Living On Air (2 page)

Jerry was constantly in motion, a frenetic mass of energy
rappin’ and pumpin’ his way through the afternoon. He wore a long-sleeved shirt rolled up at his wrists with a buttoned-up vest and dark blue jeans. I could tell he cared about his looks, but in a good way, like the way he cared about his job. He pulled up a chair for me and I sat down right next to him.

“Hey man, hold on a second, I gotta go on the radio.”

He popped on his earphones. They seemed to be made out of the same Bakelite plastic as our kitchen radio back home. I saw the word “Clevite” stamped on the side and made a mental note to remember that name. Headphones in place, Jerry cranked up the volume of the studio speaker. It was incredibly loud, crisp, and clean. He watched the record go round on the turntable to his right then flipped a switch to turn on his microphone. As soon as he did that, the room went absolutely silent. The music was now blasting solely in Jerry’s ears. He started tapping his foot, and shaking his whole body, and I could hear the music leaking out of his headphones. Then he started rapping to his radio listeners, telling everyone how hip the song was. At the same time he was doing that, he started up the next record on the other turntable. Over the intro of the new song he reminded his loyal multitude of sunbathing fans that it was “Time to turn so you just don’t burn.” He did his whole thing right in front of me and it was like listening to my transistor radio at home but it was all coming out of his mouth and I was like, FAR OUT! It was unbelievable.

I sat there for a little while longer until my personal tour guide came back to get me. At the end of my visit I guess Jerry saw the stars in my eyes, or maybe he saw a young kid who would help him with some of the work he wasn’t fond of doing every week, because he asked me if I would like to come back.

“You know little man, I’m the music director here and it’s a lotta work sorting through all the records and keeping the library straight. Why don’t you come down on Saturdays and help me out? You can meet the other guys and I’ll show you how all this stuff works.”

That’s exactly what I did every weekend for the rest of the summer. At home, before heading for the bus, I would grab my record case stuffed with forty-fives, along with my lunch, then head outside, giving one last look back because whenever I left the house, my mom always stood behind the screen door, waving at me. Every weekend Mom made me a fresh meatball grinder with her homemade sauce. At least that’s what we called them. Where you live, they might be called hoagies or subs or maybe you don’t name them at all, you’re just content to eat them. Mom would cook up the meatballs while I was getting dressed, slather them onto some fresh Italian bread and wrap it up in aluminum foil. I could still feel the heat radiating out of the paper bag, even after I got off the bus downtown. I stayed at the station until ten or eleven at night, when my dad drove down to pick me up.

That whole summer I filed records, ripped news from the wire machines, ran out to pick up food for the deejays, answered phone calls, and basically did anything Jerry asked of me. I think if anyone had told me to clean the bathrooms, I would have done that, too. After his shift, Jerry always had to record a couple of commercials so he took me into the production room with him to show me how everything worked. He was a perfectionist in the booth, sometimes taking two or three hours to produce a spot until he was satisfied. As long as it took, I would watch and learn. [
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] He taught me how to thread the reel-to-reel tape and how to fire up the cart machines so I could run commercials. But the
best time of all was the very first day when he showed me how to cue up a record.

“Alright man, now I’m gonna show you how radio works, can ya dig it? How you play a jingle, start up a record, and how you talk over the intro of a song.”

He sat me down and pulled a record out of its sleeve.

“You’re gonna like this tune man. This is a cool record. It’s the brand-new Rolling Stones single that we just started playin’ today. It’s called ‘Honky Tonk Women.’”

He put the record on the turntable, picked up the needle, put it at the front of the record and flipped the switch. The huge turntable began to spin and the second you heard the cowbell at the beginning of “Honky Tonk Women” he said, “Okay, now we’re gonna stop it right there,” and he put his index finger on the record and started slipping it backwards to that first sound and then he brought it back another half turn after that. Next he pulled out an audio cart that had a label on it that said, “WWCO Jingle,” and slipped it into the cart machine, pulling back a lever locking it in place. Then he said, “OK, so you do your rap on the microphone and then you hit the button on the cart machine that starts the jingle, ‘Dubble-You-Dubble-You…SEE OHHH!’ But you have to anticipate the end of them singing ‘SEE OHHH’ so you can start your record on time. Right around the time they’re singing ‘SEE,’ you have to flip the switch to start that turntable spinning. By the time they sing ‘OHHH’ the turntable will have rotated a half turn to get up to speed and your song will start, bamm right after they finish singing. It’s gotta go right into the song man, so timing is everything!”

Then it was my turn. I was excited and I wanted to get it just
right. I guess he understood because Jerry left me alone to figure it out on my own. It was the first time ever I was allowed to play with the equipment in the production room all by myself. I was just like the kid in the candy store. I pushed all the buttons, then turned up the music as loud as I could stand it. I spent at least one hour, maybe more, in the production room that day, doing my make-believe radio show. Jerry’s wired-up energy rubbed off on me and I kept cueing up “Honky Tonk Women” until I destroyed the beginning of that record with cue burns. From that moment on, Jerry told me I could go into that studio whenever I wanted, to practice how to be a deejay. He even gave me my own reel of tape so I could record myself to take home later for a listen. I was living my dream.

Before I knew it, summer was nearly over. I was having so much fun, time flew right by. I packed up my forty-fives, grabbed my reel-to reel tapes, and wondered how I would get through school without being able to visit the radio station anymore. Worst of all, I had to say goodbye to Jerry Wolf.

I’m not sure why Jerry took such an interest in helping me get started and I might not ever know. As nice as Jerry was, I never got as close to him as I did later with some of the other guys. He kept a little distant, like a teacher with a student, while the other deejays would become my friends. By the end of my first summer, Jerry got another job out of town and left WWCO forever. I can’t remember what station he went to and I never saw him again, but about five years after he had moved on, I heard one of his tapes. It was his aircheck, what you send out to radio stations to show how you sound on your show, when you’re looking for a new gig. It was in 1974 and Jerry was hoping to get his old job back at C-O. The program director at the station knew I used to
work for Jerry, so he let me listen to the tape. I wish I had never heard it. It was upsetting. I don’t know if it was just because I was older, or because Jerry had changed, but it sounded like he was doing a parody of his old show, trying to revive his “pumpin” and “rappin” routine. His head was in a different space and his heart wasn’t in it. What he once did so naturally and seemingly without effort, he was now trying to force it to get a job. It didn’t work. I was uncomfortable listening to him as he spoke to the program director in what was an audio letter, asking him for a break. I was too young to know how to handle those feelings, too shaken to find out what happened to him.

I prefer to think of Jerry the way he looked and sounded the first time I met him, when he was the top deejay in town, the coolest guy on the radio. I realized for all the afternoons I spent with him that summer of 1969, I didn’t even know if Jerry Wolf was his real name or something he made up. I just know without him, I might never have made it into radio. He was my teacher, mentor, the image of what I thought every disc jockey should be. Especially me.

THE SUNNY SIDE

I discovered my passion for radio at a relatively young age. It actually happened way before I met Jerry Wolf at WWCO. I was nine years old, when my fourth-grade class went on a field trip to the WTIC television and radio stations in Hartford. I was fascinated by the cameras and the lights in the TV studio but it was the on-air personalities of the two deejays that really got my attention. When our class stopped in front of their studio to watch them work, I found myself hanging on every word. Those guys were cracking jokes, playing music, while also waving at us kids through the glass window in front of their audio booth. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them and nobody else in my class could either. Especially the girls.

Up until that very moment, I always thought work was, well work, like what my dad did at the factory. This was totally different. This was fun. In school I was never much of a student, but I was a talker and I knew how to make people laugh. Now here I was, standing right in front of two guys who were getting paid to talk and tell jokes on the radio. I thought, where do I sign up for THIS? How do I get in THAT room? It was a pivotal moment for me.

Being that young I didn’t think too far ahead. It never occurred to me that I might not be able to make it in radio. When you’re older, maybe you have a dream, or there could be something different you want to try, but then your mind starts to
work against you. Most people get stuck wondering how they’re going to make it happen. What if this goes wrong, or what about that? But when you’re young, you just do it. I learned early in life that you’ve got to go after your dreams, make your own luck, which is something I witnessed firsthand from my family, a bunch of hard-working, fun-loving, boisterous Italians.

My grandparents were from the Abruzzo region of Italy, about 75 miles east of Rome. They were farmers and like so many others, they sailed to America in the early nineteen hundreds looking for a better way to live. My dad’s family made their home in the country where they had a small farm and my grandfather found work as a janitor. My mom’s parents lived in the city. Lucky for me, both families ended up in Connecticut.

I grew up on the sunny side of life, on a street called Sunnyside Avenue. That name kind of says it all. I think my parents expected to have a big family with lots of kids, like how they grew up, and when that didn’t happen, they were grateful to have Henry Junior and me, David Joseph. We were born nine years apart so I might have been called an accident or a surprise, but my mom called me a blessing. My big brother Hank may not have always felt so blessed. In many ways, Hank was like a second father to me, playing catch with me after school, helping me with homework, taking me in his car for ice cream at the local Carvel, basically keeping an eye on me. He was the smart one, a future college professor who was so good to me and I was, in return, so bad to him. Bad might be too extreme, I was mischievous. I came up with all sorts of creative ways to torture my big brother, in a loving way, of course. Like the time he showed me how to light a firecracker.

As a future teacher, Henry went through an impressive tutorial on how to hold, light, then toss a firecracker. It was so well presented, almost like one of those filmstrips you’d see in high
school with the announcer saying, “Firstly, grasp the firecracker firmly in your right hand.” Actually, that was the problem. Henry is right-handed and I’m a lefty. When it was my turn, he lit the firecracker, then put it between two fingers in my right hand. With the fuse sizzling and proudly looking down, smiling at his student, he said, “Throw it!” I had never thrown anything with my right hand before. The longer I hesitated, the shorter the fuse got and the more agitated he got, until he yelled, “Throw it, you idiot!” So I did, awkwardly, and accidentally hit Henry in his forehead. The firecracker exploded and knocked his eyeglasses clear off his face, leaving a smudge of gunpowder just below his hairline. When his initial shock wore off and he reached down to gather up his glasses from the ground, I took off before he could put them back in place, knowing he would be in hot pursuit in seconds flat. But, come on, it was an innocent mistake, right?

Then there were all those times when I secretly tape-recorded his conversations with his girlfriend, my future sister-in-law Eileen. My mom and dad would be off on bowling night or out to dinner with friends. I waited until Hank and Eileen were downstairs in the living room, whispering and giggling together on the couch, then I quietly lowered a microphone down the stairwell. Probably the only time I ever did anything quietly. I’d listen in with headphones on, taping everything they said, then surprise them by playing back their most embarrassing moments. I knew there would be retribution, but it was worth it. Hank usually grabbed me around the neck to give me a major noogie on the noggin, one of many he handed out. I think I hold the record in Connecticut for being on the receiving end of the most noogies, ever. Sometimes my brother would change it up and just swat the back of my head. But Mom always came to my defense. She would yell out to Henry, “Stop hitting your brother in the head, you’ll make him stupid.” Thanks, Mom. Years later when I started working in radio, I told Henry how helpful it had
been to spy on him and Eileen. Learning how to use that tape machine turned out to be early training for my career behind the microphone. It seemed I had a knack for using that kind of equipment, something I picked up from my dad.

In my eyes, Henry Cipriano Senior could do just about anything. He was an inventor, a three-dimensional thinker. You could give him any kind of a project to work on and he would figure out how to get it done. We never hired a plumber, an electrician, or a contractor. My dad called himself “a Jack of all trades, master of none.” He started each and every job the same way. The first thing he did was light up a Connecticut cigar, either a Muniemaker or an Evermore, then he sat down to think. It might take one hour, it might take three hours, but at some point during that process, when he was finished with his cigar, he knew exactly how to tackle that job, verbally explaining the blueprint he had drawn in his head.

Dad taught me how to do electrical work, wallpapering, fence building, bricklaying, how to finish off a basement, and many years later, when I moved to Los Angeles, he helped me build my first recording studio from the ground up. He was a successful amateur boxer in Waterbury, played baseball for the Oakville Townies, and after he discovered golf, he won the club championship several times over. Dad was introduced to his much-loved Connecticut cigars as a teenager, when he was hired as a picker in the local tobacco fields. As an adult, Dad worked for one company his entire life, the Scovill Manufacturing Plant. Everybody called it the Pin Shop because they made straight pins, safety pins, even the pins that hold together grenades. He never finished high school but that didn’t stop my dad from becoming foreman at the Pin Shop. Dad was proud of his accomplishments without ever bragging. Coming from a very humble background, he was a wonderful success story.

Both of my parents lived through the Great Depression that started in 1929 but it hit my mom, Ermina Dantino, much harder. She grew up on the south side of Waterbury. Her dad had trouble finding a job so he worked the funeral circuit. The story goes, whenever there was a wake for someone who had just passed away, my grandfather was hired to wail and cry, even throw himself on the coffin, to prove how much the dearly departed had been loved by friends and neighbors. After all that effort he was paid one dollar for each appearance. Look at that, my first relative in show business. The problem was, he needed to make more money. If he brought another person to the wake, he could take home another dollar, so he recruited someone else to help out. My mom was eight years old when he started taking her to those funerals. Never mind that she didn’t know anyone in the room, she definitely did not want to look at a dead body. Most times her tears came easily.

With money scarce, there were too many nights when Mom went to bed with an empty stomach, dreaming of cakes and cookies. There were days when the only food she had to eat was a piece of stale bread with a little sugar on top.

My mom was 11 years old when her dad died and the kids had to go to work to help support the family. Mom had just finished fifth grade when she quit school for good. She found a job as a maid for a lawyer and his family on the east side of town. Mom earned five dollars a week and bus fare was ten cents a day, so to save money she walked back and forth to work instead of taking the bus. It took her one hour each way. Mom worked for that family until she was 16 years old, when she got a job at a factory, the Peter Paul Candy Company in Naugatuck. She worked on the assembly line, just like in that episode of “I Love Lucy,” where the candy rolls down the conveyer belt, as Mom and her best friend Faye Marinelli wrapped each piece and stuffed it into a box. When they introduced themselves and Faye heard Mom’s
name was Ermina, Faye said, “Hell, I’ll never remember that. I’ll just call you Pat,” and it stuck. From that moment on, even Mom called herself Pat, so did my dad. I don’t know of anyone who ever called her Ermina. It was a very similar circumstance when many years later her son, me, would have his name changed from Dave to Joe just as quickly.

As hard a life as my mom had, she never dwelled on her difficult memories. Mom was tiny, not even five feet tall, tough, and also as sweet as can be. She would do anything for anyone without a word of complaint. She was deeply religious, saying her rosary twice a day as she sat on the edge of her bed. She never said an unkind word about anyone. My mom was a saint.

About one year after Mom met Faye, they were at a birthday party with a bunch of other people when this guy came up to Mom, took off his hat and put it on her head. That was my dad, flirting with a pretty young girl. They dated for one year and got married on October 28, 1939. My parents decided to move to the country where they could grow their own vegetables and have a few chickens. My mom would never go hungry again. Years later, even when they didn’t have to worry about things like that anymore, my mom still agonized about wasting food. If our bread went stale before we finished it, Mom always gave the package a kiss and said a silent prayer before gently placing it in the trash. She knew what real hunger felt like. That’s probably why Mom was always trying to feed everybody.

Every Sunday afternoon, all of my relatives would get together for dinner, usually at my parents’ house. That meant anywhere from 40 to 50 people, aunts, uncles, cousins, all crammed into our small home, spilling out onto the yard to play bocce or baseball. As a young boy, I remember wandering from room to room, surrounded by deep, powerful voices all straining to be heard. Some of my aunts and uncles spoke Italian, others English, plus
there was a kind of a slang that mixed the two languages together. If I closed my eyes it sounded like a big orchestra warming up, all different instruments colliding and clashing until they came together for a lively musical production.

The show would open with a joyful melody as we greeted one another at the door with loud kisses on both cheeks. My uncles would tussle the hair on top of my head and my aunts would plant a red-lipsticked smacker on my face. That was followed by a good 30 or 40 minutes of friendly conversation, slowly building louder as more people arrived. Soon voices would be mingled with the clatter of plates, glasses, and silverware as everyone started to eat and drink. Then without fail, sometime between the main course and dessert, the music turned sharp when one of my uncles, accidentally or intentionally, insulted someone else. That brought on the battle scene, with all sorts of shouting and pointing and yelling, men and women, until I thought our house would explode. In the middle of that crazy commotion, at the height of hostilities, someone would break through the riot with a mention of their dear, dead mother, my grandmother, bringing everything to a screeching halt. What followed was deafening silence that could only be broken by one word…Mama! Only it came out as a slow, mournful, wail, “Maaaaa-Ma, Maaaaa-Ma.” Then everyone started crying, tears flowed, a chorus of apologies filled the air, and peace was finally restored. That meant it was time for dessert. The day ended as it began, with warm hugs and kisses at the door and a promise to see one another next Sunday when we would do it all over again.

I had a front-row seat to my own private opera. I quickly learned if I wanted to be heard, I had to speak up. Loudly. I also learned how important family was to my mom and dad. No matter what was said during those raucous Sunday afternoons, at the end of the day, all was forgiven.

My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but when the relatives came over for dinner, they knew they would be treated to a feast. It wasn’t extravagant, but it was delicious. Mom started prepping the day before. There was homemade pasta, huge raviolis, cavatelli, and manicotti with her fresh tomato sauce, peppers, zucchini, and squash from the garden. In good weather Dad would cook outside on the grill, hamburgers and hot dogs. If it was a holiday, there would be turkey, ham, fish, you name it, we ate it. And then there were the pies. Mom was geared up for volume, making three or four pies every weekend. Cherry and apple were my favorite, then pumpkin, blueberry, and pecan. Everybody came for Mom’s dessert and they would eat those pies all day long.

My dad wasn’t a big drinker but as he liked to say, “Hey, I’ll have a slug of that.” It was usually beer, sometimes red wine, then he’d pass it to someone else and say, “Have a slug!” The thing was, if you wanted to be part any of the games they were playing, you most likely had a drink in your hand.

You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a bunch of Italian men playing Morra. [
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] All my life I thought it was called Ahmode, but that was just the mixed-up Italian/English slang my relatives used to speak. It’s a hand game between two people, kind of like rock, paper, scissors. Using one hand, you throw out any number of fingers you want to play, from zero to five. At the same time, you guess out loud how many fingers both of you will show together, from zero, on up to ten. For this game my uncles always counted in Italian, niente to dieci. And they didn’t just shake their hand and toss out a few fingers. They used their entire body, rocking back and forth, then thrusting their arm out to flash a couple of fingers. And they didn’t just call out a number, either. They shouted it out, loud enough for the entire block to hear. I loved the sound of my relatives yelling in Italian, “DUE! CINQUE!!! OTTO!!! TRE!!!”