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April 23, 2018 10:00 am  #1


The Greatest Radio Advice I Ever Got Was….

Everyone probably has a different way to complete that subject sentence, but having read that great article on Evelyn Macko (and full disclosure, I used to work with her and she’s every bit the great broadcaster many here know she is) she talks about her mentors and the advice they gave her as she was just starting out.
 
If we’re lucky, at some point in all our careers, we’ve run into that special person who’ve had a huge influence on us. And I’ve been equally fortunate in that area.
 
Yet the one piece of radio advice I remember most was, to say the least, not helpful. But it’s never left me. It happened at my first radio position (I say “position” since I was only 15 and not actually getting paid) at a local ethnic station. I was learning the equipment for the first time and determined to do a good job as a trainee operator when they introduced me to the host of a German-language show.
 
The guy’s name was “Wolfgang,” a petite, owl-eyed man with thick coke-bottle glasses whose only talent seemed to be that he happened to speak perfect Deutsch.
 
He was just getting ready to go into the booth when they told him I was going to be helping behind the board. He shook my hand, put his arm around my shoulder, gave it a short squeeze and then without a second of thought, warmly told me, “R.A., it’s nice to meet you. Whatever you do, don’t do it on my show!”
 
It’s been more than four decades since that fateful encounter and I went on to a pretty successful voyage on both radio and TV airwaves. But for some reason, that was the one piece of ‘advice’ that still stands out the most. And while it made me laugh even back then, I’ve never forgotten those words to (not) live by.

 

April 23, 2018 1:45 pm  #2


Re: The Greatest Radio Advice I Ever Got Was….

RadioActive wrote:

Whatever you do, don’t do it on my show!”

Maybe it was lost in translation, but what the eff did he mean? 🤔
 
My mentor, a former SAS covert torture endurance instructor, give me this sage wisdom, "see the sky, lose yourself in its vastness and whatever you do here, the grey squirrel will always scatter at the sound of a one-winged hummingbird at dawn, when Dundas Street smells of pungent urine".