| 15 Minutes of Fame |
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| My first experience with radio was as a student at WVBC, the campus bound "Voice of Boston College". In February of 1966 the station's student program director Bill Wheatley, who later became Vice-President of NBC News, came to me with the idea of doing a radio marathon broadcast. A student at rival Notre Dame University had just completed a 69 hour radio broadcast and we couldn't allow that record to stand. My broadcast began at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon and ran 70 hours until noon the following Sunday. If I remember the rules correctly, I had to be on the air live at least once every ten minutes and I was not allowed to fall asleep at any time during the broadcast. During the broadcast of a hockey game on Friday evening they had to come back to the studio during breaks in the action so that I could be on the air every ten minutes. |
| It must have been a terribly slow news week. Soon I was getting calls and doing interviews with disc jockeys from radio stations around the country. One of the Boston television stations came in and did a film story on the marathon and even the Asscciated Press sent out a reporter and photographer to do a story. On Sunday, minutes after finishing up the marathon, I got a call from ABC Radio and did an interview for the network's ABC Flair Reports. It wasn't until years later when I played the tape of my Flair Report for friends one night that I realized that I had been interviewed by the venerable Ted Koppel, respected journalist and long-time lead anchorman for Nightline. Due to the memory restrictions that Yahoo Geocities place on these web sites I'm not able to post the actual Flair Report here. Drop me an email and I'll send you the MP3. |
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