The WYEN Experience

Richard Cohn, a childhood friend and classmate, was a member of the student run WMTH (Maine Township High) and asked me in the parking lot at Maine East to join him on the radio station. Richard and I sat in my red 1966 Ford Fairlane 500. (Teenage boys tend to remember their first car more than they remember just about anything else.) I could not imagine Harry Ford, Maine East Class of 1960 (eventually to become Harrison Ford, the actor) had as much trouble deciding whether he should be part of WMTH. He was the first student broadcaster on the radio station. Richard and I didn’t know anything about Harry Harrison Ford, because he was still a little more than a year away from his small role in American Graffiti and five years away from fame in Star Wars. Even if we had some insight into Ford’s future, it wouldn’t have drawn me into the radio station. I mean, Richard implied I’d have to talk on the radio. Talk on radio! How? I just couldn’t keep staring at him with my mouth open. I didn’t want anyone knowing public speaking paralyzed my mouth and squeezed beads of sweat from my hands. So I shot down his fairly innocuous suggestion with my own controversial statement that could not be defended by any rational person.
“Radio is for girls!” I blurted.
Richard stared at me, letting my stupid words settle. I think I was more perturbed at myself than he was of me.
“Okay.”
Normally, Richard would always have more words to string together in sentences that might not end unless I’d interrupt. That’s why Richard was good for radio. He’d fill in all the spaces where dead air might lurk.
I fought inside my head. I think some inactive neurons got thrown around, but I didn’t knock any sense into myself. By the time a few seconds had elapsed, I still feared public speaking, and maybe feared the delayed real reaction I expected from Richard. 
I mean we went downtown together to WCFL and loved radio and everything about it. Richard did not call me nuts, but he had every right to do so. He let it go and I did too. The truth was radio in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s had far more men than women on-the-air. But I didn’t care about the demographics of males to females in radio. Statistics was just a foreign language. I had every chance to combat my fears, but jumping right into radio felt worse than my recurring nightmare of standing in the middle of my English class explaining a Mark Twain novel in my underwear. Richard wasn’t my only friend in high school radio. Jim Fry was another friend and classmate, and he represented another chance at swallowing my throat paralyzing fear. Jim had become one of the key student members of the Maine East radio station. Fry went on to become a Washington D.C. correspondent for a Dallas based CBS-TV station and eventually moved on to management with Voice of America.
Before college in 1972, the closest I came to a radio station was in 1967 at WCFL in Chicago. Richard Cohn and I got the idea of riding the Skokie Swift in the north suburbs, transferring to the Chicago EL and spending a Saturday downtown seeing the sites and stopping at WLS-AM and WCFL-AM. We made it over to the Marina City Complex at 300 North State Street and found WCFL. In 1967, WCFL promoted itself as Big 10 WCFL, Chicago’s number one contemporary radio station. WLS and WCFL were among the most popular music stations in the U.S. and the two were competing in radio wars. This was certainly an exciting time for a visit. We were thirteen-years-old in the summer of 1967, just a few months shy of eighth grade. The radio stations were everything to us in the summer. I switched back and forth between WLS and WCFL, listening to the jocks, taping the stations’ music on my recorder. I’d sing and talk into the little microphone and listen back until I bored myself silly. Richard and I were radio geeks and I couldn’t wait to see one of the jocks; maybe Barney Pip or Jim Stagg or Ron Riley or Joel Sebastian at WCFL.
Richard and I walked to the main floor of what we believed was the radio station and stood in a large room where the receptionist asked us if we were guests. We asked if she’d let us tour the studios.
“No tours on Saturdays,” she instructed, but then she warmed slightly and smiled, “How about car stickers and pictures?”
I whispered to Richard, “We came all the way downtown.”
Morton Grove is pretty far from here, I thought, and I was making myself more upset. Richard figured we were thinking the same thing. Where are the announcers? (Boys tend to stand around with blank stares, kind of their defiance until they learn how to express themselves.) I stood frozen for a few moments, thinking maybe one of the announcers might stick his head out of the room and welcome us into the studio. Nothing happened.
Richard shook his head, looked dejected, and stared at me. I took this to mean he either needed to find a bathroom quickly or was suggesting I just grab the pictures and stickers and go. I extended my hand, tried smiling at the woman, and meekly took the pictures and stickers. Richard got his share too.
“Thank you,” we said together. It was a half-hearted muffled thank you, kind of a cross between what happened when mom forced me to thank my sister for helping with my homework and when I stuffed too many donut holes in my mouth.
We walked out.
“How about we go over to WLS,” Richard asked.
“Do you know where it is?”
“Yeah.”
Richard was rather convincing. I was still upset though.
“Nah, ” I could see me walking all over downtown Chicago, getting lost and possibly crying, so I figured “let’s just skip WLS.”
Richard nodded a yes.
Clark Weber told me years later the WCFL viewing area was not designed for much viewing.
“It’s a shame you and Richard didn’t walk over to the WLS Studio at Michigan and Wacker. We had so many kids coming in on Saturday that we had an Andy Frain usher moving the kids out every fifteen to twenty minutes so we could make room for another bunch of eager kids. The only drawback to the Saturday viewing at WLS was the unsocial Mr. Lujack would pull the drapes because he said the snotty-nosed kids were a distraction, which they may have been, but Larry’s social graces were never his strong suit!”