So he continued, for a while anyway, as an itinerant, a circuit rider, his colleagues still those same graduates of the radio schools, actual fairies many of them, but fairies of a lower order: penniless, pained fellows who strove for taste and a sense of the finer as they strove to stretch their range and improve their diction.
SOME DEMO’S; FURTHER FAMOUS FIRSTS:
“Dick Gibson, KWGG, Conrad, California. This next number is ‘Dick’s Demo,’ Demonstration Record number twenty-seven, and goes out to all the guys ’n’ gals in the industry who hire and fire. This is a take. Take! I am calling you — ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh.
“I tell you about the time I worked the newsroom at KROP, Roper, Nebraska? The apprenticeship was on me and I wasn’t Dick Gibson yet. I was Marshall Maine, KROP, The Voice of Wheat. Some place that was. The ad I answered in Broadcasting said it reached listeners in three states. And so it did. We saturated two counties in northeast Nebraska, and leaped across the Missouri River to the Dell Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Whoever happened to be tuned in along a small rough stretch of Route 33 in western Iowa could also catch us.
“But let me tell you about those two counties. Sylvia Credenza County and Louis Credenza, Senior County. The whole area consisted of eight enormous farms owned by these eight brothers. The Credenza brothers: Louis III, Jim, Felix, Poke, Charley, George, Bill and Lee. That part of the state had been gerrymandered long before, and every two years each county sent a brother to the statehouse in Lincoln. They took turns. I was there during the reign of Charley and Bill.
“The station was a family hobby, sort of a Credenza hookup. Like a party line. They built it in 1935 when reception was still bad in the area and they had nothing else to listen to. Later, when Sioux City, about sixty miles off, put up KSUX, a 5000-watter, reception improved, but the boys had gotten so used to having their own station that they decided to continue it. The funny thing is, none of the brothers enjoyed speaking on the radio themselves. They became self-conscious and would cough and sputter and stammer helplessly whenever, during those biennial political campaigns they put on for each other — brother ran against brother, though only two brothers were nominated from each county and, for all I know, only Credenzas were registered to vote — one of them had to make a speech. So, though they listened constantly to their own station — they had radios mounted on all their tractors and each barn — they never performed on it except during one of those queer campaigns. (I was around during one of them. Lee was running against Jim in Sylvia Credenza County, and Felix was up against George in Louis Credenza, Senior County. It was something, hearing those speeches, each Credenza urging his three constituent Credenza brothers — one the incumbent— to get out and vote. It didn’t make any difference, they said, who they voted for. The important thing was that they exercise their ballot.)
“A staff ran the station for them from the beginning. When I was there there were two engineers, two transmitter men and two announcers. We all spelled each other and took turns sleeping in the same bunk beds out at the transmitter shack.
“Surprisingly, we did almost as many commercials as a normal station. With their two votes in the Nebraska legislature, the Credenzas carried a lot of weight with important firms around the state and could always pressure a little business out of them. They even prided themselves on the good job they did for their clients, though almost no one but Credenzas could ever have been listening. One time, when I was really into something and neglected to do a commercial exactly when it was scheduled, I received an angry call from Louis III.
“‘Hey you — Marshall Maine. What do you think you’re doing down there? The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln paid money to have that commercial done at 3:15. That don’t mean 3:14 or 3:16 or 3:18 or 3:20. Three-fifteen means 3:15. They picked that time because that’s when folks get thirsty and want something cool to swallow. They want their message said right then. You understand me? You think the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Lincoln wants its message jammed up against the Mutual of Omaha message at 3:23?’
“When people are thinking of their deaths, I thought, when they’re thinking of loss of limb, their houses on fire, liability, personal injury. ‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I was into something.’
“‘Well, you look to your knitting, sonny, or you’ll be fast out on your ass of something else.’
“‘Yes, sir,’ I said, for the truth is, I liked working there. The apprenticeship was on me, as I say, and I was getting valuable experience.
“‘Call me Lou. You last long enough around here I might be your representative. I expect it’ll be me over old Poke in a landslide. In America it don’t do to say sir to the man that’s your representative.’
“We followed FCC regulations to the letter, and functioned exactly as any station would, with all the ordinary station’s customary programming, though with the sense I had of the station and its listeners, the programs seemed experimental to me, as any public activity would seem strange performed in private. I had this notion of command performance and, because of this, a fear of my audience which was unfamiliar to me.
“Yet even granting our ordinary format of music, news, and public service, there was something special about our programs. The Credenzas wanted their tastes catered to. ‘A station has to meet the needs of its audience,’ Felix Credenza often reminded me. So for Jim, the musical Credenza, we did ‘The John Philip Sousa Hour’ from eleven to midnight. For Felix and his wife, childless Credenzas who liked to pretend there were kids around the house, we did a children’s program with fairy tales and Frank Luther recordings. The most popular program, however, the one that pleased all the Credenzas, was a public service show called ‘Know Your County!’ It was about — I quote from the introduction—‘the living legend of Sylvia Credenza and Louis Credenza, Senior Counties.’ What it really was, was the history of the Credenza family done in fifteen-minute dramas, the Credenzas themselves putting together the scripts from their memory of family gossip. The program had been on since the station’s founding, and everything that had ever happened to the Credenzas had already been aired several times. When they came to the end of the cycle — each one, like the verses in ‘This is the house that Jack built,’ slightly longer than the last because of the additional increment of history — they simply started all over again. It was the way congregations read the Bible.
“Most of the programs I was involved with dealt with the family’s founders — Sylvia and Louis Credenza, Senior — and related how they were sweethearts in the old country but couldn’t marry because Louis was scheduled to be called up for military service. There were shows about the plots and payoffs that got him smuggled to America, Louis Senior’s wanderings in the New World, the letters they exchanged once he was settled in Nebraska, Louis’s dreams, Sylvia’s misgivings about making the trip, the bad time she had in steerage, her missing her train in Chicago. This last was a milestone in the legend, a sort of Ems telegram approach to history, just that destiny-ridden. For Louis, it seems, had missed his train in Omaha. He had intended to surprise Sylvia by meeting her in Union Station and riding back to Nebraska with her, and if the two lovers hadn’t both missed their trains they would have missed each other, presumably forever. The mutual layover somehow permitted their reunion for all time.