[Kzyxtalk] When, Alice?

[Marco McClean]

To: Program director, KZYX
Subject: When, Alice?

Alice, when are you going to schedule my excellent, proven, relevant, 
local community radio show on KZYX?

Here's the recording of my show from last week. It's my 1062nd 
six-to-eight-hour weekly Memo of the Air show (293rd for KNYO, 147th for 
KMEC):

https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0293

I did that live from my wife Juanita's apartment, at the typing table 
next to the bed. You can tell when I'm doing the show from there, 
because I talk softer to not bother the neighbors. This coming Friday 
I'll be in Fort Bragg for the show, all night, as usual, with the door 
wide open for anyone in the world to wander in without an appointment, 
and no call-sabotage-delay on the live phone, should you want to call 
about this. 707-962-3022 any time after 9pm, Friday the 17th. If 
there'll be swears, please call after 10pm. We can talk for an hour if 
that's how long it takes. If somebody comes in from the bar next door, 
or from any place else, you can talk to them too. I'll put aside what 
I've brought to read and continue when you're done.

I applied to put Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio on KZYX in late 
Feb./early March of 2012 and I'm still waiting. That comes to 347 weeks 
I've been waiting, and the whole time I've been waiting I've been on 
other local stations, doing better radio than anyone you know, and I 
work harder and longer at preparing for and really doing radio than 
anyone you know, and I get along great with everyone at every radio 
station involved. The manager of KNYO is Bob Young. The manager of KMEC 
is Ed Nieves. (Copying this to them, so you have their personal email 
addresses, as you have mine.)

While I'm on the subject, think about this: your job and the so-called 
manager's job at KZYX should be merged; you should manage KZYX, and 
Jeffery should be given the boot. He knows nothing about radio. He's 
never built a transmitter, much less a whole radio station. He's never 
built a recording studio full of equipment from parts and circuit 
diagrams. He's never written, produced, directed and staged live radio 
drama. He's never taught radio production or music production or live 
sound reinforcement. He's never taught school. He's never operated any 
kind of true public-access system either on teevee or radio or in 
magazines and newspapers. He's never done even an hour of real radio. 
And he doesn't know any more about radio now than he did when they 
/hired him to run a radio station/. In the latest technical debacle at 
KZYX, it never occurred to him to plug the phone system into the 
generator with an extension cord and a line conditioner, leaving KZYX 
with no phones for days (!). He suit-and-smile fakes it and collects his 
checks. He sucks out of the station just for himself five times the 
entire yearly operating budget of KNYO. Think of how much more he's 
being paid than you're being paid. That should be galling to you.

(For that matter, it should be galling to all the local airpeople at 
KZYX. They're being paid nothing at all, and they're the ones doing 
radio, such as it is, and Jeffery is not.)

Take anyone at KZYX and compare their radio resume with mine: Here's how 
I got my music show on KMFB in 1983: I called the program director on 
the phone and was on the air that weekend. Here's how I got Memo of the 
Air on KMFB in 1997: I called the manager, Bob Woelfel, who was a fan of 
my countywide newspaper, and I asked him what I had to do to put my 
paper /Memo/ on the air. He told me how much continuing underwriting to 
bring in, I made a few calls and wandered around Fort Bragg and rounded 
it all up in an afternoon, and I was on the air that Friday, was paid 
for my airtime and for maintenance I did at the station, and for 
building and installing things the station needed, out of a cut of the 
underwriting my show brought in, and that relationship lasted for 15 
years till KMFB changed hands in late 2011. For a few years we used a 
broadcast mixing board I designed and built. (The manager said, "We need 
a mixing board that does this, this and this," and I collected the parts 
and fabricated a case and and built and installed it.) I built the 
shelves and maintained computers and satellite systems and fixed the 
plumbing and the telephone system and so on, and when things broke 
they'd call me and I'd get up at all hours and drive there and fix it. I 
got Jerry Fraley involved there. The people who own KUNK are still using 
stuff I wired up in KMFB's transmitter shack twenty years ago and they 
probably don't even know it, it's that reliable. I made a whole pop-up 
Exploratorium-style science museum for the Whale School in the late 
1980s, complete with Tesla coils, puzzles, X-Y lasers, pendulum, 
electric catapult, giant child-operated tyrannosaur marionette, etc. I 
put up a fully automatic call-in low-power radio station of my own 
invention in 1985 in Mendocino, ran it for a month to show how easy and 
harmless and wonderful, and paid the fine. I ran a public-access variety 
act teevee show for years in Fort Bragg and turned no-one away. I put 
schoolkids' plays on the radio as far south as Cupertino, through a 
phone network. Rocket events. Theater shows. Sound effects and sound 
environments for three theater companies, electromechanical musical 
instruments, microphones and amplifiers, theremins both capacitance- and 
light-controlled, and more. And all of this dazzling activity was and is 
done on a fricking shoestring. In 35 years I have never missed a radio 
airdate by even a minute.

Alice, why, with $600,000 (!) to spend every year, with three 
transmitters on three frequencies totalling less than a dollar per hour 
to keep on the air, does KZYX have to be so dumb nearly all of the time, 
when you're not only in a position to remedy this, but you are in /the/ 
position to remedy this and have been for years now? You're the one with 
the authority. You're the program director.

I've heard you talk a few times; you seem like you might be trying to be 
a stand-up person on certain issues. Stand up on this issue. Think of it 
as an unconscionably delinquent repair ticket (it's been on the books 
for over six-and-a-half years); quit overlooking it and /make the 
repair/. It's easy. Dump a few shows from a thousand miles away, push a 
couple of shows this way or that, edit the schedule, and put your I.T. 
person on setting your automation to grab my stream. Currently I stream 
live, wherever I happen to be doing my show from, to KNYO-LP in Fort 
Bragg and KMEC-LP in Ukiah every Friday night from 9pm to almost 5am. It 
would take you twenty minutes, tops, to set up the entire deal. An 
exciting, fun project for you. If there are technical aspects you're 
shaky on, let me know and I'll connect you to someone who can help.

Memo of the Air is /real/ community radio in real time with the door 
open to the street, not fibbing for fundraising purposes about being 
community radio. Wouldn't it be nice to be the one who made that 
improvement at KZYX?

I'll tell you what galls me: when I turn on KZYX just at random, usually 
at night when I driving, more likely than not it's some recorded show, 
music or talk, from Boston or New York or Colorado; last night it was 
automation-played reruns (!) interspersed with a man's warbly-smarmy 
recorded sales-voice declaring that KZYX is /community radio/. It's just 
not and really never has been. Pull the lever and make it be. It's right 
in front of you.

-- 
Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com