Chuck Dunaway

Chuck and Kendall visit with the Bush family in Houston (click photos for larger views)

The Way I Remember It (Episode Nine) 

The day I received the call from program director Jerry Hahn, asking me to
 join the staff of KXOL in Fort Worth, will live in my mind as one of the
 luckiest days of my life. His call would result in a move to a much larger
 market, where I would compete directly against other stations for the first
 time. I would meet people with much more experience, who could tell me
 radio stories. And Fort Worth was only 30 miles from Dallas, the radio
 Mecca of the day. So I gave two weeks' notice to KLUF.  It was "Goodbye,
 Galveston" and "Hello, Fort Worth, I love you."

 The salary from KXOL was a whopping $90 a week, plenty big for a young
 Texas broadcaster, husband and father who had been in the business a little
 over two years. And a second child was on the way. I was working fast in
 all departments.

 With the few dollars I'd saved during the stint in Galveston, we bought a
 '49 Plymouth coupe to move the family to Fort Worth. We arrived after a
 five-hour drive, and quickly rented a furnished apartment on a hill in an
 area close to the KXOL studios.

 As I said, our second-floor apartment was furnished, but very sparsely
 so. The only piece of furniture we owned was a rocking horse. My son John
 would spend countless hours on that horse, while his father would spend
 countless hours learning more about the wonderful business of radio.

 At KXOL I worked a split shift, 6:30 to 8:45 a.m., and then came back from
 noon to 3:00. I was the morning-drive guy and the mid-day guy, wrapped into
 one. The only other D.J. to work a split shift was Jerry Hahn.  He took the
 11:00 a.m. hour, then followed me in the afternoon from 3:00 to 5:00. The
 rest of the air staff: the Hobbies, a man-and-wife talk team, who were on
 from 5:00 to 6:30 a.m.; Parker Wilson, who played country music from 9:00
 to 11:00 a.m.; Chem Terry from 5:00 to 10:00 p.m.; and, last but not least,
 a TCU student who worked nightly from 10:00 p.m. to midnight. His name was
 Kent Burkhart.

 KXOL was off the air from midnight until 5:00 a.m. each day. It was block-
 programmed with mostly pop music, except for the shows from Kent Burkhart
 and me.  Kent and I were allowed to insert some of the rhythm-and-blues
 music we grew up with on the Texas coast.  In fact, the music mix was
 similar to what I had done at KBRZ in Freeport.

 The KXOL staffers were much older than "the kids", Kent and I. With more
 than three hours between shows, I had time to visit around the station and
 coax radio stories from the veterans of the business. I also used the time
 between programs to listen, learn, and experiment in the production room.

 -------

 About two months after I arrived at KXOL, the starter broke on my old
 Plymouth. It was necessary to park on a slight incline on Camp Bowie
 Boulevard where KXOL was located, so some of the employees could give me a
 push to get my car started. In the early morning I'd push the car by myself
 to get it started (luckily, we lived on a hill). I saved the money I might
 have spent fixing the Plymouth, for eventual use as part of the down
 payment on a new car. My father had agreed to co-sign the loan, which was
 an absolute necessity, for I was only 19, and not legally able to do much
 except work, pay taxes, and father children.

 After three months of pushing the Plymouth to get it started, I did
 eventually save enough money for a down-payment.  I bought the cheapest new
 Ford: no radio, no air conditioning, and no carpet on the floor (carpeting
 was available only on the upscale models). Therefore, the floorboard was
 covered with a rubber mat where the carpet would have been; no big deal. I
 bought a radio at Western Auto for $25 and installed it myself.

 -------

 One day at KXOL, I was talking to a station advertising salesman, and I
 discovered ratings. I had asked the salesman about their method of selling
 commercials, and he mentioned Hooper. My question was, "What was 'Hooper'"?

 He replied, "I'm surprised you don't know what a Hooper is.  You've got a
 tremendous share."

 Hooper ratings consisted of raw numbers of people listening at a given time
 with little demographic consideration. It was a simple telephone survey,
 not as scientific as surveys are supposed to be today. When Hooper called,
 the person who answered the phone told the survey taker how many in the
 house were listening, the station to which they were listening, and that
 was about it. Hooper's reports did list teens separately from adults. That
 was the extent of their demographic breakdown.

 At that time, some stations operated under the theory that if teenagers
 were listening to your station, and a teen who listened to your station
 answered the phone, your station would get credited in the ratings as if the
 entire family had been listening.

 Apparently that was a Gordon McLendon theory, because it was repeated to me
 and attributed to McLendon by Bill Weaver, who managed several McLendon
 stations. That quirk of the ratings may partly explain the teen-oriented
 on-air presentation, and the ratings success of youthful rock-and-roll
 jocks. The salesman at KXOL pointed out that 42 percent of the listeners in
 my time slots were tuned to my programs, the highest numbers on the
 station. He assured me that the guys at KLIF in Dallas were aware of my
 numbers. Whether or not his statement was true, a chill went up my spine,
 as I realized that KLIF program director Don Keyes might know who I was.

 -------

 Kent and I thought that we should print a list of our top twenty tunes on a
 sheet and place it in the record stores around town as publicity for the
 station. We explained the concept, borrowed from the Billboard Hit Parade,
 to manager Earl Fletcher, and he gave us the green light. The little
 "extra" we added to the survey was a weekly pick of a new tune we thought
 would eventually make the top twenty.  We also wanted to put photos of the
 air staff along the side of the survey.  And the survey featured a big
 "KXOL" logo, including a hole in the middle of the "O" in "KXOL."  The
 surveys could then be hung on a nail, with the nail protruding from the
 middle of the "O."

 In those days, record stores were not slick and dressed-up, as later became
 the case. The display area for records consisted of wooden racks.  Or the
 records would be hung on hooks attached to peg board. I'm sure the profit
 in selling records was so small that it wasn't cost-efficient to decorate
 more elaborately. We solicited every record store in Fort Worth to display
 our new music surveys, and they all agreed to do so. The numbers were based
 half on actual sales and half on our opinion, for we were not yet very
 sophisticated in creating music surveys.

 KXOL was playing 45 RPM records, although 78s still existed.  The
 transition had begun just a few months before I arrived.  Not all stations
 were equipped to play the new 45s exclusively. Some stations used ordinary
 45 RPM record players wired to the console, and would play the record
 without cueing it up, the jock talking his way into the music. But that's
 not what we did at KXOL. Our turntables had been modified to run at either
 45 or 78 revolutions per minute.  We were able to cue our records, and we
 did so most of the time.

 For the benefit of those of you who are not radio people of long standing,
 to cue a record meant placing the "pot" you were using into the "audition"
 or "cue" mode (see the definitions of "pot" and "cue", below).  Then you
 placed the stylus on the record, and moved the disc until you heard the
 very beginning of the song. Then you stopped the record, and moved it
 backward one-quarter to one-half turn.

 If you were backing it off only a quarter-turn, you were probably using a
 "slip start". That is, you held the record while the turntable was spinning
 beneath the disc at full speed, until you were ready to turn loose of the
 record and put the song on the air (assuming you remembered to turn up the
 pot). People who used the "slip start" method usually ran tighter programs
 and didn't suffer as many "wows" on the air. "Wowing" a record, which
 sounded indescribably dreadful, meant the beginning of the song was heard
 before the turntable had come up to full speed.

 Most consoles had a couple of pots assigned to the turntables which would
 click when you turned the volume all the way down, past the "zero volume"
 position.  When you heard the click or felt the resistance at the
 "click-cue" position, you would know the turntable pot you were using was
 now in "cue" mode.

 The word "pot" refers to the knobs -- usually between six and twelve of 'em
 -- on the console.  The pots were used for adjusting the volume of the
 various audio inputs: turntable, microphone, tapes, and so forth.  "Pot",
 in this case, is short for the word "Potentiometer," although most of us
 old jocks knew only that the "pot" was the volume control.

 -------

 While I was working at KXOL, I became friends with Pat Boone. Pat had a
 local TV show, sponsored by a dairy, which featured area talent and ice
 cream from the dairy. I was a frequent visitor. Pat and I would talk about
 the entertainment business, and our ambitions. And he would give me gallons
 of free ice cream, which were stored in freezers on the set of his program.
 During the show, he'd serve ice cream to the audience and guests. At the
 end of the show, the ice cream was either left behind, or we'd take it home.

 Then Dot Records, located in Gallatin, Tennessee, signed Pat to a recording
 contract. Randy Wood, the Dot Records owner, made a career of covering
 rhythm-and-blues hits, using white singers such as Pat.

 I always told myself I would play the original R & B versions of songs
 whenever possible, but I broke that promise when I played and charted Pat
 Boone's version of the Charms' "Two Hearts," and his cover of Fats Domino's
 "Tra-La-La."  We put those records on the KXOL survey and Pat sent the
 surveys, with his songs listed, to his mom.

 We were all young. Magical events were beginning to happen. In the next
 episode, we'll meet Don Keyes and find that he did indeed know about Chuck
 Dunaway. And Keyes introduced McLendon to the KXOL survey; a KLIF version
 would begin publication three weeks later.

 Thanks for reading.

Edited by Stacy Richardson

© 2003 Chuck Dunaway
All Rights Reserved