Live from Camp Swampy
My Baptism Into the Realm of Radio: about Ducks, Border Blasters, and a Visit from Charlie Gringo
Minnesota has three sets of seasons. One is your standard spring, summer, fall, winter. The second involves baseball and football: the Twins, the Vikings and to some, the University of Minnesota’s Golden Gophers, symbolized by a bulked-up cartoon rodent in a jersey. The third set marks the seasons during which certain breeds of wildlife may be legally blasted away or trapped by Minnesota hunters.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | TuneIn | iHeart Radio | Spotify | Deezer| PandoraIt begins in the winter with beaver. Geese and crows become fair game in March followed by bear and elk. In August there is a lottery for the privilege of hunting down prairie chickens. Rabbits and squirrels have their day of doom in September. At the end of September, hunters celebrate the Super Bowl of hunting, the duck season opener.
On the opening of duck season, I found myself in the middle of a duck habitat, a swamp near the Mississippi River underneath three radio towers. An electrical ground can act as part of an antenna. It is an axiom of radio engineering: the gooier the muck, the better the electrical grounding and the stronger the signal. At night, powerful radio transmitters with finely-tuned antennas pump signals up to the ionosphere, ionized by cosmic rays from the sun, from which they bounce back to receivers hundreds, even thousands of miles away. This is why AM radio stations often share habitat with ducks. American pop-culture in the mid 20th century was beamed from towers on these flat, boggy landscapes. Rock ‘n’ roll, baseball, football, the rants of politicians, preachers, and quacks.
John Romulus Brinkley made a fortune during America’s Great Depression promoting his goat gland prostate surgery on his own Kansas radio station. He charged $750 to implant goat testicles in men who thought they were sexually inadequate or had prostate problems. Several died. Brinkley
became so famous that Hollywood adopted the term “goat gland” as slang for attaching sound to silent films. The US government refused to renew his radio license, but that didn’t stop him. The US, at the time, was battling Mexico over the rights to radio channels along the border. Thumbing its nose, Mexico was only too happy to grant Brinkley a permit to broadcast from across the border from Del Rio, Texas in Villa Acuña, Coahuila. He built 300 foot towers and eventually increased the power of his station to a million watts. People nearby said they could hear Brinkley in their bed springs.
XER, later XERA, was the the original “border blaster,” flogging Brinkley’s quack surgery and colored-water remedies to all of North America. He first broadcast from his studio in Kansas by telephone line. Between his infomercials he played country and western music. Some big acts, including
the Carter Family, got their big break on XERA. The US government tried to shut him down again. What is known as the Brinkley Act outlawed over-the-border studios. So what did he do? He cut phonograph records of his programs and shipped them across the river. Eleven other stations selling fake cures, prayer towels, autographed pictures of Jesus Christ, mind reading and right wing rhetoric followed. Brinkley, himself, had a swimming pool inlaid with swastikas. The most famous of the border blasters was XERF, beaming 250 thousand watts from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico from which disk jockey Wolfman Jack howled at all fifty states, Canada and Latin America. Threatened by corrupt officials and bandits, Wolfman commuted across the border from his home in Del Rio, Texas with his own security detail. After two gun battles Jack, whose real name was Bob Smith, resettled at another border blaster, XERB in Tijuana, which co-starred in George Lucas’ movie “American Grafitti”. Taking an exception to the Brinkley Law”, The Wolfman broadcast from a studio in Hollywood.
The radio stars of 50s and 60s were often unshaven men with booming voices huffing unfiltered Camel cigarettes in dingy shacks. Walls of transmitters and antenna tuners hummed behind double-paned windows. After a stint in high school at a small FM radio station located in the basement of a school, I seized my opportunity to go big time. At the time, FM, with its superior sound quality was mostly for hifi enthusiasts. AM was the big deal. As a teenager I debuted as the Sunday morning announcer at an AM radio station. Its studios were located in a landscape, shared with ducks, that air personalities nicknamed Camp Swampy. I was hired to replace a man who was so boring that he became known as “the talking test pattern,” an allusion to a static chart of lines and numbers, sometimes featuring the head of a an American Indian with feathered headdress, that was set up in front of early television cameras to align them before the broadcast day. The station was run by a former Golden Gopher football star we called Cleats…on the air. At staff meetings he screamed, “Goddamit, don’t call me Cleats!” His face glowed like a vacuum tube as he waved his plastic-tipped cigar, indented by tooth marks. Every Sunday morning at 5AM I arrived at a brick building under three steel radio towers on a swampy moor, often during a heavy fog. The interior was dominated by one large room. Along one side was a room-length metal cabinet with a mad scientist’s array of dials and meters. A huge vacuum tube glowed behind a glass door like a mystic eternal flame. There were turntables and clattering tape machines. A window opened up into a studio with a large, serious-looking solo microphone with the initials RCA embossed on it. Nailed to the window frame was a rubber sex toy, a dildo nicknamed Dr. Pecker. A well-known technique when you are alone in a broadcast booth is to affix your attention on some object, pretend it is a person, and talk to it. Sometimes the good doctor was that object.
I entered a room filled with pimply young men and spent-looking young women, groupies who hung out with the all-night disc jockey. One of the regulars called himself Charlie Gringo. An out-of-towner, his weekly visit was pre-announced by a call from a phone booth on the road during which he shouted the pronouncement “Charlie Gringo’s back in town!” Alas Charlie was banned from Camp Swampy after he pulled out a pistol and blasted a hole in the ceiling during a news broadcast.
The overnight crowd cleared out by the time I sat down for my solemn Sunday morning with my pile of preacher tapes: recorded shows such as “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour”. Some were sponsored and begged for money or, as on the Mexican border blasters, sold Bibles and prayer cloths. I made my announcements, my engineer set an alarm clock, and we both dozed off during the sermons.
At 9AM, fueled by doughnuts and a bitter brew unique to broadcasting called control room coffee, made in giant vats by engineers and reheated over several shifts to a tar sand consistency, I woke up for my own show. It was a music format disparagingly referred to in the radio business as “chicken rock,” a mixture of bland pop music and safe rock and roll, like non-rock Beatles songs and an aging Frank Sinatra straining to sing something new but embarrassingly beyond his crooner range.
Mid-morning the classical music announcer arrived to do his live program on the sister FM radio station. The classical shows were mostly pre-recorded and one morning it took four hours for a listener to call to inform the station that the tape was running at the wrong speed. The tiny FM studio was not air conditioned and the classical announcer normally stripped to his waist. One morning he opened his wooden box of pistols and cleaned them during long passages,passionately swinging his arms and guns as the music crescendoed. I prayed that the 1812 Overture was not on his playlist.
On the opening weekend of duck season, tragically, some hunters get so wound up they accidentally shoot each other or themselves. At least one dies every year. I had the task of delivering this bad news about the fate of a couple of unlucky hunters on a radio newscast. As I launched into the story I took a glance out the window at my engineer. The sides of his mouth began to curl upward into a wry grin. He pressed the intercom button and talked to me through my headphones.
“Quack!”
My voice began to strain as I worked my way through the tragic story. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the disc jockey through another window in the next studio turn his head to me. He pressed his intercom button.
“Quack!”
Trying to hold back what would have been a very inappropriate laugh, my voice began to crack as I read the names of the dead hunters. Then, in unison came the sound of a flock through the walls and windows:“Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack!”
I stopped, turned off my microphone, choked and turned it on again. But I couldn’t go on. I cut short the newscast and signed off.
The studio hotline began to blink and a buzzer went off. It was Cleats. “What are you doin’ with my goddamn radio station?” he screamed.
I managed to keep my job but quit a short time later. I escaped to public broadcasting, which I was never quite cut out for. I had too big a voice. At age twenty I had an ongoing role as Zeus in an educational radio series. Once a week I summoned my pantheon of gods and set them straight. I have always wished that there were some kind of electronic irony filter that could make me sound like Garrisson Keillor or David Sedaris, or at least just a wee bit whiny. I could have been a hit in public radio. Or maybe not. Almost daily, for a time, I sat at a table at the University of Minnesota public radio station and read the news with a man – somewhat aloof and eccentric – whom the staff called Gary. If I blew a word, he looked me straight in eye and twitched his mustache. That never failed to choke me up. I was an easy mark. Gary went on to find fame and fortune in Lake Wobegon Minnesota. I slipped off into television and, in my early twenties to California.
“Watch out for Charles Manson!” warned an elderly aunt.
