come to Adelaide from America to handle the Chrysler (car) account when manufacturing started in Australia. Street was based at Young and Rubicam Advertising, and their Adelaide branch was opened specifically to handle the Chrysler business, although it very soon took on other accounts.
After a time, Street decided to go it alone,. and opened his own creative business in Adelaide. "Why Adelaide?" he asked in his first ad which appeared in B&T (stands for Broadcasting and Television) which was in those days making the move from a straight magazine about media to one that covered marketing in all its aspects.
Street's question was rhetorical, so he gave the answer. "The talent is here" - and, he added, it's a nice part of the world to live in. He didn't make much of the fact that it was his own writing and producing skills that were going to make his name - it just happened to be true that Adelaide had a huge number of highly skilled actors and singers on whom he could draw for the characters he created for his clients.
I had never heard of Street, but the B&T ad compelled me to telephone him and offer any assistance. I realised that if his business prospered, so would we at 2UE. I didn't know it, but my old friend Bob Logie at Radio Advertising Bureau was talking to him too, and soon had him on a panel at the National Advertisers' Convention.
It wasn't long before Street took me up on my offer. When deadlines came up too quickly (that happened a lot) and the production had to be approved by a Sydney client in a hurry, Street would send the commercial up by landline to 2UE, and we would have it delivered on time to the paying customer. This went on for some time, there being a good reason for us to help - apart from the friendly association that Street and I had built up. Whenever a commercial was produced for use in Sydney, we would know about it and could make our submission before anyone else. It didn't get us all the business of course, but it didn't hurt us either.
As Sales Manager, I had more impact than when I was a common sales Executive. It was my habit to make contact with a number of prospective clients every week, and that's what took me into the Clarence Street headquarters of NRMA. They were starting to promote their Car Insurance business and I reckoned 2UE was a natural for them. Our breakfast announcer Gary O'Callaghan was "Mr Sydney" - his traffic information service, gathered at high speed from just about every obvious source and many not so obvious, was the one all the other stations copied from.
What better association for a Company that, at that time, specialised only in Car Insurance?
I invited myself in to see their Advertising Manager, and since I felt I'd be more likely to be well received if Gary O'Callaghan accompanied me, I invited him, too.
There wasn't any plan to use radio as far as I knew, but by the time the visit had ended, and Gary and I were invited to have lunch with him, I knew that they were at least interested. The problem was that while they were most impressed by their advertising agency, they didn't think they had much of a handle on radio. I thought I had the answer, and suggested they get in touch with Street.
Within a short time, Street gave them an idea which they used for more than ten years.
He created a competitor for NRMA Car Insurance. This one was a company run from the boot of a car by one Happy Joe Happy, who was always out to get the better of NRMA, but always failed to do so. It was the sort of approach that needed new material very regularly, so something like thirty new commercials were written and produced each year, with the NRMA people and their advertising agency travelling to Adelaide to supervise the recording and to enjoy Street's company.
It must have been a sad day when they decided that Happy Joe was ready for retirement.
I was right - we got a large slice of the advertising. But what I should have realised was that my friends Les Hay (who ran 2SM sales), Gene Mann (2GB Macquarie), and Owen Williams (at 2UW) would all be in search of the business as well.
As I write this, about thirty years after it all happened, I am happy to know that Company still uses a substantial radio component in its advertising mix, and that many more stations are involved.
I'm happy to recognise, too, that many of the commercials they produce still seem to carry the Street Remley trade mark. Or is it that Street has taken the role of trainer in a big way, and many of his pupils have adopted his style?
The whole thing whetted my appetite for more "creative" input, just as the Major Network decided to bring out two other American specialists on the recommendation of my boss, Brian McClennaughan. Brian had been on a business trip to Los Angeles and was told of these two people who were breaking new ground. In fact, they'd been breaking this new ground for some years and had just broken up their business partnership, but were prepared to put things back together again for an Australian tour.
After a wild taxi ride through Los Angeles into the Hollywood area, Brian got to meet John Staughan and Alan Barzman, better known as Barz.
John was the get-up-and-go salesman of the pair, while Barz was much more laid back - in fact, he was completely relaxed about just about everything.
They toured the mainland state capitals where national advertising was created and placed - Sydney and Melbourne, of course, and for good measure Brisbane and Adelaide. Their seminars might be called a sell-out; there was standing room only at each of the free presentations.
Like Blore and Richman, they took it in turns to present some of their best work, describing how it came into being, and in John's case, at least one which involved a court action, brought by a national hamburger chain because of John's campaign for a competitor in Anchorage, Alaska, in which the big chain was described as being run by a "clown" named Ronald McDonald. It was settled out of court, no doubt to the joint satisfaction of both parties, as the case was well covered by the news media (big stories were notoriously lacking in Anchorage, according to John).
Barz was well known to Street Remley who was full of admiration for his work. To demonstrate this regard, at the cocktail party which followed the Adelaide presentation, Street did a streak through the room to the unstinted applause of all.
Barz probably never wrote a "serious" commercial in his life. Each commercial he presented sent the audience into gales of laughter.
With Barz, you got all of him. He wrote the ads, and was the main performer in them, although he also used some of the best known names in American radio and television as additional voice talent.
One technique he used was the interview. A Barzman interview would be recorded ad lib, with the cast knowing only what the product was and what image was to be created.
The whole thing might run three quarters of a hour. Then he would sit down and cut it down to sixty seconds.
One of his interview commercials used a regular comic from the American Tonight Show. the product was a well-known fertiliser, and the tag-line (usually used to reinforce the advertising message in other commercials) had the comic saying "On a windy day I toss handfuls of the stuff into the air, and I know that wherever it lands it's gong to do some good".
Barz always named his commercials. That is, he would describe it in such a way that it couldn't later be confused with any others for the same client. One of these was set in a restaurant. It was called "The Wine Waiter".
It was a guessing game between the diner and the waiter, with the diner trying to figure out which wine it was, totally without success. After naming many famous wines, and the waiter (Barz) giving a laconic "Naw" to each of them, the desperate diner grabs at anything: "Root beer?" Naw. "Hot chocolate?" Naw. And just as the diner is about to throttle the waiter, he reveals the secret. "Vino de Table". The commercial ends with more questions from the waiter as to how he knew what the wine was. It was the red chequered tablecloth on the label. Naw. The red labelled checker on the label?. Naw.
Stalemate. So the voice over announcer just said the name of the product.
The demand for Barz and John to talk to advertisers direct was enormous, but they didn't have the time to spare. They had to go home and earn some money, because our offer was to give them a working holiday in Australia, all expenses paid.
The other stations in the Network were not much interested in having them come back, but 2UE was because we could see that we could introduce some new clients (or bring back some old ones) on the basis of the talents of these two people. We decided to set up a small production company in Sydney and have the duo come out and work on a range of Australian clients for three months to see how it went.
It became my job to line up these potential clients, since I had met most of them either at the seminars, or in my regular rounds. To cover the cost of the visit, we asked for a thousand dollars to be charged for the first meeting, which came off the price of the finished product if they accepted it. The price of the finished product, which might be one commercial or a series - depending on the concept - was in the range from $30,000 down to $10,000.
At the time, these were unheard of prices for radio production in Australia, with advertisers believing that radio was cheap to write and produce, that being the sales pitch that radio stations had been pushing ever since television came into being.
It was a bit of a change for me to have to go out and ask for real money, even though the only real commitment was for a thousand dollars, as the actual cost of the campaign could not be estimated accurately until the material had been written and recorded.
So about six months later, John and Barz came back to town.
2UE's Creative Director at the time, Jeff Bach, elected to work with them, and his first job was to find a place for them to live. He found a two bedroom unit at Mosman with a harbour view. John brought out his new wife, Linda; Alan was between marriages and was quite content to share the premises with the newly-marrieds.
We gave them a couple of days to settle in after the long air trip from Los Angeles, and to absorb the information about the twenty or more clients we'd lined up, then Jeff went out to the unit to pick them up for their first day's work in Australia. All was quite in the unit, but after Jeff's continuous knocking, Barz answered the door.
"I've been going to have a look at that stuff" said Barz as he led the way into the kitchen. "But I couldn't".
"Why's that?" asked Jeff.
"Well, look", said Barz, showing off the empty room. "There's no one to make the coffee".
The newly weds were nowhere to be seen.
Work started late that day.
There followed a month or so of visiting the clients with John and Barz in Sydney and Melbourne, and one out of town client in Newcastle. (Since 2UE was owned by a Newcastle family who also owned 2KO, that figured).
Jeff found himself being an accountant and paymaster, skills he had to learn quickly, for John and Barz were not skilled in finance matters. But when actors and musicians were employed by the new company, they wanted to be paid on the spot - and at the appropriate rates. But the enterprise prospered, with campaigns for Ford, the Dairy Corporation, the old-time cure-all Bonnington's Irish Miss, Norman Ross (a firm Allan Bond bought into thus allowing Gerry Harvey to start up Harvey Norman) and a lot more.
The Network was proud of us, and some other stations also shared in the media money generated by these commercials, for having paid what were seen to be horrendous amounts for these commercials, the clients had to get as much exposure for them as possible.
To round off the tour of duty, I thought it would be agood idea to run a seminar in Melbourne and Sydney, so creative people and their clients could hear what had actually been done.
I don't think either Allan or John thought much of the idea - they'd been working non-stop for three months, but John and his wife agreed to go to Melbourne, and Allan said he'd be happy to stick around for the Sydney event. So we allocated the last two days of their tour to these events.
The Melbourne event was a rollicking success. The commercials went down well indeed, and augured well for the second round which we were planning. And the Sydney even was even more successful.
What happened between the two presentations was less than satisfactory.
When we got back to Peter Anderson's office after the Melbourne people had heard the whole story, we discovered that there was an airline strike, and that we would not be able to get back to Sydney that evening - and the next day did not look all that hopeful either..
The Anderson machine went into action, and while we sipped coffee, Peter's people were looking for ways for us to get back to Sydney - the Sydney presentation could not go ahead without us - we had all the tapes.
They eventually got us on a train. The Spirit of Progress had added several extra carriages, and we were just lucky, I guess. At least that's what we thought.
A taxi deposited us at Spencer Street station early in the evening, and we quickly found our seats in an old-style carriage which had separate compartments leading off a hall running along the side of the carriage.
We had a travelling companion, who greeted us cheerfully, and then suggested that we could probably improve the shining hour with a drink. He produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and asked me if I'd mind getting two or three paper cups from the water cooler.
I looked at John and his wife. John didn't drink, nor did Linda, but they gave me the nod.
"Just one", said John.
Liberal nips were measured out by our new friend, and I'd taken the precaution of bringing two paper cups of water back to the seats, and we sat back.
"Cheers!" said our host, who promptly downed his drink in one gulp, and began to re-load the paper cup. "Cheers!" he said again.
When he discovered that we did not intend to join him drink for drink, the good humour disappeared, his face turned sour, and he huddled in the corner seat, pouring Johnny Walker into the paper cup and tossing it off, although the pace abated somewhat.
John got up from his seat, to see if he could find other seats, but he came back with a sad expression. ("It's packed like a sardine can", he ruefully observed).
By this time our companion had run out of Johnny Walker and had left unsteadily to see if he could find a bar. He did, and stayed there until it closed, and after. He confused the staff and to keep him quiet, as they thought, they allowed him to sit on a stool (though how he kept his balance was truly wonderful to see) in front of the closed bar, with a small bottle of whisky, some water, and a real tumbler.
He came back to his seat as we steamed into Albury in the middle of the night. As he was settling in, a young soldier came aboard, checked the seat number, dumped his gear on the luggage rack, and sat down next to our friend. This was too much for our drunk, who had thought he would have the two seats for the whole trip, and he proceeded to complain to the soldier, asking him if he'd checked his seat number carefully, then suggesting that he take a look along the carriage in case there was a better seat, and finally, as if in acceptance, asking whether he happened to have a drink on him.
This was too much for John and Linda. They left the carriage, explained to the conductor what the problem was, and got themselves seats which had mysteriously materialised in one of the first class carriages.
When the conductor came along to investigate the subject of John's problem, it was sound asleep, slouched over two seats, breathing heavily and snoring loudly but intermittently, so that just as you thought he'd stopped the snoring and you could get some sleep yourself, he'd start again.
The soldier was sitting in Linda's seat.
At six o'clock in the morning, the sleeping beauty arose, produced a razor from his luggage, dry-shaved himself carefully, changed his collar, brushed his jacket and trousers and behaved as if we were all friends together.
At Central Station, he was met by his driver, who took his bags and led the way along the platform, with our friend carrying a cane underneath his arm striding out confidently on his way to work.
Who was he? What did he do for a living that justified a personal driver?
John was of the opinion that he was a member of the legal profession, engaged in some sort of industrial negotiations. He'd deduced this from some of the ramblings of the man during the early part of the evening.
I have never tried to find out whether John's guess was right, so it's still one of life's little mysteries.
The idea of having a top-line radio writing and production organisation in Sydney was right, but it didn't last. Maybe it was John's experience on the Spirit of Progress, or the jet lag, or maybe the fact that American sponsors didn't argue so much about up-front fees; in any case the enterprise folded about six months later. Nothing quite like it has ever been established in Sydney since. Perhaps no other radio station was prepared to take the risk and finance such an idea the way 2UE did.
Some years later, I met up again with John Strahan and Alan Barzman in Los Angeles. John had transferred his wild enthusiasm into the making of commercial film documentaries, Alan was bigger than ever in radio commercials. Both of them remembered the "Australian caper" with a great deal of pleasure.
Chapter Thirty Eight
There was consternation in the station. The word had got around that Allan Faulkner, who had been General Manager since the station was bought from Associated Newspapers in 1957, was about to retire. He had a health warning, we all knew, and after a brief spell in hospital he came back, only to announce he'd decided to go off and do his own thing while there was still time.
We were all sorry he was going. He had built up the radio station, which was in something of a sorry plight when the Lamb family had bought it from Associated Newspapers. He had selected, or approved the appointment, of just about everyone on the staff, and he was quietly proud of his achievement.
(I remember many years later being at his bedside just a week or two before he died. In great good humour because he felt he was getting better, he said very loudly to Brian McClenaughan and me, and to Des Foster, who had worked with him at 2UE earlier: "What a great radio station it was in those days!!!" To which his wife gave voice to an enthusiastic impression of a trumpet voluntary).
Avidly we watched for the position to be advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald - and sure enough, it was. But not so you would notice it the first time around. You had to be on the inside to know what it was about, for there was no mention of 2UE, although it did say that the new incumbent would be given the opportunity of spending a lot of time with the former GM.
I was not a candidate of course. I didn't have the accountancy qualifications demanded; I knew the company was looking for new blood, and someone with a degree in business administration. The times they were a-changing, radio was going to be different. It would become more competitive, government interference would be more constant, new stations would be licensed. Some tough decisions were required, and perhaps the board felt that an outsider would be preferable to any of the old guard, including Brian McClenaughan, who might have been considered to be in the box seat.
But it was fun to watch, as I had with the applicants for the Sales Manager's role previously, as they came and went - mostly in the early mornings. I'd formed the habit of arriving early - it doesn't hurt when you're running a busy department in a company that lots of people would have liked to join. Les Hay had a description for it, loosely translated it meant protecting your backside.
So as I cleared my desk each day, I was able to watch the candidates as they walked back down the corridor and past my office, chatting with Stewart Lamb, who had rightly decided that he would see everyone on the short list and the decision would be his. After all, he had picked Allan Faulkner, and the 2UE bank account was evidence that he'd chosen well.
If I didn't have any idea who was going to be the winner when it all started, I was able to ring some of my colleagues late one afternoon and tell them the name of the new man. I was attending a function at an advertising agency (translate function as drinks and a sales pitch on the agency and its latest client) when someone I knew from Channel 7 sidled up to me.
"You've got the White Mouse", he told me.
I didn't have much idea what he was talking about, but he explained that the word was around Channel 7 that their Finance Director had just resigned to take up the 2UE role. He'd been at 7 for a reasonably short time, he told me, and they'd just "got him trained". The nickname, I found, referred to his voice, but I was to find it did not refer to his personality.
The man was right. Stan Willmott (two ls and two ts) turned up within the next few days and sat with Allan Faulkner for about a day and a half before he took over. During that time, he met all the executive staff and put us all through a short third degree, a process that was to continue for some time before he could bring himself to trust any of us. He made copious notes as my interview proceeded, and I fervently wished that I'd had the foresight to bring a notepad and pen with me, so I too could have a record of the conversation. I learned the lesson. From that day on, whenever I
was called into conference, I made notes. I think he appreciated that.
We all knew it was tough for him, but we didn't try to make it any easier for him either, especially when he gave us to understand that he was not impressed by what he'd found.
He emphasised this by the simple stratagem of giving us all a job to do, to show what we knew about our specialty - in my case, he asked me to go out and make a sale. Quite a reasonable challenge, I had to admit. He selected the category. He wanted me to sell a campaign to a swimming pool manufacturer, in late summer when they were all flat to the boards catching up on the pools they'd promised and when budgets were exhausted. Perhaps he knew all this. It was up to me to select the lucky prospect (or prospects, as he must have been convinced I'd have to make several attempts before finding a starter - if ever).
I selected the one that might have some budget left: Clark Pools. Their advertising department was located in Melbourne, but I knew there was a member of the Clark family handling the Sydney operation. I rang him and told him about a great idea I had and asked him to allow me to play a sample of what I had in mind.
Without much enthusiasm, Graham Clark agreed. He gave me some time the very next afternoon.
I'd spoken to Jeff Bach, our Creative Director, who'd come up with an idea for a commercial featuring a cheeky kid nagging her mother over the radio about a swimming pool. The ads started off "Hello Mum! It's me. On the radio. I want to talk to you about Clark Pools..."
"Where will you get the cheeky kid?" I asked him.
"You've got one", he told me.
He'd spoken to me at home a few days previously and Virginia had answered the phone. She had a cheeky chuckle that took Jeff's fancy.
So that night, I took a tape recorder home and had Virginia speak the lines, allowing her to break into laughter when it all got a bit too much.
Back at the station the next morning, Jeff took the tape into the recording room, edited it and came up with four versions of his idea. All of these went onto a cassette, and the client liked all four of them later that afternoon.
It was one of the easiest sales I'd ever made in my life.
It gave me much pleasure to leave a short message for Stan, saying that Clark Pools would start their campaign the following week, and also that the local manager had rung Melbourne to suggest they start on 3DB (our associate station in the Major Network) as soon as possible.
Stan was impressed, although he didn't say so. He came good. In addition to a small talent fee for the voice-over, which I organised, Stan bought a couple of picture books for Virginia, addressed them himself and posted them to her with a note in his own firm scribble.
The relationship between Stan and I immediately relaxed, just a little, but it remained for a long time at arm's length. It wasn't as if I was lonely - I had a lot of company among the other executives.
This situation might have been relieved had Ian Lucas, who was one of our salesmen, been kind enough to talk me out of an idea he and I had. The Christmas staff party was coming up, to be held as usual (but for the last time) at the Killara Golf Club, where Allan Faulkner had been President. The party was held on pay night, and always started well because the Company used to pay a Christmas bonus equal to a week's pay for each person who'd been there for twelve months or more. The Chairman would greet us all as we arrived, and then promptly and wisely, vanish for the night.
This was always a fine night out for all of the above reasons, and many more. One of these was the amazing amount of talent among the staff. If somebody wanted to perform an item - well, when it passed the critical eye of Sid Emerton (he was station censor among other things) you got a spot on the program. Ours did receive the nod, mainly because Sid felt it was a message that Stan ought to get.
It was at the time when an oil company, Golden Fleece, was using a character named Stanley in its television ads, and the concept had developed to the point where "Stop for a Stanley" had become a by-line. For lots of things. The concept, presumably, was that you "stopped for a Stanley" because the drive-way service at Golden Fleece service stations was so good. (Or was that the idea?)
Ian and I wrote a ditty based on the theme "Stop for a Stanley". Unfortunately the words have been lost to posterity so I can't remember them here. (It is highly unlikely that Stan himself made a note of them. He was caught by surprise like everyone else - we didn't reveal the concept to anyone just in case it got banned at the last moment). And Ian was having second thoughts about the whole thing, anyway.
With the help of Peter Anderson and the Melbourne advertising agency involved, we got a copy of the "Stop for a Stanley" banner, and in place of the photograph of TV's Stanley, we had an actual photograph of our Stanley, courtesy of his wife. She only had a snapshot, so we had the company's printer do an enlargement to fit the space on the banner, and I must say it looked very nice, especially since Stan was smiling, something many of us had rarely seen.
Stan did not comment.
He simply got on with the job of changing the station, making it more efficient in its office routines, and in particular in the accounts department. This affected me because he figured I should be able to make an educated guess at the start of each financial year, as to how much money we amass in the next twelve months. I'd done this as a guesstimate for some time, but Stan wanted it to be accurate. I worked on it for a number of years without gaining the degree of accuracy he wanted, and gradually he got tired of asking.
Revenue built up, and the station was poised to expand.
One of the first moves was to establish a representation company in Sydney to provide professional service to interstate and country radio stations. There were a number of excellent such organisations in Sydney, but I believed there was room for one more. In the end, I took a proposal to Stan that 2UE should purchase a long-established company and mould it to our style of doing business.
Already we were representing 2KO Newcastle in Sydney through the Sales Department where we had Jack Gleeson (the 2KO "expert") and a new recruit named Jock Kelso who took over Jack's mantle. I was also the representative for a new station, 2CC Canberra. The General Manager of 2CC was Nick Erby, who'd come to 2UE as Assistant program Manager and eventually program Manager before the job at Canberra's first new radio station in more than forty years was offered to him.
Nick had wanted me to represent the station, which meant that 2UE had to be the official representative, since 2UE didn't want me moonlighting when I should have been looking after the Company's business. So Nick signed a contract with 2UE, but in all his trade advertising, he gave my name as the representative, with the 2UE phone number.
Stan signed the agreement - he went to Canberra especially for the purpose. There, the Chairman of the new station told him how impressed he was with my style, and this so impressed Stan that he remembered it without making a note, and was kind enough to mention it to me in passing when he got back.
"I dunno where he got the idea you were so good", he murmured in passing. Stan was always honest in his appraisals.
So we had two stations to blend into the representation company we were buying from a gentleman named Peter Halse. Peter was retiring, and the offer came at the right time.
I discovered this when I was talking to one of my old Lismore mates, Dick McLaren, who had given up being called "Trigger" as I'd given up the "Buck Hawkins" name. Dick was now a senior sales representative for Peter Halse and Associates. His boss was Norman Taylor, who'd been around for years in Sydney representation and before that in the motion picture business. I'd had a lot to do with Norman over the years.
2UE was to maintain its own sales department, which, among other things, meant that the new company, titled Central Media Sales, would be on its own and would therefore be able to seek clients from stations which were in competition with Major Network Stations in other cities.
Dick and Norman were both anxious for 2UE to take over, and retain the company as it was. That's what we did, except that Jock Kelso joined the team and worked on business for 2KO, and a bright new bloke, Mike Whiteman, also joined the new company. I wondered where Norm had got him from and would have liked to have had him on the 2UE team, but it didn't seem right to try to steal staff from Central Media Sales - especially since both Norm and I answered to Stan.
Meanwhile, other things were happening.
Sitting in Stan's office one morning, I heard him take a phone call. Well, what I heard was his comment to his secretary "Tell Gerard I'm always happy to take his calls" before he asked me to excuse him for half an hour or so.
I went back to my office, quite convinced that he was talking to Gerard McCauley, who headed up a small country network. But why would he do that?
The answer was obvious. Stan didn't waste time on things that weren't productive. It seemed that he had made an offer for the company that owned three of my very early stations - 2KA, 2KM, and 2LT - as well as 2LF.
We were all sorry he was going. He had built up the radio station, which was in something of a sorry plight when the Lamb family had bought it from Associated Newspapers. He had selected, or approved the appointment, of just about everyone on the staff, and he was quietly proud of his achievement.
(I remember many years later being at his bedside just a week or two before he died. In great good humour because he felt he was getting better, he said very loudly to Brian McClenaughan and me, and to Des Foster, who had worked with him at 2UE earlier: "What a great radio station it was in those days!!!" To which his wife gave voice to an enthusiastic impression of a trumpet voluntary).
Avidly we watched for the position to be advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald - and sure enough, it was. But not so you would notice it the first time around. You had to be on the inside to know what it was about, for there was no mention of 2UE, although it did say that the new incumbent would be given the opportunity of spending a lot of time with the former GM.
I was not a candidate of course. I didn't have the accountancy qualifications demanded; I knew the company was looking for new blood, and someone with a degree in business administration. The times they were a-changing, radio was going to be different. It would become more competitive, government interference would be more constant, new stations would be licensed. Some tough decisions were required, and perhaps the board felt that an outsider would be preferable to any of the old guard, including Brian McClenaughan, who might have been considered to be in the box seat.
But it was fun to watch, as I had with the applicants for the Sales Manager's role previously, as they came and went - mostly in the early mornings. I'd formed the habit of arriving early - it doesn't hurt when you're running a busy department in a company that lots of people would have liked to join. Les Hay had a description for it, loosely translated it meant protecting your backside.
So as I cleared my desk each day, I was able to watch the candidates as they walked back down the corridor and past my office, chatting with Stewart Lamb, who had rightly decided that he would see everyone on the short list and the decision would be his. After all, he had picked Allan Faulkner, and the 2UE bank account was evidence that he'd chosen well.
If I didn't have any idea who was going to be the winner when it all started, I was able to ring some of my colleagues late one afternoon and tell them the name of the new man. I was attending a function at an advertising agency (translate function as drinks and a sales pitch on the agency and its latest client) when someone I knew from Channel 7 sidled up to me.
"You've got the White Mouse", he told me.
I didn't have much idea what he was talking about, but he explained that the word was around Channel 7 that their Finance Director had just resigned to take up the 2UE role. He'd been at 7 for a reasonably short time, he told me, and they'd just "got him trained". The nickname, I found, referred to his voice, but I was to find it did not refer to his personality.
The man was right. Stan Willmott (two ls and two ts) turned up within the next few days and sat with Allan Faulkner for about a day and a half before he took over. During that time, he met all the executive staff and put us all through a short third degree, a process that was to continue for some time before he could bring himself to trust any of us. He made copious notes as my interview proceeded, and I fervently wished that I'd had the foresight to bring a notepad and pen with me, so I too could have a record of the conversation. I learned the lesson. From that day on, whenever I
was called into conference, I made notes. I think he appreciated that.
We all knew it was tough for him, but we didn't try to make it any easier for him either, especially when he gave us to understand that he was not impressed by what he'd found.
He emphasised this by the simple stratagem of giving us all a job to do, to show what we knew about our specialty - in my case, he asked me to go out and make a sale. Quite a reasonable challenge, I had to admit. He selected the category. He wanted me to sell a campaign to a swimming pool manufacturer, in late summer when they were all flat to the boards catching up on the pools they'd promised and when budgets were exhausted. Perhaps he knew all this. It was up to me to select the lucky prospect (or prospects, as he must have been convinced I'd have to make several attempts before finding a starter - if ever).
I selected the one that might have some budget left: Clark Pools. Their advertising department was located in Melbourne, but I knew there was a member of the Clark family handling the Sydney operation. I rang him and told him about a great idea I had and asked him to allow me to play a sample of what I had in mind.
Without much enthusiasm, Graham Clark agreed. He gave me some time the very next afternoon.
I'd spoken to Jeff Bach, our Creative Director, who'd come up with an idea for a commercial featuring a cheeky kid nagging her mother over the radio about a swimming pool. The ads started off "Hello Mum! It's me. On the radio. I want to talk to you about Clark Pools..."
"Where will you get the cheeky kid?" I asked him.
"You've got one", he told me.
He'd spoken to me at home a few days previously and Virginia had answered the phone. She had a cheeky chuckle that took Jeff's fancy.
So that night, I took a tape recorder home and had Virginia speak the lines, allowing her to break into laughter when it all got a bit too much.
Back at the station the next morning, Jeff took the tape into the recording room, edited it and came up with four versions of his idea. All of these went onto a cassette, and the client liked all four of them later that afternoon.
It was one of the easiest sales I'd ever made in my life.
It gave me much pleasure to leave a short message for Stan, saying that Clark Pools would start their campaign the following week, and also that the local manager had rung Melbourne to suggest they start on 3DB (our associate station in the Major Network) as soon as possible.
Stan was impressed, although he didn't say so. He came good. In addition to a small talent fee for the voice-over, which I organised, Stan bought a couple of picture books for Virginia, addressed them himself and posted them to her with a note in his own firm scribble.
The relationship between Stan and I immediately relaxed, just a little, but it remained for a long time at arm's length. It wasn't as if I was lonely - I had a lot of company among the other executives.
This situation might have been relieved had Ian Lucas, who was one of our salesmen, been kind enough to talk me out of an idea he and I had. The Christmas staff party was coming up, to be held as usual (but for the last time) at the Killara Golf Club, where Allan Faulkner had been President. The party was held on pay night, and always started well because the Company used to pay a Christmas bonus equal to a week's pay for each person who'd been there for twelve months or more. The Chairman would greet us all as we arrived, and then promptly and wisely, vanish for the night.
This was always a fine night out for all of the above reasons, and many more. One of these was the amazing amount of talent among the staff. If somebody wanted to perform an item - well, when it passed the critical eye of Sid Emerton (he was station censor among other things) you got a spot on the program. Ours did receive the nod, mainly because Sid felt it was a message that Stan ought to get.
It was at the time when an oil company, Golden Fleece, was using a character named Stanley in its television ads, and the concept had developed to the point where "Stop for a Stanley" had become a by-line. For lots of things. The concept, presumably, was that you "stopped for a Stanley" because the drive-way service at Golden Fleece service stations was so good. (Or was that the idea?)
Ian and I wrote a ditty based on the theme "Stop for a Stanley". Unfortunately the words have been lost to posterity so I can't remember them here. (It is highly unlikely that Stan himself made a note of them. He was caught by surprise like everyone else - we didn't reveal the concept to anyone just in case it got banned at the last moment). And Ian was having second thoughts about the whole thing, anyway.
With the help of Peter Anderson and the Melbourne advertising agency involved, we got a copy of the "Stop for a Stanley" banner, and in place of the photograph of TV's Stanley, we had an actual photograph of our Stanley, courtesy of his wife. She only had a snapshot, so we had the company's printer do an enlargement to fit the space on the banner, and I must say it looked very nice, especially since Stan was smiling, something many of us had rarely seen.
Stan did not comment.
He simply got on with the job of changing the station, making it more efficient in its office routines, and in particular in the accounts department. This affected me because he figured I should be able to make an educated guess at the start of each financial year, as to how much money we amass in the next twelve months. I'd done this as a guesstimate for some time, but Stan wanted it to be accurate. I worked on it for a number of years without gaining the degree of accuracy he wanted, and gradually he got tired of asking.
Revenue built up, and the station was poised to expand.
One of the first moves was to establish a representation company in Sydney to provide professional service to interstate and country radio stations. There were a number of excellent such organisations in Sydney, but I believed there was room for one more. In the end, I took a proposal to Stan that 2UE should purchase a long-established company and mould it to our style of doing business.
Already we were representing 2KO Newcastle in Sydney through the Sales Department where we had Jack Gleeson (the 2KO "expert") and a new recruit named Jock Kelso who took over Jack's mantle. I was also the representative for a new station, 2CC Canberra. The General Manager of 2CC was Nick Erby, who'd come to 2UE as Assistant program Manager and eventually program Manager before the job at Canberra's first new radio station in more than forty years was offered to him.
Nick had wanted me to represent the station, which meant that 2UE had to be the official representative, since 2UE didn't want me moonlighting when I should have been looking after the Company's business. So Nick signed a contract with 2UE, but in all his trade advertising, he gave my name as the representative, with the 2UE phone number.
Stan signed the agreement - he went to Canberra especially for the purpose. There, the Chairman of the new station told him how impressed he was with my style, and this so impressed Stan that he remembered it without making a note, and was kind enough to mention it to me in passing when he got back.
"I dunno where he got the idea you were so good", he murmured in passing. Stan was always honest in his appraisals.
So we had two stations to blend into the representation company we were buying from a gentleman named Peter Halse. Peter was retiring, and the offer came at the right time.
I discovered this when I was talking to one of my old Lismore mates, Dick McLaren, who had given up being called "Trigger" as I'd given up the "Buck Hawkins" name. Dick was now a senior sales representative for Peter Halse and Associates. His boss was Norman Taylor, who'd been around for years in Sydney representation and before that in the motion picture business. I'd had a lot to do with Norman over the years.
2UE was to maintain its own sales department, which, among other things, meant that the new company, titled Central Media Sales, would be on its own and would therefore be able to seek clients from stations which were in competition with Major Network Stations in other cities.
Dick and Norman were both anxious for 2UE to take over, and retain the company as it was. That's what we did, except that Jock Kelso joined the team and worked on business for 2KO, and a bright new bloke, Mike Whiteman, also joined the new company. I wondered where Norm had got him from and would have liked to have had him on the 2UE team, but it didn't seem right to try to steal staff from Central Media Sales - especially since both Norm and I answered to Stan.
Meanwhile, other things were happening.
Sitting in Stan's office one morning, I heard him take a phone call. Well, what I heard was his comment to his secretary "Tell Gerard I'm always happy to take his calls" before he asked me to excuse him for half an hour or so.
I went back to my office, quite convinced that he was talking to Gerard McCauley, who headed up a small country network. But why would he do that?
The answer was obvious. Stan didn't waste time on things that weren't productive. It seemed that he had made an offer for the company that owned three of my very early stations - 2KA, 2KM, and 2LT - as well as 2LF.
Chapter Thirty Nine
Within a few weeks I found myself sitting on a plane. I had become used to travelling by air to Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane as part of my Sales Manager's "beat", working with Peter Anderson in Melbourne, Ray Cant in Adelaide and Bede Williams in Brisbane. These people represented the Major Network as an Australia-wide network (2UE Sydney, 3DB Melbourne, 4BK Brisbane, 5AD Adelaide, 6PR Perth, 7HT Hobart, 7EX Launceston, 2KO Newcastle and regional stations in South Australia and Western Australia. It sounded grander than it actually was, for with the exception of 5AD and 2KO, none of them had the ratings achievements that 2UE could boast about.
The Company sent you first class, so you got used to the best.
But here I was, with my new title "Marketing Manager", sitting on a Fokker Friendship which seemed to be bouncing all over the sky, heading for Port Macquarie, and in the only class there was.
2UE had bought the Macauley stations (in earlier times two of them were known as the "Jack Lang" stations, for the former NSW Labor Premier was believed to have owned them through the Macauley company).
There were four of them. 2KM Kempsey, with studios in Port Macquarie as well as Kempsey and Coffs Harbour, 2KA Katoomba (but based in Penrith at the foot of the Blue Mountains - there was not even an office in Katoomba, unless you counted the real estate company that sometimes provided a room for meetings with local authorities) 2LF Young and 2LT Lithgow. Four was the most you could own in any one state, so 2UE was going to have to dispose of two of them. They did: 2LF went before anyone even mentioned Jack Robinson, and 2LT went a few weeks later to John McEvoy.
I had known about the purchase as soon as Stan had concluded his negotiations as there was a need for me to assure him of the likely revenue 2UE would receive by the time the contract had to be signed. Other investments were not going to be touched, it seemed - the money would come out of 2UE's income. But I wasn't to speak of it - although I was sorely tempted.
Geoff Horsnell had joined the 2UE Sales Department, where Chris Maitland was now Sales Manager, some twelve months previously. He had come from 2KM Kempsey. Suddenly he announced that he was going back to Kempsey, where he had been offered the position of Station Manager. This was a reminder to me of my return to 2LM some twenty five years previously with the thought that I would gain management experience.
We all found ourselves at the North Sydney Club the night Geoff left, and after several drinks, we all had a say about Geoff and his move. I contented myself with the comment that I felt that "someday, sooner or later, Geoff would find himself working for the Broadcast Investments Group" - my title had become Marketing Manager, Broadcast Investments Pty Ltd.
Geoff looked at me with horror.
"No way", he said.
He walked into 2KM to take his new position on the Monday morning, and Jeff Condron, manager for the four Macauley stations who had decided to take the 2KM managership when he heard of the takeover, called Jeff into his office.
"Geoff. The place has been sold", he said. "You're working for Broadcast Investments".
And here I was on my way to 2KM to meet up with him again, and all the rest of the team. Waiting at the country airport was John Lamb, named after his grandfather who founded the dynasty. John had recently joined the company and he faced the problem of being one of the family coming into the family business, but he soon overcame that. He was a most likeable young man who called dinner "tea", but someone who could talk finance with anyone.
John had taken over responsibility for these new acquisitions, 2KM and 2KA. He'd driven up a few days previously and presumably had been looking at the books and sorting out the systems.
The plan was to visit all three locations (Port Macquarie, Kempsey and Coffs Harbour).
It had been some years since I'd seen the inside of a country radio station, but the environment had not changed. The equipment looked old (it was). The soundproofing was of a token kind, and the organisation seemed to have dispensed with the need to employ a cleaner. I recalled my earlier time at 2KM, back in 1942, when cleaning the place was the duty of the breakfast announcer, to be done while the morning news was on.
A quick visit to the Port Macquarie studio, up two flights of stairs in one of the town's high-rise buildings (three stories), to meet the staff of three - the studio manager (who handled sales) an announcer and an office assistant. The two male staff members were to join us in Kempsey for a meeting later in the afternoon.
In the car as we drove to Kempsey (a short trip) I commented to John that two young men seemed very dedicated and "good types". I was to find that what had changed in country radio was that the people now being employed had a sense of professionalism and took their jobs very seriously. When I'd started in radio the stations would be likely to give anyone a go, and it was a matter of the survival of the fittest. Judging by our first get-together, that had changed.
It was quite a surprise to find that Port Macquarie was a major contributor to 2KM's revenue, although it should not have been. As we drove across the bridge over the Macleay River, I saw that Kempsey had changed very little, if at all, in the time since I left there during my first years in radio.
The location of the radio station had changed. It was now in West Kempsey. There was an entrance, and a big sign that said 2KM. This was a great change.
True, as we stepped into the hall, Geoff Condron warned me that there was a hole in the floor, covered by the threadbare carpet.
"We lost a coupler of announcers down that hole", he said.
The big surprise for me was to find that there was a production room with what was for those times, some very sophisticated equipment. Commercials were produced there, and sent by landline to the studio which would be playing it. This meant that the station could afford to employ a person with production skills because there was plenty of work on hand.
It was good to meet Geoff Horsnell again, even though he had not forgiven me for not letting him on the secret which I obviously had when we farewelled him from 2UE.
"Well, gentlemen" said Jeff Condron. "In this meeting we'll talk about sales and how to get better figures, but before we do so, I'd like our two visitors to know how we do things in this neck of the woods. Has anyone any questions on any subject?"
The was silence for a moment, and then someone asked when the station was gong to buy the promised new equipment for Port Macquarie.
Geoff fixed him with a baleful stare. "Today is Thursday", he said. "As a matter of policy, we never buy anything on a Thursday. Or", he added, "on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays....."
The meeting finished at around 4.30 to allow the Coffs Harbour people time to get home before sunset. It was a good two hour drive.
The rest of us were invited to have a "get to know you" drink. It so happened that 2KM's office was right next door to one of the West Kempsey pubs, something which I think would have impressed my old friend and manager Rex Morrisby no end.
Jeff Condron had booked John Lamb and me into a motel in the centre of town. It was a single story building, spread out over a couple of acres, and had, according to Jeff, the best dining room in town. Unfortunately, when we got there, having gotten to know not only the station's staff, but also most of the local inhabitants, the dining room had closed and the staff were in the final stages of clearing up.
"Tell you what", said the proprietor. "You fellers go into the dining room, help yourselves to a beer, and I'll go find some prawns".
He did, too. King Prawns in great numbers.
The first day at 2KM ended on a very satisfactory note although the drive to Coffs Harbour the next morning was somewhat of a trial. It seemed that all of us had eaten too many prawns. It could not have been the drinks.
The Company sent you first class, so you got used to the best.
But here I was, with my new title "Marketing Manager", sitting on a Fokker Friendship which seemed to be bouncing all over the sky, heading for Port Macquarie, and in the only class there was.
2UE had bought the Macauley stations (in earlier times two of them were known as the "Jack Lang" stations, for the former NSW Labor Premier was believed to have owned them through the Macauley company).
There were four of them. 2KM Kempsey, with studios in Port Macquarie as well as Kempsey and Coffs Harbour, 2KA Katoomba (but based in Penrith at the foot of the Blue Mountains - there was not even an office in Katoomba, unless you counted the real estate company that sometimes provided a room for meetings with local authorities) 2LF Young and 2LT Lithgow. Four was the most you could own in any one state, so 2UE was going to have to dispose of two of them. They did: 2LF went before anyone even mentioned Jack Robinson, and 2LT went a few weeks later to John McEvoy.
I had known about the purchase as soon as Stan had concluded his negotiations as there was a need for me to assure him of the likely revenue 2UE would receive by the time the contract had to be signed. Other investments were not going to be touched, it seemed - the money would come out of 2UE's income. But I wasn't to speak of it - although I was sorely tempted.
Geoff Horsnell had joined the 2UE Sales Department, where Chris Maitland was now Sales Manager, some twelve months previously. He had come from 2KM Kempsey. Suddenly he announced that he was going back to Kempsey, where he had been offered the position of Station Manager. This was a reminder to me of my return to 2LM some twenty five years previously with the thought that I would gain management experience.
We all found ourselves at the North Sydney Club the night Geoff left, and after several drinks, we all had a say about Geoff and his move. I contented myself with the comment that I felt that "someday, sooner or later, Geoff would find himself working for the Broadcast Investments Group" - my title had become Marketing Manager, Broadcast Investments Pty Ltd.
Geoff looked at me with horror.
"No way", he said.
He walked into 2KM to take his new position on the Monday morning, and Jeff Condron, manager for the four Macauley stations who had decided to take the 2KM managership when he heard of the takeover, called Jeff into his office.
"Geoff. The place has been sold", he said. "You're working for Broadcast Investments".
And here I was on my way to 2KM to meet up with him again, and all the rest of the team. Waiting at the country airport was John Lamb, named after his grandfather who founded the dynasty. John had recently joined the company and he faced the problem of being one of the family coming into the family business, but he soon overcame that. He was a most likeable young man who called dinner "tea", but someone who could talk finance with anyone.
John had taken over responsibility for these new acquisitions, 2KM and 2KA. He'd driven up a few days previously and presumably had been looking at the books and sorting out the systems.
The plan was to visit all three locations (Port Macquarie, Kempsey and Coffs Harbour).
It had been some years since I'd seen the inside of a country radio station, but the environment had not changed. The equipment looked old (it was). The soundproofing was of a token kind, and the organisation seemed to have dispensed with the need to employ a cleaner. I recalled my earlier time at 2KM, back in 1942, when cleaning the place was the duty of the breakfast announcer, to be done while the morning news was on.
A quick visit to the Port Macquarie studio, up two flights of stairs in one of the town's high-rise buildings (three stories), to meet the staff of three - the studio manager (who handled sales) an announcer and an office assistant. The two male staff members were to join us in Kempsey for a meeting later in the afternoon.
In the car as we drove to Kempsey (a short trip) I commented to John that two young men seemed very dedicated and "good types". I was to find that what had changed in country radio was that the people now being employed had a sense of professionalism and took their jobs very seriously. When I'd started in radio the stations would be likely to give anyone a go, and it was a matter of the survival of the fittest. Judging by our first get-together, that had changed.
It was quite a surprise to find that Port Macquarie was a major contributor to 2KM's revenue, although it should not have been. As we drove across the bridge over the Macleay River, I saw that Kempsey had changed very little, if at all, in the time since I left there during my first years in radio.
The location of the radio station had changed. It was now in West Kempsey. There was an entrance, and a big sign that said 2KM. This was a great change.
True, as we stepped into the hall, Geoff Condron warned me that there was a hole in the floor, covered by the threadbare carpet.
"We lost a coupler of announcers down that hole", he said.
The big surprise for me was to find that there was a production room with what was for those times, some very sophisticated equipment. Commercials were produced there, and sent by landline to the studio which would be playing it. This meant that the station could afford to employ a person with production skills because there was plenty of work on hand.
It was good to meet Geoff Horsnell again, even though he had not forgiven me for not letting him on the secret which I obviously had when we farewelled him from 2UE.
"Well, gentlemen" said Jeff Condron. "In this meeting we'll talk about sales and how to get better figures, but before we do so, I'd like our two visitors to know how we do things in this neck of the woods. Has anyone any questions on any subject?"
The was silence for a moment, and then someone asked when the station was gong to buy the promised new equipment for Port Macquarie.
Geoff fixed him with a baleful stare. "Today is Thursday", he said. "As a matter of policy, we never buy anything on a Thursday. Or", he added, "on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays....."
The meeting finished at around 4.30 to allow the Coffs Harbour people time to get home before sunset. It was a good two hour drive.
The rest of us were invited to have a "get to know you" drink. It so happened that 2KM's office was right next door to one of the West Kempsey pubs, something which I think would have impressed my old friend and manager Rex Morrisby no end.
Jeff Condron had booked John Lamb and me into a motel in the centre of town. It was a single story building, spread out over a couple of acres, and had, according to Jeff, the best dining room in town. Unfortunately, when we got there, having gotten to know not only the station's staff, but also most of the local inhabitants, the dining room had closed and the staff were in the final stages of clearing up.
"Tell you what", said the proprietor. "You fellers go into the dining room, help yourselves to a beer, and I'll go find some prawns".
He did, too. King Prawns in great numbers.
The first day at 2KM ended on a very satisfactory note although the drive to Coffs Harbour the next morning was somewhat of a trial. It seemed that all of us had eaten too many prawns. It could not have been the drinks.
Chapter Forty
The drive to Penrith from home was twice as long as the drive to North Sydney, where 2UE was based, but in fact took half as much time because I didn't have to travel through the city.
2KA had changed since 1942, when all it owned was a transmitting station, with all the programming originating from 2GZ's Sydney studios in Hosking Place.
Now it had its own studio set-up, though not in Katoomba, but in downtown Penrith. There was a good reason for this.
In a battle to survive, against the competition of Sydney commercial stations all of which put a good signal into the Blue Mountains, 2KA applied for what was known as a translator licence. This meant that they could provide a "local" service to an area in their coverage which did not receive a satisfactory signal from the main transmitter. While that could have been said about a number of places, it was certainly true of Penrith. The 1,000 watts coming from the main transmitter at Wentworth Falls was certainly hard to listen to in Penrith.
The case for this translator station became solid the moment the station decided to cover all the matches played by the local Rugby League team - the Panthers. They had been lucky enough to find a caller named Frank Lee, who was a headmaster at one of the Blue Mountains schools and who had some real skills in calling the game.
This local support made it relatively easy for the station to set up a local transmitter. The equipment, and the transmitting mast, were located within the grounds of the local prison farm. When anything went wrong with that transmitter, the engineer would take off advising that if anyone wanted him, he'd gone to jail.
That transmitter was approved to operate on 500 watts, but was capable of sending out a much stronger signal than that would suggest, and at times it did - until the broadcasting authorities started asking questions.
The only times I'd ever been in Penrith over the years it had been either horrendously hot or chilling cold, and I was now about to prove that what I remembered about Penrith was absolutely was correct.
While 2KM operated at a profit, 2KA didn't. 2KA existed perhaps because of sentimental reasons on the part of the owners, who allowed 2KM's profits to keep 2KA running.
This had brought about some strange practices - one of which was the use of a private bag which was sent by rail to Penrith instead of using the postal service. For example, if there was a tape recording or schedules to be sent to the station from Crows Nest, where the headquarters were established (some thought, appropriately in the offices of Labor Motor Funerals) that material would await something more important before it was sent. This sometimes resulted in the wages failing to arrive on the due date, a regular cause of some concern to the staff.
I went out to 2KA to have a look around and see what needed to be done.
The first thing I did was to announce that wages would be paid when they were due. This made 2UE a very popular new employer.
The major problem was that the wages being paid amounted to more than the revenue the station was getting, and wages were only a fraction of the total costs. This was something that had to be addressed very quickly. There was a small sales staff and considering the fact that the station had a very small audience due to its confused programming policies they had done remarkably well.
In its past history it had been the station that carried all the greyhound racing descriptions; it had been a country music station; it had been programmed for a while by Rod Muir's Diagamae Company which set it rockin' along until one of its directors had happened to tune in and disliked what he heard (or perhaps Rod realised that 2KA was a terminal case and resigned the business). It had tried to be all things to all people; it had tried to specialise. But nothing worked.
Stan reckoned that we needed someone there who could "crash through", and he selected the then 2UE promotions manager and former news editor, Greg Grainger. Greg took to the job with real enthusiasm, even renting out his north shore home and buying a house on the mountains, ten minutes drive from Penrith.
As part of this plan, I was to spend as much time as possible at 2KA each month, especially working with the sales staff to increase the revenue base.
Now I was working on a budget for 2KA sales, a little way down the scale of 2UE's, and trying to encourage the sales team to go out with confidence and talk to potential advertisers throughout the district. I'd been impressed with the way in which 2KM could get business from local traders but I also realised that the competitive situation at Kempsey was completely different.
Each Sales Meeting started off with some instruction in basic sales techniques and we would set out a plan for the week ahead using the old concept of "making something happen" every day. As the sales team began to see their station in a positive light the sales figures gradually started to rise.
Meanwhile, in Kempsey, a decision was taken to move the radio station from Kempsey itself and to build new studios in Port Macquarie, and the marketing concept included a change of call sign for 2KM. For some time, the station had been calling itself "Mid Coast Radio" on a regular basis, without overdoing it. Now we decided to drop the call sign of 2KM, except for specific times of day, and simply use Mid Coast Radio as our call sign.
Eventually we were to call the station 2MC, and we made the change and the move without losing much support at all from the Kempsey people. In fact, the transmitting station was located on the outskirts of Kempsey, so there was no change to the service area at all. And the transmitter put out a superb signal up and down the North Coast.
The contrast between 2KA and 2KM was quite dramatic.
I was visiting the North Coast for two or three days a month. We had a survey conducted which demonstrated that the station had a very big audience, and that most of them were intensely loyal to 2KM. Jeff Condon knew an artist who specialised in "pop art" and he put together a very different "coverage map" of the Mid Coast. It was spectacular with its glaring colours. It looked like something you might see in a tourist guide book, and it got the attention of the media buyers. It took a little time, but in the end we were able to respectably increase the revenue to 2KM locally, and also from the national point of view.
Then I had the idea of getting a jingle made. Not quite sure what we could do that would be different, I spoke to Keith Pottger - the Seekers had broken up and he was in the jingle business for the time being. The theme was "This is where we live" and it was something like a National Anthem (Seekers style) for the area. Greg Grainger liked it so much that Keith did a version of it for 2KA's use.
There were sponsors seminars in both areas - and in the case of 2KM, we had to cover three main centres which meant at least three days out of my week. There's no doubt I enjoyed this part of the job although it entailed early starts and late nights, but something told me I should look around and do something else before I got much older.
In the time I'd worked with 2UE I had had several approaches from other organisations, most of them not worth even considering. I was once offered a position with a small advertising agency to help them develop new business. Unfortunately it was not an agency that was strong in radio, and I let the opportunity go by.
Another station had suggested I might like to set up a business developing concepts for audiences in the 25-39 age group, and while I thought the idea had some merit (especially since they would employ me to get it started) I took it quite seriously for a while.
I'd also almost moved from 2UE to CBN Radio Sales. They were looking for a new general manager, and I'd been approached at an industry function by Gordon Lewis who was ending his radio career overseeing the Commonwealth Broadcasting Network for 2UW. This one interested me for several reasons - one was that I had a good association with Frank Jeffcoat, 2UW's station manager and I felt we would get along together. Another was that it offered a company car (2UE company cars ended at the station manager level at that time), and still further, they had a much better superannuation scheme than we had. This job entailed taking over the operation of a representation company that was highly respected and successful, looking after a large number of radio stations in Australia and Radio New Zealand commercial stations as well.
I was still very loyal to 2UE but Gordon kept asking me to take it seriously, and so I did.
I let Stan Willmott know what was in my mind. He didn't think it was much of a job, so he said, and asked me to consider what I'd be giving up. The Chairman of 2UE came into my office and reminded me that the Company policy was not to provide cars to anyone below the standing of station manager, as it became too difficult to manage.
I promised I'd give CBN a quick answer at that point, and was about to tell them I'd go over when Stan Willmott rang me and asked me what sort of car I wanted.
He'd also changed the superannuation scheme.
His sales ability had not been evident up until this time, but by then I knew that he must know something about selling. How did he sway the Chairman?
I stayed.
That was close, but the closest was when Sid Emerton, who'd left 2UE and was working as a consultant helping to build new radio stations, and re-build old ones, asked me if I'd like to go to lunch at Parliament House in Sydney. I told him that sounded like a good idea, but wondered why. He told me that a director of one of the applicant companies for the new so-called "western suburbs radio station" was interested in having a talk.
The director was Pat Hills, former Premier and still a member of parliament, who had set up a company with some other influential people. He wanted theirs to be the very best application in terms of the way it was presented and also by way of showing that everything was in place to start up quickly should they get the licence. Sid had suggested that I be General Manager, and he was prepared to take over the technical side.
I promised to think about it, and had several talks with Sid about it and eventually agreed that if the licence was granted to them, I would join the company.
The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, as it was in those days, conducted a hearing. I didn't attend but several of the directors would ring me during the course of the hearing to tell me what had happened and to get answers to questions. During one session, the Chairman of the hearing, Ken Archer (a former 2UW and CBN General Manager) asked if they had selected a General Manager, and the applicant wrote my name on a sheet of paper and handed it to him in confidence. He apparently nodded his satisfaction (or otherwise) and the hearing continued.
But that raised the question in the radio fraternity - who was this mysterious general Manager - and eventually someone surmised that it was me. The word got around at a Sydney Time Club luncheon. I had attended it but had left early (not my usual custom) and my friend Norman Taylor rang me. "Is it you?" he asked. "And if it is, we want to be your Sydney representative".
I didn't want 2UE to find out on the grapevine, so I told Stan what was happening.
I think he was somewhat nonplussed by this event because he made no special comment that I can remember.
About half an hour after I'd told Stan, the Chairman made his appearance in my office. Unusually for him, he sat down - normally he would breeze in and out without using the furniture - and asked me if it was true that I'd been offered this job. I told him it was.
He explained that it would be no picnic starting up a new station in what was a very crowded market (FM hadn't started yet) and that I should consider my future very carefully. I promised to do so, and we had a long chat about what might and might not happen.
Suddenly he stood up and smiled at me.
"Tell you what to do. Take next week off and think about it", he said. "Then if you decide to take this job, don't come back, eh?"
Before I could say a word he was gone.
I stayed that time too - just as well, as it turned out, because the ABT decided to award the licence to that Company, a protest was issued, and that resulted in the company that became known as Wesgo getting the nod and the station became known as 2WS.
And now, as Marketing Manager of Broadcast Investments Pty Ltd, I was really only working for two of the stations - the two new acquisitions were taking up just about all my time.
A new face had appeared at 2UE. John Conde, the Chairman's son in law, had come in and was running the show, with a little advice from his friends, including me. All Stan's time was now spent on Broadcast Investments affairs including as we all later discovered, the purchase of Channel 9 in Adelaide which the delighted Chairman told me was the only television station in Australia to be owned by the one family.
This was all going through my mind. I was 55 and I felt the somebody had painted me into a corner - probably me. I needed some kind of change, but I still wanted to work in radio.
One of my other jobs was as a member of the Committee running the radio industry's marketing arm - Australian Radio Advertising Bureau had recently become known as Radio Marketing Bureau. The Marketing Director had resigned, and together with my old friend Bruce Rogerson, now running the AWA network, and Garvin Rutherford, General Manager of the 2SM group, we were looking for a new person to take on the job.
We came down to the final three, had interviewed one, discounted another, and were waiting for the last of them to arrive for his interview.
Anne, who had been Allan Faulkner's secretary, was now working for Bruce in the same role, and she'd just come in and offered us a cup of coffee as we waited. She went away to get the coffee and intercepted a phone call from the applicant saying that he'd reconsidered his application and he wasn't interested.
We looked at each other.
"What do we do now? Advertise again and go through it all once more?" I asked.
"Tom", said Bruce. "How about you? Would you think of taking it on?"
"Yes", I said. "That means - I'll think about it".
And a few moments I had another bite at it.
"If I'm in charge and responsible only to the Chairman of the Committee, I'll do it".
I had made the decision to break my twenty year term with 2UE - almost twenty three years if you count my earlier time with the station. And, while it obviously had no connection, about two years before 2UE announced that Kerry Packer had bought the station for $20,000,000 - the same price his late father had offered twenty five years previously.
By that time, many of the old guard had gone.
2KA had changed since 1942, when all it owned was a transmitting station, with all the programming originating from 2GZ's Sydney studios in Hosking Place.
Now it had its own studio set-up, though not in Katoomba, but in downtown Penrith. There was a good reason for this.
In a battle to survive, against the competition of Sydney commercial stations all of which put a good signal into the Blue Mountains, 2KA applied for what was known as a translator licence. This meant that they could provide a "local" service to an area in their coverage which did not receive a satisfactory signal from the main transmitter. While that could have been said about a number of places, it was certainly true of Penrith. The 1,000 watts coming from the main transmitter at Wentworth Falls was certainly hard to listen to in Penrith.
The case for this translator station became solid the moment the station decided to cover all the matches played by the local Rugby League team - the Panthers. They had been lucky enough to find a caller named Frank Lee, who was a headmaster at one of the Blue Mountains schools and who had some real skills in calling the game.
This local support made it relatively easy for the station to set up a local transmitter. The equipment, and the transmitting mast, were located within the grounds of the local prison farm. When anything went wrong with that transmitter, the engineer would take off advising that if anyone wanted him, he'd gone to jail.
That transmitter was approved to operate on 500 watts, but was capable of sending out a much stronger signal than that would suggest, and at times it did - until the broadcasting authorities started asking questions.
The only times I'd ever been in Penrith over the years it had been either horrendously hot or chilling cold, and I was now about to prove that what I remembered about Penrith was absolutely was correct.
While 2KM operated at a profit, 2KA didn't. 2KA existed perhaps because of sentimental reasons on the part of the owners, who allowed 2KM's profits to keep 2KA running.
This had brought about some strange practices - one of which was the use of a private bag which was sent by rail to Penrith instead of using the postal service. For example, if there was a tape recording or schedules to be sent to the station from Crows Nest, where the headquarters were established (some thought, appropriately in the offices of Labor Motor Funerals) that material would await something more important before it was sent. This sometimes resulted in the wages failing to arrive on the due date, a regular cause of some concern to the staff.
I went out to 2KA to have a look around and see what needed to be done.
The first thing I did was to announce that wages would be paid when they were due. This made 2UE a very popular new employer.
The major problem was that the wages being paid amounted to more than the revenue the station was getting, and wages were only a fraction of the total costs. This was something that had to be addressed very quickly. There was a small sales staff and considering the fact that the station had a very small audience due to its confused programming policies they had done remarkably well.
In its past history it had been the station that carried all the greyhound racing descriptions; it had been a country music station; it had been programmed for a while by Rod Muir's Diagamae Company which set it rockin' along until one of its directors had happened to tune in and disliked what he heard (or perhaps Rod realised that 2KA was a terminal case and resigned the business). It had tried to be all things to all people; it had tried to specialise. But nothing worked.
Stan reckoned that we needed someone there who could "crash through", and he selected the then 2UE promotions manager and former news editor, Greg Grainger. Greg took to the job with real enthusiasm, even renting out his north shore home and buying a house on the mountains, ten minutes drive from Penrith.
As part of this plan, I was to spend as much time as possible at 2KA each month, especially working with the sales staff to increase the revenue base.
Now I was working on a budget for 2KA sales, a little way down the scale of 2UE's, and trying to encourage the sales team to go out with confidence and talk to potential advertisers throughout the district. I'd been impressed with the way in which 2KM could get business from local traders but I also realised that the competitive situation at Kempsey was completely different.
Each Sales Meeting started off with some instruction in basic sales techniques and we would set out a plan for the week ahead using the old concept of "making something happen" every day. As the sales team began to see their station in a positive light the sales figures gradually started to rise.
Meanwhile, in Kempsey, a decision was taken to move the radio station from Kempsey itself and to build new studios in Port Macquarie, and the marketing concept included a change of call sign for 2KM. For some time, the station had been calling itself "Mid Coast Radio" on a regular basis, without overdoing it. Now we decided to drop the call sign of 2KM, except for specific times of day, and simply use Mid Coast Radio as our call sign.
Eventually we were to call the station 2MC, and we made the change and the move without losing much support at all from the Kempsey people. In fact, the transmitting station was located on the outskirts of Kempsey, so there was no change to the service area at all. And the transmitter put out a superb signal up and down the North Coast.
The contrast between 2KA and 2KM was quite dramatic.
I was visiting the North Coast for two or three days a month. We had a survey conducted which demonstrated that the station had a very big audience, and that most of them were intensely loyal to 2KM. Jeff Condon knew an artist who specialised in "pop art" and he put together a very different "coverage map" of the Mid Coast. It was spectacular with its glaring colours. It looked like something you might see in a tourist guide book, and it got the attention of the media buyers. It took a little time, but in the end we were able to respectably increase the revenue to 2KM locally, and also from the national point of view.
Then I had the idea of getting a jingle made. Not quite sure what we could do that would be different, I spoke to Keith Pottger - the Seekers had broken up and he was in the jingle business for the time being. The theme was "This is where we live" and it was something like a National Anthem (Seekers style) for the area. Greg Grainger liked it so much that Keith did a version of it for 2KA's use.
There were sponsors seminars in both areas - and in the case of 2KM, we had to cover three main centres which meant at least three days out of my week. There's no doubt I enjoyed this part of the job although it entailed early starts and late nights, but something told me I should look around and do something else before I got much older.
In the time I'd worked with 2UE I had had several approaches from other organisations, most of them not worth even considering. I was once offered a position with a small advertising agency to help them develop new business. Unfortunately it was not an agency that was strong in radio, and I let the opportunity go by.
Another station had suggested I might like to set up a business developing concepts for audiences in the 25-39 age group, and while I thought the idea had some merit (especially since they would employ me to get it started) I took it quite seriously for a while.
I'd also almost moved from 2UE to CBN Radio Sales. They were looking for a new general manager, and I'd been approached at an industry function by Gordon Lewis who was ending his radio career overseeing the Commonwealth Broadcasting Network for 2UW. This one interested me for several reasons - one was that I had a good association with Frank Jeffcoat, 2UW's station manager and I felt we would get along together. Another was that it offered a company car (2UE company cars ended at the station manager level at that time), and still further, they had a much better superannuation scheme than we had. This job entailed taking over the operation of a representation company that was highly respected and successful, looking after a large number of radio stations in Australia and Radio New Zealand commercial stations as well.
I was still very loyal to 2UE but Gordon kept asking me to take it seriously, and so I did.
I let Stan Willmott know what was in my mind. He didn't think it was much of a job, so he said, and asked me to consider what I'd be giving up. The Chairman of 2UE came into my office and reminded me that the Company policy was not to provide cars to anyone below the standing of station manager, as it became too difficult to manage.
I promised I'd give CBN a quick answer at that point, and was about to tell them I'd go over when Stan Willmott rang me and asked me what sort of car I wanted.
He'd also changed the superannuation scheme.
His sales ability had not been evident up until this time, but by then I knew that he must know something about selling. How did he sway the Chairman?
I stayed.
That was close, but the closest was when Sid Emerton, who'd left 2UE and was working as a consultant helping to build new radio stations, and re-build old ones, asked me if I'd like to go to lunch at Parliament House in Sydney. I told him that sounded like a good idea, but wondered why. He told me that a director of one of the applicant companies for the new so-called "western suburbs radio station" was interested in having a talk.
The director was Pat Hills, former Premier and still a member of parliament, who had set up a company with some other influential people. He wanted theirs to be the very best application in terms of the way it was presented and also by way of showing that everything was in place to start up quickly should they get the licence. Sid had suggested that I be General Manager, and he was prepared to take over the technical side.
I promised to think about it, and had several talks with Sid about it and eventually agreed that if the licence was granted to them, I would join the company.
The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, as it was in those days, conducted a hearing. I didn't attend but several of the directors would ring me during the course of the hearing to tell me what had happened and to get answers to questions. During one session, the Chairman of the hearing, Ken Archer (a former 2UW and CBN General Manager) asked if they had selected a General Manager, and the applicant wrote my name on a sheet of paper and handed it to him in confidence. He apparently nodded his satisfaction (or otherwise) and the hearing continued.
But that raised the question in the radio fraternity - who was this mysterious general Manager - and eventually someone surmised that it was me. The word got around at a Sydney Time Club luncheon. I had attended it but had left early (not my usual custom) and my friend Norman Taylor rang me. "Is it you?" he asked. "And if it is, we want to be your Sydney representative".
I didn't want 2UE to find out on the grapevine, so I told Stan what was happening.
I think he was somewhat nonplussed by this event because he made no special comment that I can remember.
About half an hour after I'd told Stan, the Chairman made his appearance in my office. Unusually for him, he sat down - normally he would breeze in and out without using the furniture - and asked me if it was true that I'd been offered this job. I told him it was.
He explained that it would be no picnic starting up a new station in what was a very crowded market (FM hadn't started yet) and that I should consider my future very carefully. I promised to do so, and we had a long chat about what might and might not happen.
Suddenly he stood up and smiled at me.
"Tell you what to do. Take next week off and think about it", he said. "Then if you decide to take this job, don't come back, eh?"
Before I could say a word he was gone.
I stayed that time too - just as well, as it turned out, because the ABT decided to award the licence to that Company, a protest was issued, and that resulted in the company that became known as Wesgo getting the nod and the station became known as 2WS.
And now, as Marketing Manager of Broadcast Investments Pty Ltd, I was really only working for two of the stations - the two new acquisitions were taking up just about all my time.
A new face had appeared at 2UE. John Conde, the Chairman's son in law, had come in and was running the show, with a little advice from his friends, including me. All Stan's time was now spent on Broadcast Investments affairs including as we all later discovered, the purchase of Channel 9 in Adelaide which the delighted Chairman told me was the only television station in Australia to be owned by the one family.
This was all going through my mind. I was 55 and I felt the somebody had painted me into a corner - probably me. I needed some kind of change, but I still wanted to work in radio.
One of my other jobs was as a member of the Committee running the radio industry's marketing arm - Australian Radio Advertising Bureau had recently become known as Radio Marketing Bureau. The Marketing Director had resigned, and together with my old friend Bruce Rogerson, now running the AWA network, and Garvin Rutherford, General Manager of the 2SM group, we were looking for a new person to take on the job.
We came down to the final three, had interviewed one, discounted another, and were waiting for the last of them to arrive for his interview.
Anne, who had been Allan Faulkner's secretary, was now working for Bruce in the same role, and she'd just come in and offered us a cup of coffee as we waited. She went away to get the coffee and intercepted a phone call from the applicant saying that he'd reconsidered his application and he wasn't interested.
We looked at each other.
"What do we do now? Advertise again and go through it all once more?" I asked.
"Tom", said Bruce. "How about you? Would you think of taking it on?"
"Yes", I said. "That means - I'll think about it".
And a few moments I had another bite at it.
"If I'm in charge and responsible only to the Chairman of the Committee, I'll do it".
I had made the decision to break my twenty year term with 2UE - almost twenty three years if you count my earlier time with the station. And, while it obviously had no connection, about two years before 2UE announced that Kerry Packer had bought the station for $20,000,000 - the same price his late father had offered twenty five years previously.
By that time, many of the old guard had gone.
Chapter Forty One
"Before you leave us, Mr Crozier".
Stan Willmott and I were talking in his office about when and how I might leave the company I'd worked for twenty years this time around.
I wondered what he had in mind.
"Greg is leaving us too, quite soon, and I'd like you to stay around and look after 2KA for a while - say, for the next three months".
I couldn't honestly say that Greg's leaving was a surprise to me. While he hadn't told me about it, obviously he had a problem with working on a radio station nobody talked much about. And he missed television.
Stan, in addition to his work at Broadcast Investments, was at the time the President of FARB, and so in a sense he was going to be my new boss. It seemed strange, resigning to him and then having him accept me as the new recruit to the industry organisation. In fact, FARB was something of a kingdom of its own and members didn't generally get to know much of the day by day detail - not even Stan, who loved to know everything that was happening.
The next day I was due to spend the day in Penrith, and when I got there I discovered that Greg wasn't around. We had our sales meeting, and I went around the area with one of the sales people, meeting new prospects and trying to lead by example.
It was a winter's day and the climate control in my car was on "hot". Back at the station there was a message from Greg. He suggested we buy a couple of pies and have our meal somewhere outside the station - so that's what we did. Penrith had a great pie shop. We sat at a table in a small park and he told me of his plans.
He was leaving immediately. "She's yours, old son", he said as we walked back to the studio.
So the next day I was ensconsed at 2KA, back where I had started when I was sixteen - almost forty two years ago. Sure, I wasn't there to say "2KA testing" but the truth is that 2KA was still testing itself. My job was to keep it going at a steady pace, with revenues increasing, and the program format resolved by Greg, to keep the staff happy and loyal, and to assist in selecting a new General Manager.
Stan had taken the stance that the time I left the organisation was up to me - if a new General Manager could be found, someone who met with his approval of course, then I could go earlier. So the quicker someone got found, the better.
John Lamb was busy finding people too and sending them out to me so I could "sell" them on the idea. As the hopeful newcomers came and went, I observed the staff doing what I'd become expert at doing when new people were selected at 2UE - finding a means of taking a look at the prospect and making a judgement based on appearances.
It was a Sunday morning when John rang me at home. "Can you get to St Leonards and pick up a bloke and his wife and give them a day at 2KA?" he asked.
"What's he like?" I asked.
"David met him and he thinks he might have something", said John. David - David Mulley - was the lately-appointed general Manager of 2KO, our Newcastle station, and Graham Johnston had impressed him with his marketing background.
The best way to get out of 2KA and on with the new job was to get in the car and go through the familiar routine, ending with a late lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Penrith.
While most of the applicants had seemed fairly unimpressed with Penrith, Graham could see the potential - and he struck me, too, as having something. He went down on the list of finalists.
He was quickly appointed, I spent a week with him, announcing that Friday would be my final day.
This had become a busy week. On the Thursday there was a meeting of Major Network stations in Melbourne, followed by a function for Melbourne clients and advertising agencies, which I'd been asked to attend. And on the Friday....
John lamb had rung me.
"You're finishing up on Friday", he said. "So what are you doing at lunchtime? You see, the Chairman wants to buy you lunch".
I was conscious that the Chairman had bought lunch on very rare occasions, to celebrate various things, but never in recent times had he done anything like this. Usually it was a case of resign, pick up your bongos and go. Someone will tidy up your desk and send any personal items out to you. This was something very different.
"I'll be here in Penrith in the morning", I told him, to which he responded that the Chairman wanted to go to a restaurant at Valley Heights - just "up the hill" from Penrith, so that would be OK. John was going to be his driver and Graham was to be invited so the Chairman could meet him.
The Lambs were there when Graham and I arrived at the restaurant. I'd been telling Graham some of my favourite stories about the company, including the time when we had a new sales executive who had come from an advertising agency.
I'd introduced him to the Chairman as we passed in a corridor, and the Chairman's comments went something like this: "You'll find it different here, Mr. Brown. In the agency business, when you lose a client you might be in danger of shutting up shop. But when we lose a client Tom gets in his car, drives up Parramatta Road, and gets a new one".
It was nice to have inspired such confidence. While he stayed with us, that particular sales executive would preface any news of a lost client by saying that Tom had better get in his car and go up Parramatta Road.
And the time when I was Chairman of the luncheon celebrating the 50th anniversary of radio in Australia. I got the job because I was President of the Sydney Time Club and the Club was hosting the luncheon, with representatives from the entire broadcasting sector, including of course the ABC, and a whole host of old-time radio personalities from around Australia.
The official ceremonies over, it looked like being a long afternoon. I was making my way to the rest room when I bumped into the Lamb family, all of whom had come to the function, but were now quite wisely, taking their leave.
"You'll have to stay here for a while Tom", said the Chairman. "How are you off for money?"
He produced his wallet but I was able to tell him that I'd had an advance from the accounts office in case my expense account got a little too much to handle. Later I realised that this had been a heaven-sent opportunity to put in a plug for a greater fee for my services - even if the place was not quite appropriate.
The lunch started on time and finished late. Just as I was about to get into my car and roll it down the hill to Penrith, the Chairman told me to wait a minute, as he went to the boot of his car. He produced a whisky decanter and glasses, but not the whisky, and as well a gift for Nan whom he'd never met.
"You'll still be working for us when you're at Radio Marketing Bureau", he said. "So I wish you the best of luck for the future".
For a moment I wondered whether there was something I didn't know about - that maybe history was going to repeat itself. Maybe he was making a bid for Radio Marketing Bureau, and maybe on my arrival there in a few weeks' time, I'd be greeted by someone saying "Guess what? The place has been sold".
I had come to the end of the line, and the line was bent into the shape of a circle. I'd started at 2KA and appropriately, perhaps, I finished there. People I'd known in the past kept on coming back into my experience. It was an environment where you knew almost everyone, for radio was a small club and a great one to be in. All you needed was staying power, a good sense of humour, and an armour-plated back.
Stan Willmott and I were talking in his office about when and how I might leave the company I'd worked for twenty years this time around.
I wondered what he had in mind.
"Greg is leaving us too, quite soon, and I'd like you to stay around and look after 2KA for a while - say, for the next three months".
I couldn't honestly say that Greg's leaving was a surprise to me. While he hadn't told me about it, obviously he had a problem with working on a radio station nobody talked much about. And he missed television.
Stan, in addition to his work at Broadcast Investments, was at the time the President of FARB, and so in a sense he was going to be my new boss. It seemed strange, resigning to him and then having him accept me as the new recruit to the industry organisation. In fact, FARB was something of a kingdom of its own and members didn't generally get to know much of the day by day detail - not even Stan, who loved to know everything that was happening.
The next day I was due to spend the day in Penrith, and when I got there I discovered that Greg wasn't around. We had our sales meeting, and I went around the area with one of the sales people, meeting new prospects and trying to lead by example.
It was a winter's day and the climate control in my car was on "hot". Back at the station there was a message from Greg. He suggested we buy a couple of pies and have our meal somewhere outside the station - so that's what we did. Penrith had a great pie shop. We sat at a table in a small park and he told me of his plans.
He was leaving immediately. "She's yours, old son", he said as we walked back to the studio.
So the next day I was ensconsed at 2KA, back where I had started when I was sixteen - almost forty two years ago. Sure, I wasn't there to say "2KA testing" but the truth is that 2KA was still testing itself. My job was to keep it going at a steady pace, with revenues increasing, and the program format resolved by Greg, to keep the staff happy and loyal, and to assist in selecting a new General Manager.
Stan had taken the stance that the time I left the organisation was up to me - if a new General Manager could be found, someone who met with his approval of course, then I could go earlier. So the quicker someone got found, the better.
John Lamb was busy finding people too and sending them out to me so I could "sell" them on the idea. As the hopeful newcomers came and went, I observed the staff doing what I'd become expert at doing when new people were selected at 2UE - finding a means of taking a look at the prospect and making a judgement based on appearances.
It was a Sunday morning when John rang me at home. "Can you get to St Leonards and pick up a bloke and his wife and give them a day at 2KA?" he asked.
"What's he like?" I asked.
"David met him and he thinks he might have something", said John. David - David Mulley - was the lately-appointed general Manager of 2KO, our Newcastle station, and Graham Johnston had impressed him with his marketing background.
The best way to get out of 2KA and on with the new job was to get in the car and go through the familiar routine, ending with a late lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Penrith.
While most of the applicants had seemed fairly unimpressed with Penrith, Graham could see the potential - and he struck me, too, as having something. He went down on the list of finalists.
He was quickly appointed, I spent a week with him, announcing that Friday would be my final day.
This had become a busy week. On the Thursday there was a meeting of Major Network stations in Melbourne, followed by a function for Melbourne clients and advertising agencies, which I'd been asked to attend. And on the Friday....
John lamb had rung me.
"You're finishing up on Friday", he said. "So what are you doing at lunchtime? You see, the Chairman wants to buy you lunch".
I was conscious that the Chairman had bought lunch on very rare occasions, to celebrate various things, but never in recent times had he done anything like this. Usually it was a case of resign, pick up your bongos and go. Someone will tidy up your desk and send any personal items out to you. This was something very different.
"I'll be here in Penrith in the morning", I told him, to which he responded that the Chairman wanted to go to a restaurant at Valley Heights - just "up the hill" from Penrith, so that would be OK. John was going to be his driver and Graham was to be invited so the Chairman could meet him.
The Lambs were there when Graham and I arrived at the restaurant. I'd been telling Graham some of my favourite stories about the company, including the time when we had a new sales executive who had come from an advertising agency.
I'd introduced him to the Chairman as we passed in a corridor, and the Chairman's comments went something like this: "You'll find it different here, Mr. Brown. In the agency business, when you lose a client you might be in danger of shutting up shop. But when we lose a client Tom gets in his car, drives up Parramatta Road, and gets a new one".
It was nice to have inspired such confidence. While he stayed with us, that particular sales executive would preface any news of a lost client by saying that Tom had better get in his car and go up Parramatta Road.
And the time when I was Chairman of the luncheon celebrating the 50th anniversary of radio in Australia. I got the job because I was President of the Sydney Time Club and the Club was hosting the luncheon, with representatives from the entire broadcasting sector, including of course the ABC, and a whole host of old-time radio personalities from around Australia.
The official ceremonies over, it looked like being a long afternoon. I was making my way to the rest room when I bumped into the Lamb family, all of whom had come to the function, but were now quite wisely, taking their leave.
"You'll have to stay here for a while Tom", said the Chairman. "How are you off for money?"
He produced his wallet but I was able to tell him that I'd had an advance from the accounts office in case my expense account got a little too much to handle. Later I realised that this had been a heaven-sent opportunity to put in a plug for a greater fee for my services - even if the place was not quite appropriate.
The lunch started on time and finished late. Just as I was about to get into my car and roll it down the hill to Penrith, the Chairman told me to wait a minute, as he went to the boot of his car. He produced a whisky decanter and glasses, but not the whisky, and as well a gift for Nan whom he'd never met.
"You'll still be working for us when you're at Radio Marketing Bureau", he said. "So I wish you the best of luck for the future".
For a moment I wondered whether there was something I didn't know about - that maybe history was going to repeat itself. Maybe he was making a bid for Radio Marketing Bureau, and maybe on my arrival there in a few weeks' time, I'd be greeted by someone saying "Guess what? The place has been sold".
I had come to the end of the line, and the line was bent into the shape of a circle. I'd started at 2KA and appropriately, perhaps, I finished there. People I'd known in the past kept on coming back into my experience. It was an environment where you knew almost everyone, for radio was a small club and a great one to be in. All you needed was staying power, a good sense of humour, and an armour-plated back.
Chapter Forty Two
"Hi, I'm Liz Taylor and I'm just the person to keep you on the straight and narrow" said the young lady who'd applied for the position of secretary.
She got the job and proved she was right. Her name had been Taylor, but by now she was married and it was Hughes. Before her family came along, she kept Radio Marketing Bureau moving along pretty well. It was always a cheerful place when Liz was going about her business.
"Now, listen to me", she would order at the start of the day's business. "This is what you've got to do today". The list was always precise.
Having done that she would go to her recalcitrant word processor and talk it out of its wayward spelling.
B&T, the trade magazine, ran a picture of me walking past the display board at Radio Marketing Bureau (or as the family called it Roadside Mail Box), saying that I was "clearly relishing being part of the next surge of radio's growth and development".
And so I was. It was the middle of 1981, Nan and I had just had the holiday I'd always wanted - in Alice Springs. It was the best holiday we'd ever had. Now I was ready to start work, not just for 2UE but for the then 140 or more radio stations around Australia.
Old-fashioned telegrams were having a last fling.
"I can't tell how delighted I am with the news. I believe my enthusiasm will be shared by the entire industry..."
"You're the right man for the job.."
"Thank God you're on our side!"
It was all very encouraging.
Bob Logie, who had worked with me at 2UE in 1961 and right through until I became Sales Manager, was waiting to welcome me to the RMB, which was located in Milson's Point as part of the FARB organisation, but I quickly discovered that we were really on our own. We were two separate organisations: it had to be so, for FARB was the enforcer of the industry rules, both with stations and with advertisers. RMB was the team of good guys who were friends with everybody, but especially the advertisers and their agencies.
Les Hay had left 2SM and was working with RMB on some special projects, which continued for some time until 2SM asked him to go back and assist with their sales organisation.
Des Foster was Federal Director of FARB, and in that role, was always available to tell the new boy where the ropes were, and what they were for. Before he joined FARB he was General Manager of 2GB, and prior to that a 2UE executive, although I never worked with him there.
I knew the others well too. There was John Finlayson, who'd once managed 2LF Young and was now a FARB executive, dealing mainly in technical and industrial matters, and Jeff Rushton who had been with the Department of the Media, but became Deputy Federal Director of FARB and one of the best organised people I've ever met. For someone who had been for some years with the ABC as well, he was a pretty active sort of bloke.
My first six years at RMB were quite fantastic. But there were two others, right at the end of my term that weren't in the same mould.
We found new clients for radio (including the first one ever to spend a million dollars in the medium, although today that figure seems minuscule), and importantly we developed some initiatives that helped the advertising industry come to terms with how to use radio advertising, how to write it, how to produce it.
It was something I'd been fiddling with at 2UE in my last couple of years, as the role of Marketing Manager proved to be a little less challenging than I'd expected it to be, and so I'd already prepared some notes on how to go about it, and where to find the practical information we'd need.
There was also a large amount of survey information collected by the Bureau over the years, which simply needed updating and which could be integrated into the "how to use radio and make it work for you" kit.
Bob Logie had set up, some time previously, a base from which we could work, as he'd arranged with Frank Jeffcoat who had retired from 2UW, to take over presentations in provincial markets - where the need for radio to gain extra revenue was extremely urgent. The capital city stations were doing reasonably well, but the bush stations were mostly facing up to tough times.
An old 2UE colleague, John Hansberry, was in charge of Grace Brothers' radio advertising, so I asked him to come in and tell us what he thought made for successful radio advertising. As a result of what he told us we were able to develop a highly practical presentation for the bush. Complete with Bob Logie's slides, Frank Jeffcoat covered the territory for several years to the financial wellbeing of regional radio.
I had been at the Bureau for less than six months when the Adelaide radio sales managers invited me go discuss a plan I had mentioned in a report. It was simply to set up an annual workshop for advertising agency copywriters who did not have a "feel" for radio, and to show them how pictorial radio could be.
"We want you to run this workshop in South Australia!" they said. "And we've found the place for it!"
With that, I was taken to the airport, one of my new friends and I boarded a helicopter with a tv station's insignia on it, and headed off to McLaren Vale. The pilot had obviously been told that I was a visiting fireman from Sydney, so he gave me a ride I will never forget. We followed the contour of the land, which meant many ups and downs, and when following a road we would move from side to side, matching the movement of the road. I wasn't well when we got to McLarens on the Lake.
This was a new resort concept, with a winery as part of it all, conference facilities, and just enough rooms to accommodate the numbers we had in mind.
This workshop was an opportunity to involve Street Remley and renew my association with him - and he was delighted. He'd been pushing for something like this for some time, and he was prepared to be the draw-card and to direct the training. His friend, Andrew Killey, an agency creative director also readily agreed to work with us - and for no remuneration! Although we covered all their costs, all our trainers were always out of pocket on the deal, sometimes due to the bar prices - but that was common to everyone who attended.
By the time our thirty trainees arrived at McLaren Vale the following winter, we had about six trainers - all specialists in various areas, including production - and an organisation which Bob Logie directed, which ran absolutely smoothly.
We changed the venue after three years because Street said he would like to go somewhere else, and the workshop continued to grow both in attendance and reputation as we tried to vary the location from year to year.
As I write this, I am pleased to know that workshop continues to introduce young writers (and some old ones) to the radio medium year by year.
The idea was to concentrate on advertising agency writers, as a move to improve radio's share of the national advertising dollar, but that didn't suit the individual station operators, who wanted training for their station's copywriters.
There is a very obvious difference between people working in advertising agencies and those who write advertisements at radio stations: the agency people have more time to be "creative" - they simply don't have as many clients to work for - while people working on commercial stations, especially in regional areas, had to churn out material for many clients in one day. The approach had to be very different to meet their needs.
Bob had done some of this work some time before I joined, so we put a new workshop together and took it on the road. The attendances were excellent.
I'd been interested in developing the sales potential of the team at 2UE for many years, had started a training session in association with sales meetings some years before. Now there seemed to be a need to do this on a national basis.
That's how I met my friend Walter Dickman. As soon as he knew we wanted to run sessions in every state capital (and some regional areas) he came into the office to have a chat. He'd worked with the radio industry several years previously.
It was easy to strike up a rapport with Walter and we quickly put together a workshop program over twelve months. It provided for three sessions in each centre, and meant a lot of travelling. I used to work my schedule so that I arrived before Walter, or stayed on after we'd finished these sessions, so I could make presentations to advertisers and their agencies. Since we charged fees for workshop attendance, my travel for these sessions did not come out of our budget.
But sometimes Walter and I would travel together.
Walter would call the flight attendant over to our first-class seats.
"My father would like a champagne as soon as we get up there", he would say, pointing to me and then to the sky. So would Walter, although he drank less of his than I did of mine.
Walter was 72, I was 53.
For some time, even while at 2UE and as a member of the Committee for RMB, I had been looking for a "positioning statement" for radio, and the time came when I knew something had to be developed. I wrote out what I believed the problems were, with my ideas as to how they should be attacked, and handed them to an old friend, Ray Heckendorf. Ray had just joined McCarthy Watson Spencer, an advertising agency where he was creative director.
It's well known that all advertising agencies believe that the client doesn't know much, and they set out to prove it again in this case. My long treatise came back in three words: The Right Frequency. The rationale was that radio was "the right frequency" for advertisers because it could deliver frequency better than other media. That is, all advertising has to have frequency of impact in order to be effective, and radio was best placed to achieve high frequency because of its lower costs, both in air time and in creativity. In newspapers and television, a reasonable frequency costs substantial money - but you could do it less expensively on radio.
It was a classic case of telling people what they already felt to the the case.
The national advertisers' convention had invited all media to contribute to their next big event so I set about finding someone who could present the story with authority and came up with Hugh McKay. Hugh had appeared at seminars for us throughout my stay at Radio Marketing Bureau, and he was happy to contribute, doing some research of his own, and using some material I had put together on the subject.
And to make sure we attacked the creative aspect as well, I asked Street Remley to help.
Our presentation became a three-screen extravaganza, something reasonably unusual in those days - two screens from tape, the third being "live", from a presenter on stage.
The agency recommended that we use another high-profile presenter, who was the then Chairman of the RMB Committee. He was the General Manager of 2GB and his name Nigel Milan.
That presentation was hugely successful and was backed by print advertising, direct mail, and radio commercials. It was instrumental in establishing an "umbrella" under which radio stations could promote themselves and the industry.
I established an office in Melbourne after a lot of pushing by the Melbourne stations. It was run at first by Mark Newstead and later, when Mark rejoined McNair Anderson and later went to Europe to work in commercial radio, by David Irwin-Bellette, two people with whom I had instant rapport and therefore whose company I enjoyed immensely.
FM started to become a force in the industry during my stay at RMB, and with it, some new players. The radio scene was changing, and changing fast, as new plans were developed for the future of the industry.
I had bumped into John Bloody Kingston Pearce at a restaurant where Phil Charley and I had sought sanctuary after visiting old colleague Dick McLaren in hospital. John was working at 2UE at the time, and since I knew it was ratings Day - the day when the fate of the personalities would be sealed once again - I asked him how it had gone for his early-evening show.
"I'm number one in my time-slot!", he proclaimed - for all the world sounding like the John Pearce you heard on radio. "So now I'm going to do what everyone should do when they get to Number One".
"What's that?" I wanted to know.
"Resign, of course", he said. And he did.
It seemed to me that it might be time for me to go too. It had all been good fun. The mission, if not completely accomplished, had given commercial radio a new face and a bunch of convinced new advertisers.
I was 63 and I had made a lot of friends. But perhaps maintaining the pace was going to be more difficult. I felt sad, especially since some of the new people who now had influence within the radio industry did not want to understand what our team was doing and they were making noises about getting new, younger faces.
It was getting tougher to be enthusiastic about an industry where in-fighting had always been a way of life, but now warfare had broken out between the FM and AM people.
One station owner took the trouble to travel to Sydney to see me - to try to convince me not to leave. He felt that I had been influenced by a "bunch of lemmings" who were hell bent on doing their own thing, to the detriment of the commercial radio industry.
But by that time I had made up my mind. I would go, but I would retain my association by providing workshops for radio sales people around the country and in other places as well. The idea worked. For more than three years I was kept busy in many parts of Australia and New Zealand, and even went as far afield as Malasia. On one occasion, Bob Logie and I went to Fiji for Radio Fiji.
My decision would mean giving up the feeling of being in the centre of things - something that had driven me throughout my entire career - part of the excitement, the advances made in spite of the competition (especially television), and the very real fellowship of the little radio club.
I had been in commercial radio for forty seven years, the last eight with the industry association.
On June 30th 1989, I picked up the superannuation cheque, wiped away a tear and began to work on the future.
She got the job and proved she was right. Her name had been Taylor, but by now she was married and it was Hughes. Before her family came along, she kept Radio Marketing Bureau moving along pretty well. It was always a cheerful place when Liz was going about her business.
"Now, listen to me", she would order at the start of the day's business. "This is what you've got to do today". The list was always precise.
Having done that she would go to her recalcitrant word processor and talk it out of its wayward spelling.
B&T, the trade magazine, ran a picture of me walking past the display board at Radio Marketing Bureau (or as the family called it Roadside Mail Box), saying that I was "clearly relishing being part of the next surge of radio's growth and development".
And so I was. It was the middle of 1981, Nan and I had just had the holiday I'd always wanted - in Alice Springs. It was the best holiday we'd ever had. Now I was ready to start work, not just for 2UE but for the then 140 or more radio stations around Australia.
Old-fashioned telegrams were having a last fling.
"I can't tell how delighted I am with the news. I believe my enthusiasm will be shared by the entire industry..."
"You're the right man for the job.."
"Thank God you're on our side!"
It was all very encouraging.
Bob Logie, who had worked with me at 2UE in 1961 and right through until I became Sales Manager, was waiting to welcome me to the RMB, which was located in Milson's Point as part of the FARB organisation, but I quickly discovered that we were really on our own. We were two separate organisations: it had to be so, for FARB was the enforcer of the industry rules, both with stations and with advertisers. RMB was the team of good guys who were friends with everybody, but especially the advertisers and their agencies.
Les Hay had left 2SM and was working with RMB on some special projects, which continued for some time until 2SM asked him to go back and assist with their sales organisation.
Des Foster was Federal Director of FARB, and in that role, was always available to tell the new boy where the ropes were, and what they were for. Before he joined FARB he was General Manager of 2GB, and prior to that a 2UE executive, although I never worked with him there.
I knew the others well too. There was John Finlayson, who'd once managed 2LF Young and was now a FARB executive, dealing mainly in technical and industrial matters, and Jeff Rushton who had been with the Department of the Media, but became Deputy Federal Director of FARB and one of the best organised people I've ever met. For someone who had been for some years with the ABC as well, he was a pretty active sort of bloke.
My first six years at RMB were quite fantastic. But there were two others, right at the end of my term that weren't in the same mould.
We found new clients for radio (including the first one ever to spend a million dollars in the medium, although today that figure seems minuscule), and importantly we developed some initiatives that helped the advertising industry come to terms with how to use radio advertising, how to write it, how to produce it.
It was something I'd been fiddling with at 2UE in my last couple of years, as the role of Marketing Manager proved to be a little less challenging than I'd expected it to be, and so I'd already prepared some notes on how to go about it, and where to find the practical information we'd need.
There was also a large amount of survey information collected by the Bureau over the years, which simply needed updating and which could be integrated into the "how to use radio and make it work for you" kit.
Bob Logie had set up, some time previously, a base from which we could work, as he'd arranged with Frank Jeffcoat who had retired from 2UW, to take over presentations in provincial markets - where the need for radio to gain extra revenue was extremely urgent. The capital city stations were doing reasonably well, but the bush stations were mostly facing up to tough times.
An old 2UE colleague, John Hansberry, was in charge of Grace Brothers' radio advertising, so I asked him to come in and tell us what he thought made for successful radio advertising. As a result of what he told us we were able to develop a highly practical presentation for the bush. Complete with Bob Logie's slides, Frank Jeffcoat covered the territory for several years to the financial wellbeing of regional radio.
I had been at the Bureau for less than six months when the Adelaide radio sales managers invited me go discuss a plan I had mentioned in a report. It was simply to set up an annual workshop for advertising agency copywriters who did not have a "feel" for radio, and to show them how pictorial radio could be.
"We want you to run this workshop in South Australia!" they said. "And we've found the place for it!"
With that, I was taken to the airport, one of my new friends and I boarded a helicopter with a tv station's insignia on it, and headed off to McLaren Vale. The pilot had obviously been told that I was a visiting fireman from Sydney, so he gave me a ride I will never forget. We followed the contour of the land, which meant many ups and downs, and when following a road we would move from side to side, matching the movement of the road. I wasn't well when we got to McLarens on the Lake.
This was a new resort concept, with a winery as part of it all, conference facilities, and just enough rooms to accommodate the numbers we had in mind.
This workshop was an opportunity to involve Street Remley and renew my association with him - and he was delighted. He'd been pushing for something like this for some time, and he was prepared to be the draw-card and to direct the training. His friend, Andrew Killey, an agency creative director also readily agreed to work with us - and for no remuneration! Although we covered all their costs, all our trainers were always out of pocket on the deal, sometimes due to the bar prices - but that was common to everyone who attended.
By the time our thirty trainees arrived at McLaren Vale the following winter, we had about six trainers - all specialists in various areas, including production - and an organisation which Bob Logie directed, which ran absolutely smoothly.
We changed the venue after three years because Street said he would like to go somewhere else, and the workshop continued to grow both in attendance and reputation as we tried to vary the location from year to year.
As I write this, I am pleased to know that workshop continues to introduce young writers (and some old ones) to the radio medium year by year.
The idea was to concentrate on advertising agency writers, as a move to improve radio's share of the national advertising dollar, but that didn't suit the individual station operators, who wanted training for their station's copywriters.
There is a very obvious difference between people working in advertising agencies and those who write advertisements at radio stations: the agency people have more time to be "creative" - they simply don't have as many clients to work for - while people working on commercial stations, especially in regional areas, had to churn out material for many clients in one day. The approach had to be very different to meet their needs.
Bob had done some of this work some time before I joined, so we put a new workshop together and took it on the road. The attendances were excellent.
I'd been interested in developing the sales potential of the team at 2UE for many years, had started a training session in association with sales meetings some years before. Now there seemed to be a need to do this on a national basis.
That's how I met my friend Walter Dickman. As soon as he knew we wanted to run sessions in every state capital (and some regional areas) he came into the office to have a chat. He'd worked with the radio industry several years previously.
It was easy to strike up a rapport with Walter and we quickly put together a workshop program over twelve months. It provided for three sessions in each centre, and meant a lot of travelling. I used to work my schedule so that I arrived before Walter, or stayed on after we'd finished these sessions, so I could make presentations to advertisers and their agencies. Since we charged fees for workshop attendance, my travel for these sessions did not come out of our budget.
But sometimes Walter and I would travel together.
Walter would call the flight attendant over to our first-class seats.
"My father would like a champagne as soon as we get up there", he would say, pointing to me and then to the sky. So would Walter, although he drank less of his than I did of mine.
Walter was 72, I was 53.
For some time, even while at 2UE and as a member of the Committee for RMB, I had been looking for a "positioning statement" for radio, and the time came when I knew something had to be developed. I wrote out what I believed the problems were, with my ideas as to how they should be attacked, and handed them to an old friend, Ray Heckendorf. Ray had just joined McCarthy Watson Spencer, an advertising agency where he was creative director.
It's well known that all advertising agencies believe that the client doesn't know much, and they set out to prove it again in this case. My long treatise came back in three words: The Right Frequency. The rationale was that radio was "the right frequency" for advertisers because it could deliver frequency better than other media. That is, all advertising has to have frequency of impact in order to be effective, and radio was best placed to achieve high frequency because of its lower costs, both in air time and in creativity. In newspapers and television, a reasonable frequency costs substantial money - but you could do it less expensively on radio.
It was a classic case of telling people what they already felt to the the case.
The national advertisers' convention had invited all media to contribute to their next big event so I set about finding someone who could present the story with authority and came up with Hugh McKay. Hugh had appeared at seminars for us throughout my stay at Radio Marketing Bureau, and he was happy to contribute, doing some research of his own, and using some material I had put together on the subject.
And to make sure we attacked the creative aspect as well, I asked Street Remley to help.
Our presentation became a three-screen extravaganza, something reasonably unusual in those days - two screens from tape, the third being "live", from a presenter on stage.
The agency recommended that we use another high-profile presenter, who was the then Chairman of the RMB Committee. He was the General Manager of 2GB and his name Nigel Milan.
That presentation was hugely successful and was backed by print advertising, direct mail, and radio commercials. It was instrumental in establishing an "umbrella" under which radio stations could promote themselves and the industry.
I established an office in Melbourne after a lot of pushing by the Melbourne stations. It was run at first by Mark Newstead and later, when Mark rejoined McNair Anderson and later went to Europe to work in commercial radio, by David Irwin-Bellette, two people with whom I had instant rapport and therefore whose company I enjoyed immensely.
FM started to become a force in the industry during my stay at RMB, and with it, some new players. The radio scene was changing, and changing fast, as new plans were developed for the future of the industry.
I had bumped into John Bloody Kingston Pearce at a restaurant where Phil Charley and I had sought sanctuary after visiting old colleague Dick McLaren in hospital. John was working at 2UE at the time, and since I knew it was ratings Day - the day when the fate of the personalities would be sealed once again - I asked him how it had gone for his early-evening show.
"I'm number one in my time-slot!", he proclaimed - for all the world sounding like the John Pearce you heard on radio. "So now I'm going to do what everyone should do when they get to Number One".
"What's that?" I wanted to know.
"Resign, of course", he said. And he did.
It seemed to me that it might be time for me to go too. It had all been good fun. The mission, if not completely accomplished, had given commercial radio a new face and a bunch of convinced new advertisers.
I was 63 and I had made a lot of friends. But perhaps maintaining the pace was going to be more difficult. I felt sad, especially since some of the new people who now had influence within the radio industry did not want to understand what our team was doing and they were making noises about getting new, younger faces.
It was getting tougher to be enthusiastic about an industry where in-fighting had always been a way of life, but now warfare had broken out between the FM and AM people.
One station owner took the trouble to travel to Sydney to see me - to try to convince me not to leave. He felt that I had been influenced by a "bunch of lemmings" who were hell bent on doing their own thing, to the detriment of the commercial radio industry.
But by that time I had made up my mind. I would go, but I would retain my association by providing workshops for radio sales people around the country and in other places as well. The idea worked. For more than three years I was kept busy in many parts of Australia and New Zealand, and even went as far afield as Malasia. On one occasion, Bob Logie and I went to Fiji for Radio Fiji.
My decision would mean giving up the feeling of being in the centre of things - something that had driven me throughout my entire career - part of the excitement, the advances made in spite of the competition (especially television), and the very real fellowship of the little radio club.
I had been in commercial radio for forty seven years, the last eight with the industry association.
On June 30th 1989, I picked up the superannuation cheque, wiped away a tear and began to work on the future.
Reprise
There were things to do.
I started my "consultancy" even as I was completing my service with Radio Marketing Bureau, and arranged a workshop in Adelaide by telephone. It was the first of many in across the country. I established this business because there was a need and I wanted to fill it, and because I wasn't ready to give up radio.
Things happened quickly.
The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation Commercial Division asked me to go there and tour the country, staging workshop and client presentations. The contractor for advertising to the Malaysian commercial radio division also hired me to do workshops.
My old sparring partner, Reg Mowatt at the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, invited me to speak at a conference of newspaper sales executives. Another old friend, Alan Wyatt had taken up the challenge of running 8HA in Alice Springs and he gave me the challenge of working with his sales team several times - a challenge I always enjoyed because I liked the people there and I have a soft spot for the Centre. Graham Schmidt who owned 4LM Mount Isa and 4GC Charters Towers asked me to make regular visits...
In fact, stations from North Queensland across to Perth and Bunbury asked me to help train their sales people.
I started a monthly publication called SalesTalk as a means of staying in contact with stations and it lasted for three years. I gave it up because I could not continue to produce the material and keep up with the number of requests for radio station workshops.
Then suddenly I discovered community radio. I'd known about it at Radio Marketing Bureau because it was my task to make sure these new stations didn't make any inroads into the revenue commercial radio thought of as its own. I quickly discovered that the lack of discipline in the community radio industry meant it would not be a challenge for many years to come.
But now, someone was asking me to join the committee of a new station to be established in Sutherland Shire. I took part in the organisation, launch and early days at 2SSR-FM before I found myself in the Sydney Eye Hospital being operated on for a detached retina.
Like everyone else, I took my eyesight for granted, but while recovering from the operation, I found I could not read the newspapers I'd always read greedily, even though I competed with them for advertising dollars. I missed the information that newspapers provide. My portable radio did not fill the information gap. I knew that when I recovered (and fortunately I did) I would have to see if Radio for the Print Handicapped could use my services. I would retire and become a volunteer.
I privately thought I could read the newspapers better than any of the people I could hear on 2RPH, but when they gave me an audition,. I realised the terrible truth: I couldn't read better than any of them, and some were better than me. That's because newspapers aren't really written to be read out loud and you have to be able to scan ahead to read them well. In spite of my lack-lustre audition, 2RPH took me on as a volunteer reader and announcer.
The 2RPH studio equipment wasn't far advanced from the time I gave up broadcasting in favour of an office desk thirty years before. It was hand-me-down stuff from 2SM and other radio stations, but it worked - most of the time. It reminded me of 2KM as I knew it almost fifty years before.
One of the first volunteers I worked with there was Bob Jackson, who'd been my boss at 2WL long years before.
I continued to work for commercial stations as they wanted me, but gradually 2RPH began to absorb more of my time.
One night in 1993, as I slaved over the word processor putting together workshop material for Perth or somewhere equally far distant, I received a phone call. It was one of the Directors of 2RPH saying they were in a Board Meeting, the station manager had resigned, and they'd decided to ask me to take the job.
It paid a small honorarium, too.
I was back in the daily grind of an operating radio station. I still wasn't ready to give up radio.
Phil Charley started to give me a hand in training the volunteers in radio techniques, Graham Bunyan, who I'd known as the office boy at the Colgate Palmolive Radio Unit (and who later read the Macquarie News in its heyday) joined the team, and occasionally Bruce Menzies, another person I'd met at 2UE (later with Channel 9 and then at the ABC as a newsreader) also came along to give me a hand.
And people who had never dreamed of becoming broadcasters joined the team as well. Universitry professors, a retired Judge (although he had been a Quiz Kid in his youth), engineers, chefs, priests and other pastors, housewives, researchers, lawyers, cleaners, taxi drivers - they all turned up at regular auditions, and those who could
read intelligently and with real understanding got their chance to read for the print handicapped audience, and experience the thrill of actual broadcasting.
I realised that I'd been hired to save the volunteers getting worried when things went wrong. Not a day went by without a crisis of some kind. A volunteer forgot to turn up. A creditor wanted a bill attended to. The logging tape recorders played up (they were aged beyond reasonable limit, being hand-me-downs from 2Day FM's original equipment). The transmitter landline was cut by a bulldozer. It was my job to panic.
In many ways I was back in 1942. Some of the equipment could have started its career at the same time as I did.
I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into it. After fifty years of it, it was a little late to apply for that bank job.
Mr President, fellow members and guests of the Time Club ...
I have been asked to name the Radio Person of the Year, and it is more than a cliche to say that it gives me great pleasure to do that.
Normally, the person announcing this prestigious award gives a somewhat veiled account of the recipient's career, just enough to build the suspense, and then surprises everyone, the recipient included, by announcing the name.
The career of this year's recipient is so unique, so long, so varied, so full of achievements, and so marked by the respect and admiration of those who know him, that were I to recount some of the details he would be quickly identified.
Let me just say that nobody has been more deserving of this Award.
Before I announce the name, I would just like to play for you a short extract of a performance of this person, in 1951....
...The man who played the character of Snap Burke in 1951, announcer, copywriter, salesman, sales director, marketing director ... the man who has had a love affair with radio extending over more than 40 years, is none other than the Marketing Director of the Radio Marketing Bureau for the past six years.
Please acclaim Tom Crozier.
- Des Foster, Sydney Time Club Christmas Luncheon, December 1988
I started my "consultancy" even as I was completing my service with Radio Marketing Bureau, and arranged a workshop in Adelaide by telephone. It was the first of many in across the country. I established this business because there was a need and I wanted to fill it, and because I wasn't ready to give up radio.
Things happened quickly.
The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation Commercial Division asked me to go there and tour the country, staging workshop and client presentations. The contractor for advertising to the Malaysian commercial radio division also hired me to do workshops.
My old sparring partner, Reg Mowatt at the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, invited me to speak at a conference of newspaper sales executives. Another old friend, Alan Wyatt had taken up the challenge of running 8HA in Alice Springs and he gave me the challenge of working with his sales team several times - a challenge I always enjoyed because I liked the people there and I have a soft spot for the Centre. Graham Schmidt who owned 4LM Mount Isa and 4GC Charters Towers asked me to make regular visits...
In fact, stations from North Queensland across to Perth and Bunbury asked me to help train their sales people.
I started a monthly publication called SalesTalk as a means of staying in contact with stations and it lasted for three years. I gave it up because I could not continue to produce the material and keep up with the number of requests for radio station workshops.
Then suddenly I discovered community radio. I'd known about it at Radio Marketing Bureau because it was my task to make sure these new stations didn't make any inroads into the revenue commercial radio thought of as its own. I quickly discovered that the lack of discipline in the community radio industry meant it would not be a challenge for many years to come.
But now, someone was asking me to join the committee of a new station to be established in Sutherland Shire. I took part in the organisation, launch and early days at 2SSR-FM before I found myself in the Sydney Eye Hospital being operated on for a detached retina.
Like everyone else, I took my eyesight for granted, but while recovering from the operation, I found I could not read the newspapers I'd always read greedily, even though I competed with them for advertising dollars. I missed the information that newspapers provide. My portable radio did not fill the information gap. I knew that when I recovered (and fortunately I did) I would have to see if Radio for the Print Handicapped could use my services. I would retire and become a volunteer.
I privately thought I could read the newspapers better than any of the people I could hear on 2RPH, but when they gave me an audition,. I realised the terrible truth: I couldn't read better than any of them, and some were better than me. That's because newspapers aren't really written to be read out loud and you have to be able to scan ahead to read them well. In spite of my lack-lustre audition, 2RPH took me on as a volunteer reader and announcer.
The 2RPH studio equipment wasn't far advanced from the time I gave up broadcasting in favour of an office desk thirty years before. It was hand-me-down stuff from 2SM and other radio stations, but it worked - most of the time. It reminded me of 2KM as I knew it almost fifty years before.
One of the first volunteers I worked with there was Bob Jackson, who'd been my boss at 2WL long years before.
I continued to work for commercial stations as they wanted me, but gradually 2RPH began to absorb more of my time.
One night in 1993, as I slaved over the word processor putting together workshop material for Perth or somewhere equally far distant, I received a phone call. It was one of the Directors of 2RPH saying they were in a Board Meeting, the station manager had resigned, and they'd decided to ask me to take the job.
It paid a small honorarium, too.
I was back in the daily grind of an operating radio station. I still wasn't ready to give up radio.
Phil Charley started to give me a hand in training the volunteers in radio techniques, Graham Bunyan, who I'd known as the office boy at the Colgate Palmolive Radio Unit (and who later read the Macquarie News in its heyday) joined the team, and occasionally Bruce Menzies, another person I'd met at 2UE (later with Channel 9 and then at the ABC as a newsreader) also came along to give me a hand.
And people who had never dreamed of becoming broadcasters joined the team as well. Universitry professors, a retired Judge (although he had been a Quiz Kid in his youth), engineers, chefs, priests and other pastors, housewives, researchers, lawyers, cleaners, taxi drivers - they all turned up at regular auditions, and those who could
read intelligently and with real understanding got their chance to read for the print handicapped audience, and experience the thrill of actual broadcasting.
I realised that I'd been hired to save the volunteers getting worried when things went wrong. Not a day went by without a crisis of some kind. A volunteer forgot to turn up. A creditor wanted a bill attended to. The logging tape recorders played up (they were aged beyond reasonable limit, being hand-me-downs from 2Day FM's original equipment). The transmitter landline was cut by a bulldozer. It was my job to panic.
In many ways I was back in 1942. Some of the equipment could have started its career at the same time as I did.
I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck into it. After fifty years of it, it was a little late to apply for that bank job.
Mr President, fellow members and guests of the Time Club ...
I have been asked to name the Radio Person of the Year, and it is more than a cliche to say that it gives me great pleasure to do that.
Normally, the person announcing this prestigious award gives a somewhat veiled account of the recipient's career, just enough to build the suspense, and then surprises everyone, the recipient included, by announcing the name.
The career of this year's recipient is so unique, so long, so varied, so full of achievements, and so marked by the respect and admiration of those who know him, that were I to recount some of the details he would be quickly identified.
Let me just say that nobody has been more deserving of this Award.
Before I announce the name, I would just like to play for you a short extract of a performance of this person, in 1951....
...The man who played the character of Snap Burke in 1951, announcer, copywriter, salesman, sales director, marketing director ... the man who has had a love affair with radio extending over more than 40 years, is none other than the Marketing Director of the Radio Marketing Bureau for the past six years.
Please acclaim Tom Crozier.
- Des Foster, Sydney Time Club Christmas Luncheon, December 1988