Wow... it's been a while since I've been here to update things, so if you just got your first notification in AGES that there's been activity on this blog, that's why! Zebby here, reminded by the calendar that tomorrow marks 36 years since good ole WLCS AM 910, Baton Rouge, went officially and permanently bye-bye from our radio dials. 6:00 pm, Friday, August 31, 1984 to be precise; it's a good time to state for the record (since I doubt anyone else will ever provide it for "broadcasting internet anthropologists!") what first and last songs were, how it went, and all that good stuff. WLCS was a major radio station and a best friend to generations of Baton Rougeans, first broadcasting with those calls in 1946 and with its studio in downtown Baton Rouge, on old North Street. Sometime shortly after One American Place was completed by the old American Bank (1974), the station moved to the (I'm pretty sure now defunct and renumbered) Suite 2420 on the top floor, sharing that space with the US Transmission Service, the American Bank Board Room and the Hon. Alvin Rubin, 5th Circuit US Court of Appeals judge. Whatever Suite 2420 is numbered now, it's the one where you come off the elevators, turn right, then turn right again and go down the short hall past the men's bathroom and storage closet. The floor may have been reconfigured a thousand times over in 36 years. I'm recalling it vividly as if my last trip for an airshift was yesterday, and yet I can't really remember breakfast in reality-yesterday. :-)
Most of the active airstaff, full and part-timers included, were in the control room (overlooking the Mississippi River, best view in the city) for her passing. We'd all been told about a month prior (as I recall) that after the sale from Gene Nelson and Lamar Simmons' Airwaves, Inc. to Richard Oppenheimer's eponymously-named broadcast group out of Austin, TX. that the decision had been made to change format to satellite-delivered "Stardust" from Satellite Music Network (later taken over by ABC, then Citadel Broadcasting, then renamed "Timeless" but shut down in 2010 because of huge shedding of listeners across the network). SMN had started the service in 1981, and Oppenheimer'd decided that with the dominance of FM in those days (though WLCS in the Summer of '84 kicked ass with #1 away-from-home books! We were still fighting mightily to keep and grow our audience against our decidedly more boring if not clearer-signaled FM competitors!). Gene and Lamar, who were AWESOME people for whom to work, had long cleared the building, and the GM was Lew Campbell, brought in by Oppenheimer from Denver to run WLCS and sister FM WQXY (which slightly earlier had gone from Schulke Easy Listening to Adult Contemporary- I was on the air for the "New Q's" first shift as well as the old one's last ever easy listening shift that overnight. Let me tell you-- I have NEVER received as many geriatric threats of violence as I did that morning while playing Billy Joel and Toto, and I actually AGREED with them). I was dismayed at the decisions being made back then, having been with Airwaves on and off (mostly on) for the last 5 or so years, as a teenager. I understood enough about radio, though, to know that it's a business-- and Lew and Dick had made the decision they thought was best (albeit without really understanding what a fixture WLCS was to LOTS of native Baton Rougeans). I later worked for Lew at KAJUN 103 FM when he and partner Don Nelson bought it (well, I'd also worked for the original owner in '85 when WLCS went under!), and then later still at WIBR when they bought that property. Lew was a great guy, and a smart man. I wish he was still with us; I may not have liked *everything* I learned from him (e.g. the format change!)... but I can't deny that most of it was awesome training and I will always be in Lew's debt for that.
Anyway, back to the MAIN story... so my last 7p-12a airshift (I loved that timeslot) on WLCS was the night before, Thursday, August 30th. I probably stayed up til 5 the following morning thinking about how awesome it was that I got to work for the station that defined my childhood for the time that I had at it. But I DAMN SURE DRAGGED MYSELF OUT OF BED by about 11 am or noon that Friday, washed up and dressed and drove back to One American Place to MAKE SURE I was there to send our old, beautiful friend off with all the respect and love she deserved. I got back to the suite around 2-3 pm, as I recall. Killed time with the other jocks, said bye to some of the salespeople and staff I liked, knew it was going to be my last time in that hallowed space. Took photos from our beautiful corner view of the river and the capitol. Terry Jackson, our morning drive guy, was on the board doing a special "Memories Countdown" show which included some of the REALLY INCREDIBLY FAMOUS talent that got their starts or big career boosts at WLCS (and there were an impressive number of them). The control room had been (of course) fully rewired and ready to roll with the new format; the decoders and such were active in the rack behind us (we previewed Stardust on the internal speaker), and for the first time in its history, WLCS had two huge automated cart carousels loaded up with the spots purchased and ready to roll for its new incarnation at 6 pm CDT that evening-- as WXAM.
That was probably the biggest gut-punch of the whole thing, thinking about those beautiful WLCS calls no longer existing in Baton Rouge. I wasn't sure at that tender age that the city would survive! But I also felt like the calls should be forever associated with the contemporary hits, rock and roll, even the urban contemporary from the old evening "Jam Central" show that Ken "The Animal" Allison had turned into such a monster a few years before (we scrapped it by '84 after replacement host Dr. Jazzmoore took off. I loved Ray- he was awesome! That was a horrible air name though). So in a way, I was glad WLCS was becoming WXAM. It meant we could protect the letters and their legacy, we had plausible deniability that it wasn't WLCS playing Stardust in the middle of the 1980s while all our Billy Idol and Van Halen and etc. carts were sitting in a corner waiting to be packed up and recycled for the last time!
I can't remember precisely who was in Control when it happened, when 6 pm came, but I was on the far right side of the panel where the reel tape deck was, with that gorgeous view I loved to my back. I remember being really sad. Terry timed the last WLCS song, Don McLean's "American Pie," perfectly. Cold outro... "the day.... the muuuuu-sic............ died." BAM. 6 pm, top of hour satellite network ID into "Glow Worm" by the Mills Brothers, the first song on the reborn WXAM. And just like that, fortyish years of Baton Rouge radio history came to an end. Dunno who stayed or went, but they were kind not to have security trying to rush us out of the building (LOL). I sort of wanted to stay a little longer, but I didn't really feel like I could; IMMEDIATELY, the WLCS Control Room felt like a foreign place I'd not seen before, and I felt like an interloper. I said a few g'byes, got into the elevator for the last trip down, said goodbye to the really cool and funny security guard I used to socialize with before and after my airshifts. My car was parked on the street right in front of the building, no need to go into the garage. Piled into my loud orange '76 Vega and went home. I'm pretty sure I went to bed early that night, and drove home listening to any number of tracks I'd played just the night before from Scorpions or something on the cassette player.
So there's one eyewitness' testimony to what happened in WLCS' last 24 hours as Baton Rouge's best friend. On the day.... the music......... died.
