Typical Radio Show Day

Whitley and I don’t do a lot on Sunday afternoons before we broadcast Dreamland. We’ve learned the hard way that we can’t travel on tickets that require a Saturday overnight stay, because we’ve gotten stuck in airports twice and missed the show. My main regret about Dreamland is missing Sunday night football. My son is grown up now, but he’s left me with a love for the NFL.

We’ll sometimes watch an old movie on T.V. while Whitley looks over that night’s book again. On April 2, the night Peter Levenda was on talking about Nazi conspiracies, a cable channel played Nazi documentaries all day, so we were in the right mood by the time Dreamland started.

By the time Sunday night comes along, I’ve checked with our regulars for any late-breaking news. I count on Roger Leir, Jim Marrs, Michael Lindemann of CNI News, and Michael Glickman and Patricia Murray, to keep us up to date on what’s going on when it comes to implants, UFOs and crop circles.

By biggest job is finding guests I think our listeners will like. I mostly follow Whitley’s lead, because he’s interested in so many topics: ancient cultures, conspiracies, Nazis, cults, religion, weather, the environment, UFOs, NDEs, OBEs, health and healing.

I’ve noticed that when you go into most bookstores these days, you see the same few authors displayed in the front and in the windows. One thing not everyone knows is that publishers pay the bookstores to place books there. It’s wonderful to be part of those displays, but it leaves a lot of good books out in the cold. Producing the show has led me to discover so many wonderful authors that I’ve had the pleasure of introducing to our listeners, authors whose ideas deserve to be heard. Our listeners can decide for themselves if these books are good-they don’t have to follow the dictates of the marketplace.

The sun is usually just starting to set by the time we leave for the show. It’s a short drive to the radio station, and there’s almost nobody there on Sunday nights. It’s so quiet that it’s a little eerie. One time we got out of the car and saw a dramatic lightening display in the sky. As we stood there watching, totally awestruck, we noticed that our local engineer, Kevin Delosh, was outside watching it too. That snapped us all out of it, and we hurried inside so we wouldn’t be late.

We’ve recently moved to a new radio station, because the first one we broadcast from is constructing a new building here in San Antonio. They are gradually dismantling their old studios, and we walked in one Sunday night to find that the studio we had been broadcasting from was gone-nothing was there but an empty room. We made a frantic cellphone call to Will Hilliard, our engineer in Oregon, and he played a tape that night.

Whitley and I have been known to sneak out to the vending machines during the breaks and buy junk food. You can’t eat anything crunchy or sticky over the air, as Whitley found out one time when he got his jaws stuck together by a candy bar just when the music came up after the news. Will gave him a lecture about that one.

That brings me to the subject of Will, the irascible engineer who’s hooked up to us from Oregon. He runs the show and tells us when Whitley?s mike is “hot”, and how many minutes the breaks will last. I wish listeners could hear the joking that goes on between Will and Whitley on Sunday nights. Will likes to play music he knows will annoy Whitley, but sometimes it annoys listeners as well, who’ve sent in complaining e- mails, so he’s toned it down some. Will has been up for about 18 hours by the time he runs our show, and I think he’s a little crazy by then.

During the show, I communicate with Whitley by hand signals and writing on a legal pad. No matter how much you plan ahead, glitches occur on live radio. Once, in our old studio, Whitley unplugged his microphone cord by mistake, when he crossed his legs while he was on the air, and I managed to dive for it and plug it back in within a couple of seconds. Another time Roger Leir brought a stack of taped interviews back from a UFO conference in England, only to discover, on the air, that the airport x-ray machine had ruined them all.

The strangest thing so far happened to us one night when we were a little late arriving, and noticed that our studio was filled with people who appeared to be broadcasting. We asked our engineer what was going on, and he said he’d move them to another studio. The door opened, and out came a line of people, some blind, using canes and dogs, others in electric wheelchairs, all parading slowly out of the room while we jumped up and down impatiently, afraid we’d miss the start of the show. The last person out had her hands on the back of a chair and was wheeling it out the door. Thankfully, I noticed just in time that there were no more chairs in the room, so I asked her to please put it back. If I hadn’t, Whitley would have had to start his broadcast standing up, while I hunted around frantically for chairs.

Another time, the air conditioning cut out for a couple of weeks, so we baked inside the studio as the hours wore on. We tried keeping the studio door open, but for some reason, people like to bring their children to the station at night and let them run through the halls, shouting. I’d always thought radio stations would be quiet places, but they’re not. There was even a sign up at our last station asking people not to run, because it made the CDs skip.

A few weeks ago, the head engineer stopped by the studio to tell us that he was working late because the owner was making one of his rare appearances, and they were cleaning out all the junk that had accumulated in his office. I stopped in the Ladies’ Room on the way home, and almost passed out. Whitley heard my shriek and came rushing in to find that they had put a nine foot stuffed teddy bear in there across from the sinks, where you could glimpse it in the mirror as you walked in. The last time I looked, it was still there.

No matter how tired we are when we start the show, we get charged up on the air, so we have to cool down again before we go to bed. On Monday, we read our messages and the Dreamland bulletin board, to get reactions about the show.

That’s it for now, I’ve got to go check my e-mail! Best wishes, Anne

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.