Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ManyAmericanradiostations,particularly outinthehinterland,areridiculouslysmalland
cheap. I know this for a fact because when I was a teenager I used to help out at KCBC
in Des Moines. KCBC had the contract to broadcast the Iowa Oaks professional baseball
games' but it was too cheap to send its sportscaster, a nice young guy named Steve Shan-
non' on the road with the team. So whenever the Oaks were in Denver or Oklahoma City
or wherever, Shannon and I would go out to the KCBC studio-really just a tin but standing
beside a tall transmitter tower in a farmer's field somewhere southeast of Des Moinesand
he would broadcast from there as if he were in Omaha. It was bizarre. Every couple of in-
nings someone at the ballpark would call me on the phone and give me a bare summary of
the game, which I would scribble into a scorebook and pass to Shannon, and on the basis
of this he would give a two-hour broadcast.
It was a remarkable experience to sit there in a windowless but on a steaming August night
listening to the crickets outside and watching a man talking into a microphone and saying
things like, “Well, it's a cool evening here in Omaha, with a light breeze blowing in off the
Missouri River. There's a special guest in the crowd tonight' Governor Warren T. Legless,
who I can see sitting with his pretty young wife, Bobbi Rae, in a box seat just below us
here in the press box.” Shannon was a genius at this sort of thing. I remember one time
the phone call from the ballpark didn't come through-the guy at the other end had gotten
lockedinatoiletorsomething-andShannondidn'thaveanythingtotellthelisteners.Sohe
delayed the game with a sudden downpour, having only a moment before said that it was
a beautiful cloudless evening, and played music while he called the ballpark and begged
somebody there to let him know what was going on. Funnily enough, I later read that the
exact same thing happened to Ronald Reagan when he was a young sportscaster in Des
Moines. In Reagan's case he had the batter hit foul balls one after the other for over half an
hour while pretending there was nothing implausible in this, which when you think about
it is more less how he ran the country as president.
Late in the afternoon, I happened onto a news broadcast by some station in Crudbucket,
Ohio, or some such place. American radio news broadcasts usually last about thirty
seconds. It went like this: “A young Crudbucket couple, Dwayne and Wanda Dreary and
their seven children, Ronnie, Lonnie, Connie, Donnie, Johnny and Tammy-Wynette, were
killed when a light airplane crashed into their house and burst into flames. Fire Chief Wal-
ter Water said he could not at this stage rule out arson. On Wall Street, shares had their
biggestone-dayfallinhistory,losing508points.AndtheweatheroutlookforgreaterCrud-
ville: clear skies with a 2 percent chance of precipitation. You're listening to radio station
L-R-U-D where you get more rock and less talk.” There then followed “Hotel California”
by the Eagles.
