Monday, June 08, 2009

Going Forward With Flint

I am among those who call themselves Flint Expatriates.
That's the name of a most interesting blog hosted by Gordon Young who now lives in California. Take a look at it for photos, comments and memories of the town that General Motors made famous and Michael Moore made infamous. I became a reader of Gordon's blog with the hope of finding something about the Flint Musical Tent that brought professional Broadway type theater to Flint when I was there. But most bloggers are too young to know about it.

Like the old gray mare, Flint, Michigan ain't what she used to be. The old horse went to the glue factory, replaced by those horseless carriages built in Flint's auto factories. My in-laws worked at the Fisher Body plant, demolished long ago.

Flint was still in pretty good shape in 1950 when I spoke my first words into a microphone, "Going forward with Flint." That was the theme of an advertising campaign on WMRP, the station where I would be a hotshot deejay, driving around in my big Buick Dynaflow and on which my marriage to a fan would be broadcast in 1954. Like most of the dozen or so stations I worked for, that one is long gone. My last one in that town, one of the several employers that would eventually find me of no value, was WTAC. That stood for "The Auto City," I think that one is still on the air with those call letters. I also worked at WKMF, no longer on the air. That one was owned by Fred Knorr, who also owned the Detroit Tigers. I went to sleep during a Tigers broadcast and failed to cover the Dearborn feed's station break with our own and "WKMH" got on the air. Actually I didn't get canned from that one. My term there was to sub for the evening deejay until he returned from several months at the TB sanatorium.

Leaving Flint, the next stop was WDOG in Marine City, on the St. Clair River, a short ferry boat ride across the river from Sombra, Ontario, Canada. Someday I will tell stories about weird stuff that happens at radio stations. Readers might think I made it up. Maybe I did. But there really was a WDOG and a Miss WDOG. I think I blogged about her someplace in the oldy moldy archives. The best stories must go to the grave or the oven with me or be published after I go to that great radio station in the sky to protect the innocent, the guilty and my family. Stay tuned for the rest of the story. Apologies to the late Paul Harvey for stealing his line.

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