The following is excerpted from a column entitled
Thanks For The Memories, originally published in The Pulse of
Broadcasting
magazine in 1987, written by Dale Tucker:
The summer of '67 found me at WRKO in Boston. My first major market.
Hired from WABB (1440/Worcester) by Bob Henabery, I drove to Boston, was
put up in a nice hotel with a good prime rib restaurant in downtown and
went to work. I was Production Director of the FM that's WRKO-FM, the
one that started it all. The station that paved the way, a year or so
later, for the giant of classic New England radio, the flagship of the
grand old Yankee Network's WNAC to change (the station into) a kick-ass,
high-energy rock 'n roll WRKO. Fifty K at 680! Wowser, what a signal.
WRKO-FM (now WROR) was the first (and probably the only) example of an
automated FM (or AM) radio station succeeding because the guy behind it
capitalized on the fact it was automated. Bob Henabery (and more about
him shortly) had the wisdom to promote it as R-KO, The Shy But Friendly
Robot. There were even PAMS jingles to that effect, plus "Only R-KO
plays four in a row;" etc. Tape from 6 PM to 6 AM, live (simulcast)
during the daytime hours. A promotional budget of zip and only FM, it
was a hit at night when the students at BU and Northeastern and most of
the other schools in The Hub discovered that, yeah, the WMEX and WRKO
jocks were great and fun and both stations had contests and promotions,
but this FM thing had almost no commercials, one newscast in eighteen
hours (at 6:40 PM) and played the hits all the time!
Looking back, I judge that Bob Henabery had to be a genius. How else
could he cook up this Drake format after monitoring hours and days of
co-owned KHJ and others, adapt what he heard in a very faithful fashion
and then launch a format that used PAMS instead of Johnny Mann jingles
(for a much softer, less strident sound), guide the jocks (remember the
WRKO Jocks?) to be up, tight, fun and all that but human, too? By gosh,
that station had warmth. Just a few weeks after my arrival, Bob resigned
and we were consulted (directed? Dictated to?) from the West Coast and
the warmth and the fun and the realness were all gone. And in the middle
and throughout it was Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.
Bob Henabery had some help. I don't know where he found him, but somehow
a brilliant, creative, innovate strategist who could conjure up the most
fascinating, involved, fun, intelligent (that means it didn't insult you
if you had a more-than-room-temperature IQ, to borrow a line from Gordon
Liddy who may have borrowed it from a certain magazine publisher near
and dear to us all) contests and promotions. Just before I arrived in
Boston, the resident genius brewed up a scheme to tie the station in
with the new James Bond movie opening at a theater near you. The scam
was this: show up in a trench coat at two o'clock in the bleeping
morning in the lobby of this movie house in downtown Boston and just
because you're there at that weird hour in a trench coat, fergodsakes,
you'll get in free. Bob Henabery and this off the wall promotional guru
(whose name it turned out was and is Harvey Mednick and who remains the
only person I have ever seen in my entire life who not only bought a
Nehru suit, he actually had the gall to wear it to the office) launched
the James Bond dress-alike promos, sat back and prayed that somebody
would show up. Their great hope was that since Boston is such a great
college town, that maybe, just maybe a 150 students might show up. I
mean, after all, it is a large metro area, so hoping for a 150, maybe
even 175 or 8 wouldn't be too much to hope for.
The following days Boston Herald newspaper spread the photo across the
front page as police had to be called out to handle 20,000 trench-coat
clad undergraduates mobbed outside a theater with maybe 900 seats and
few in the aisles. It wasn't easy for the GM (Perry Ury) keeping a
straight face as he apologized to the Chief of Police with half the
staff in the conference room next door knocking down six packs and
screaming about the biggest G.D. promotion to ever hit this major
market. |
