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(12 - Orono Weekly Times, Wednesday, May 1, 1996 ' BAI BLAC Arthur Black I was just remembering with a wince, my most embar- rassing moment on the job. This would be nearly twen- ty years ago. I was a humble announcer-operator at a humble radio station in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Which is to say, I read the weather, punched up the station breaks, cued up records and gossiped with the guys from the news department. Once you learn the basics it's a job that an average chimpanzee could hold down, which leads to boredom. Which leads to distractions.... Which maybe explains why I was on the telephone in the control room, murmuring Sweet Nothings to my Inamorata one Friday evening. Well, why not? There was a long record playing - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I think - news was a good twenty minutes away, everyone else had already gone home for the weekend.... And that' s when the Code Red Phone rang. The Code Red Phone was a special line that got right through to the radio control room no matter what. We knew that the Code Red Phone never rang unless: a: The Russians had launched an all-out nuclear offensive. b: The dreaded Big One had finally struck, swallow- ing California, Vancouver Island and possibly even Kamloops. c: Elvis had been found alive and well, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or d: The station manager desired to speak to you. Urgently. In my case, it was the sta- tion manager. He wasn't happy. He wasn't even coher- ent. But I finally managed to decipher the message he wanted to convey. It was: YOUR MICROPHONE IS OPEN! ! !'! ! Telling a radio broadcaster his mike is open is very much like telling a normal guy his fly is open. It means the same thing. You are exposed. Perfect strangers are learning all kinds of things about you that you really don't want them to know. In my case, the entire world was learning what kind of idiotic things I cooed in my partner's ear when the lights were low. Fortunately for me, the only listener my program had was the station manager. Other broadcasters have been less lucky. Such as the poor sap who got to interview the famous actor Walter Pidgeon, on live radio. His opening line: "Mister privilege, it is indeed a pigeon." Harry Von Zell was a famous American radio announcer whose career spanned several decades - amazing when you consider that early on, Von Zell told the nation on live radio: "And now, the President of the United States, Mister Hoobert Heever." We've had our screw ups this side of the border as well. I can still hear the CBC announcer in Ottawa intro- ducing a new member of the Trudeau cabinet as "The Minister for Wealth and Hellfire". I actually have on tape a radio guy in Montreal crooning "remember...at Pharmusave, we fill your pre- scriptions with scare and kill...." And who can forget the network news announcer who once signed off across the nation with the intonation: "This...:is the Canadian Broadcorping Castration." The worst blooper I ever heard of happened to a skin- ny young kid on his first job at a tiny radio station in Texas about 30 years ago. Part of his job involved actu- ally throwing the switch to put the station on the air at 6:00 a.m. each morning. Wasn't a big deal - the first half hour was a recorded ser- mon by a traveling preacher who happened to be a favourite of the station owner. All the kid had to do was put the record on then head down to the local burger joint to grab a fast-food breakfast. He always had time to scoff down his chow and get back before the record ended. Almost always. There was the morning that the record....got stuck. The skinny kid got back to the station just in time to hear the radio saying "GO TO HELL. GO TO HELL. GO TO HELL." Apparently the station had been broadcasting the same phrase for at least 20 min- utes. The bad news: the skinny kid was fired from his job. The good news: his name happened to be Dan Rather. So things turned out pretty good in the end. Multiple Sclerosis SocIety of Canada 1-800-268-7582 Recycle This Newspaper ~. igw CAN s1Îtt MA kE LAST CALL AT 2A.N... tNOW ALL 14EY WAVE TODO 1 l1GAUZE AFWIVING AN4D h.D R SR!11-; -POL!çýA(IMoRoé0o TrlE GREEN LEAF RESTAURANT 28 King Street East, Newcastle, Ontario 987-4363 Home of the Famous Mountain Boy Chicken Wings 1-i-9mmmmm-m m MWU 11, mmaijlý--