{"id":63,"date":"2010-01-14T10:06:53","date_gmt":"2010-01-14T10:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buffalodick.tv\/?page_id=63"},"modified":"2018-03-05T13:00:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T18:00:18","slug":"the-birth-of-buffalo-dick","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/buffalodick.net\/?page_id=63","title":{"rendered":"The Birth Of Buffalo Dick"},"content":{"rendered":"

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[This is an excerpt from Jeff Lamb’s\u00a0 book “I Used To Be A DJ” Available NOW<\/a>!!]<\/p>\n

Just Hanging Around<\/strong><\/h1>\n

My brother Bill was the number one salesman at WWCK which was the number one radio station in Flint, Michigan.\u00a0 I wanted so badly to be on the air.\u00a0 During the day, I would hang around almost everyday and\u00a0 almost all day at the radio station under the premise of \u201cvisiting Bill\u201d or \u201cvisiting Peter C. Cavanaugh<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0 Peter C. was a Flint radio legend who had given up being on air and was now the GM of WWCK.<\/p>\n

I should preface this part of the story with some as yet not mentioned background.\u00a0 During my high school years.\u00a0 I would listen to a call in talk show on WTRX that was hosted by Wally Kennedy.\u00a0 It was a great show with open lines to talk about anything.\u00a0 Wally didn\u2019t have an agenda like all the talk show hosts do today.\u00a0 He would just \u201cvisit\u201d with his listeners five nights a week from 7-11pm.\u00a0 I mentioned earlier that I wasn\u2019t a bad kid.\u00a0 But I was mischievous.\u00a0 I would call Wally\u2019s \u201cFlint Feedback\u201d show not just nightly, but several times a night.\u00a0 These calls would be anything I could think of to get on the air.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t take me long to figure out how to get passed the call screener .\u00a0 I had to change my voice and name with every call and have a pretty compelling premise.\u00a0 Hey what’s a bored 16 year old supposed to do?<\/p>\n

One night I called as a Foster Brooks drunk to talk about how alcoholics anonymous had helped me.\u00a0 Clearly. as a drunk this made for a fun call for Wally.\u00a0 Another time I called as a man who\u2019d been arrested and this is my one phone call I knew my wife wasn\u2019t home and I really hoped she was listening. I called back a few hours later to tell Wally that she came and got me!\u00a0 My Favorite Call\u00a0 was when I called him (supposedly) from a payphone just to shoot the breeze.\u00a0 A friend of mine, David W. Grant had just been fired that day from the radio station and of course in radio, they never talk about firings on the air.\u00a0 The DJ just “Goes Away.” \u00a0 So I was trying to get Wally to talk about\u00a0 The firing\u00a0 of David Grant. \u00a0 Just as I\u2019m getting to the point of my call, the operator (my friend Mary on another extension) cuts in to tell me to deposit another twenty-five cents or signal when through.\u00a0 I told her I didn\u2019t have any more change but let me ask around the store.\u00a0 While I was shaking people down for a quarter, Wally starts hitting on the operator.\u00a0 This went back and forth several times and it was a personal record for me as the longest time to keep Wally on the line without being dismissed.\u00a0 The point of this whole excercise is that, in the process, I learned to do a LOT of voices while pulling Wally\u2019s leg.<\/p>\n