Free Living On Air by Joe Cipriano Page B

to 250 watts, just a little bit stronger than the light bulbs in your home. You could just about toast a slice of bread with that power. WWCO-AM 1240 may have been state of the art for its time but its days were numbered, and closing in fast.
    As FM was taking over, we were going under. When we should have been doing everything we could do to stay fresh and on top, we tightened up. Bill Raymond had moved on and we had a new program director who seemed out of touch with the reality around us. He called the station “The Famous 1240” and the deejays were now “The Good Guys.” Instead of sounding like the cutting-edge station we had always been, we started sounding like something out of the nineteen fifties. C-O would make one last great comeback under the guidance of Joe McCoy with a group of talented deejays, but for now, I was desperate to leave. I was still doing the afternoon shift at C-O when I became the music director, which was Jerry Wolf’s job when I first met him at the old studio on 65 Bank Street. I liked the added responsibility, but I was always angling for more.
    I got lucky and picked up a part-time shift at my dream station, WDRC, in Hartford. Everybody called it The Big D and for me, it was my first little step towards the big time. Coverage of thetwo stations overlapped, so I had to come up with another name to use on the air at “Big D.” I was still Tom Collins at WWCO, but at WDRC I called myself Dave Donovan. I was inspired by Dan Donovan at WFIL in Philly, Dale Dorman at WRKO in Boston, and Dr. Don Rose at KFRC in San Francisco. I liked the alliteration of the two “D” names, it just sounded cool to me. Twenty years later, in 1994, I would meet the ultimate Mister Cool, another “Double D.” I’ll get to that story a little bit later.
    But for now I was stuck. In the blink of an eye another year rolled by and it was New Year’s of 1975. My life was at a standstill. Johnny Walker had recently left for Q105-FM in Tampa, Florida. Steve Martin was gone too, now the morning newsman at WRVQ-FM in Richmond, Virginia. And I was still at WWCO-AM, doing everything I could to move up and out of my hometown but truth be told, as my friends moved on, I was left behind.

EVERYBODY’S MAKING IT BUT ME
    As the music director of WWCO I received boxes of records every week from the record companies, with each song promising to be the next big hit. One day there was a song that landed on my desk that put a lump in my throat. It was actually a country tune by Shel Silverstein and the title summed up my feelings at that time. It was called “Everybody’s Makin’ It But Me.” I tacked it up on my wall as a grim reminder of where my head was. I had been at WWCO for six years now, since I was 14 years old. I was making one hundred and fifty dollars per week. I sent out airchecks all up and down the East Coast, trying to move my career forward, but nothing was happening.
    I had somewhat absentmindedly sent my tape to WRC in Washington, D.C. At about the same time, I got a hit from another one of my tapes. A radio consultant named Mike Joseph was starting up a new station in Providence, Rhode Island, called WPJB. He asked me to come to town for an interview, and when I got there he offered me a job, but they wouldn’t tell me what shift I would get. All they said was, that’s the way Mike Joseph works. This was not at all normal. Usually you are hired for a specific shift on the air, but Joseph preferred to keep his new hires on edge. I wasn’t sure I wanted to move to Providence, I had hoped to get to a bigger city, but I wanted out so badly that Iaccepted the job. It would be several weeks before the station was up and running, so I kept working at C-O and the Big D, killing time, till I packed my bags for Providence. Then I got a call from Washington, D.C.
    “Hello, Tom? This is Gordon Peil, program director at WRC Radio in Washington. We like the tape you sent us but we’re looking for deejays that