Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  He always pauses to look in on Catherine as she sleeps quietly, a stuffed toy clutched close, even if he is running late for his shift. He is the boss, after all. He can simply reprimand himself. Besides, he has to allow time to marvel at her beauty, her brilliant yellow hair that is so long and full for a three-year-old.

  She has her own radio that is never turned off. The glow from its dial is her night light. If he ever dares to switch it off, she would wake up immediately and turn it right back on, then fuss at him a bit before she slept again. Her record player hums quietly, too, spinning away in a far corner of her jumbled, toy-strewn world. It rarely stops turning.

  He has to fight the urge to gallop over to where she sleeps and sweep her up and hold her close, nuzzling her neck until she erupts into giggles and hugs him back hard. No, he lets her sleep. He will be back home soon and they can run and play then, with him being as much a child as she.

  The mist is almost always rising from Lake Hampton as he pushes the pickup truck around the twisting, turning road girdling its shore. He crosses the dam that holds back the Okolona River to form the lake.

  Cleo swears that children grow bigger and stronger near the water, just as oaks and elms do. She is probably right, he thinks. As he breathes in the smell of the deep water, it reminds him of his own growing up along the Tennessee River and makes him feel young again.

  Just past the river bridge, he makes the quick stop each day at Jessie’s Cafe and Bait Shop. Jessie always has a Styrofoam cup of steaming black coffee ready for him, no charge. Jessie’s wife, Vera, usually has him a hot biscuit with sausage or country ham inside, wrapped in waxed paper, and a song request or two jotted down on a paper napkin. He will pay for the breakfast with a few mentions on the air about how good they were.

  Usually, if the morning mist is not too dense when he makes the turn onto Route 22, he can spot the top beacon of the little tower just above the tree line. If he does not have to slow for an early-morning tractor, he can cut the engine completely and glide the last hundred yards. That spares the couple of farmers whose houses stand near the highway the noise of the engine when he downshifts into the radio station parking lot.

  Once out of the car, he usually pauses there in the gravel lot for a moment to once again breathe in the clean air and new-day smell. When he gets inside, he starts a pot of his own coffee brewing and turns on the switch for the tube filament voltage in the ice-box-sized transmitter in the back room.

  Then he is ready to sit down and shuffle through the twisting piles of wire copy that have moved overnight from the Associated Press. He culls carefully, tearing off the biggest news stories, the farm and market reports, the odd or funny stories called “kickers,” the sports scores from whatever games are in season, all the items that are of interest to folks in his part of the world. He hangs the sheets neatly on labeled hooks on the control room wall, except for the weather report and hourly temperature roundup. Those are creased and propped against some switches on the front of the ancient control board.

  The actual sign-on times for the station vary monthly with the time of the sunrise, as early as 4:45 in the summer, as late as 7:30 in the winter. But there is always a little tingle in his gut when he first tosses the switch that sends waves of high voltage coursing through the old transmitter's dust-covered tubes. He smiles when the lights in the control room dim slightly from the strain of supplying all the electrical power needed to fire up the old box. Then he settles back into his chair and listens as the crackling static from the studio monitor speaker is replaced by the quiet hum of a strong signal. Soon, audio will be applied to ride piggy-back out and over the air.

  It is only a daytime AM radio station. Some call it “ancient modulation” since FM and its clear stereo signals kicked the mode off the top of the hill in the late seventies. And it only sends a modest thousand watts of radio frequency energy down a narrow one-inch-in-diameter stretch of coaxial cable. The signal moves along to a stubby two-hundred-foot tower that seems to sprout like a sweet gum tree in the middle of a sage grass field behind the little cement block studio building. The station occupies a frequency somewhere on the high end of the AM band, up where the squealing heterodynes sound their siren calls, the gasping, wheezing preachers save souls, and the crashing static still jealously rules the domain on humid, stormy, summer days.

  But the little station is his. His and Cleo's. And it is on the wind.

  The phone invariably rings just before he hits the button that starts the tape cartridge machine that plays "Dixie" for a sign-on theme.

  "Is it going to rain today, Jimmy?"

  "Nope, Charlie. Not a chance today. Go ahead and get the plow out of the shed."

  "'I sure do appreciate it, Jimmy. Now don’t forget to play me something by Hank Williams. Junior, not senior. Okay?"

  "I'll do it, Charlie. You have a good day."

  And then “Dixie” is playing on the air while Jimmy reads into the microphone all the legal sign-on stuff he has to say each day. He could record it once and not have to read it live, but he enjoys saying the words. Over the opening few bars of the first record, he leaves the microphone open while he takes a noisy slurp of his coffee right there on the air. Then he says a sincere "good morning," gives the time and temperature, and gets out of the way for the singer and whatever the words are that he or she wants to sing. Words about love, life, happiness, sadness.

  He plays whatever songs he wants to play or those his listeners tell him they want to hear. There are no long columns or tables of research numbers to analyze to hone the playlist down to the lowest common denominator. No “safe list” of music sent down from some consultant somewhere, filled with songs that are supposed to be as well suited for Poughkeepsie as they are for Portland.

  On this station, the Grateful Dead happily follow Ronnie Milsap. Michael Jackson yelps right next to Crystal Gayle. The Doobie Brothers share the air with Count Basie.

  Any time the microphone is on, Jimmy still talks with his audience. Not at them. Not to them. With them. He puts some of them directly on the air over the telephone when they call in, and without benefit of a delay system of any kind. He trusts his listeners to keep it clean and they have not let him down yet.

  He does not disappoint them either. He makes sure anybody listening will hear all the things he or she needs to know. He reassures them that the world did not end as they slept, or that the Rapture did not take place during the night. He lets them know if a rain slicker or short sleeves would be appropriate for the day. He brings them up to date on the news, the weather, and the price of peaches at the Mississippi Farmer's Market. And he also tells them of the sale on seed at the Growers’ Co-op Store in Corinth and the special on Spam at the Piggly Wiggly in Iuka.

  One thing is for sure. When he tells his silly jokes or rambles on about something he thinks is important, he knows for certain that they are out there listening to him. WHOF is their entertainment, their information source, their best friend.

  The listeners remind Jimmy of that everywhere he goes. At lunch at the cafe, they’ll come right up and tell him how much they enjoyed the story he told that morning. Peggy, the waitress, will scribble down a request for the next morning’s show on the back of his ticket. Baggy Morrison, the barber, will threaten to give him a buzz cut if he does not quit playing so much of “that old rock and roll mess.”

  Mickey Mashburn wanders into the studio just before nine o'clock in the morning. He is a part-time Primitive Baptist preacher, part-time radio commercial salesman, and part-time deejay. He has done a mid-day gospel music show on the station since it went on the air early in 1952, forty years before Cleo and Jimmy bought it from its original owner. When Mickey is not holding a revival somewhere or spinning Blackwood Brothers records on the radio, he sells commercial spot announcements for five dollars apiece. Seven if they want him or Jimmy to do the commercials live instead of being recorded. Most of them do.

  Jimmy Gill always moves the remnants of his show out
of Mickey’s way, cues up his first song on one of the ancient turntables, and almost reluctantly steps aside.

  "Give 'em what they want, Mick."

  "If the Lord's willin', I will, Jimmy. I sure will."

  Later, Homer Davis will play country music for a couple of hours while he takes a long lunch from his day job at his law office in Booneville. Then a college student from Tupelo will spin rock and roll records (without the hard stuff, of course) until the sun goes down and "Dixie" comes on to wrap up another “broadcast day” at WHOF.

  Sometimes, after his show is finished, Jimmy will spend a couple of hours with paperwork, or call on a few of his sponsors before he takes lunch at the café uptown. Maybe he will try to sell some commercials to be run in the upcoming high school football play-by-play broadcast he enjoys so much doing. Or maybe he will stop by the Massey-Ferguson tractor dealership and get on the telephone for a free, live “cut-in” commercial on the air, just to show them how much he appreciates their business.

  But he always calls Cleo first. He needs to make sure she is still there. That nothing has happened to her or the baby while he played radio. That is his greatest fear. That something or somebody will try to take them away from him.

  She always puts her day on hold to listen to him. She postpones tending to the horses, fooling around in her little recording studio out back, or digging in her garden plot next to the barn. She understands how much he needs to hear her voice, how important it is for him to be able to talk nonsense with Catherine.

  Once a month or so, they put Catherine in the car seat between them and drive up the winding back roads of North Mississippi and Southwest Tennessee. Eventually, they meet up with I-40 and follow it on into Nashville like a trio of tourists. Jimmy never bothers to put on a tie, even then. He has not worn a suit anywhere besides church in four years.

  Detroit Simmons is always glad to see them, even if he is in the middle of something important. He stops his chore and insists on spending the day with them. That is even though he and Rachel often drive down to the farm to spend the weekend or holidays. Even though they have their own bedroom upstairs at Jimmy’s and Cleo’s house.

  They are Catherine’s god-parents. She named a couple of her favorite Canadian geese after them.

  Wizard has continued to grow with Detroit at the helm, now in more than name only. The fall-out from the mess with the George twins was minimal. Since Jimmy had voluntarily severed the connection when he learned what was going on, there was no lasting problem.

  Jimmy could have stayed on if he had wanted to. The Security and Exchange Commission hinted it might be best if he stepped down, but there was no pressure, really. Not from them. Not from the board of directors. Not even from the stockholders who were so happy with their investment so far.

  No, it was Jimmy’s choice. Their choice, Cleo's and his, to pull back and let Wizard have its head.

  Jimmy Gill had known deep down what was missing in his life, where things had gone wrong, even before the deadly showdown with DeWayne on the dam at Percy Priest Lake. Pride and stubbornness and the inertia of the roller-coaster he had set in motion kept him from admitting it. Then, when the whole thing almost flew off the track, when he came so close to losing the people who really mattered, he finally realized that he had nothing else to prove to anybody.

  Wizard had grown too big for him. He had strayed much too far from the side of the business that he loved so much. He had found himself insulated from the magic that had pulled and tugged him into broadcasting in the first place. He craved the simple one-to-one communication between radio personality and radio listener. He finally realized that he missed it as much as he might have breathing.

  Stations and chains of stations were run by accountants and regulators, consultants and researchers. It had to be that way. Too much money was invested by people who knew little or nothing about the broadcasting business, who were in it for the monetary return only. Some turned out to be good operators who hired bright and creative people to put an exciting product out over the airwaves. Others lived and died by the bottom line only, bought and sold stations for profit in the short-term, and in the process, good people got hurt. They tried to cut their way to success.

  Detroit had hung onto the Birmingham and Louisville stations after all, pulled them off the selling block, and withdrew the offers for the stations Jimmy had gone after in the huge markets. The stockholders quietly questioned his strategy, but the profits were there already, their investments were sound, and they soon hushed. Detroit, Lulu Dooley, Clarice George, Greta Polanski and the employees of the company began to gradually buy back all the stock anyway, and it will eventually return to being a private corporation again.

  Cleo and Jimmy make more than enough from their shares to live comfortably, and all Cleo’s music publishing goes directly to a trust fund for Catherine and their later children. Catherine Gill is already a wealthy young lady.

  The radio station they own is not there for money. Jimmy takes no salary.

  When they are back visiting in Nashville, Jimmy sometimes gets a twinge of feeling for the power he willingly turned his back on. When he walks through the studios at Wizard, he is reminded of the audience out there, the people listening to the programming that is being packaged and sent out from that special place. He can feel the creative energy that bursts from those padded, sound-deadened rooms.

  There is no mistaking, either, the look he sees in Cleo's eyes when they drive down Music Row. She gazes out at the studios and record companies and booking agencies and he knows she misses it. But when either of them senses the other getting that feeling, they merely look at each other, smile, share a moment frighteningly close to telepathy, maybe kiss, and then move on without hesitation.

  They both know they will soon point the truck back toward home. As soon as they top a certain hill just a few miles south of the Tennessee border, about the same time they can catch their first glimpse of the Okolona River, they will also be able to begin pulling their station's weak signal out of the mud and clutter of the high end of the AM broadcast band. Mickey will be playing a special request for one of the "sick-and-shut-ins" who lies all alone in a cranked-up hospital bed somewhere. Or he will send out a number to someone who sits in a wheelchair in a sliver of shade on a front porch, ear close to a radio, spirit buoyed briefly by the song he spins.

  Or maybe it will be one of the late-afternoon pop songs breaking through the cacophony. They imagine some kid, maybe bouncing high inside the cab of a tractor, towing a plow across row after row in an endless field, his headphones taped into each ear so the jarring ride won't tear them loose. He will be spitting dust, riding a sea of furrows, as the waves of music take him far away, to another place, another life.

  They know that just across the river, up a narrow country road, in a grove of pines next to a field of sage, there is a small cinder block building. Inside, ghosts hum and blue lights flash brilliantly in a couple of glass bottles caged in a metal cabinet. Magnetic energy is amplified and shoved along to the steel spire in the field behind the building, then spins out across the ether at the speed of light. Somewhere out there, it will be snatched from the wind by aerials and the radios will convert it all back to music and voices.

  It’s only a low-powered daytime station on the high end of the dial in a tiny town in North Mississippi.

  But inside that little cinder-block building, the wizard is still busy, still working his magic.

  Author’s Note

  When Wizard of the Wind was first published by Bob Wyatt and St. Martin’s Press in 1997, the novel received almost universally positive reviews. However, two that really counted among publishers and bookstores—Publishers Weekly and Library Journal—were less than kind. Both reviewers felt the book would have been better had it simply been about deejays and their hijinks, or an inside story of one particular radio station.

  They missed the point entirely.

  I spent twenty-two years doing about everything o
ne can do around radio broadcasting, from being a deejay to managing to ownership, then developed and marketed software systems and audience research data to the industry for twelve more years. I was fortunate enough to be in the business during some of its most exciting times: the top-forty AM wars, the rise and domination of FM radio, as well as the explosion of growth after the FCC relaxed ownership rules in the mid-1990s. I had the privilege of working with and for some of the most talented broadcasters there were. And I was on the air when AM was in its last glory days, was one of the first to do free-form “underground” FM when it made its appearance, and got to do country music radio from Music Row in Nashville just as the format was beginning to make its mark on FM.

  This gave me a view from the catbird seat to watch the business of radio evolve during some exciting and creative times, but to ultimately veer off in what I consider to be a terrible direction. I admit I was positive when the FCC changed its ownership rules to allow a single company to own multiple AM and FM stations in a single market, and removed restrictions on how many total stations across the country a company could own. I figured this would bring in strong and creative operators who would take marginal stations and invest in the development of talent and programming and make them better. With a variety of market sizes, they could experiment, innovate, find out what worked with less risk and then bring the good stuff to the big markets. They would replace many weak, unimaginative mom-and-pop operators who eked out a living with their signals but did little to deserve that sliver of spectrum.

  I was wrong. By the time I was writing Wizard of the Wind, it was becoming apparent that those new big-buck operators had a different idea about how to make their “properties” profitable. Oh, some did it right. Some still do. But several of the biggest ownership entities operated on a different philosophy: cut, cut, cut until the station becomes profitable. Then cut some more to assure it not only makes money but that the group shows enough growth quarter-to-quarter to keep Wall Street analysts and stockholders happy.