Chapter 10

News Radio Meets Bill McNeal

"He whose voice reaches halfway

around the world is wiser than

he whose voice reaches only to

the end of the bar."

~ Edward R. Murrow, 1975

You might think it would be easy for a person with my considerable talent, with a phoned-in philosophy degree and two years of late-night college radio experience, to stroll into any radio station and demand a job in broadcasting. To my surprise, I learned there is actually quite a bit of competition in the world of on-air talent. As it turns out, a lot of people struggle to break into the field which I now dominate. It didn't necessarily matter that my voice was made of honey, my cadence was musical, and my enunciation was unmatched. It takes more than just flawlessly refined talent to break into this business. Looking back, I realize I may have faced that same struggle as a lot of those other schmucks had I not had another factor working to my advantage: nepotism.

As luck would have it, my Aunt Becca owned a radio station. I had recently graduated without honors, barely skating by on my charm and wit. I was still living in my shared room at the Sigma Nu house. The other graduates had moved out and the younger frat boys had indicated it was time for me to move along. My father had converted my old bedroom into a moonshine distillery of sorts, so moving back home was not an option. I couldn't very well afford a place of my own without a paycheck. Applying for a job seemed daunting with my complicated schedule. I was still on the air with WFIB. I would leave the station at 6:00am, sleep for a few hours, wake up, spend most of the day getting drunk, and then wander back toward the station just before midnight. I had a full plate. How was I supposed to go to job interviews?

About the third or fourth time I was picked up by campus police for being drunk in public at ten in the morning, the dean put in a phone call to my parents. Dean Turner said I was becoming a nuisance and would not be allowed on campus any longer. My father, who picked up the phone, replied, "Bill who?" and nearly hung up. Luckily, my mother was there and grabbed the receiver from him. She was very surprised to learn that I had graduated and apparently couldn't quite recall which university I had attended. As luck would have it, Aunt Becca happened to be visiting my mom at the time. She took the phone and told Dean Turner that she would take care of the situation. The next day, just as I was emerging from the fraternity house with my first drink of the day in hand, Aunt Becca pulled up to the curb. She slapped the bottle of Jack Daniels right out of my grip and told me it was time to get my life together. She said I needed to clean myself up and get to work. She had a job for me. Aunt Becca helped me gather my few belongings that weren't saturated in stale beer, loaded me into her car, and set off for Rochester, New York.

I hadn't thought much about my aunt since I had been away at college. We usually only saw her at Christmas time. It never occurred to me to ask what she did for a living. To my great fortune, Aunt Becca owned WHAM 1180AM, a small news and talk radio station based in Rochester. She had decided she was going to give me a job on the air so that she could keep an eye on me and make sure I stopped drinking. Of course, Aunt Becca didn't know what she was up against, but we'll get to that later. At first I was resistant to the idea. I was quite enjoying drinking my life away with college kids during the day and spinning the vinyl every night. News radio, by comparison, sounded incredibly boring. Over the course of the eight hour drive, however, I came around to the idea. As much as I prided myself on my excellent taste in music, the records certainly posed a challenge to much of my precious speaking time. With an all-talk format, I would be able to flood the airwaves non-stop with my vocal talents. Suddenly I could see the destiny I was meant to fulfill. I would be the voice of Rochester. I would bring the news to the people.

Rochester at that time was a city of about 300,000. It seemed like a meager fan base to work with, but it was a start. My aunt initially only wanted me doing the time and station ID. Occasionally she would throw me a bone and let me do weather as well. Even those meager tasks were tricky at first. She had me working day-shift, which was, of course, my normal drinking shift. Ever the multitasker, I decided I could do both. Needless to say I was off to a rocky start. I'm told that at one point I reported the news time as seventeen eleventy-two in the morning. I also had a habit of pronouncing the station ID as, "double-U ham," and then giggling about the word ham. Aunt Becca wasn't thrilled. But as time went on, I was able to readjust my internal clock and get back on a normal schedule. I didn't start my drinking until the more socially acceptable hour of 5:00pm. Once I had my schedule sorted out, that's when I really found my voice.

Once I was sober, it was plain for me to see that the rest of the broadcasters were lame ducks to say the least. They put no effort into creating an on-air persona. There was no authority in their way of speaking. If you're going to read the news, you have to read it with enough command and power that no listener would have the audacity to question its truth. That way, if it's a slow news day, you can get away with making up stories to fill the dead air. These broadcasters had no clue.

There was one guy, Ryan something-or-other, who they mostly utilized for political stories. He had no authority in his voice whatsoever. Every statement that came out of his mouth sounded like a question. It was pathetic. So, one day, I stole his news copy, locked him out of the booth and did his stories myself. He went crying to the news director. She was some woman with a strange name... Tavern? Tophie? Something Phillips. Imagine that, a female news director. Now-a-days we're seeing more and more of the ladies in positions of power. But this was back in the seventies. Despite her title, I knew she had no real sway over me, so I was unconcerned. Besides, I had my ace in the hole: Aunt Becca. I continued to steal Ryan's stories until he got fed up and left for a competing station across town.

With Ryan gone, there was more air-time to go around. Ms. Phillips didn't have much choice in the matter. She began giving me more stories to cover. However, she was still nervous about giving me free reign on the microphone. She would put me on the air with a co-anchor in an attempt to keep me under her thumb. That was when I began my trademark move of asking follow up questions of my on-air partner that were not included in the news copy. For example, when I was on the air with this anchor, Justin, he might read a story about a local city councilman who had gotten himself caught up in a scandal. I would then ask where that councilman had attended school, who were the lead contributors to his campaign, and what type of music he listened to. Justin would, without fail, get flustered and become unable to answer even simple questions. He would try to move on to the next story, but I would interrupt him to further illustrate his inadequacies as a broadcaster. At one point, he attempted to retaliate. He asked me some follow up questions about a story I had just delivered regarding a recent string of vehicle break-ins downtown. Justin really thought he had me, asking for a description of the suspect. I knew what Justin had yet to realize. You don't have to know the answer. You just make something up and if you can do so without stuttering, the idiotic listeners will believe you. If you say it with as much confidence and charisma as I possess, even the police will believe you. Needless to say, based on my detailed description of the suspect, Justin was arrested for the crime spree the following day.

Those were the days when it was becoming the norm for every broadcasting station to have a female voice on staff. Our resident anchor lady was a gal by the name of Calli. She was a sweet girl, if a little naive. She seemed to believe that she could occupy a seat in the male-dominated arena of news radio and be given special treatment on account of being a lady. I say, if you want to compete with the boys, you need to be able to take a punch like a man—figuratively speaking, of course. I didn't actually hit the woman. Calli began filing complaints against me. They were small annoyances at first. She went to the news director to whine that I had been warning the listeners that they were about to hear a woman's voice whenever she was about to go on air. I did so simply because I didn't want the listeners to be shocked and turn the dial in disgust. Calli felt that my preemptive announcement to her broadcasts undermined her contributions to the station simply because she was a woman. I explained I was worried that our listeners would hear her feminine tone and mistakenly think they were listening to an advertisement for cookware or household cleaning supplies. I was simply trying to keep the audience from tuning out. Ms. Phillips told me to knock it off, so knock it off I did.

Calli's next complaint was that I would regularly adjust the crotch of my pants in her presence. Talk about a double standard! Do you think any of my male colleagues would have filed such a complaint? Never! And to the young reader who is curious why my crotch needed regular adjusting, it was the seventies—the pants were a lot tighter back then. I felt it was outrageous for her to deny me my God-given right to address the needs of my groin. Still, I was directed not to do so in front of the lady, so I complied. Whenever we were on the air together and I felt a discomfort in the fly of my pants, I would simply announce into the microphone that I needed to ask my female co-anchor to leave the booth so that I could address my manly needs. After about a dozen of those incidents, Calli tendered her resignation and the problem was solved.

After the quick exodus of three of her long-time anchors, Ms. Phillips, the news director seemed to be under a lot of stress. Her temper was short and she seemed to want to unfairly take it out on me. It didn't take much to reach her breaking point on any given day. Something as simple as broadcasting a made up story about the local zoo curator being fired on allegations of bestiality was enough to send her through the roof. She obviously didn't have much of a sense of humor. So what if I broadcast her home address and phone number over the airwaves? That's the type of thing you have to expect when you accept the high-profile job as the news director of a local AM radio station. Besides, what was she trying to hide? She barged into Aunt Becca's office, screaming obscenities and demanding I be fired. But Aunt Becca's hands were tied. Blood was thicker than FCC fines, and so she kept me on the staff.

Ms. Phillips did manage to get a kill switch installed in her office so that she could cut the feed whenever she deemed necessary. I had some fun with that as well. I had a clear view of the news director in her office from my seat in the booth. I used to try to fake her out. I would start down the road of a story or outburst that would cause her to cut the feed, but the moment she would place her hand over the button, I would steer back toward the boring news copy set before me. I would start off with the lead story of the day. Then I would suddenly veer off topic by declaring I had just received a breaking news story that one of our local government officials had sworn his allegiance to Augusto Pinochet, the dictator ruling Chile at the time. As soon as I saw Ms. Phillips raise her hand over the kill switch, I would steer the story right back to the upcoming toll increases on the local thruway. I would play that fun little game with her two or three times a day. Then, all at once, it stopped without warning. No matter what I did or said, I could not get Ms. Phillips to press that button. I tried everything. I invented salacious stories. I gave out her social security number. I listed every swear word I knew. Nothing I did could get her to press that button. She just sat in her office, staring at me with a smug look on her face. Confounded, I did what any professional adult would do. I went over her head and asked Aunt Becca what the deal was. It turned out my aunt and Ms. Phillips had come to an agreement. They would keep me on the payroll, but whenever I was on the air, they would switch to a national news broadcast. I was dumbfounded. All my beautiful words were going unheard. It was a travesty, a crime, an abomination!

I would not stand for it. I knew I could not stay under Aunt Becca's thumb any longer. I had outgrown her little Podunk radio station. The time had come to cut ties with Rochester and WHAM and all the people who attempted to keep me from rising to fame and glory. I could have quit right then and there, but that wasn't really my style. No, when you have wronged Bill McNeal, there will be consequences. I will make sure to leave a mark. I spent the next month sabotaging every aspect of the operation. I filed several grievances against my news director with the local chapter of the broadcaster's union citing wrongs against me, both real and fictitious. I made several calls to the Better Business Bureau, utilizing my wide variety of accents and impersonations, and explained all the ways in which the station was cheating advertisers and skirting their tax obligations. I purchased a very nice home entertainment system for myself and charged it to the station. I robbed the supply cabinet blind. Once I cut the wire to the kill switch there was nothing left to do but resign by interrupting a live broadcast and telling the listeners what I really thought about every last person still employed at that insignificant little station. With that, I packed my things and lit off for the great unknown.

I spent the next ten years or so bouncing around the east coast at various news stations. It was hard to leave my aunt in the lurch like that, but my hands were tied. I could not stand for censorship. It went against my journalistic integrity. It turned out that it was for the best that I left when I did. The station folded within a month, probably due to the fact that they no longer had their claws in the great Bill McNeal. I tried to keep in touch with Aunt Becca for a while, but honestly she turned into something of a raving lunatic. Every time I tried to give her a call she would fly off the handle, droning on and on about some nonsense that I had run her station into the ground. Eventually I stopped calling. Years later she tracked me down when I was living in New York City. I woke up to her banging on the door of my apartment late one night, threatening to burn the entire building down if I didn't open up. I did the only rational thing I could do: I phoned the police and told them there was an insane woman threatening to commit arson. They came and picked her up shortly. I ended up having to file a restraining order against her. It's a shame, really. People throw you a bone when you're nobody and then they want to ride your coattails to the top. Once I made a name for myself, she felt I owed her something. I guess that's simply the price of being famous.