In the Twist of a Dial: What happened to radio, 1960-2020?

by Joe Taylor

You may have grown up online, clicking on the music, news and opinions you wanted to hear. You may find it interesting that the way much of what you hear on your devices today was initially structured and programmed on radio stations. You'll see that radio, like the Internet, brought people together, and then sorted them out. Radio chronicled the news, music, and fads of the twentieth century. While those of us in radio were covering those stories, playing that music, and often part of those fads, we were, out of earshot, experiencing the dramas, dysfunctions, and unpredictability of our own lives. So this is a book filled with stories about people—people with aspirations, with flaws, people trying to make a living doing something they loved. Everybody enjoys a good story. Radio's story is my story. I grew up listening to history being made on the radio. I remember playing with a toy truck on the floor in my grandmother's living room while I heard Harry Truman's surprise victory over Thomas Dewey being announced on a cathedral-style radio. Fifteen years later, I would be on the radio when President Kennedy was assassinated. But, for me, and I'm sure for you, if you're of a certain age, radio has been about entertainment. The nature of radio entertainment evolved from the stars of Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Burns and Allen all having their own network comedy shows, and dramas like The Shadow and Dragnet , morphing into glib, youthful-sounding disc jockeys playing the top songs of the day. Along the way anger became entertainment, or at least cathartic. As a child I listened to those radio comedies and dramas. As an adult I've had a part in what followed. Sometimes I was the guy on the mic, sometimes the “brain” behind what you were hearing, sometimes the “suit” doing what in the U.S. it's always about—peddling it all to make a buck for the company. I have been on the air doing all of these formats and others. I've been the person off-mic creating, structuring, tinkering with those formats. I've peddled those formats and their listeners, taught sales people how to get clients to buy an intangible, an ad that's “on the air.” I've managed the whole menagerie of egos, stars, hucksters, crusaders, and drifters who populate a radio station. I have been the man in the middle, having to deal with a latter-day Scrooge, an owner who can't understand why that young disc jockey has to be off for his grandfather's funeral. I've managed a hometown station that an out-of-town corporation viewed as merely a commodity to be bought and sold. I wasn't a big star. Sure, I had my following. I still actually have some people who remember me from my time on the air. But I wasn't a true radio star. Not like Dan Ingram in New York, Dick Biondi in Chicago, or LA's Real Don Steele. Radio, from the mid 1950s into the '90s was uniquely local. The stories and the people that I'm going to tell you about are largely from markets that I worked Rochester, New Haven, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Philadelphia, and smaller towns in New England, Pennsylvania and Ohio. But the situations, the attitudes, the antics are universal to radio of that era across the country. What follows will not chronicle the history of radio in linear fashion. It will not be a thesis on radio's influence in society in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This book will be full of remembrances, observations of events and people that I have experienced in my six decades in radio. I have written this book “inside out,” telling stories, many of them personal, drawing sketches of some of the diverse characters I've worked with in this business, and telling “tales out of school” of the shenanigans I've seen and participated in. Consider these snapshots to be individually enjoyed, or maybe shocked by, or to be assembled, as if in a scrapbook, so that you'll be able to see what radio has been before it disappears.

228 pages, Paperback

Published September 21, 2021

About the author

I’ve had stories published in over 100 literary magazines. Pineapple, A Comic Novel in Verse, was published by Sagging Meniscus Press, as was Back to the Wine Jug, another novel in verse. NewSouth Books published The Theoretics of Love. Sagging Meniscus also published a story collection of mine, entitled Ghostly Demarcations. A previous novel of mine, Oldcat & Ms. Puss: A Book of Days for You and Me, was published several years ago by the now defunct Black Belt Press, and it was reviewed in Publishers Weekly. I have three story collections published, and I’ve edited several anthologies, notably, Belles’ Letters: Contemporary Fiction by Alabama Women and Tartts One through Five. I recently published a novel with the imposing title, Let There Be Lite, OR, How I Came To Know and Love Godel’s Incompleteness Proof. I’ve been the director of Livingston Press . . . forever.