I was excited to get my first paycheck for a couple hundred dollars, but quickly learned how bad things were at the station when it bounced. Standing in front of a banner for KBBA in the control room on August 14, 1989. It was cluttered with a lot of features we aired on Fridays. AUDIO: KBBA aircheck from June 23, 1989, beginning at 5 p.m. But local news stopped after the news director left because, like me, he was not getting paid. Also we had been running the same stories since the morning. I was told to try and keep the newscasts to five minutes because they were coming after hearing state, then national casts. At first I’d read every single story we had, sometimes doing 15-minute newscasts. I really enjoyed doing these local newscasts, in which I would make big stacks of carts with actualities and carefully coordinate them with pages of copy. We had sound bites every day from a postal service spokeswoman detailing the injuries, updating the carrier’s condition and making calls for dogs to be secured so they couldn’t attack mailmen. During the first week I was there the big local story, which was stretched over several days, was about a letter carrier being attacked by a dog. He also took cuts and reports from Arkansas Radio Network feeds. When I started the station had a news director who wrote local stories and gathered sound. For the entire hour there would be one call after another. It was like classified ads on the radio and people seemed to love it. Or sometimes I heard people call to say they had a litter of kittens that were free to good homes. The color doesn’t work anymore so I’ll take $5 for it,” and would then give the phone number. A typical example would be, “I’ve got a 10-year-old, 19-inch TV. It was almost surreal to hear one caller after another trying to sell what was often junk. KBBA aired Tradio, which I also heard go by the name Trading Time on other stations, weekday mornings from 8 to 9 a.m. The station also aired a peculiar show endemic to small town radio called Tradio, in which listeners would call in and announce things they had for sell, how much money they wanted, and would give their phone number. I think local sports broadcasts were some of the few times we had many listeners or any significant advertising. We also carried state sportscasts from a company called the Creative Sports Network out of Conway and would sometimes air local high school championships, with Riddle doing the play-by-play. I followed a tight format clock, playing a mix of current and classic country music, along with national news from ABC, state news from the Arkansas Radio Network, and I’d anchor local newscasts during my first two hours. My shift was 5 to 10 p.m., when I’d sign the station off and shut down the transmitter. We talked on the phone a few minutes with him telling me what the position entailed and I started the next night. I waited at least a half-hour before he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it because he was busy trying to sell ads to a specific client. I was surprised there wasn’t a receptionist, but rather the middle-aged DJ came out of the control room to tell me station manager John Riddle was still out on a sales call. The turntables, control board and cart machines were probably several decades old. At a time when CDs had taken prominence, KBBA was still playing 45 rpm records. When I walked in for my job interview, I was immediately struck by how old and outdated the equipment was. The station broadcast from a strip mall behind a furniture store on Military Road. Apparently the station manager of KBBA had called my school looking for cheap talent and hired me along with two other students. I had been volunteering at KABF a few months by then and was hoping to get a paying radio position somewhere. I heard about the job through Bob Gay, my high school broadcasting instructor, who thought it would be a good starting position for me. The call letters were said to have stood for Keep Building Benton, Arkansas. The station, broadcasting with 250 watts at AM 690, was a low-power country music station in the small town of Benton, Arkansas, just outside of Little Rock. But it still ended up being a good learning experience, while exposing me to the difficult realities facing the industry. Those were our currents in heavy rotation. My hand on the button, ready to start another record spinning.
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