NIGHT CALL Sitting next to a quiet classmate in the cafeteria, I discovered he was nuts about radio, too. Bob Chambers became excited when I suggested we visit a station. “I can use my mom’s car,” he said. “Where should we go?” I told him I found WPAT in Paterson when a kid of ten, but didn’t say how I balked at the door and didn’t go in. Saturday night, Bob pulled up to my home in a Nash Metropolitan. The little car looked like an upside down bathtub, but I fit in nicely and the radio worked. We approached the office building on Hamilton Street in Paterson, WPAT hidden behind tall windows backed by tightly-closed blinds. Under the glow of a streetlight, the striking red and gold call letters on the glass were daunting. Surely no one will turn away a person of my age and stature. Bob was the one who pushed the bell. There was no reaction. We looked at each other. “Somebody has to be in there,” I said. “What about the announcer we heard on the way down here?” As I started back to the car, the door clicked open and a man stuck his head out. I stammered something about wanting to be in radio. “Can we come in and look around?” I croaked. He stepped aside and with a sweep of his hand, motioned us to enter. “Where’re you from?” the man said as we walked down a hall of closed doors. I recognized his voice. He was the announcer we heard in the car. “Ridgewood, up in Bergen County,” I said. The carpet ahead was bathed in a soft light from an open door. Bob and I reached it and hesitated. “Go ahead in, boys,” the announcer said. Stepping up on a raised floor, I was met with the sight, sound and smell of radio. Fluorescent lights lit yellow perforated tiles on the walls of a control room, soaring violins played the theme from a movie and the gray metal casing of a control board gave off a sweet aroma. The engineer, a heavy gent in a plaid flannel shirt, sat in a chair on wheels, his big stomach pressed against a u-shaped desk. I moved around in back of him to see the control board. Black knobs the size of donuts stretched along the bottom. Toggle switches stood above each knob, some straight out, some leaning to the right. Black buttons as small as dimes stood in a line at the top, a few pushed in, a few left out. In the middle, a thin needle in a glass box danced to the music of the violins. The control board looked intimidating, but I wanted so much to touch it. From the engineer’s vantage, I looked through slanted windows of three studios. In the smallest one directly ahead, an announcer had his head down by a microphone on a desk stand. “He’s marking up news from the teletype down the hall,” the man said who met us at the door. To my left was a studio the size of my bedroom. Our host announcer went in there and sat facing the window. A microphone hung inverted from a boom making the letters W P A T across the top appear upside down Light from the control room shone into a large studio to my right. A boom mike leaned into the open top of a shiny grand piano. I figured the studio was big enough to hold all the furniture in the living room at home. My eyes went back to the engineer. He sat between four turntables, two on each side. As one spun a vinyl platter with the movie theme, the engineer pulled another from an album cover and in a flash fit it perfectly on the little metal spindle of an opposite turntable. Leaning over, he knew right where to place the needle of the pick-up arm. Studying his moves, I felt he and I were the only people in the room until the announcer in the medium studio looked up and waved his hand. “Move away from the window, boys,” the engineer said. The movie theme ended, the engineer flipped a switch on the control board and a red glow came on in the hall. He nodded to the announcer, who gave the station’s call letters and location, his voice resonant, his diction perfect. Man, will I ever sound like that? The engineer turned off the switch, flipped on another and nodded to the man in the small studio. Holding torn pieces of teletype paper, he read a newscast with the aplomb of an announcer on a national network. Finishing, he launched into a commercial for Lake Hopatcong Heights. I whispered to Bob, “I’ve heard that one a hundred times.” The announcer raised his finger, the red glow went off in the hall and the engineer pushed a button on a turntable. A love song blossomed from a speaker on the wall. How smooth. How professional. Our host announcer came out of his studio. “There’s another engineer at our transmitter down the road in Clifton,” he said. Golly, four people to run the station. Comparing WPAT to New York stations, I knew it was smaller, but that’s how radio was done in Paterson, New Jersey in 1953. Not wanting to wear out our welcome, Bob and I started to leave. I thought enough to thank the man who let us in, but being young, neither Chambers nor I performed the ritual that came so easily to adults – we didn’t shake his hand. Stepping down from the control room, I turned to see what caused the red glow in the hall when the microphones came on. A metal box above the door had two words cut out of the face backed by red plastic and a light bulb. I knew then those words were going to mean everything in my life. They said “On Air.”
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