The Green WENY, my times at WLEZ FM

In my business life I have always tried to run any business with integrity and customer service, along the way I have found that personally you can not survive, doing that, UNLESS you own the business.

As I mentioned the last time WLEZ FM was part of "The Green Group" owned by Howard Green and Donald Simmons, that group included WENY AM, WENY TV 36 in Elmira and WOND AM, WMGM FM, and WOND TV 40 in Atlantic City, N.J. and at one time an AM FM combo in Utica/Rome, N.Y. Each station in Elmria had their own manager, (who reported directly to Corporate General Manager Mike Steele),when I started to run WLEZ, the manager of WENY AM was Dick Ireland, and Bob (C.Robert) Edwards was the manager of WENY TV 36. Each station had their own sales team and shared other administrative, news, and support staff. I always felt that WLEZ got the short end of the stick, but at the time I took over from Ted Hodge, the station was floundering in revenue.

WLEZ in 1982 was programmed "Beautiful Music" using TM Productions music package operated by and SMC automation system. AT 92.7 Mhz it was a Class A FM with tower facilities on Comfort Hill to the South of Elmiria. The signal was a pretty good one in spite of the age of the transmitter. Ray O'Donnell the Chief Engineer had it peaked nicely and with an Orban processor it had a clean sound. The station did not have any live capabilities when I took over the thinking even then was that FM was not important. Back in what the insiders at the station called "the bomb shelter," was some production equipment that was bought as part of the Emergency Broadcast Service. There was a generator for power as well, but when it was in operation you could not hear yourself think, plus the room had no ventilation to speak of and got terribly hot in the summer. It, as I was given to understand was built as a fallout shelter and came complete with Geiger counters! The one thing, in addition to ventilation, they forgot was bathrooms, I am not sure what they though you would do in the even you had to spend a long time back there.

When I took over WLEZ my staff consisted of myself, John Savino as Sales Manager and Mary Ellen Pannell as and Account Representative. The remainder of functions were handled by shared staff and the jock on duty on WENY was responsible for keeping the automation supplied with music reels, Ted Hodge agreed to stay around and do morning news, and production. One of the first things I did was to add additional local news in the morning drive as well as weather forecasts and community announcements.

As with most computers the SMC Automation suffered from a bad case of "GI-GO," garbage in, garbage out. Ted Hodge was a great guy, but I soon found that he knew very little about the programming of the unit. There were a number of commands to move it through the different routines and sub-routines, time corrects and the like. I can remember spending one entire weekend re-writing the routines and sub routines to change commercial availability and music flow. One thing was to add more vocals to the mix, giving the station a somewhat brighter sound until I could do a complete format change. My first priority was to try to increase sales based on what we had and I instituted several new policies most of which were not to popular with John who I found out felt that he should have been chosen to replace Ted.

While I was doing that, I started shopping around for a new format, I felt that an oldies based "Easy Listening" format would be the way to go. No one in the market was playing oldies and a lot of really good "baby boomers" music was not being played by anyone. I finally got hooked up with a fellow by the name of Dave Nelson at Century 21 Productions in Dallas. Tx, C-21 had just the format elements I was looking for and were willing to talk with me. The problem, we still had almost 2 years to go on our TM contract. By a stoke of fate, TM dropped the format into a station in Binghamton, N.Y. The TM contract we had gave us market exclusiveness for 75 miles, Binghamton was 70 air miles from Elmira! This was the way out! In addition to being able to cancel our contract the station got a complete TM production package at no charge, I suspect this was to keep us from suing for breech of contract.

Now the road was set, except for equipment! As luck would have it, WMGM FM in Atlantic City, our sister station was doing away with automated programming, so I requested that I be given my pick of stuff! Surprisingly I managed to get 3 commercial carousels, and three reel to reel machines, this crammed the equipment racks full. By this time Ray O'Donnell had left and was replaced by an old time engineer Vaughn Richardson. Vaughn and I hit it off and had many lively debates about things that the automation system could and could not do. Usually I would ask Vaughn if we could do this and that and he would say no way, well in a few hours he would be back in my office showing me how we could do a certain function. One thing that really amazed me was the unit he rigged up to record ABC news. Using the clock on the automation he rigged a system to switch the satellite, arm the recorder, start it and put an advance tone on at the end of the newscast. The recorder, an old delay cart machine from the WENY talk show. As is was recroding the new ABC newsacat, would erase the previous news it was recording the new newscast from ABC. It would then cue up and be ready to go at the top of the hour. Pretty amazing as as soon as the ABC news feed was done the satellite had to switch back for NBC news for the AM.

I would like to say that the format change went smoothly, and from a technical standpoint it did, but from a public view it didn't! The station received many phone calls from angry business people who used WLEZ as their "in store" music. They loved it because of the "elevatorness sound." These were the same people who would NOT buy advertising on the station, but could not understand why we changed to format to something that could be sold! One of the the most vocal was the Director of The Corning Chamber of Commerce Cy Levine, who would not accept that it was a business decision on our part. I often told people that it was also an effort to keep me awake while I was in the office as I remember falling asleep one day while sitting in my office at the station. But as time went along people discovered the station and the format was a big hit financially and ratings wise.

Once the format was squared away, I set about the task of increasing sales. The Green Group was represented nationally by McGavern-Guild and I became a regular caller to their offices following up on national business. In addition I began making regular regional agency trips to Rochester, Syracuse, and Binghamton to meet with the agencies that placed business in the market. I really enjoyed the challenge of the agency visits and became quite successful in landing quite a few major accounts.

Locally the sales effort was, for a long time, stymied by the sale people I had. Over the course of time I completely changed the staff, first by adding a part time traffic person, Laura Peck to the staff. While she did not have any radio experience, Laura quickly became my right hand person and defacto Assistant Manger. New sales people included Donnalee Pulito, Byron Palmer, and Debbie Lusk. Both Byron and Donna had radio experience and Debbie was a natural sales talent and the bottom line started to show it.

WLEZ was off and running, but then Mike Steele my boss, friend and ally left to buy his own property, it was the beginning of my end! More next time when "Puff The Magic Pipe Man" appears!