CHAPTER 20

 My consulting venture was unsuccessful. In July of 1980, I rejoined Dick French at KULF in Houston for an agonizing year and a half. Wall Street was already taking a look at radio stations as it’s new toy. Harte Hanks Communications, a publishing conglomerate bought one of the last great independent chains, Southern Broadcasting, which included KULF. Every time I turned around there were problems.  The sales manager was a hot head who started trouble every chance he got. The morning team were a couple of over the hill guys who were living on their reputation. One of them didn't show up for work one Monday morning. A couple of hours later, we found him....in jail in Belize. He crashed his plane and the local authorities allegedly found dope and guns on board. It cost him a small fortune to buy his way out of the mess. We hired Kenny Stabler, new quarterback of The Oilers to do a one minute bit on Monday mornings after the Sunday games. We paid him pretty good bucks, problem was he'd forget to call and we'd have to track him down. He was the greatest guy in the world, but I guess the money we were paying him was "chump change" and his radio reports just weren't that important to him. 

Me and "The Snake"

Mac Davis stopped by the KULF penthouse studios.

We had a newsman who was a pedophile and some of my "friends" became my worst enemies. The end came in the Spring of 1982. I was not exactly in demand and resorted to being a club dj just to keep from losing my house.

Finally in September of 1982, Kent Burkhart recommended me for the PD job at WCCO-FM in Minneapolis. It was the only time in my life I was told not to succeed. One of the funniest things that ever happened was when Tad Griffin, production director, was on the air one Sunday morning. We were doing the "At Least Four In a Row or You Win $25,000.00" contest. Tad called me at home and said "Skip, I think I just played only three in a row, what do I do?" "Pick up the phone and get a winner", I calmly replied. I didn’t fit the Midwest Communications employee profile; to top it all, I wanted to win. One good thing about my time there was getting to hang out with Doug Lee. Doug told me from day one that I wasn't going to fit into  the ‘CCO organization. He was right as rain. I really raised eyebrows when I added a Prince song to the playlist. WCCO-AM had made a big fuss about the impropriety of "Let’s Get Physical" by Olivia Newton John. I think they even banned it From their playlist. I added it! There are varied versions of why the adult hits format didn't work. The number one reason, no one in that organization wanted it to work. The ax fell in February 0f '83.

I went back to Houston because I still owned a home there. When I negotiated my deal, Midwest Communications agreed to pay my house note ($1200 a month and one more time, thank you Uncle Rex) until it sold. My wife steadfastly refused to lower the price and we at least had a place to go. I went back to being a club dj. I worked briefly at an R&B FM station on weekends. Then I got the morning job at KNUS, an AM oldies station. The PD was the biggest loser I ever met in the radio business. Married about twelve times, he was an ordained minister to avoid paying income tax. I was pretty good and he didn’t like it. There was an FM right across the hall that was big band. The place was a grave yard for old Houston DJs. There were some young talented guys at KNUS including Sean O'Neal and a crazy Hispanic guy named Willie Sanchez. If I could have gotten my hands on Willie early in his career, I could have helpred him become huge. He sounded like Creech Marin and was very popular for just being on weekend overnights. The PD berated Willie constantly. I helped Willie get a job at KFRC and the PD at KNUS called San Francisco and tried to get him fired. What a loser! He finally fired me.

 I had run out of options in Houston. I packed up and left Houston in the Spring of 1984. I stayed with my folks for a couple of weeks, then Jimmy Davenport invited me to come stay with him. I was in pretty down in the dumps. Jimmy wouldn’t let me feel sorry for myself. The minute I tried, he’d leave the room or put me on "ignore". Mid summer of 1984, Kent Burkhart asked me to do a short term project for him. He and Jim Phillips (owner of KHEY in El Paso) had some interest in a station in Corpus Christi. I went down to help out. The GM was a former big name jock who was doing some sneaky stuff. He and I tangled and I was back home before I knew it. The only good thing that came out of that experience was just that, experience and a few bucks. I also lost a lot of weight. A broken heart will do that to a man. I came back to Atlanta tanned and lean.

In the fall of 1984, I was hired to return to my hometown of LaGrange Georgia to manage the first station I had ever worked for, WLAG. Rick Ellis, a guy who I had met years earlier at WFOM in Marietta, took a chance on me as a GM. At first it was very difficult for me to get my mindset on revenue, but in a few months, I had the station in the black. One day, a headhunter called me; he had a client who was buying a radio station in Albany, Georgia and he was going to recommend me for the job. Wow, I was moving up fast as a GM. I took the job and the owners turned out to be Ilene Berns and Peabo Bryson. Ilene had more money than sense and Peabo was there to get the license transfer approved (it was a minority distress sale). It was a fiasco from the beginning. I knew I was in trouble when Berns' elderly father lectured me on how to sell radio time. Didn’t matter that he’d never been in radio in his entire life. I got fired, but had a contract. I sued Berns and won. I briefly worked for another non-radio guy at an Albany station . This guy had a real bad perspiration problem. It was embarrassing to go anywhere with him because he had these gigantic wet spots under his arms. He was a real doofus and everyone made fun of him. I had recently gotten married and upon returning from my honeymoon, I was fired. I was, unemployed again. The big difference was that my wife and I had just gotten the news that she was pregnant. 

I was out of ideas when I heard that a guy in Columbus, Georgia had just bought WGNE FM in Panama City. I went to see him and he hired me to go to PC and baby sit WGNE for a month or so then I was to move to Columbus to be GM at a new FM he was putting on the air. He asked me to do some research on the Columbus market and make some programming and marketing recommendations. I advised him to so the format that was sweeping the country, soft AC; call the station "Sunny", and designed artwork for the logo, borrowing heavily from KSTP AM in Minneapolis. After a couple of months, the guys says for me to come to Columbus. I found a house to rent, paid a deposit and the first months rent and was about to start packing. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, 1986. I show up in Columbus and the jerk calls me in his office and says he's changed his mind. I could feel that I was very close to committing physical violence. It was all I could do to limit my assault on this piece of excrement to words. He stammered and sweated said he'd reimburse me for the deposit and rent on the house in Columbus if I would leave peacefully. He finally paid me. What he didn't know was that I went back to the people I'd rented the house from and told them what had happened. They gave me my money back. I got the last laugh on that deal.   

A friend of mine was General Sales Manager at Susquehanna Broadcasting’s WKIS in Orlando. I moved there in 1986 to be a salesman for the AM station and The Florida Radio Network. After a few months, my friend left, and I was made local sales manager. In June of 1987, my son John Carlton Long, Jr. (Sean) was born.

In the summer of 1987 Susquehanna sold the station and network. I was uncertain of my future despite the assurances of the new ownership that "no changes were going to be made". Over the previous years I had become friends with Bud Polacek, former manager of WZGC in Atlanta. Bud had left Z and started his own broadcast company. The first acquisition was a station in Gadsden, Alabama, then Tyler, Texas and Tupelo, Mississippi. Out of the clear, Bud called me and hired me to go to Tupelo to manage WELO/WZLQ. Bud’s partner was a New York jerk who had the sense of humor of a rat. It was not a pleasant experience. I loved Bud, but loathed his partner. After about a year it was back to Orlando. This go round, I worked for the Florida Radio Network as National Sales Manager. Sadly, Bud passed away a couple of years ago.

In the Spring of 1989, Bill Sanders, Executive Director of The Georgia Association Of Broadcasters called me with the name of a guy in Waynesboro, Georgia who needed a GM. I didn’t even know where Waynesboro was. Bill said the guy told him he was willing to make the right guy a partner in the little AM and the FM for which he had applied. My eyes lit up. I got a map and to my delight Waynesboro is only 20 miles from Augusta. At this time, radio station prices were fetching unheard of prices. The words, "move-in" came to my lips. The FM could put a decent signal over Augusta, a larger market. I called the guy and he flew me up to talk. He owned a bunch of Dairy Queens and was just kind of plain and ordinary. He had bought WBRO-AM on the courthouse steps and figured it might be worth something one day.

A kid who worked for him pointed out the opportunity for an FM construction permit to the guy. We struck a deal, I would own 45% of the FM. I moved to Waynesboro and finally built the FM with the help of, now deceased engineer, Jim Taylor. Jim was a great guy and a hell of an engineer. We built it for $280,000.00. I told my partner not to expect instant success. Additionally, our goal wasn’t to keep the station. I figured the station could easily bring a million once we got it on the air and could demonstrate the coverage of the Augusta market. We had been able to get an upgrade to 25,000 watts and I couldn’t persuade the old codger to hang in there and do the upgrade and then cash in. My partner and I had a major falling out. A religious broadcast group leased us tower and studio space. Those Christians never miss a trick and swooped in and stole the station for what we had in it, cutting me out of the deal in the meantime. I wound up suing my former partner. 

It was the Summer of 1992. I didn’t have a job and once again Jimmy Davenport invited me to come stay with him. After bumming around for most of the Summer, I took a temporary job at Y-106/Y-107 FM. My friend, Gary Corry (also known as Red Neckerson") worked there writing for the morning show and helped me get the job. I worked weekends then, the production director left. I got that job but only on a temporary basis. In the fall of that year, I moved to Milledgeville, Georgia to run a station owned by a weird guy from New York who was in business with a friend of mine. That lasted about three months. I quit for a combination of reasons: my father had just passed away and I was pretty confused, I had gotten my settlement from my former partner in the Waynesboro station, and the weird guy was just TOO weird for me to handle.

In the Fall of 1993, I fulfilled a lifelong dream and opened a restaurant. It was called DJ’s Buffalo Wings. I decorated the place with all my gold records, antique radios, and pictures of me with rock stars.  I operated it for about six months. It was a failure business wise, but I can honestly say that next to radio, it was the most enjoyable thing I've ever done. In the Spring of 1994 I went back to the Augusta market and radio as a salesperson for a new country station. After working at WKBG for about a year I was ready to get out of radio. It wasn’t fun. Broadcasters no longer owned radio stations. Investment companies owned them and they don’t care about anything but profit. Believe me I understand the concept, but when you don’t know who you’re working for from one day to the next it is very unsettling. In 1995, I left radio.

EPILOGUE

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