Art for Art's Sake

I worked for many years in broadcast radio with a colleague with whom I shared the same first name. When he went on vacation, I used to pull his board shift and sit in for him (much to the consternation of many of his listeners, based on the notes he'd get upon his return). We took to calling one another 'the other bill' or TOB for short, when referring to one another on the air.

The Other Bill, as I called him, was a great fan of adult-contemporary music, at a time when Mike Joseph was honing the "Hot Hits" format to a formula to build the perfect beast. I was always a bit more umm, less hit-driven (I'm not sure what the statute of limitations on some offenses is and I'm loath to find out by mentioning something that hasn't yet lapsed) and far more intrigued by folks pushing the envelope.

That I often heard people refer to what I did on the air as "diving for dopers" was, to my mind, their problem and certainly not mine. Prejudice is a terrible thing. That I was the only person, to my knowledge, on the staff whose fan mail was regularly swept by the drug dogs was not lost on me. And as a public service I used to suggest on more than an infrequent basis that enthused listeners who were tempted to share more than suggestions for radio playlists NOT mail those envelopes to the station (not that this idea made me any friends with the mail clerk).

TOB and I often had to pull newstank duty, which sounds a LOT more armed forces and the shores of Tripoli than it really is. Basically, for whatever, the news department would find itself short-handed and the dj would have to pull together four and a half minutes of news copy to read live at the top of the hour. TOB was a true newsie and was excellent at reading news. I, perhaps because of my more introspective nature (as reflected in my choice of music, such as The Allman's Mountain Jam or Pink Floyd's Ummagumma) tended to dwell on one story.

If you wanted to know what was going on around the world, the other Bill was your guy. If you wanted to know everything about the role of grain supports in the price of bread sold in the commissary, stick with me. I never let technicalities like 'only' four and half minutes stop me--or even confine my devotion to a story to one newscast. As I tended to work the 2200-0600 air shift, it was pretty much me, the guys and gals in the air control towers across Europe, the kids on the Fulda Gap (both sides as I discovered) and the grunts at Graffenwoehr and Baumholder. News is whatever passes the 'who cares test?' (actually, the test's real name involves the word 'gives' and a contraction of 'fire truck' that eliminates the first two vowels and the second through fifth consonants).

All of that was long ago and far away and I thought of it when the newsie TOB sent me an item that the NY Times didn't seem to contain, Erotic Gallery Owner Won't Fight Charge. Talk about crazy from the heat. I think I'm most taken at the violation of the law which seems, as I remember the account, to have something to do with the display of umm, personal parts, in an establishment selling liquor. It would seem to me that the Gallery owner in the story has suffered for his art--for a moment, I feared it was about to be our turn.
-bill kenny