Monday, March 25, 2019

Public Radio

Public Radio

       I was over at the Public Radio station during the Fund Raiser, to talk up the idea of giving financial support. "We know you're listening, so why not send in a few dollars to help us stay on the air?"
With KDAQ Stn. Mgr. Lee Conger, doing a remote
from Doyle Jeter's Enoch's Cafe, Shreveport, 1990-ish.

       I have been associated with Public Radio for almost forty years, but have not been actually employed there since 1992. When I retired, I left them with my Christmas show — Cajun Christmas, co-produced by Lee Conger (right); it's a program which is still broadcast, annually.  Also, I will participate in the Fund Raiser if I'm in town. My wife, Marsha, will work on the phone bank. The fund raisers are getting a little more arduous, year by year — a 'slog' I called it this time and Wally Derleth, the local jazz host,  thought that was a pretty good characterization of the event. They were always difficult; most of us don't like having to interrupt the regular programming and ask for money. We are mostly artists, writers and musicians without much idea of how money is made. You can hear these "drives" on your local radio station, or see them at your PBS TV affiliate. They can be embarrassing, but the fact is: that's the way they make their money.  They also make money through writing grants to government entities such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and private foundations, and by applying directly to wealthy corporations and businesses. Part of the very small staff works full time raising money and organizing fund raisers. It's hard, complicated work, and it's a slog.
With Public Radio dog, Cammie, in
our old broadcast studio at LSUS.


       The whole business reminded me, this time, of my own experience with this radio station. The studios are in south Shreveport, Louisiana, in a converted chapel on the edge of the campus of the State University. They are beautiful, functional, and purpose-build within the last few years. When I worked for the station, beginning in 1987, the studios were located in a "temporary" eyesore, a rectangular hut with aluminum siding and a couple of rooms full of junk. This structure sat next to a similar hut which housed our offices. The fact is, it worked perfectly well for about 25 years and, since it's radio, nobody noticed that it looked like crap.
Out in the field with Beethoven
NPR T-Shirt & cassette recorder.
       Back in the mid-80s Marsha and I had started a folk festival in Bossier City, (Grassroots,) and we visited the radio station looking to get some publicity. We probably got PSAs on two or three stations but KDAQ, this Public station, was the only one that asked me,"Would I like to start my own, hour-long, weekly folk music show?" I guess I leapt at the idea. I do remember a meeting with Tom Livingston, the lanky General Manager, when I said I'd like it to be about "Louisiana folk music." He agreed that would be a good idea and sent me off to make up a name for it. 
       I didn't know much about Louisiana folk music at the time, except that I'd been familiar with Leadbelly since my college days in Vancouver, B.C., and Marsha and I had visited South Louisiana and fallen in love with the culture of Cajunland. We'd also lured a Cajun band — Gene Savoie and his Playboys — to come up to Bossier City to perform at our Grassroots Festival. They stayed at our house, slept all over our living room, ate our food, and played for free. They were fabulous, and not all boys; Gene's wife played the bass.
       The festival was a great success; along with the Cajun band we had an Irish band, two Bluegrass bands, Clog dancers, Otis and Artis Johnson and their African drummers, the state fiddle champ Mary Grimsley, and  my wife and I. We did a set of mostly comedic folksongs like "Grandpa Went to Florida to Die" "My Son, the Preacher" and "Four Nights Drunk" about a woman who . . . oh, never mind! When I say "great success," I don't mean it made money or attracted a multitude. It just felt right; we repeated it the next few years. 
With Marsha and Swallow Records' owner Floyd Soileau.
The week following the festival I met with Tom Livingstone again to finalize plans for the radio show. In a burst of showmanship, I suggested we name it "Gumbo's Air Show," but Tom, a low-key scholarly fellow from Minnesota, seemed to prefer my second choice — "Louisiana Folk Music" — so we went with that. It was several months before we went on the air — an example of Tom's caution — I got a bit antsy but, truth be told, the delay allowed me to become much more familiar with my subject matter and I was able to gather quite an extensive library of 45 and 33 1/3 rpm records. 

       As the start date drew nearer, I had to go in for an hour of training, for nobody but me was going to engineer my program. There weren't enough staff to go around. Also, I was scheduled for 7 pm Saturdays (after "Prairie Home Companion:") and nobody likes to work on weekends. I would have to fly solo. In those days we were required to have a live body in the station 24 hours a day and for several hours on a Saturday, I was to be that live body. The night man, a hoary antique whiskey-voiced radio veteran named Leon Smith, didn't come on until 11 pm.
Robert Trudeau's blessing in the Shreveport
Journal — or was it Forum magazine? 
       I was not only to keep the station up and running; I had to put my own records on the turntables. Therefore, the first order of business was learning how to use the record players like a DJ would: turn the table to where the music began, then spin backwards one half turn and hold it. You had two turntables, so you could line up one disc ahead. I learned how to switch on and off the microphones and modulate the volume on air and on headphones. Over my first few weeks there were occasional technical blips and stretches of the dreaded "dead air," but I got through them without being fired and the program became an integral part of the regional airwaves. I don't think anybody liked what I was doing quite as much as I did.
       About mid-way through my Public Radio career, the new General Manager, Catherine Fraser, offered me a new, paid position as Arts Producer. Once again I leapt at the idea. Tom Livingston had been NPR's man to shepherd our new station into existence, and because he was successful, he was given the General Managership at one of NPR's flagship stations in Washington, DC.
My arm, microphone and Jazz man Danny Barker
 

        As Arts Producer I was to produce, which is exactly what it sounds like, a four to nine minute module to fit into Morning Edition on Fridays at 7:20 and 8:20. My subject was the Arts and my territory included anywhere our radio signal could be heard. 
        By the time I took up this expanded job, perhaps early 1989, the station had grown into a regional network. We had coverage to the south of us in central Louisiana at KLSA, Alexandria, and another station to the north at KBSA, El Dorado, Arkansas. By the time I left, in June, 1992, we had added a fourth station, KLDN in the Piney Woods of East Texas. We were then, and still are now, known as Red River Radio, and in the year 2019 we have yet another East Texas station covering Kilgore and Longview.
      My own personal goal, apart from making these modules as interesting and educational as possible, was to make them fit seamlessly with the slick, professional content of Morning Edition in general. I didn't want to sound like some clumsy local bumpkin, and I didn't want them to be boring. By the time I moved on from Public Radio I'm pretty sure I achieved my goal. And I loved my job. 

With blues singer Marvin Seals at Public Radio
89.9 FM broadcast from LSUS Theater. Nov.1, 1991

       At the beginning of this article I mentioned my radio program, Cajun Christmas,  which I created originally in 1990 as a live show and then as a transcription for a syndication by American Public Radio. It was broadcast to some one hundred radio stations in the Public Radio nation, and has been broadcast  somewhere annually ever since; on Red River Radio if nowhere else. One year I broadcast it on European Country Music from England.
       Cajun Christmas was done in the style of all my radio shows — with tape and a razor blade. It has been safely transferred to digital and exists in CD form, Tech time marches on and we have only a foggy idea of what in store for us in the next few years, but the robots are on the march and they are not learning to wield razor blades. Not for making radio programs, anyway.
     
Nunc Allie Young, a regular on
Louisiana Folk Music.
 As for fund drives, how does the future look? Whenever you start spending more time raising money than spending it, it's going to feel like politics. Maybe things haven't gone quite that far, but what can be done to keep costs in line? Or to treat PBS and NPR like Britain treats the BBC. Like necessities. Like the National treasures they are. Presently, things are looking a little shaky. Lets hope that Public Radio stays with us a few more decades. It's up to all of us.
            

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

University School

The school we attended in Victoria, B.C., was University School. It has since merged with another private boarding school for boys and become St. Michael's University School, which is co-educational and very forward looking. It looks as if one could get a very liberal education there. My brother Peter got a four-year scholarship to the school and he was there from 1950 to 1954. Then he moved on to the (actual) University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I remained at the school in Victoria until June, 1957, at which time I was sixteen years old, graduating from 12th grade, and planning to attend UBC.
At our Dad's apartment in Prince George, dressed
to leave for school in Victoria.

From the very beginning, September, 1950, I liked this school. It compared so favorably to Athlone School in Vancouver that it was hard not to. It was like paradise — the food was edible and the discipline relaxed. It wasn't ruled by despots. The only drawback was its location: being in Victoria meant we couldn't go home on weekends, so we only saw our father for the three annual holidays,  Christmas, Easter, and summer. Having our parent(s) in Prince George meant that we were among a small group of boarders who lived more than a couple of hours from the school. About half the students were "day-boys" who lived in Victoria; another batch lived on Vancouver Island, and thus could drive home; some lived on the mainland in Vancouver, Seattle, and Tacoma and so were a ferry ride away. We were a ferry ride plus another five hundred miles; there weren't many like us, though there was one from Venezuela another from Costa Rica during my time; there was also Jim McClaskey from Portland; also Spike Dalziel from the Yukon and a guy called Gordon Geddes who also came from Prince George. He was in my brother's class but back in Prince George he moved in different circles.

Peter on rugby field with main
school building behind.
As for ethnicity, we were predominately White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; I wish my Dad had signed us up as Roman Catholic (he was an atheist so it didn't matter to him) because what few Catholics there were got the freedom of a bus ride into town and a very short Sunday service. We Anglicans had to form up in two columns, march a mile or two to St. Luke's Church in Saanich, and get excruciatingly bored by an hour and a half of ritual and sermonizing. Lucky catholics! They probably could have skipped the whole thing and nobody would have noticed.
There was a family of Sikhs from an hour or so up the Island: Mindy, Gindy, Vigindy and Mike - Mayo. They were on the roll call as Mayo I, II, III and IV. Mike was my age and we were on pretty good terms. The three elders (Vigindy may have been a cousin) wore turbans, but not Mike. I have no idea why. I do know that the family integrated well into our society, and Mindy was an asset to the rugby team.

We had at least one jewish guy, (Levi), who came from Vancouver or maybe Portland, Oregon, the latino from Costa Rica who was heavyweight boxing champ, and LaTour from Venezuela who we considered French rather than Latino. We did make fun of Levi, had a little jingle ("Levi's got a deal") because he often came up with "a deal," but I think we liked him OK and even thought he was pretty cool. There was certainly cruelty in the way we dealt with one another, and it wasn't a good idea to parade any weaknesses; but racism wasn't rampant by any means.

This picture of me would've been taken on a Saturday
morning when we were allowed to wear any clothes we wished. I am in the quad with Harvey House in the background. I may have been serving detention, though I don't look unhappy about it. Detention was handed out in "hours" by teachers and prefects during the week, and worked off like community service on Saturdays. Accumulating three hours of detention during the week was not uncommon (9-12 am) and 1 hour was expected now and then. There were so many rules to be broken.

Most of our teachers were characters: white-haired Mr. Genge always seemed to be in a world of his own. It was generally understood that he'd gotten shell-shocked during World War II. The story was that he'd been a tank commander, blown up in his own tank. He taught Latin and Greek and was heard tom say "gneep" at irregular intervals. We felt we had to be careful around Mr. Genge lest he suddenly explode. In fact there was the time in Latin class when we were working quietly on some project and MR. Genge looked at his watch and muttered "time" and someone thought he was asking for the time and we all thought this mis-communication was so funny we very nearly laughed out loud, so that when Shaefer actually DID laugh, a kind of wild horse laugh, Genge exploded and flew down the aisle, yanked poor little Shaefer out of his desk, dragged him to the hallway and gave him a violent beating. The rest of us were horrified.

Mostly, though, Mr. Genge was a reasonably peaceful man. Mr Storr was another story. Middle-aged, compact, with a big salt-and-pepper mustache and a red face, Mr. Storr was in charge of the book store and the junior rugby team. One time in 7th grade we discovered that the teachers' chair had a broken leg, so between classes a group of us set it up so that it would collapse a soon as anyone sat in it. Mr. Storr was the next teacher and for about ten tantalizing minutes he criss-crossed his platform while our eyes followed him with a mounting sense of anxiety. Finally he went to sit; the chair collapsed and he disappeared behind the desk only to rise seconds later with a roar like a wounded lion. He picked up the chair and, in one motion, hurled it at the wall where it made a satisfying crack as it slid to the floor in several pieces. He may have made an attempt to find out who was responsible, but we never let on. His nickname was "Crazy."

J.J.Timmis, M.A. (Oxon) was Headmaster during my seven years at University School. We gathered that he'd got his MA at Oxford; he spoke like he had a mouthful of hot potatoes and taught Mathematics to the seniors. For six years, then, I knew I had J.J. to look forward to at 9 o'clock each school day; it was not a happy prospect. We did not call him J.,J.; we had another nickname for him which made fun of the way he spoke. Each morning there was an assembly which involved a roll-call, announcements, the handing out of awards, a prayer or two, and a hymn. We particularly liked the idea of Timmis nnouncing the number of "Hymn number 444," because of the way he pronounced his 4s, and his nickname became, "Foi-foi." I'm not sure there was a hymn number 444, but the nickname stuck.

Mr Hinton was the science teacher; he rarely strayed from his natural habitat, the Chem Lab. He was a gentle soul and we never bothered him much nor did we saddle him with a nickname. His story was that he invented radar during the war. HE didn't tell us this story, but in retrospect it's possible that he'd worked on some such project.

Mr. (Reg) Wenman was the most notorious teacher, and, because he called us "birds," he was known as "The Bird." He lived for the school; indeed, he'd been a student at the school and returned later to become a teacher. When I was at my smallest, I feared the Bird. He was a tall, hard man who stood like a vulture in the doorway of his sports equipment room as we walked past during breaks from class. His room was across the hall from Crazy Storr's room and either one or both of them would be standing in their doorways, monitoring the flow of traffic in the hallway. The Bird was the coach of the Rugby and Cricket teams and therefore wielded a lot of clout. He used heavy sarcasm and picked at one seemingly randomly, so one didn't want to draw his attention. During my second year at the school, the Bird was sent away to a sanitarium to be treated for tuberculosis. Much to my relief and the relief of many other students.

During the years that the Bird was away, we had a blond-haired body-builder name Derek Hyde-Lay to replace him as Games Master; we didn't use the term "Coach." Hyde-Lay was just too Sportsy for me and I dare say he never knew who I was. I was passable at Games, but certainly no "athlete." Sports were compulsory at our school and this included boxing during the Spring term, and Cross-country running during the mud season. Of course we played rugby and cricket and I was on the Colts rugby team, which was the team for boys under 120 pounds weight. I qualified for that team right up through the 11th grade. We had three teams to represent the school: the 1st XV, the 2nd XV, and the Colts XV, and a game day against St. George's school of Vancouver or Shawnigan Lake School up the island had a real festive air about them. We also played against local high schools like Oak Bay and Victoria High, but they rarely had a 2nd XV. 



We did quite a lot of travel just to get to and from the school. I'm sure you could fly from Victoria to Vancouver, but I don't have any clear memory of doing it; we went by boat. As soon as school finished and the holidays began, we were off to the docks to catch the CPR Ferry off the Island. Sometimes it was the overnight service known as the Midnight Boat which left at midnight and got you to Vancouver in the morning. I think you had to debark by eight or nine o'clock, though the boat arrived probably by five or six.
Peter on the daytime Ferry between Vancouver
and Vancouver Island. 
I remember having a cabin on board and I remember getting drunk on lemon gin; my first experience with liquor was on the Midnight boat to Vancouver. There were usually about six of us kids from the school on the boat.

The CPR ferries were like small ocean liners. If you took the Queen Mary and just smalled it down somewhat, you'd have the Princess Mary. Looking back through the names of these boats that plied the routes on the West Coast during the nineteen-fifties, I find the Princess Patricia — or, Princess Pat — to be a very familiar name. Perhaps that was the ship we travelled on most often.
I forget how it worked the next day; we may have stayed overnight in Vancouver with our alternate parents, Marie and Bill Harrison-Eke. I would guess they'd pick us up at the boat and take us to the airport or wherever we needed to be. I believe we took the PGE railway during the early 50's when it ran from Squamish to Quesnel, and the only way to get to Squamish was by a Union Steamship vessel from downtown Vancouver. I don't remember, but we may have just gone from one dock to another,

The Ekes were our home in Vancouver: our Dad had met them soon after we arrived in Canada, in 1947, and they lived in a comfortable apartment on Haro Street in downtown Vancouver. By the early fifties they had built and moved into a house with a view and a giddy location halfway up the mountain in West Vancouver. It would still count as one of the best locations in the city. We could always count on Marie and Bill to take good care of us.