Free Living On Air by Joe Cipriano

laugh. Johnny called me “Kid.” The little dude in the front seat, making all the goofy comments.
    Now that I had graduated high school, that spring of 1972, WWCO had become my new home. I spent more time at Commerce Campus than I did at Sunnyside Avenue. I never even thought about applying to college because I was already working the job I most wanted in life. Even when I had finished my own shift, I would hang out with the deejay on the air, or meet up with the guys in the jock lounge. There were still plenty of girls who wanted to meet a deejay and we were happy to hang with them, too. Saturday night in particular was known as visitor’s night, mostly because of Eddie Maglio, one of the salesmen at the station. Eddie loved doing live broadcasts from around town in support of local charities and on the weekend he had his own radio show. He called himself The Mad Hatter, and wore a leather top hat to all of his appearances. He probably raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for different charities at those events. Every Saturday night, at nine o’clock, he would kick off his show playing “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. When he was on the air, The Hatter always had a couple packs of Marlboro cigarettes lined up on the audio board, and one of those packs was full of joints. Whoever was around would meet up in the parking lot, with one of the guys going in to see The Hat to score a couple of joints. After a while The Hat would throw everyone out to go back on the air for something he called The Lover’s Hour. It was kind of a sad, tearful show filled with songs about breaking up and making up, and you could always hear Eddie singing along in the background.
    Dick Springfield was another deejay I will never forget. He helped me figure out when it was okay to push the limits or when it was better to play it safe. Dick was the morning man and music director at WWCO in our new Commerce Campus location.He was tall, thin, and always doing eighteen things at once. He would frantically run into the studio and ask me, “Hey, Tom, have you heard this record? What do you think?” Most times, before I could answer, he would be out the door asking someone else the same question. Dick was a smart, funny, all-around nice guy and he went on to enjoy great success later in life as a radio consultant on the West Coast. Dick lived about three hours north of Los Angeles in San Luis Obispo and years later, in the 1990s, after I had moved to L.A., whenever he was in town, we would get together for lunch or just hang out for a while to catch up with one another. Sad to say, Dick passed away much too young and radio played a role in the story of his passing.
    I’m going to jump ahead for a moment to tell this particular story. It happened in June of 1998. Dick was up north when he was admitted to the hospital for emergency heart surgery, a complication from dental work he had done years earlier. His wife, Bobbie, and their daughter were driving from San Luis to San Francisco to be with him after his surgery and during the drive they were listening to a Frisco station that Dick programmed. The song they were listening to started to fade out and, as usual, they waited for the disc jockey to jump in with something smart to say but that didn’t happen this time. Instead the song continued to fade out much longer than normal and after a moment of silence, as the microphone was turned on, they heard some noise and confusion in the background. The disc jockey was a woman, and when she came back on the air she spoke with a heaviness in her voice. Tenderly, she told her audience that she had just gotten news of someone very dear to the station who had passed away after heart surgery. As Dick’s wife and daughter entered the city that night, it was their car radio that brought them the news thattheir beloved husband and father was gone. As much as it hurt to find out that way, Bobbie told me later that it was just so right to hear that