It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XXXV

It was Wednesday, October 8, 1986. It was time for a remote.

A bit of history here: Southdale was the first enclosed shopping mall ever. August 8 1986 was the thirtieth anniversary.

And as part of the mall's celebration, they wanted the Don Vogel show to do a live broadcast from the mall's old atrium.

Live remotes are a big job even today; back then, doing a good remote was a huge job. Engineers had to get the phone company to run special high-bandwidth phone lines (this was a decade and a half before DSL and Broadband were everywhere, so it was expensive) to the remote site, haul a station wagon full of gear to the site...

...and, hardest of all, getting the air talent to come on out.

I'm a mutant in radio - I have always loved doing remotes. I'm a vanishing minority in the business. Most radio people detest leaving the comfort of their own studio.

Vogel was worse than most; it's harder to work a room when you're blind. Don hated remotes. But he was a great showman, and he realized what a great promotion tool they were. So he worked to minimize the impact of his blindness on the show when we went out on remotes.

Which was a big part of my job

I got in to work around 9AM to get some other work done, fix some bookings, and get ready. Don was doing a voice-over job in downtown Minneapolis, and would need to be picked up and hauled out to Southdale. Chauffering Don was a good-sized part of my gig back then. But this was no ordinary pickup; the station was earning a lot of money on this remote, and everything needed to work perfectly. If my jeep broke down, there needed to be a backup to get Don to the site.

The engineer, Norm Paetznick, handed me a big, white brick with an antenna. "Take the cell phone, and call if there's a problem".

I'd seen cell phones - on Miami Vice. This one was about three pounds, the size of a walkie-talkie, had access in a thin little corridor through the metro (including the downtowns and the airport), and cost a ton, plus two dollars a minute for airtime. It was, obviously, for emergencies.

I set out to get Don. It was a gorgeous October day in Minneapolis. As I wheeled down Sixth Street to get to the studio (high up in the Multifoods Tower), I had this brief flash; "I have a talk show, a job that pays the bills, a jeep, a leather jacket...all I need is a band and a smokin' girlfriend, and I'll have pretty much everything I want in life!" Armed with my expense-account, I wheeled into the parking ramp by Multifoods (on my own, I'd have driven around until a meter opened up), grabbed the phone, and walked into the tower. As I crossed the lobby, a small knot of drop-dead attractive (could it be any other kind?) office girls walked past. I took out the cell phone - which, back then, had vastly different implications than it does today - held it to my head, and started a one-sided conversation as I walked past them.

I'm sure they dug me.

===========

I'd never been to Southdale. The whole crew was doing the live show; sports guy Bruce Gordon; John MacDougall with his stack of AP wire copy, Dave Elvin, Don and me, along iwith a couple of engineers (Norm Paetznick and Dennis Nistl, if memory serves). We were set up at a couple of tables in front of an old water fountain in front of the old Donaldson's store.

And, at 3PM, we started broadcasting.

Fact is, I don't remember much about the broadcast itself. We had a rep from an online dating service on the air. Vogel chuckled "Let's fix you up with a challenge - fix Berg up with a date!". They accepted the challenge.

We'll get back to that.

Also - Don had lost a bet with Gordon on a football game. The stakes? He had to wriggle like a strip of frying bacon on the floor. I escorted him out to the middle of the floor in front of the table for the ceremony. (The next day someone called up and asked "I thought you guys always said he was blind! I saw him! He's not blind! There's just no way he could get around like that if he was blind!" I must have done a good job...)

The highlight of the show was our regular bit, "Dare Line", where we'd dare people to do stupid things for lame prizes.

The highlights:

• The Dare: Jump into the water fountain. A guy in a brand-new cashmere sweater took the dare, and did a bellyflop into the fountain's twelve inches of water. The Prize: a tube of Plasti-Dip.
• The Dare: Walk into Donaldson's and demand that everyone tune in Don Vogel. A young woman volunteered. Bruce Gordon, with the mobile mike, escorted her to the store - where she not only bellowed the demand to all and sundry, but grabbed a few passersby and made the demand in person. The Prize: Another tube of Plasti-Dip.

The other memory - it was about as much fun as I'd ever had doing radio. We had an audience of a couple of hundred people gathered around in the mall by the time we were done. It was a huge hit.

After the show, Don offered to take the crew out to dinner - provided we could find a greasy-enough greasy spoon. We - Don, Dave, Mac, Gordo and executive producer Rob Pendelton and I - adjourned to Doyle's, an old greasy-spoon diner at 38th and Bloomington in south Minneapolis, for the best pork tenderloin sandwiches and onion rings in the world, then and now.

I had a jeep, a leather jacket, a talk show, a gig that I loved that paid the bills, and that glowing sensein the pit of my gut that I really belonged somewhere.

Posted by Mitch at October 8, 2006 11:30 AM | TrackBack