Free Living On Air by Joe Cipriano Page A

heartbreaking news through the medium that Dick loved so much.
    Back at C-O, before I knew it, another year passed. My determination at work had paid off and I was promoted to afternoon drive, on the air from two in the afternoon to six at night. I followed a guy who was different from any other deejay I had ever met. His name was T.J. Martin, a smooth-talking ladies’ man, twice my age. We heard that T.J. had a wild affair with the woman who wrote the best-selling book “Peyton Place.” She divorced her husband to marry T.J. but as much as T.J. loved her, he was much fonder of classic cars and handmade suits. Two years after they were married, when he had helped blow through all that Peyton Place money, T.J. stuffed the trunk of his 1964 Mustang with all his clothes, then took off in the dead of night. Somehow he ended up working at Commerce Campus, cooing to the local ladies of Waterbury.
    T.J. was hired for the midday shift, ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, to charm and sweet-talk the housewives listening at home. I know it sounds sexist, but first of all, it was 1972. It was sexist. Secondly, it was Top 40 radio where every day-part is clearly identified. Six to ten a.m.? Wake up people, give them the news they need to start their day, and a heavy dose of fun and hit music. Ten a.m. to two p.m.? Kids are in school, not able to listen and people who worked were at their desks. In ’72, nobody listened to the radio at work, it wasn’t allowed. The only audience left out there was officially “housewives.” Who do you put in that midday shift for that audience? Someone who canmake housewives forget their day-to-day chores, put a smile on their face, and help them fantasize a little. Enter T.J. Martin, Mister Cool. He oozed charm and sophistication and dressed the part too, wearing tailored sports jackets, pocket squares, Italian slacks, clothes his wife bought for him before he skipped out on her. Every day T.J. showed up at the station looking suave, immaculate, a little bit like the singer Dean Martin. He always brought his lunch with him and a thermos of coffee to sip on during his shift. But by the end of his show, he had lost some of that luster. He not only looked like the character Dean-o portrayed on TV, he sounded like him too. T.J. slurred his words, missed his cues, and talked over the lyrics of every song. Finally someone figured out it wasn’t coffee in that thermos. It was vodka. By the end of his shift, T.J. was smashed.
    Our general manager at that time was Bill Raymond, the same guy who threw the record at me. He wasn’t going to take that shit from anyone. Bill sat down with T.J. to tell him he just couldn’t drink on the air anymore, it had to stop, so T.J. promised to go cold turkey. Instead of bringing his thermos to work, he started bringing in fruit every day, apples, grapes, even a bag of oranges, to snack on during his shift. Only his show didn’t get any better. Somehow, T.J. was still getting loaded by two in the afternoon. It took Bill a couple of weeks but he finally solved the mystery. Every morning, before he came to work, T.J. injected the grapes and oranges with his favorite drink of choice. You guessed it, vodka. Before they could fire him, T.J. skipped town in the middle of the night, just as he did when he left his wife. We heard all kinds of stories about him, that he faked his death, he changed his name, maybe he moved to Colorado, but we never found out what really happened.
    Around the time T.J. disappeared was the same moment AM radio started to lose its grip as king of the airwaves. By 1974, the FM frequency that we all laughed at and dismissed back in the sixties would begin to reveal its true potential. Our FM country station was 20,000 watts, and covered hundreds of miles from Massachusetts, through the entire state of Connecticut, on down to Long Island. The AM signal was a paltry 1,000 watts and barely made it past Waterbury. At sundown the signal dropped