The title comes from my rendering of what a medical office person with the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania area dialect said when struggling with her non-responsive tablet. It actually bears no connection to the rest of this post, but I hate to waste anything.
Instead I wanted to write about quotations I often heard when I worked as a DJ at WZIX-AM 1350 in York, PA.
I should note that I had a variety of shifts: midnight to 6am during the week, Saturdays 6pm to 2am, Sundays 6am to noon, and Sundays 6pm to midnight. In some weeks the last three shifts would happen in the same week and I remember shutting off the transmitter, going home to bed, getting up and going back to the station, and turning the transmitter back on.
When I worked the midnight to 6am shift I had to play certain recurring PSAs in the last hour of my shift. It contained fun facts about the state and always began and ended with an enthusiastic announcer proclaiming, “It’s a BEEE-YOU-tiful day in Pennsylvania!”
Another PSA (or public service announcement) dealt with food safety and introduced a dialogue between “Salmonella and his brother Arnie.” I get Salmonella, but never understood Arnie Monella.
On Sunday morning, I played several taped shows. One of these was, “The KLU Hour.” KLU stood for “keep looking up,” and the announcer began the show saying, “This is the KLU Hour, one hour of the morning’s worship service” from some church, the name of which I forget. Two things were notable about this: 1) the guy pronounced “worship” as “warship,” and 2) the recording only lasted 30 minutes, not an hour.
And speaking of recorded shows, Sunday nights also featured a 2-hour jazz show that began with, “This is Rit, and this is Jazz…” Rit worked at Sol Kessler’s stereo store in the record area, and was our first experience growing up with an African-American man. He knew records and jazz and seemed cool to us.
The show was okay with its traditional jazz tracks but eventually suffered a serious technical problem. He reused the same tapes week after week and year after year. After a long while the tape began to stretch and it would bounce over the play heads, making the cool jazz sound more like music from rubber bands.
One night a disgruntled listener called and realized I was not Rit when I said, “Hello, WZIX” in my white DJ voice. “Let me talk to Rit,” the caller said. I then had my American Graffiti moment when I echoed Wolfman Jack, saying, “He’s not here. His show’s recorded on tape.” There was a pause and the caller said, “It sounds like shit!” and hung up. And he was right. I left a note about it and I think about a month later Rit started using new tapes.
Those were days.
MUSOFYR 