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So I've been sitting at the bar talking with this guy for a couple of hours at least about everything under the sun except for sports. It's just nothing I've ever really sat and talked about. We decided it was time to call the night, so I got up and said, it was nice talking to you. I didn't catch your name. I almost wish she hadn't told me. Turns out the guy I was joined to about kids, plumbing problems and the next car I wanted to buy was a guy widely considered to be the greatest pitcher in baseball history. I'm Jim Pulling. This is my view from the middle. When I was making rounds to radio stations begging for a job, the one common thing I kept hearing about the radio business was the fact that people moved around a lot. I had a deed tell me that you stay at a job until you've been promoted to the highest position possible, or until you've made as much money as possible, then move on. Well, I never really saw that happen a lot, but the one thing I did witness was a lot of people getting fired. Seems whenever a station changes format, starts losing money, or is simply feeling frisky, They go and fire people, especially air talent. If you're a high priced air talent, you're especially vulnerable. Listeners tend to associate a certain air personality to a particular format, and if that format isn't doing well in the ratings, well, the management will change it to a format that does. But along with the format change usually comes an on air talent change. Management will generally want to change the entire image of the station to create a completely new sound, So all the music, if there is any, all the jingles referred to in industry parlance as imaging, and all the voices must change to make that happen. The positive side of all this is the fact that getting fired in the radio business doesn't carry with it the same stigma as it would in other lines of work. It's just part of the business and most of the time getting fired didn't mean you weren't doing your job well. But still getting fired means you're out of work and no paycheck is coming in. It doesn't matter if you're a banker, a butcher, or radio DJ. Getting fired sucks. By the time I reached Whoo, I had never been fired from a job. I never had the experience of someone telling me where the door is and not to let it hit me on the butt on the way out, but not to worry that soon would change. Whoo is owned by a small broadcasting company called Bluegrass Broadcasting. The company owned some other stations somewhere I don't remember where. Who had been the dominant radio station in the Orlando market for a full service country music station. They had gone for decades without a significant challenge from another country station. Most didn't want to even try for fear that Whoo would mop the proverbial floor with them. Country music and Whoo were synonymous terms in Orlando, Florida at the time. That would soon change too. WHOOAM nine ninety was a country music station, while WHOOFM ninety six point five was a beautiful music station also known as Doctor's Office or elevator music station. The FM station was completely automated. One guy ran the whole thing. He programmed the computer and changed music tapes on this huge automated carousel. Later they flipped to a country format, but it was still automated and not very exciting to listen to. With the possible exception of the morning show, the egotistical Whoo management was convinced that if it did anything to make the station too exciting, it would damage the ratings of the cash cow station, who Am FM radio was only now beginning its surge to becoming the dominant band in radio. This short sighted attitude would soon prove to be the deathnell for Whoo. The owners of the Crosstown Beautiful music station WDBOFM ninety two point three obviously saw this weakness and went for it. They flipped the format the country music K ninety two FM was born. Not only did Whoo management let their egos get in the way when making planning decisions, they continued to trip all over themselves in what happened next. They called a meeting of all Whoo employees and told all of us, we're not going to react to them, referring to K ninety two, we're the old pros at country music in this market. But from that point on, all they did was react to them. Every move K ninety two made, whether it was music promotional activity or sales activity, Whoo copied them, always late and never able to best them at anything. The K ninety two guys knew exactly what they were doing and Whoo was like a dog on a leash. Not only did the owners of K ninety two FM flip to a format that directly competed with Whoo, but they also started going after our employee, offering significant salary increases to win them over. After a few people accepted employment offers at WDBO, I was called into the office and told they were doubling my salary so I wouldn't be tempted to jump ship. They didn't say that was the reason, but it was obvious I hadn't been offered anything at K ninety two, nor would I be. But I took the money and ran. Whoo began to decline and fast. Ratings took a dive, sales dropped, and more people began to leave. One day, after my morning drive shift was over, I was sitting in my office when my sports director walked in with a shocked look on his face. I was just fired, he said, in a weak and confused tone. I shot up out of my seat and started to charge down the hall to the program director Buck's office, furious that they would fire my sports guy out from under me without even consulting me. But as I started walking quickly, at first I began to slow down as a realization and a very bad feeling started to come over me. I stopped it in the hallway as reality slapped me directly in the face. Bucks, the program director, appeared before me, seemingly out of nowhere. He looked at me in the eye for a split second before averting his eyes to the floor. He didn't say a word. He curled his index finger as if to say, follow me. I followed him to the office, where he closed the door and we both sat down. Jim, he began the only thing consistent about this business is its inconsistency. That was followed up with we have to let you go. He continued to talk. I knew he was talking because I could see his mouth moving and I heard his voice echoing in the room, But to this day I'm not exactly sure what he said. I heard something about K ninety two and something about market share and some other industry mumbo jumbo. All I knew is I was out of work. Several years later, I happened to be visiting the studios of WDBO on an unrelated matter, and I passed by a fake tombstone near the side entrance to their building. Here lies whoo am and FM was the epitaph. Good job not reacting to them. Whoo. The problem with getting fired for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time is you never know where or when it's going to happen again. You can be doing a terrific job and keeping your nose clean, then wham oh, you're out on the street. It makes you paranoid after a while, but God closes one door and opens another. A couple of months later, I landed a gig as an evening news anchor on the Florida Radio Network later renamed Florida News Network or FNN. After a couple of years on the anchor desk, I was eventually promoted to operations manager of the network and radio station. Yeah quite a jump, but I had been helping out in operations and the management new I was qualified. But that job lasted only a couple more years, and in January nineteen eighty seven, I got WAMO. There were varying theories as to why I got canned. The prevailing one was the ownership was getting ready to sell the network and I was the only full time person on the payroll since most of the rest of the people needed to run the place were actually paid by the radio station and not FNN. Shortly after I was booted, the network did get sold to a new company, but I was out of work for at least ten months, which felt like an eternity. I bopped around at some stupid sales jobs that went nowhere. A fun experience that I had during all this, though, was an independent contractor job I got working for IDB Communications at the Los Angeles Dodgers spring training camp Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida. IDB was a satellite communications company. What they did was provide radio uplinking services for sports teams all over the world. I was hired as a contract uplink technician for the LA Dodgers and Dodgertown. It was my job to operate idb's uplink system there for the radio broadcasts of the Dodgers and any visiting teams. I put the broadcast on satellite, so radio stations throughout the country affiliated with the LA Dodgers radio network or the network of the visiting team were able to receive and in turn broadcast the games. This involved handling not only the English speaking broadcast for the Dodgers, but also the Spanish language broadcasts and the English, Spanish and even French broadcasts when they played the Montreal expos of the visiting teams. So I could be managing the uplink of as many as five networks simultaneously for each spring training game and coaches show. I learned all the technical ins and outs of uplinking during my tenure at FNN. Plus I had engineering friends in the business who would helped me at the drop of a hat if I needed it. Now, here's an odd thing about all this. I have never been a sports guy. I just wasn't a big fan. I was more interested in radio. When in Detroit, I went to Tiger games and listened to them on the radio. But that was because I was into in the radio broadcast, not the sport itself. I'd go to Tiger Stadium and was more interested in trying to see what was happening in the WJR broadcast booth than it was the actual game. What a radio geek. I knew how to play baseball, football, soccer, hockey, etc. But I wasn't very good at any of them. Later on, I would actually produce national radio broadcasts of baseball and football games for which I had to know the sports pretty well, but still I wasn't all that interested, nor did I pay attention or follow the players. This is what caused the embarrassing moment with the greatest pitcher in baseball history. When you worked at Dodgertown, whether you were employed by the team directly or you were a contractor like me, you hung out with the players during off times. You ate in the dining hall with them, you hung out at the bar with them. One crazy memory I have of Dodgertown was leaving the dining hall one night rather late and hearing team coach Tommy Lasorda chewing out a player in the middle of the parking lot. Losorta was, I don't want to be loud and boisterous, and he was rating this kid to riot act for something I'm not sure what, probably for drinking alcohol. There's something in violation of the team rules. The f bombs are flying left and right, and I didn't want to get hit by any of them, so I kind of stood off to the side and waited for the dressing down to finish before moving on to my next destination. On another evening, I was sitting at the bar. It had been a long day for everyone, since we had done a couple of different games on that day. I had randomly sat down next to this guy I'd never met before. He seemed to be in his early fifties. Didn't really ask, nice enough guy, and we sparked up a conversation. He seemed to want to talk, so I played along. We talked about a lot of different stuff, but sports never came up. This went on for a couple of hours. We had some drinks and some laughs, but it became time for me to get up and drag myself back to the hotel room since I had an early day the next day. So I got up and I said, it was nice talking with you. I don't think I caught your name. My name is Jim Polling. He stood up and shook my hand and said, likewise, my name is Sandy Kofax. Yes, the Sandy Kofax, considered one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, who played for the Dodgers for twelve seasons from nineteen fifty five to nineteen sixty six. Three time winner of the Cy Young Award, named the National League's most Valuable Player, in nineteen sixty three and the youngest player ever to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He retired from the game when he was thirty. See. I can read Wikipedia just like everyone else. No other way I would know all that because I just don't follow baseball. Hello. Anyway, all my baseball fanatic friends hate me when I tell them this story. They say to me, I can't believe you just sat and talked to Sandy Kofax for two hours and didn't know it, like I was having a beer with Jesus or something. I'm not sure what I said or did when Kofax introduced himself. I think I just smiled and said it was nice meeting you. Anything else I said would have made me look like an idiot. Of course, I knew the name Sandy Kofax and that he was a great baseball player, although I couldn't spout off any of the stats I had just read to you and that I got from Wikipedia. By the way, by saying something benign like nice meeting you, I was hoping I would just make him think I knew who he was and really didn't care. So there I am in the middle. Dodgertown mecca for baseball fans, and me oblivious to the sports aspect of all of it. Sitting with one of the greats of the game and not asking him a single thing about his career, about the game, about his awards, nothing. He actually probably appreciated the break. Getting fired from radio jobs is unfortunately part of the business overall. I was lucky in my forty plus year career that I only moved a couple of times. I was more the exception than the rule, though, But as you can see, that couple of moves gave me some unique, exciting and sometimes embarrassing experiences. I'm Jim Pauling, and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, is life really a bunch of coincidences? Or maybe it's just a God thing? Next on my view from the middle.