Big Time Radio, Chapter 2- "Big Bang Fireworks"

The story so far: The Old Saleswoman has moved up in the world.  She's taken a job at market leader KDKA-Radio in Pittsburgh.  Now the pressure to perform begins.

Gene created an office for me in a tiny room with one little window near the ceiling at the end of a brightly lit hall. The office was also used to store old advertising copy, and miscellaneous station giveaways. Brad and Laura, two of the more established and successful sales reps, shared an office "suite" across from me. Brad was from New York City, owned his own tuxedo, and got manicures. Laura was from Boston and carried a designer handbag she bought at Saks. She spent quite a bit of time on the station’s watts line talking with former sorority sisters. Both of them had desks big enough to pull chairs up to for visitors.

A lot of Brad’s and Laura’s sales calls were made to ad agencies right in the same building, which meant they could go on appointments in the winter, even if it was snowing outside without putting on a coat, much less several layers. Rumor had it that bigger things were in store for both of them.

They both regularly stopped in my office before or after calls to ask me how I was doing and just to hang out. Brad loved to hear about life in Wheeling and was fascinated with my apparent fear of getting stuck on the wrong end of a bridge or tunnel. Laura liked to talk about make-up and hair and asked me several times where I had my hair permed.

Gene got into the habit of visiting me in my office every morning at about nine o’clock. He’d walk in, look around the room like he's seeing it for the first time, and ask, “What’s new?”

Of course, I took that to mean did you sell anything. It wasn’t very long before I started to dread this simple morning greeting because I had nothing concrete to offer up in return. I didn’t even have a nibble to report.

The same day the general manager, Roxanne, a very tall, very thin, Smith graduate with a perfectly cut blonde bob who pronounced negotiate, “ne-go-see-ate” with a long e, instead of “ne-go-she-ate”, stopped in to ask me what was new, I took out the list of WWVA clients I had stuck in the back of my notebook for good luck, and my map of the tri-state region.

The tri-state region ran approximately east to Altoona Pa, south to Morgantown, West Virginia, north to Youngstown, Ohio, and east to Zanesville, Ohio, home of the first Taco Bell in the region, and a must-stop destination for Doug and I whenever we were in town to make a call or collect money from a delinquent advertiser. Doug always brought home a couple of tacos for Helen from those trips, which I saw as tremendously gallant.

WWVA and KDKA are both smack in the middle of the Valley, about 50 miles apart, with a definite overlap in the coverage area. I looked at my desk calendar for a second, noted the upcoming Fourth of July weekend, and knew where I could go to sell something.

I drove south on I-79, on the alert for any new or temporary signs near the highway or just off the exits. A bright blue truck with a load of colorful cartons signaling to make an exit looked interesting. On a hunch, I followed it off the exit, parked on the shoulder, and watched as the pick-up followed a fresh set of tire tracks over the grass toward a big white tent with a couple of banquet tables placed out front. The driver got out and stapled a huge sign on what looked like a sawed-off telephone pole stuck in the ground. The sign read: “Big Bang Fire Works! If It Explodes, and It’s Legal Anywhere, We Got it! Best Prices in the Tri-State!”

I knew it would be a very bad move to invade this guy’s territory without warning. Big Bang was what Doug and I called “shaky”, as in shaky shacks, our name for mobile homes among other things. We used to drive down the highway and point at one business or another and pronounce it shaky, based on its looks, or its history with the station, or just an instinct we had. Lots of things can be shaky. People, accounts, even situations, for that matter, can be shaky and can fall apart at the slightest provocation. So I waved my arms and shouted from the shoulder of the road.

“Hey, Dave! It’s me.” I walked slowly across the grass. Fortunately, his name came to me at the last second. “The sales lady from WWVA! Remember me from last year?” He put down his staple gun.

“Yeah! I remember you! You’re from W-W-V-A radio.” He did a fairly good imitation of my sales voice. “And you want to sell me advertising! You want my money! You want my wallet!” He ran on like that for a while.

“I’m with KDKA now.”

A look that was wary, but maybe a little impressed, crossed his face.

“So no more free Saturday night Jamboree tickets.”

“No, afraid not, but I have something even better for you. New customers.” I pulled out my KDKA coverage map. “You can cover Wheeling, Steubenville, Weirton, and Pittsburgh with KDKA.”

“Maybe I want to try an FM station this summer, get a new, younger, partyin’ crowd that likes to shoot it up big for the fourth.”

I let Dave bust me a little before I went on.

“Yeah, right, your ad will run all the way from the FM station’s tower to the first hill and splash! Into the ground! Look at the coverage I can give you! And on the Fourth of July, where else are you going to advertise?! KDKA is the first commercially licensed station in the United States, and it’s the only station with call letters that start with K east of the Mississippi!”

I don’t know what that had to do with anything, but it seemed to work. Dave was so sold on KDKA he gave me a bunch of firework samples to bring back to the station for the on-air talent to play with. Dave didn’t know that while advertisers always want the announcers to try their product, the truth is, most samples end up in the sales department.

Since I wasn’t the only one in this conversation who knew Dave was shaky on payment, Dave walked back to the canvas tent and returned with a paper bag full of money in a Redwing shoe box. He shoveled handfuls of fives, tens, and twenties out of the bag and into the box. Then he shook it a little to spread out the bills. “I bet that‘s fifteen hundred dollars.”

“And I bet you’re right!” I said, adding that the ability to estimate things was a sign of superior intelligence. “But we have to be sure. Pittsburgh accountants, you know.”

So we counted out the bills together, and I threw the shoe box and the samples in the laundry basket I kept in the backseat of my car for occasional dry cleaning runs. It was late and I wanted to get back to the station with my surprises.

To be Continued in Chapter 3, "Bing, Bang Boom"