The Aircheck Vault

The first time I ever remember listening to a radio, I was four years old, listening to our Hitachi transistor radio in my room. The song playing was Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler, the station was WROV Roanoke, and the guy on the air was Ron Sunshine. A few years later I was spending every evening in my bedroom hoping to hear new Beatles songs played by Jack Fisher. About ten years later I was inside of WROV for the first time, shooting photos for the school newspaper while my friend Cliff was interviewing Bart Prater. At some point, during these experiences, I decided, "I'M GOING TO DO THIS!"

Throughout life I've had a few experiences where it seemed that, within a period of a few days, one door slammed shut and another one flew open. It was like that in Fall 1974 when my girlfriend went off to college and we subsequently broke up, then within days we did the interview with Bart, and a few weeks later I'd gotten the "job" of being the WROV High School Correspondent for Cave Spring High which meant I was going down there every Wednesday night reading the weekly "Cave Spring High Report" on the air. One week I actually said "Well the Cave Spring tennis team had a busy week out knocking their balls around on the tennis court!" Honest. From there I started doing photography for them (I did it for free as long as they let me in there to do it).

That December, while visiting a friend named John who lived in the subdivision called "Sugarloaf", we built our own "radio station" using potentiometers (volume controls) from an old TV and a metal breadbox for a "board". We had no way to transmit this so we ran it into an amplifier, put the speaker in his open window, and blasted our "station" out of the back of his house. Because it was about 30-degrees that day we about froze our asses off. But we didn't care, as long as "somebody" might be listening to this. About an hour later the phone rang, it was a girl named Robin who lived behind him who said "I'm having a Christmas party and everyone arriving can hear you. Why don't you both just come over here?" We went. I met a guy there named Steve Finnegan. And after that it seemed like, off we went!

By Summer 1975 I'd gotten my FCC license and was running the closed circuit station at the high school, WCSH. A short while later Steve was working overnights on "beautiful/elevator/dentist office music station WPVR. Then we met Bucky Stover who was yet another guy just like us who wanted to do radio. Finally in 1976 I was hired at the local public radio station, WVWR, where I met my lifelong friend, Rick Howell. A year later, I was hired at WPVR which by then had merged with AM Top 40 station WFIR. I got my first chance to be on the radio, playing actual records, in early 1978 when the full-time overnight guy, Carl Foster, wasn't able to work one night because earlier that day, he'd been elbowed in the balls on the basketball court. Honest. But regardless of how I got there, I'D ARRIVED!

By 1979, Bucky had worked at WROV doing weekends and that summer they hired Steve to be the full-time overnight guy on WROV. About that same time, I became the full-time overnight guy on WFIR. Then we were interviewed by the newspaper (and if you were brave enough to read that and want more, here's the rest of it...)

By the beginning of the 1980s, we were both working at WROV. My goal was to have a job there by the time I was 25. We both made it when we were both 22. And we got there just in time for the heyday to be over. In 1981, the new Top 40 FM WXLK ate WROV's lunch and soon they toned it down and became "Adult Comtemporary". Steve left for "The Triad" (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point NC). In 1982 I was hired to do weekends at K92. By the end of the summer I'd been fired and that was the end of me working on the radio in Roanoke. For a while I thought it was over for good but this only turned out to be Act I...

So here we are, going through my eight boxes of cassettes, which I've saved all of these years because—way back then—I really believed "One of these days we'll be famous and they'll want all of this stuff for the documentaries and for the Smithsonian Institute." Young people really are full of shit and have their heads up their asses, don't they? For many of these I've written some notes detailing anything I remember about them and what was going on at the time.

Anyway, ENJOY! Or, BEWARE! With most of these you could go either way...actually I should say...

NOTE: The stuff of mine that you will hear on this page, for the most part, SUCKS. It was very early in my career and, thusly, pretty horrible. If you want to hear me when I was halfway good at this, PLEASE go to the "NC Years" page...to do that CLICK HERE.