The switch

I was doing afternoon drive at Z93 back in the summer of '87. Our board was in a "stand up" configuration, so we had a tall chair that you could use if you were tired of standing.

One afternoon, as I'm jocking the show, the board died. No juice. Nothing. Everything else was running. Studio lights. Cart machines. Tape deck. Chip Longshore, our engineer, came running in as did the GM, sales staff and just about anyone else in the building. No one could figure out the sudden power outage to the board. Chip was checking fuses. Asked me about a dozen times if I'd spilled coffee in the board. Nothing. Could NOT figure out the mystery. Meanwhile, someone called our Ops Manager, Darryl Parks . . .

. . . who was at home and had to come in. Who rounded the corner into the studio, bent down and flipped ON the power supply to the board, which was just below a ledge where, if sitting on the chair you could rest your left foot ... and could slip and easily hit, thus killing power to the board:



At the time, the switch didn't have a guard like you see now. We'd been off air for around 30 minutes. Darryl comes around the corner, flips the switch .. and leaves. No one said a word. I'll never forget it.

Z93 - Photos

The old Z93 studio.

After you've entered the backdoor, rounded past WIOU, you moved down the hall toward the Z93 studio just ahead on the left:



The studio:

Z93 Top of the Hour ID

We used the Hot Kiss jingle package from Jam.

Here was the top of the hour talk-over bed:

Song file

At Z93 in the mid to late 80s, we used a paper clock and color coded carts to rotate through our songs. The top 11 songs were on white doted carts. Currents used brown dots. Recurrents used green dots and brand new songs used blue dots. You would then follow the paper clock, which had corresponding dots, to pull the carts from the wall racks to setup the hour.

We rotated through our "oldies" category by pulling index cards from a card file. Each song had a card in the file with the cart number, title, artist, intro, running time and usually the tempo and ending style of the song.

Here are a few examples:

Playlist - 10/5/87

Here's the playlist from October 5, 1987:

Playlist - 9/28/87

Here's the playlist from September 28, 1987:

Playlist - 9/21/87

Here's the playlist from September 21, 1987: