In Praise Of Local ... Media

I get it.  I'm old-fashioned.  Just how old, though...  You might be surprised.

I do remember very clearly hopping into the VW Beetle my parents owned when I was very young and riding, unbelted, in the back seat, the half-mile or so to my grandmother's house for the occasional Sunday Night dinner.  It was a chance to see my grandmother, yes, and her house on the bank of the Mississippi River, and her COLOR TV.  We'd watch the Wide World of Disney, usually, whether it was a Disney movie, a nature program, a tour of the park under construction, or ... Well, anything else in color was cool.  Our TV at home was black and white, which was how I later saw Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

But the media I consumed, as it was, back then was all local.  Mom usually kept a radio on in the kitchen, tuned to the local AM radio news station, WJON.  They would deliver local weather every 15 minutes or so, farm prices, local news updates, and they had regular daily radio news programs.  As I got older and more aware of the world around me, yes, their music choices were extremely safe and not much of it.  My father, who was a big history buff, began to get some local recognition for what he knew about our local history, including the Pan Auto company.  

But there was also TV, which I guess I really benefited from due to their local emphasis on quality.  Again, the local station my parents watched was usually the CBS Affiliate, which is still WCCO TV.  Back in those days when I was a kid, Dave Moore was the main anchor of the news, Bud Kraehling for the weather, Ray Scott for sports.  Watching a special presentation put on by the local PBS station that detailed the growth of and reverence for local news organization I learned quite a bit.  For much of my youth, the TV was glued onto Channel 4 for the 5:30-6:30 hour as Walter Cronkhite would present the national and international news, which was followed by Dave Moore, handling the local stuff.  With that and the local radio, we'd have pretty much everything we needed in the overview.

Of course, the mailbox would also contain a copy of what my father called "The St. Cloud Daily Mistake".  For all of those who read the Daily Times in the 70s, my father was an author, editor, and honestly, a language snob.  When I'd ask my father what something meant, he said to check the dictionary.  We had several, and for many years I defaulted on one of the easier ones, until one day I discovered that I could indeed move both the Random House and the Oxford Dictionary.  For those of you snorting at my weak arms, I suppose you might assume that, if you were not aware that "unabridged dictionary" means a book that's about eighteen inches tall, fourteen inches wide (when closed), and about eight inches thick.  And yes, they were printed on thin paper, so they were something to behold, preferably while they sat on a table in front of you.  

Dad used to congratulate us if we could find the inevitable mistake of phrase, spelling, or usage in the payer.  Yeah, I came by the title of "nerd" rather honestly. I did horribly in my school language classes because I damned well never could diagram a sentence, but I could re-write on the fly and get a sentence from mangled "cringe-lish" to Reasonable English.  I did it very simply, by associating the words sprayed on the page into a sentence which was quite a bit closer to something I might read in a book that wasn't written or edited by an idiot.  

But to make my point here, I grew up in an age where local control of the media meant that what was locally produced when it came out of the TV or radio meant it had some bearing on or relevance to my life.  That is, the weather report might include 50 or 100 miles away from the station's tower, but it would most definitely include the weather having to do with everything close.  

When i was about 9 or 10, I'd had my first bike and a pocket AM Transistor radio.  I tried not to use it a lot because it used batteries, which were expensive, back then.  So I'd listen to it a bit, then shut it off.  One afternoon I'd ridden my bike across the main road to the neighborhood where my grandmother's house stood.  I was riding up and down that newly-paved road (great for bikes), when heard the radio announcer start talking about an incoming fast-moving storm.  I looked up, to the west, and saw a dark line of clouds peeking above the trees.  In my infinite wisdom, I judged I had an hour or two, then went back and forth on the road.  

I looked up again, after another announcement where the radio announcer said the storm was passing through Avon, a little town just to the west of where my father worked at St. John's University.  I knew Dad took about 20 minutes or so to get home using the cross-country back roads of the time, and thought "well, maybe".  I started peddling back towards home, then got to the main road.  There was a stretch of about a tenth of a mile from where the road I was on met the "main road" and the road into my neighborhood turned off.  I looked up - the clouds were very much closer.  

At that point, I realized that my mother's order to be home before any bad weather struck might be a challenge.  So I checked for traffic, crossed the road to the correct side and peddled my fool head off.  I hit the turn, dove down the hill, pumping madly, up the little hill at the far end of the neighborhood, and realized the sky above me had started to darken due to the high clouds preceding the thunderheads.  I shot past the Daniels' house, the Browns, the Pogatchnik's, the Millers, the Heinens, and the Hohaugs - when I got to the open lot next to the Benieks, the drops started, I blasted past the empty lot next to our house, made the turn, missing the driveway and rolling into the front yard, missed the corner of the house and turned across the back yard skidding to a stop next to the back garage door into the yard.  I'd gone out the open garage door, the back garage door was locked.  I grabbed my bike and ran around the house, turned the corner and slammed my face into the garage door, which was closed.  I crossed to the side door next to the garage door, and it, too, was locked.  So I went to the front door we almost never used, and rang the doorbell.  My mother came up from the basement, opened the front door, and let me in.  The tornado warning had her and the girls in the basement, I was soaked to my skin.

"Where were you?"
"I was ...  Over at Chris's house, we were in the sandbox for a while, then we were riding bikes."  That's how the afternoon, like most summer days, started, then Chris had to go in.  I was "out of bounds" because I wasn't supposed to be riding my bike along a busy road...  Which was how I got to Grandma's neighborhood.
"Why didn't you come right home?"
"I was riding my bike."
"Didn't you see the sky?"
"I did, but the trees hid it."

The moral of that story was "pay attention to the news."  Which stuck with me.

With today's media consolidation into "empires" I think we've lost a lot of that local immediacy.  Today, the local newspaper (which used to be the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and has rebranded as the "Minnesota" Star Tribune) has an article detailing how my favorite radio station has gone into "under construction" which will likely represent a major format change.\

Mind you, after my introduction to radio from WJON, a station which was so local I got to sit in one of the studios with my father while he was interviewed by the morning news host Mike Diem, who couldn't have been that famous, because, well, he was also a lector in our church, and I occasionally served mass there when he was the lector (usually Saturday evening 5 pm Mass)...  But then again, being who I am, I imagined that most big-city radio studios were similar to, if not run better than, good old WKRP.  For some years, my radio diet consisted of WLOL, which was a top 40 format station with John Hines and Bob Berglund.  Their morning banter was occasionally witty and fast, and every Friday Morning the radio show started and ended with Todd Rundgren's "Bang The Drum".  KOOL-108 made it into the rotation because they were playing music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s when I found them.  But the main station I listened to was KQRS, also known as KQ92.  

These were the days when Howard Stern was trying to build a national following for his radio station and another local station had the ... well, short-sightedness to attempt to make Stern a local fixture.  Tom Bernard and his rotating cast of characters was dominating morning radio at the time, his misogynistic and twisted views on life weren't yet in full bloom.  This was about the time that, for one of their morning show "stunts" they strapped two of their personalities into a ride at the state fair.  The cage these two people were strapped into was attached by bungies to two very tall (around 100 foot) towers, and when released, the cage would shoot into the air.  And I can recall Tony Lee saying over and over "don't swear-don't swear-don't swear" while his copilot, a young lady whose name has totally escaped my internal Google tool, was shrieking full blast.  It was quite funny at the time, as were many of their "bits".  I also recall the day they implemented their "Listener segment" where they'd share things people had sent in, such as the fellow who had gone deer hunting the week before, and had, to his horror and regret, discovered that the previous evening's chili had run it's course in a rather unexpectedly short time, and so, as campers everywhere are unfortunately familiar with, had to find a fallen tree up off the ground which allowed him to remove the upper layer of his snowmobile suit - that is, a sort of insulated coverall piece of clothing that covered the wearer from ankles to the top of their head with an insulated hood - where he uncovered to lower his pants, sat on the log, relieved himself quickly of the now-useless chili which remained in remarkably thin consistency, then he pulled his suit up after cleaning himself off, headed back to camp, all the way trying to figure out where the chili had gotten stuck to him.  

When he reached Deer Camp, his fellow hunters didn't let him back into the cabin, because he'd managed to deposit his used chili into the hood of the snowsuit.  He'd walked the three or so miles back to the cabin wearing it.  And yet he thought 'well, I'll fix those mothers.  I'll send this story to the biggest radio station in the state."  Obviously his name was left off the air.

But it's things like that that streaming and the other internet-based media producers can't produce today.  The connection.  Sure, they may have weather for the entire country, but knowing the gust front and edge of the storm is maybe 20 minutes from your position, or a story from a local event, or about a seasonal event that is extremely popular in your area, perhaps nowhere else, isn't ever going to "move the needle" all that much.  I guess the problem is if you broaden your audience for numbers, do you really build any loyalty, given that the audience knows you're not local?  

Ach, well, anyway, I guess it's just me whining that I'll have to find some way to replace the 32-year-old radio in the garage with something that will tune in other stations so I can search for the music I like.  Or I'll have to get a bluetooth speaker that I can plug in and drive the content from my cell phone where I've added a 500-GB Micro-SD card to give me all 120Gb of my music I've stored on my home server - yes, Mom, almost all of it from CDs I own...  A lot of it from cassette tapes or albums I owned years ago when I was a teenager, because I love music that reminds me of times and events with friends and family.  Not that I can get that much any more these days from the radio, I guess.  But I won't ever find out about the local turkey drop until it's too late...