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    Ithaca Radio
    Ithaca Radio
    Ithaca Radio
    Ebook201 pages41 minutes

    Ithaca Radio

    By Peter King Steinhaus, Rick Sommers Steinhaus and Keith Olbermann

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    About this ebook

    From Long Island to Fiji, college students flocked to the sleepy little town of Ithaca to learn the how-tos and how-not-tos of broadcasting. From that influx came some of the future leaders and celebrities of the broadcasting industry. Television stars were born here, and some of radio’s future stars were nurtured to succeed in an industry that impacts the daily lives of Americans. Ithaca’s rich broadcasting history includes two college radio stations and several locally owned and operated stations. From the Greaseman to Keith Olbermann, Ithaca was the launch pad for numerous successful careers in music, talk, news, business, and satellite radio. Through vintage photographs, Ithaca Radio shares a history of local radio and some of the great voices that have called Ithaca home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateAug 11, 2014
    ISBN9781439646731
    Ithaca Radio
    Author

    Peter King Steinhaus

    Peter King Steinhaus and Rick Sommers Steinhaus are alumni of the radio culture at Ithaca. They are brothers who grew up in a New York City suburb, exposed to radio greats like Dan Ingram, Ted Brown, Don Imus, Marv Albert, and Charles Osgood. They eventually ended up at Ithaca College’s renowned School of Communications, and each embarked on a path they look back on with great love and admiration for the town where they started. Peter is a Florida-based correspondent for CBS Radio News. After a long radio career in New York, Rick is the broadcast membership liaison for SAG-AFTRA in New York.

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      Book preview

      Ithaca Radio - Peter King Steinhaus

      minefields.

      INTRODUCTION

      If this did not all actually happen on one day, it could have.

      On some afternoon early in 1978, I could have stood up from my seat at my radio newswriting class at Cornell University and said goodbye to teacher Don Martin, thanking him again for giving me the only practical broadcasting advice I ever got in school—"Whenever I hear somebody say, ‘Good morning, Ithaca,’ or ‘Hello, everybody,’ on radio, I always turn around to see who’s come in the room with me. You broadcast to a listener or a viewer. The crowd you imagine is vanity. My classmate Peter Schacknow, later of UPI, ABC, and CNBC but at that point our news director at WVBR-FM, could have joined me in wondering aloud how Mr. Martin was as entertaining as he was when the stations Cornell owned and for which he served as general manager, WHCU-AM and -FM, were not. Decades later, Mr. Martin would finally answer my question about how somebody as talented, deep-voiced, and gifted with perfect diction, had not advanced to national radio by smiling and saying quietly, I liked it here."

      Leaving Mr. Martin to defend his play-by-play rights to all the Cornell sports from our jealous, leering advances, Peter and I could have walked through Cornell’s agriculture quad, then cut past the hockey rink and down toward the electrical engineering buildings, and finally across the bridge into Ithaca’s Collegetown. When we got to 227 Linden Avenue, WVBR’s home, we would have passed by the ramshackle offices of the Ithaca New Times, a weekly newspaper that rented our bottom floor. The term rented often required quotation marks—we would have doubtless cracked wise about its proprietor, known to the rawest trainee at VBR for not always paying on time. His name was Jay S. Walker, and he would go on to be a founder of Priceline and fund TED, and after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Forbes reported that his net worth was down to only $333 million.

      Pete and I would pound up the loud, metal stairs to the studios on the second floor and buzz our way into the place. If our friend and soon-to-be program director Glenn Corneliess was not staring at us through the glass of the main studio, he would be found in the business office talking to somebody—on the phone, in person, in a large group, or one-on-one—about how to do radio correctly. After 18 years of being on the air and in management at stations from Binghamton to Long Island, Glenn was one of the wise young men of Katz Radio, again addressing the recruits on how to do radio correctly, when a congenital heart defect, of which he never knew, struck without warning and killed him before he collapsed to the floor. Gone nearly 18 years now, Glenn—with his older son already working in television—is still way ahead of the rest of us in life accomplishments, but I do not think he’d mind that, when I got the honor to name VBR’s new studios on Buffalo Street, I dedicated them to him and my late father.

      Somewhere near Glenn, we’d likely find Pat Lyons, promotions director, disc jockey, and a guy whose turntable operated a few RPM faster than everybody else. That winter in 1978, he and I were splitting the public address announcing for Cornell basketball when, groggy from an all-nighter, Pat announced, Good evening and welcome to Cornell hockey. After the requisite laugh, he apologized and went on to say, Good evening and welcome to Cornell basketball, upon which the basketball crowd actually booed the reality that they were the basketball crowd. Pat is now Patrick J. Lyons of the international desk of the New York Times and looks more like an ambassador than a promotions director throwing Frisbees at his colleagues.

      As the elected station executive in charge of the training program and all matters personnel, I would have to check all of my sheets on the station’s bulletin board. There were sign-up sheets for training sessions for disc jockeys and sportscasters, and newscasters, and technicians, and the WVBR-FM official staff list, which I had to update (by typing it completely anew) each time another trainee passed his staff test. I would also have to retype it every time one of our techies, Jon Rubinstein, would cross out his name and defiantly write in the only thing he ever answered to: Ruby. Like our senior tech guys John Hill and Andy Ingraham (who between them spent about 70 years working at VBR), Ruby could fix or repurpose anything. Yesterday’s worn-out headphones would become tomorrow’s remote patch cord. Ruby was great at that—a truth that Steve Jobs noticed just a few years later, after he had hired Jon J. Rubinstein but before Ruby created the iPod for him. Ruby went on to run Palm for a time and then part of Hewlett-Packard. I wonder if he would cross out his given name on whatever Silicon Valley equivalents existed for college radio staff lists.

      At some point in these travels, Pete and I would’ve run into Phil Shapiro. Nothing and no one is forever, but Phil is a serious argument against that conclusion. He found a home at the station in the 1960s, selling advertising and producing a folk-rock show, Bound For Glory,

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