Bill fills us in:

In the early 1980s, WTXR was one of the first 13 stations in the nation to offer programming exclusively by satellite and was the first in Illinois to go all-digital, using PCs to control programming and transmitters.

My company owned another station, WZRO-FM, in Farmer City, Illinois. This, too, wa a highly computerized station. At the time we sold our stations in 1994, we also had a LPTV application in central Illinois (Lacon).

And he remembers:

I was a big fan of Wally Phillips the early 1960s. I convinced my parents to let me attend New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, because it had a 10-watt educational FM station, WNTH. The kid who engineered my Saturday morning radio show, Mike Aisner, arranged with his dad, whose company was a big WGN advertiser (Heet, the gasoline additive), for us to visit the station and sit in on Wally's morning program in 1964. That visit ultimately resulted in a 30-year commitment to radio broadcasting.

As was typical in those days, we loved pranks. Tom Foster, the announcer who followed me on WNTH, was always late. One Saturday, Mike set the studio clock ahead five minutes. When Foster arrived for his show, he thought he was VERY late. From the control room, Mike had put some fake programming and my mic into the audition circuit and fed the audio to the studio monitors. Foster grabbed his headset and sat down to begin his show.

I introduced him this way, "Now, ladies and gentlemen, late as usual, here's that son-of-a-bitch, Tom Foster."

Whereupon, Foster fell backwards in his chair and lay speechless on the floor. Aisner then switched the monitor from the faux programming to what was actually being broadcast. There was interminable dead air while Foster composed himself. He was never late again.

Before going off to college, I recall a late-night visit to WEBH (FM) located in the old Edgewater Beach Hotel, in Chicago. The overnight announcer (who shall remain nameless) was reading a newscast when a bare-breasted chorus girl (leaving her job in the adjacent night club) popped-up in front of the studio window that faced the public area of the hotel. She proceeded to fondle herself in an attempt to make him break up while on the air. I was slack-jawed, but the announcer seemed disinterested. He finished the newscast and the girl quickly left the building.

"Wow! Did you see that?" I asked.

"Yeah, and a lot more. She's my wife. Frankly, I wish she knew how to cook."

Then, in the 1970s, there was the time Lee Malcolm, an announcer at Peoria's WIRL, and I were suspended by a crane, broadcasting from a motor home, above John Bearce Ford's lot as a part of a weekend remote broadcast intended to hype car sales. The premise was that we would not be lowered to the ground until the dealership sold a bunch of cars. It was night, everyone had gone home, and we were still in the camper, suspended by a cable, when the civil defense sirens went off and the motorhome started to sway to and fro in the wind. There was a tornado on the way ... but that's another story.

-30-