The Daily Brief

Being let go as a part-time announcer from the public radio station where I worked since… umm, how many years ago? Thirteen, I think – maybe fourteen. It was a bit of a shock, being told over the telephone that there would be no need for my services after the 14th, thank you very much. Still a better way to be told than just ordered to lump all of your personal stuff into a cardboard box and being escorted off the premises by a large security man; TPR doesn’t have a security guy at present anyway, even though that might be another one of those things that are changing. As it turns out – it wasn’t just me. It was all the part-timers who worked one or two regular shifts a week; weekends and evenings mostly, and additional if needed because someone else was sick, or going on vacation or had a temporary conflict with their regular work schedule. We were all given the word, by letter, email or phone. Almost without exception, each of us initially assumed that we were the only one being let go.

A little background might be in order: I started work there under a general manager who was the original GM, since the classical station began broadcasting in 1982. Both the classical station, KPAC and the news/information station KSTX operated from the adjacent studios in the same location, shared the same management staff and production facility and even occasionally swapped announcers back and forth. The announcers, full and part-time were an amusingly assorted lot – so were those who produced various pre-recorded programs. Over the last fifteen years there have been a couple of retired Air Force broadcasters besides myself, including one who had been the commander of Air Force Broadcasting. Another producer was a lady was an accomplished poet. There was a retired diplomat who wrote a weekly opera lecture program that I produced, who was the single most cultured human being that I never knew personally – we worked together every Saturday afternoon that the Metropolitan didn’t broadcast an opera for about a decade. Musicians – there is a horn-player for the local symphony, and a teacher who builds exquisite bespoke harpsichords, and a young man who played piano in a restaurant on the Riverwalk.

There was a genial Irishman who was a retired railway executive – his wife owned a white Rolls-Royce. (We have – or had – four Irish people on staff, an amusingly high ratio for South Texas.) There were a couple of actors, both of whom had pretty recognizable names in local theater circles, a freelance video producer, a writer for a small glossy magazine, and a woman who teaches at the local community college and helps run a local animal shelter and the spay and neuter program. Add in an assortment of ‘ladies who lunch’ who did it for amusement and broadcast students who did it for exposure and experience, amateurs and enthusiasts of every stripe – and when I say amateurs, I do not mean it in the pejorative sense. Just about all of us were quite skilled, enormously experienced – having done this sort of thing for years. This wide assortment among the staff conferred upon TPR a considerable degree of connection and inter-connection to the community. I used to joke that you could connect anyone in San Antonio to anyone else in about three degrees, if you routed the connection through TPR.
Unlike the local PBS TV station – which seemed to have a revolving door for their staff, turnover in at TPR was pretty minimal. Hardly anyone was fired or quit – people left because they died, or a spouse relocated out of the area. Otherwise, people stayed for decades. This was SOP until the old general manager retired a couple of years ago. The new GM had ambitious plans to expand the local news mission.

I think the station came into some serious grant money – for the studios were all rehabbed and updated, this last year, with all sorts of jazzy new equipment and computer razzle-dazzle. The old sat-net room was also rehabbed, and turned into a cubicle farm for the news staff. They hired a guy to be news director, and just last week a new full-time announcer, who had an impressive resume from another classical station.

The thing about the new computer technology is that long segments of programming can be pre-arranged to play – the music, the announcements, spots and IDs all. Automated radio, in other words – other stations have done this for years, and the means of doing it has become less and less complicated and easier and easier to facilitate. Some of the more far-sighted of us joked about this possibility over the last couple of months. But the thing about TPR was that we weren’t like other stations – we had real human beings in the studio, after hours and on weekends. Our listeners expected to talk to a real human being – and as I said, many of us had been there for years. Surely management couldn’t seriously be thinking about throwing all that community good-will and staff experience over the side, just to turn TPR into a clone of Sirius radio, or a classy version of Clear Channel …

Alas, they could, and did. I don’t even think we are getting any sort of severance pay, not that we would have expected anything, being that we were part-timers with no benefits at all. I don’t even think we will get a certificate or anything like a letter of referral. New broom, in the hands of new management – we agreed that if this is what TPR is being transformed into – than it is just as well that we have been swept out the door.

(So please, I bleg of you, hit the book link and boost my sales stats for “Truckee” – and next month I will begin taking advance orders for the “Adelsverein Trilogy” – with luck, the royalties will soar well above what I earned at the radio station!)