I mentioned yesterday in my piece about Maron that I would tell the President Clinton story.
So it’s sometime in the 1990’s, probably 1993-94 or so since I was still running boards. I was running “local” for WOR-AM which meant doing the inserts on the New York broadcast of the national Gene Burns show which was originating from the room next to me.
Gene had scored an interview with President Clinton like from the White House. Awesome.
So Gene did a short intro and they/we took the first break early leaving a nice run of time for The President.
But the President was running late. I began wondering what would happen when the hard network break at 3:30 came along.
Now that’s a tough decision. If you blow off the break you can throw off the automation systems across the country. On the other hand….
Gene sits down and starts talking to the president. For maybe a minute. I’m sitting at “local” wondering what’s going to happen and….
….
….
….I hear the roll up music into the break. They took the damn break!
What you heard on the air was the President being faded down mid-sentence and then a cut to a Larry King commercial for, if memory serves, Ginsana. OMFG.
Fortunately Gene kept his professionalism and kept doing the interview, which was being recorded down the line, and didn’t tell the President we had cut away.
I keep thinking about this. Presumably the need for the hard break was so that some stations could go to news. I wondered what that news would be. Would it be “today the President said….”
Anyway, the punk 20-something staff, including me, made so much fun of this over the upcoming weeks. Somewhere there is a collection of “Great Moments in WOR” where we made things like
“Today….I consider myself….the (music fades up) Hi this is Larry King for Ginsana.”
“That’s one small step for….(music fades up) Hi this is Larry King for Ginseng.”
I dunno. I would have kept the President on live and taken angry calls from the PD in Elmira and blown the Larry King Ginsana revenue. Maybe that’s why I am writing this from my backyard. Ha.