“Well,” I answered, “I’d love to have an internship at WLIR.”
At the beginning of my sophomore year, in 1980, I showed up at the WLIR office for an interview. The fact that it was in the slum of Hempstead didn’t deter me. I couldn’t believe I was inside a professional radio studio, seeing it all firsthand. The guy I listened to every morning, Steve North, was just finishing a news report. He was only about six or seven years older than me, but he might as well have been Edward R. Murrow. We were in the same studio but the difference between us was immense. He was on air and getting paid; I was an amateur. He was comfortable; I was quivering behind a mustache. He had on a suit and a tie; I wore the nicest outfit I had: a loud, blue and red striped button-down shirt that I bought at Just Shirts in the Roosevelt Field mall, a skinny tie that looked like something I stole from the band the Knack, a pair of beige slacks I picked out at Sid’s Pants (which was right next to Just Shirts), and a snazzy pair of Capezios.
The first question he asked me was “Do you smoke?” Did he smell my breath? This was a newsroom with young journalists. I thought everyone smoked. I did, so I told him. “Well, that will not be accepted.”
I made a mental note. Right after that we started talking about news and its value and other high-minded philosophies of journalism. The conversation turned to Geraldo Rivera and his late-night news show, Good Night America. Steve had been a producer on the show. I told him my favorite segment was when Geraldo had had on Jack Ruby’s sister and Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow and they got into a knock-down, drag-out fight on the air. I couldn’t get over that. Seeing people fighting like that on TV was crazy to me. Turned out, Steve produced that piece.
I was hired that day.
I had to be in the office twice a week by 6 A.M. Three weeks after starting, my car radio was jacked from the LIR lot. But that didn’t slow me down. I’d get there before the sun came up. Initially my principal job was called “sledding.” This was long before everyone had a computer, but slightly after stone tablets. Reporters couldn’t Google to find information. They needed interns. That was me. The station subscribed to all the major local papers. Every day I had to go through the papers and clip the most important features. Along the wall were packets of the biggest stories happening at the time and each day we added the new articles. That way, if someone was working on a piece about, say, Agent Orange, they could go to the packet, flip through all the stories, and be up to speed.
Steve was very methodical and precise. When he told you how to do something he wanted you to do it his way from then on. I did the sledding job well. I also learned a valuable lesson: If you do shitty tasks well and without attitude, someone will give you better stuff to do.
I hung around Steve as much as I could, watching as he did interviews on the phone, pulled articles from the sledding files, edited his pieces, and read newscasts out loud to himself before going on the air. The politics of the place made me chuckle sometimes: All the stories my brother Anthony warned me about when he was rebelling against my father were being played out and reported on every day.
About a month into the gig, Steve sent me out on an assignment. Nassau Community College was holding a “handi-capable” day to raise awareness for handicapped people. It wasn’t political intrigue, but it got me out of the office. He threw me a tape recorder and said, “Go.”
“Umm, what do I do?” I asked.
“Talk to people, ask them why they are there, what they hope to achieve,” he said.
So I went down there and walked around all the different booths and interviewed people. I would start off asking everyone, “Are you having a good time?” Then I’d launch into an interview. I thought I got some good stuff. People were really excited about “handi-capable” day. I got back to the studio and gave Steve the tape. He popped it into a deck, started listening, and, ten seconds in, paused it.
“First tip,” he said to me. “Never ask a yes-or-no question.”
He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to give me the assignment, listen to the tape with me, or give me any criticism at all. He didn’t really have to acknowledge I existed for any reason other than cutting out newspaper articles and making his job easier. But he did all of that. And when we were done going through the interviews he cut ten seconds of tape, put it into his broadcast for the day, and introduced it this way: “WLIR’s Gary Dell’Abate was there and asked people what they thought of the event.”
Holy shit! That broadcast ran six times throughout the day. I went to work at the kennel the next day and people said to me, “Hey, I heard your name on the radio!” That was it: my first taste of countywide fame. I was a month into my internship and my name was already broadcast on the station all my friends listened to.
After that, Steve kept throwing me the recorder. He knew I was a huge sports fan—he couldn’t have cared less—and not too long after my “handi-capable” success he asked me if I wanted to interview Rick Cerone, the Yankees catcher, who was doing an autograph session at a mall in Hicksville. It couldn’t have been more perfect for me. While my fandom had expanded to the Jets and the Islanders, the Mets and baseball were still my true loves. They were everything the Yankees were not: upstarts, scrappy, abused, laughed at. Clearly, I could identify with this team. Plus, my dad loved the Mets and I idolized my dad. Every year he’d take my brothers and me to a game for a Dell’Abate boys day out. At night he and I would watch the Mets together. He used to joke that on his third try, he got it right and had a boy who was a sports fan. It was something only he and I could share.
In 1980, the Mets were in the midst of a particularly bad run. They won the World Series in 1969. But during a stint from the mid-to late seventies, they finished above .500 just twice. And in 1980 they were in the middle of seven straight seasons with fewer than seventy wins. They were easily the worst team in baseball.
Meanwhile, those damn Yankees were the best. In 1980 they had won 103 games. But the good news for me was that right before my interview with Cerone, the Yankees had lost the pennant to the Royals. In fact they didn’t just lose, they were swept by a team that had won six fewer games. By all accounts their season was a failure, no matter how many games the team won during the regular season. Now their catcher was signing autographs and our news director asked me if I wanted to go talk to him. Hell yeah, I wanted to talk to him! The Met fan in me couldn’t wait to rub his nose in it.
At first I thought it would be an easy gig. I figured since Steve asked me it had all been set up and I would just arrive, interview Cerone, and then come back with the tape. Cerone was famous, and the Yankees were important. He wouldn’t leave something like this to chance with an intern. Actually, he would. Steve told me to find out who was in charge when I arrived at the mall, show them the tape recorder, explain that I worked with WLIR, and ask if Cerone would talk to me. It would be just that easy.
As I approached the autograph stand I saw, of course, that Cerone was surrounded by hundreds of people. I fought my way through the crowd with a microphone in one hand and the tape recorder dangling from a strap that hung around my neck. It was mid-October and the equipment, paired with my fledgling mustache and John Oates hair, made me look like someone who was trying out a Halloween costume as an early ’80s rocker.
As I was pleading my case with the woman running the event, Cerone caught a couple of sentences of our exchange and said, “Sure, I’ll talk to you. As soon as this is over.”
So I stepped off to the side to wait my turn. I started testing my tape recorder to make sure it worked. I did it half a dozen times, “Testing one-two-three, testing one-two-three.” Then I’d stop, rewind, play it back, and do it again. I didn’t want to blow this opportunity. I wasn’t going to ask yes-or-no questions and I wasn’t going to let a technical snafu get in the way, either.
I did, however, miss Cerone.
After all the triple-checking and psyching myself up, I looked over to the autograph stand and Cerone was gone. The crowd was gone. The p
erson running the event was gone, too. What the fuck? The only guy still there was a security guard. “Excuse me,” I asked him, panicked. “Do you know where Rick Cerone is? I’m with WLIR and we are supposed to do an interview.”
“He left,” the guard said.
“I know. But he agreed to do an interview with me ten minutes ago and now he’s not here. Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, man, look at me. I need to get this interview. He said he would do it!”
Maybe he pitied me. Maybe he was already bored with the conversation. Maybe he was a Hall and Oates fan. In any case, he told me, “Check the mall office.”
I sprinted up an escalator to the mall offices and banged on the door. It opened about an inch. The guy behind it put his face in the crack and said, “What do you want?”
“I want to interview Rick,” I said. “He agreed to talk to me after the autograph session.”
“He’s busy,” the guy answered and started to shut the door. But before he could close it, I wedged my foot in the crack. I literally had my foot in the door.
To this day, where on earth I got the balls to do that I have no idea. It was Rick Cerone, not Rick James.
“What are you doing?” he asked me. He was not happy.
“I was supposed to interview Rick Cerone,” I answered.
Before it escalated I heard a voice from behind the door. It was Cerone. “It’s okay, let him in, let’s do it.”
I turned on my tape recorder—it worked—and then fired out this question: “Do you guys see it as a failure that you lost the pennant?”
His eyes burned with anger, and not because it was a yes-or-no question. “We won a hundred and three games this year. How is that a failure?”
The interview ended shortly after that. But I got it done. And it aired all weekend long. I considered it a victory for Met fans everywhere.
BABA BOOEY’S TOP 7 CONCERTS
(You Don’t Sully a List Like This Just to Get to 10)
1. Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti tour, 1975, Nassau Coliseum: I went with a friend and we paid four dollars a piece for scalped tickets. This was the first concert I ever went to. Zeppelin opened with “Rock and Roll.” For the final encore Robert Plant said, “This is a song we recorded that has become popular beyond our wildest dreams.” Then they did “Stairway to Heaven.”
2. Bruce Springsteen, The River tour, 1980, Nassau Coliseum: My buddy Steve and I were in the second to last row directly across from the stage, but Springsteen made us feel like we were in his living room.
3. Clash, 1981, Bonds: The Clash were supposed to play ten shows in an old Times Square men’s clothing store that had been converted into a club. But the first night the fire marshal shut them down. Since they were, after all, the band of the people, Mick Jones said they would honor every ticket that was bought. So they played for twenty-seven straight nights. I saw them on night twenty-five. They were losing their voices, but their energy was amazing.
4. Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues tour, 1983, West Side Tennis Club Stadium, Forest Hills, Queens: This concert took place in the old stadium that was home to the U.S. Open in the late ’70s. It was the middle of summer, hot and humid. The show progressed chronologically, starting with David Byrne alone, carrying a boom box and singing “Psycho Killer.” By “Burning Down the House” the stage was full of band members, percussionists, and dancers.
5. U2, The Joshua Tree tour, 1987, Madison Square Garden: I had never seen this band live before. It’s the only other time I had that feeling I got when I saw Bruce: They turned a giant arena into an intimate room.
6. Frank Sinatra, 1983, Nassau Coliseum: I took my parents to see him. I was not a huge fan but realized he was a legend and wanted to catch his show before he died. Nothing better than watching sixty-year-old women act like twenty-year-olds. Before he’d start to sing you’d hear a woman yell, “We love you, Frankie!” He’d say, “I love you too, baby.”
7. Bruce Springsteen, 2005, Two River Theater, Red Bank, New Jersey: It was just me and four hundred other people for a VH1 Storytellers performance. There was Bruce, a piano, an acoustic guitar, and his stories about every song he played. Unreal.
THE INTERNSHIP WITH WLIR went so well, they asked me back for a second semester. I was working nearly every day with Steve, doing grunt work like sledding, and he kept rewarding me with more assignments. This was when the New York Islanders started their run of winning four straight Stanley Cups. Steve sent me out to the victory parades, where I interviewed all the players, talked to people along the route, and then brought back a mess of tape for him to decipher, edit, and graciously credit me for on air. It ran for days.
I even got to cover some hard news. When John Lennon was killed in December 1980, grieving fans held vigils all over New York. All the good reporters were sent to Central Park. But I did get to cover the one at Eisenhower Park and file live reports from the scene.
The same thing happened after Ronald Reagan made some federal budget cuts almost as soon as he took office in January 1981, including taking out a huge slice of student aid. There were protests at colleges all over the country and, eventually, there was a march on Washington during my spring break. So what if it wasn’t for peace or equal rights, my brother Anthony’s issues. It was a cause I could get behind: I needed cash to go to school.
After my WLIR experience I went internship crazy. My parents were incredibly supportive. They could see how happy I was and knew I was killing myself at school and with weekend jobs—at the kennel, at the gas station—so my dad offered to pay for my car insurance. That meant I could work more gigs for free and not have to pick up hours during the week. In the second semester of my sophomore year, while I was interning at WLIR, I applied for an internship at SportsChannel on Long Island, which carried the Islanders and covered a lot of high school sports.
On my first day there my boss handed me a notebook and told me to go up to master control and log tapes. I didn’t know where master control was, because it wasn’t in SportsChannel’s main headquarters. In fact, it was on top of Long Island Medical Center, the tallest building in the area, which meant it got the best reception. You took the elevator to the roof, then climbed a ladder up to a trailer that was filled with high-end video equipment.
The other problem: I didn’t know what it meant to log tapes, or what I was logging tapes for. This is when it turned into a scene out of The Karate Kid. My boss explained that logging meant watching tapes of thirty different high school sporting events—soccer, lacrosse, football, basketball—and writing down the time on the video deck whenever a great play happened. Good kick, log it. Good save, log it. I did that for a week, then I carried the notebook with me whenever I came to work, waiting for him to tell me what we needed it for. It wasn’t until the end of the internship that he sat me down and showed me how to cut up my logged highlights to create a highlight reel.
Meanwhile, here was the real perk: They gave me a press pass for all the Islanders home games at the Nassau Coliseum, which was walking distance from my house. I showed up for every game at 3:30 and ran through a litany of duties, all grunt work that anyone getting paid would be irritated doing. But I couldn’t wait to get there. There were not enough hours in the week for me to learn what I wanted to learn. When I walked into the Coliseum I never wanted to leave.
The first thing I did when I showed up for work was check the pagers all the refs wore that alerted them when they needed to take a TV time-out. I walked around every spot on the ice checking for dead spots. Then I would dig out the SportsChannel banner from the bowels of stadium storage and unfurl it in front of the booth where the announcers sat during the game.
After that, I spent hours making copies and gophering between the production truck and the stadium and the press room. I got to know everyone from the camera guys to the directors to the Zamboni driver. There wasn’t a part of the job I didn’t see. My favorite guy was Stan Fischler, a legendary hocke
y reporter who did player interviews on TV and wrote for The Hockey News. Between every period, players from both teams would stop by Stan’s booth near the locker room and give him five minutes. Then, after the game, he picked a “Star of the Game” to interview. I was Stan’s set decorator and wrangler.
Before the games I had to gather extra team jerseys to hang in Stan’s cubbyhole as backdrops for his interview. The Islander equipment managers just handed the unis over. But the road team’s managers always gave me the once-over—my hair, my mustache—and said the same thing: “You better fucking bring them back.”
When the game ended Stan would make his Star of the Game picks. But the criterion wasn’t who had a hat trick or the most assists; it was above all who would talk to Stan. I’d head into the locker room—Islanders or visitors—with a list of three or four guys Stan voted as that night’s MVP. I’d ask the first guy, “Can you do an interview?” If he said no, I went to the next guy. On and on, until I found a guy who would do the interview. It wasn’t always easy.
One time Stan had written an article for The Hockey News about which player he would take first if he were starting a team. This was the early 1980s. Wayne Gretzky was emerging as the greatest player in NHL history and one of the biggest stars in all of sports. He was young, handsome, well spoken. Forget hockey—if people were starting a pro basketball team at the time they would have taken Gretzky. But Stan wrote that his first choice would be the Islanders’ Bryan Trottier. It had become a running joke, with Stan and the Islanders’ lead broadcaster always saying Trottier was the best player in hockey. Truth was, he was scoring fifty goals a season and was the glue that held together an Islanders team that was in the middle of a dynasty. But Stan wrote the story in such a way that it was not so much about why Trottier was great; it gave all the reasons Gretzky wasn’t.
They Call Me Baba Booey Page 12