When I was a disk jockey, my fellow DJ’s and I were often creating alternative realities because our own reality was living on little money and all the Dairy Queen free hamburger passes we could steal.

In those days, there was a thing called the Associated Press teletype.  This was essentially a typewriter that was hooked up to a nationwide network and would clack out news stories 24 hours a day.  The teletype was fed by a continuous roll of newsprint.

I faked a story using teletype paper and an old manual typewriter. I used authentic AP “slug” number codes and I added the usual typos, missed letters and garbles.   AP member stations could and did contribute news stories to the wire.  I made this one look like it had been filed by our station.

There was a board we used to tack the day’s interesting stories so that the late night guy would have stuff for the newscasts he would tape at the beginning of his shift.  I put this story on the board for him.

The late night jock was just out of high school, very, very paranoid, and into dark things. This story was tailor made for his pyche.

RN

(STATIONS–PLEASE NOTE NATURE OF FOLLOWING)

(AP)  -  GBI HELP REQUESTED

(W-L-G-A)

(VALDOSTA) – LOWNDES CIRCUIT DISTRICT ATTORNEY LAMAR COLE SAY H  HAS REQUESTED  HELP FROM THE GEORGIA BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION IN THE SEARCH FOR AN “ANIMAL RAPIST” OPERATING IN LOWNDES AND BROOKS COUNTIES. ACCORDING TO COLE, A “SICK AND PERVERTED” INDIVIDUAL HAS BEEN SEXUALLY ASSAULTING POULTRY AND LIVESTOCK IN FREEZER COOLERS AND SLAUGHTER HOUSES.
AN EYEWITNESS IS TO MEET WITH A G-B-I CRIMINAL ARTIST TODAY TO RECONSTRUCT A PERSON HE SAW ACTING SUSPICIOUSLY AROUND A FREEZER HOUSE IN BROOKS COUNTY. THE PERSON IS BEING DESCRIBED AS A WHITE MALE IN HIS LATE TEENS WHO LOOKED “LIKE A BOWLING BALL WITH A HEAD” AND TALKED
XKXKXKXKXKXNGKS
ASHED UP RADIO ANNOUNCER FROM THE 50′S”
“THANKFULLY,” SAYS COLE, “NO ONE HAS EATEN ANY OF THE RAVAGED MEAT”. COLE SAID THAT SHOPPERS ARE BEING WARNED THROUGH THE MEDIA TO CHECK ALL THE MEAT THEY PURCHASE, “ESPECIALLY LIVER”.

AP-AX-09-09-83    1443EDT

B928

RN

(AP)  -  GEORGIA  A – P DRIVE-TIME NEWS

GEORGIA RADAR WEATHER

Our target was so freaked when he found this in his stack of news items to read that he called the AP night desk in Atlanta to check on it.  He was sure that someone was trying to frame him for this terrible crime.

This of course, meant that he self-identified himself as being round as a bowling ball and sounding like a washed-up radio announcer from the 50’s.

While the AP man allowed that he would have heard about such a story if it had actually moved on the wires, he was able to confirm that the codes on the story were for the Hog Prices. A nice touch, I thought.

I attended a redneck wine-tasting with an oenophile.

That’s not as dirty as it sounds. Oenophiles suffer from guilt by association with the suffix of the word Pedophile. An Oenophile is a wine lover.  Oeno is from the Greek “oinos” for wine. Phile is from the Greek “Philos” which means love.

A Pedophile strictly means a “child lover”, so you could call your wife a Pedophile and be correct. And also be sleeping on the couch with a big angry welt slashed across your face.

Enough of sex with dictionaries, back to wine tasting with rednecks.

I did not intentionally attend a redneck wine tasting. The advertisement for the San Sebastian Winery in Saint Augustine, FL offered a free walking tour of the facility and a free wine tasting.

My brother-in-law, the oenophile, suspected that this would be a farce, but was too polite to douse my enthusiasm.  I cannot help it. I am a sucker for tourist traps in Saint Augustine.  I pictured a cultured crowd tasting small samples of wine while cleansing their palates with water and an unsalted cracker between vintages.

That illusion lasted until I saw the red fake choo-choo tourist train disgorge a sweaty crowd of thirty into the parking lot. It was a mixture of Yankees, red necks, and some red neck bikers that were festooned with tattoos and piercings.

The tour guide made his opening announcement: “We will watch a short video, take a look around, and then have a wine tasting where you get to sample six kinds of wine.”  He gave a smirk over that last part and the crowd giggled.

From the video I learned that San Sebastian wine is made from muscadine grapes. Ding dong! Bells went off in my head.  Unless you are from the south, you may have never heard of muscadine grapes.

Muscadine is a very sweet white grape that loves the semi-tropical conditions of the underbelly of the south along the Gulf coast. My grandfather had a grape arbor that was used as a source for muscadine jelly. My cousin still makes it and sends me jars. It tastes like candy.

From the video, we walked across a catwalk above the winery and took a cursory look down at some stainless steel vats.  We then entered the climate controlled barrel room that was set up with plank tables for the wine tasting. Not much foreplay in this seduction.

Before the first pouring, our guide admonished us to hold off from drinking until he had shown us the proper way to taste wine. He proceeded to pour a generous two ounces of chilled “Reserva” white wine into everyone’s glass. This was followed with a short class on looking, swirling, and smelling the wine prior to making three sips for the three stages of taste. Then he toasted us and allowed us to drink.

Behind his back the rednecks had their own method for the three stages of taste: swirl it around, stick your nose in it, and then knock it back like a shot of peppermint schnapps.

Here now is my review of the first bottle: the nose revealed the smell of Muscadine jelly in the morning. In the mouth, a slight astringency fought fruitlessly against a barrage of sugar.  It was drinkable like Hawaiian Punch spiked with 190 proof Golden Grain is drinkable. My oenophile-in-law rolled his eyes.

Now it was time for the second tasting. No water to cleanse the palate, no cracker, no new wine glass. Just hold out your glass out for your next two ounces please.  This time a hybrid of muscadine and something else that was supposed to make it mimic red wine that tasted like hell.

One sip and I switched to red neck wine tasting mode. I couldn’t just pour it out because the guide made it clear that once the glass touched your lips the wine was yours and couldn’t be spit or poured out.  You come here to drink and you are going to drink, dammit!

Our tour mates loved it. The room was filled with happy laughter.  Suddenly the door opened and another tour group entered and made a sharp turn to another tasting area that was set up behind a screen of barrels of aging port.

“Fourth of July weekend is busy around here,” noted our tour guide. I later learned that six(!) tasting rooms were rolling at once. Doing the math, that is 180 people swilling wine per hour.  There are bars in my hometown that would kill for that kind of business.

I passed on the cream sherry.  Even good cream sherry tastes bad.  I went for the port. One sip and I started looking for a place to hide my glass. I was afraid that if I knocked it down redneck style it might gurgle up and bring all its friends along.

Six two ounces glasses of wine in thirty minutes adds up to 12 ounces of wine. The cheap drunks were very, very happy and I have to admit I had the makings of a buzz myself.

We now continued the tour by walking back over the same catwalk but now we looked over at the other wall for a moment and admired the bottling machine.  Then it was down to the gift shop.

The tour guide said that the winery sold 300,000 bottles of wine a year. Now I know how they manage this – happy tourists with a buzz on hitting the gift shop. Some guy from Ohio ordered an entire case to be shipped home. Everyone had two, three, four, and more bottles in their arms.

I am glad I was not on the tourist train when the rednecks decided to crack open a bottle and give their buzz a pick me up.

In fairness, the people at the San Sebastian Winery were very nice and I am sure their wine has earned its 300 medals competing against other muscadine wines. Some people like really sweet wine – unlike most regular wine drinkers.  The winery did not spring their high end $11.95 bottles on our tour group and those might have been good.

Right.

“This Stupid College is too backward to do anything!”

David was always frustrated that he had chosen to go to a college in the Bible Belt – even though he was a regular member of a local Baptist church.

“The rest of the world is doing all this cool stuff and we just sit here doing nothing!”

He was right. College students in the spring of 1974 were dropping their clothes and running around naked except where we lived at Valdosta State College. David was a Speech Major who really, really wanted to either be a political demagogue, a third world dictator, or a Baptist Preacher.

He stewed for several days and then, at the weekly fraternity meeting, he sprang a bizarre idea on us:  The Delta Sigma Phi Book of Records

“It’s like the 50’s out there. Students are doing things like swallowing goldfish and stuffing phone booths and setting stupid records. We can get a column in the VSC Spectator and publicize anyone who sets a record. People will call us and we’ll send someone over to observe them. It will be great publicity!”

There really wasn’t a lot of discussion. David was always going off on weird trips and he had enough followers (they thought they were his friends) to do the hard work. The rest of us could watch and enjoy the scene. We told him to go ahead.

Later that week, I came on one of those weird scenes. Some of my frat brothers were sitting on the steps of Georgia Hall watching some dweeb ride a bike around the Langdale Hall Circle in his quest to get the record for most trips around while riding with no hands. As no one had ever recorded such a feat, one or two trips should have done it, but he was after an impressive number that would discourage competitors. They sat there watching him, counting the laps, and cursing David.

Besides this guy, David had someone get the record for number of laps in the fountain, and another sang the entire 99 Bottles of Beer song while standing on one leg. He rejected the guy who said he’d shat a 10 inch turd and saved it in a jar.

Several of us gave him heck for suddenly having standards, but, really, we just wanted to watch David have to hold that jar.

His hidden agenda burst out Saturday night when he jumped out of a car in a back parking lot and then took off buck naked between Georgia Hall and Langdale Hall. David was tall, skinny, and had a head full of white blond hair. He covered his head in a variety of things including a ski mask, a visor, and a scarf. He crossed the circle and then took off heck for leather for a second car that was idling in front of Ashley Hall.

Along the way he shocked some Alpha Zee’s sober and almost knocked over a completely drunk ROTC guy who didn’t see it coming.

Enough people did see him to start a buzz. He turned up the volume in the newspaper column that week when he revealed that he had been contacted by a mysterious “Mad Streaker” and had observed the run across the Circle.  He even had a small interview with himself.  The Mad Streaker had a hallowed place in the Delta Sigma Phi Book of Records, which, by the way, David never bothered to publish.

David and his crew were hauled into the Dean of Student’s office and grilled. They stuck to their story of an anonymous caller. David got so wound up that he delivered a fatuous speech on the rights of the press and his right to observe anything he wanted without calling the Dean ahead of time. They all refused to fink on the next streaker.

We heard later that the Alpha Zee’s and the ROTC Guy were also hauled in to the inquisition. The guy  admitted that he was so drunk that later that same evening he saw God on the radio. Actually, he heard Canadian Commentator Gordon Sinclair and his Top 40 Hit “The Americans“. I understand he stood in front of the radio, crying, and holding a salute while his friends kept looking at the speaker trying to see if God was really in there.

Next Saturday, we took a call from some TKE’s who were just drunk enough to want to streak across Langdale Circle. A crew took off and parked and waited. Sure enough, three TKE’s in head gear came a running. So did the Campus Security Cop who had been posted to watch for copycats. He should have just watched. There was no way a 50 year old man was going to run down athletes in their early 20’s running out a massive adrenaline wave that propelled them to super human speed.

Their feat went down in the fictitious “Book of Records” as the first group streak and the running really started. People were calling us every night. Some were even streaking without calling us. Every time anyone streaked, fraternity brothers were hauled into the Office of the Dean for more grilling. They even started putting guys in second rooms for interrogation and trying to trip up their stories.

David was completely disgusted because no one was streaking during the day. He would erupt from time to time shouting, ” Bunch of wimps!”, to no one in particular. He was wanting to see spontaneous chaos and the world was letting him down.

As the novelty wore off and it became safer to walk around the campus at night without fear of being run down by naked aggression, David made his move.

It was eight fifty-five in the morning during the change of classes: one of the busiest times on campus. The Mad Streaker jumps out of a dark Green Chevy Nova in front of the College Union and starts running in his union suit in a long mad dash that took him in front of the Library, by Nevins Hall, down by Brown Hall, to end up running into the basement of Patterson Hall. Actually they called it S-21 in those days as Mr. Patterson wasn’t dead, yet.

It was like an unexpected punch. No one was ready for a naked man running by them for what was, for many, the first class of the day. Especially not the girl in David’s nine fifteen class who recognized him. I don’t know how she knew and I don’t want to know. In class, she kept looking over at him in a fetching mixture of embarrassment, excitement, and pure lust. Every time she looked, David became more agitated and would whisper at me:

“She knows it’s me! She knows it’s me! Oh My God, she saw me naked and she wants me! She’s such a skinny little bitch. Gross! She had never paid attention to me until today when she saw my weenie. She stared at it when I ran by. Oh my God, she’s looking again!”

You would think David would have realized that when you run naked across campus in the broad daylight people are going to see your prurient parts and some are going to admire them.

Back at the dorm, two of our original three TKE’s were on the phone and they had a newbie who wanted in on the action. A time was set and a rendezvous was agreed on — the Mad Streaker was down for his first group run. Calls were made to all the Frat houses and to the local media.

In no time, there was a mob at the College Union.  David had either been canny enough or lucky enough to pick the day that our Illustrious President, Dr. S Walter Martin, was in Atlanta for meetings. The Dean of Students had to make a decision on his own authority: should he try and break up a mob or let it run its course?

He knew Dr. Martin would go for the National Guard, clubs, and tear gas. S Walter was a very conservative Methodist Minister who meant business. He would want the National Guard, the guys who did at Kent State what many a rural southerner had said should have been done all along: shoot down hippie protesters like rabid dogs. Which is why no major anti-war riots were never held in the Old Confederacy. Luckily, S Walter was not in town and no one had to die for T &A.

The Dean knew that infuriating a mob would be a PR disaster. The word went out to the Campus Cops to do crowd control, keep people from getting hurt, and let the naked people run.

I became the Press Officer for the Mad Streaker, an item I have always taken care to omit from my resume. There was a balcony on the College Union overlooking the street and it was loaded up with TV and Radio guys. My job was to watch for the Green Chevy Nova and warn them so they could go live on the radio and get those old 16mm film cameras up to speed.

In the interim, some people drove a car down the drive hanging their bottoms out of the windows. They got some polite applause, but really, American Graffiti, was so last year. Bunch of wimps.

Finally, the Nova hove into view. Four guys left the car and began their run into history. Really. The same picture of their bottoms has graced our local newspaper more than once and was picked up by the Associated Press. The shot was taken by Joey Ivansco who is now an award winning photographer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I wonder why he doesn’t feature it on his website so I could rip it off?

Instead, I have had to do manual labor and scan a copy of this shot from the staff photographer of the VSC Yearbook, The Pine Cone.  David is on the far left. No, I did not bother to crop out his butt:

One place the picture was not welcome was on the television in Dr. S Walter Martin’s Atlanta hotel room. The one he was staying in because someone had stolen his car and kept him from driving back to Valdosta that very day. Conspiracy theorists are welcome to make of this what they wish.

After the historic run, the phones heated up and a major streak was scheduled for Langdale Circle that night. The Dean called the Georgia State Patrol and had them seal off the campus to anyone not carrying a VSC Student or Faculty ID.  They had plenty of customers to turn away, too.

The night was a smashing success. People just ran naked wild and most of them didn’t even bother with masks. At one point, David and his henchmen ran through in a perfect single file line. The Mad Streaker still had his mask on, but now it looked silly and out of place.

Only one person was hurt and that was a girl who was  hypnotized by the metronomic swing of the pendulum that belonged to my frat brother “Horse Hung” Cooper. Maybe she assumed he would swerve at the last moment. Brother Cooper was half blinded by his mask, running hard, did not see her, and did not know what he had hit.

The collision cold cocked her. She awoke to find Brother Cooper bent over her apologizing while all her friends bent over to get a better look at Brother Cooper. In the picture nearby, she is holding her injured arm while waiting for the EMT’s to take her away. Notice the curlers on her room mate. I say they are curlers, but they are the size of beer cans.

The crowd began to peter out around midnight because there were classes the next day.

Dr S Walter Martin returned in a white heat and ordered security to catch a streaker and charge him with crimes.  Being unable to run down anyone, they got a faculty member who wasn’t even there to sign the charges against some guy who streaked a baseball game that Sunday. The kid’s dad was wealthy, the frame-up job was quickly unmasked by his lawyers, and VSC quietly paid them all off. No matter. The arrest cooled jets that were already cooling.

After one last hurrah in the next edition of the paper, the Delta Sigma Phi Book of Records was laid to rest, unpublished, and only exists in the microfiche stack of the Spectator holdings at the VSU library. One guy continued to dutifully call in his records including being the first streaker to make a pit stop at the library fountain. Whoopee.

David went on to become a Baptist Preacher as he was too young to be a political demagogue and lacked the army that was required to stage a Third World Coup. He not only denies ever having run naked, he has even been known to pretend he does not even know his own fraternity brothers.

Wimp!

Yes, I did streak. I was on crutches at the time from a basketball injury so I was too slow to outrun 50 year old cops. I hopped naked around the circle at Lowndes Hall the next day when there weren’t any cops to chase me and not too many people to watch should I fall over and hurt my ego. I managed, barely, to avoid clinching the record for being the first streaker to skin the knee of his middle leg.

David is not is real name, but he is a Baptist Minister, and he does shun people from his past to the point of pretending he’s never met them.

If you found this post a bunch of fun, please consider hitting on the Humor Bloggers Icon and giving me a rating.

This week also saw my winning the Caption Contest over at The Soccer Mom Files. My award is posted somewhere to the left for now.  My thanks to Colonel Ray Hammel for the inspiration.

How I came to name a private body part

I don’t name a lot of things. My car has no name. My house has no name. None of my guitars has a name. Some people would think I was completely impoverished. No, make that many people.

The Hat Circa 1985

I first discovered the need to name when I took a liking to a certain hat many years ago. I wore that hat in what could be called true cowboy style — I never took it off. Well, I didn’t wear it to bed or in the shower, but everywhere else you found me you found it. People began asking me if my hat had a name. When I told them that the hat was nameless, they would begin what I called the hat dance.

First, they believed that the hat had a name and that I wasn’t sharing it. Then, they became angry because if they spent 90% of their waking hours with a hat, it would have a proper name and why couldn’t I be like other people and not be so weird. They would say that I had no heart and didn’t love my hat enough to give it a name. Just before they would walk away, there would be the acceptance that I had indeed resisted the urge to anthropomorphize my hat.

The question became a conversational gambit for the small talk impaired. Right after the “Hi, how are you” would come the inevitable “what’s your hat’s name?” I should have bought the hat business cards and taken to introducing it around as the hat-with-no-name. Instead, I came up with a cheaper solution — a smart-alecky reply.

“If I gave the hat a name, then it would have top billing!” I would protest. That witty reply fell flat about everywhere I dropped it, but I am nothing if not dogged in my loyalty to it.

The Death Trap 1974

My car didn’t have a name either, for a while. My friends drove Bessie’s and Edith’s and Sam’s while I made do with a generic no-name Volkswagen that had the nasty habit of opening its passenger door when I made a left-hand turn. It was during one of these exciting moments that my friend, Bill Postel, christened my car. After we stopped to wipe off the seat, he finished the job by naming my car “The Death Trap.”

Here was something my friends could appreciate — a man who had a name for his car. I knew I had arrived when one of the car-less girls at the college radio station came up and asked if she could borrow “The Death Trap” to run up to the convenience store. My car had a name. It must be friendly. Tell that to the guy who bought it from me only to have the engine toss a rod on the way home. Silly me, I neglected to tell him that the car had a name.

The belief that when you name something you have control over it comes to us from ancient times. In the Bible, God was always renaming people to show his ownership of them. Parents do the same thing to children. Listen to parents at the end of their persuasions as they scream a child’s full name to let them know that they really are serious this time.

I have no better example of this than the feckless male practice of naming their reproductive organs. Most men (and all women agree with them) have no control over it. None at all. So, they name it in the hope that the appearance of control is almost as good as the real thing. As you may have guessed by now, mine was nameless for many years.

I was unaware that I had neglected this vital rite of passage until one night when I was the designated

The Radio Sales Team

driver for a van-load of drunken radio people. My all-female crew was chattering away as we rolled back into town on US 41. One of them told of a recent floating party on the Suwannee River (and they were way down upon it, too) where the weekend had come to the obligatory skinny dipping event.

“All of them had names for their hoonies!” she screamed and all the others screamed, too.

Very quickly, eyes rested on the sober sales manager who was driving the van — the only male in the vehicle. Since they were drunk and the radio station was too small to have a sexual harassment policy, they asked. They didn’t believe. Surely a woman down the line had done for me what I had not done for myself. Things were getting uncomfortable, so I took control — I named it.

Right there in front of them, I named it after the station’s receptionist who was riding shotgun in the van. She admitted it to be a singular honor. She didn’t admit to much else after that. One of the other girls began teasing her over it, so I threatened to have a name change if the subject wasn’t dropped. Virility intact, I hastened back to town clutching the forlorn hope that they would be too drunk to remember my act of wild abandon.

It must have been the secondary alcohol fumes. How else do you explain that your member is named for a stranger you never knew in the biblical sense?

No. I’m not telling you. She got married. He has lawyers. I avoid tattoo parlors.

This piece originally appeared on my personal web space in about 1995 and has been offline for a year or more. It made the “Best of the Web Today” that week and can still be found on the way-back machine. I need to scrounge up a picture of the hat when it was younger — 1975 was when it was born. The picture of the radio crew shows some of the ladies that were on board the van that fateful night.

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It happens every year. Somewhere in America a Disk Jockey is getting drunk on the air for New Year’s Eve to demonstrate the dangers of drinking and driving.  Johnny Fever did it on an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati and that one episode is responsible for this annual event.

WKRP caused untold havoc in radio due to the incredible monkey-see, monkey-do, ethos of the industry.  If Johnny Fever had cut off his penis, some idiot would have been imitating him, live on-the-air, the very next week.

In the early 1980’s, my Program Director declared that I was to be the designated drunken monkey.

I would like to relate to you all the hilarious things I did and said while swilling Crown Royal on the company clock, but I can not remember a thing. All I can remember is afterward sitting on the window-sill of a dark green Camaro waving at no one in particular and singing at the top of my lungs as my designated driver tried to drive me home one handed while holding on to my leg to provide ballast.

I am told that they kept trying to show how drunk I was by getting me to read the weather. That did not work as I had long ago mastered the trick of reading the weather while stoned.

I picked up this skill in college working at an automated radio station.  There wasn’t much to do there but watch a computer play ten-inch reels of tape and smoke lots of pot. The only air work you did was changing the weather forecast tape every three hours. A year of that and you could flawlessly read the weather under any mental condition.

The Sunday after my New Years drunk, my Mom (a committed teetotler) was at church and everyone wanted to stop at her pew and talk about my show. Next thing my Dad knew, Mom had walked out of church and drove off leaving him to find his own way home.

Next year, it was my turn. The Program Director was the designated drunk and I got to enjoy watching him get smashed under the watchful gaze of a uniformed State Patrol officer who dutifully administered a Breathalyzer test 20 minutes after each drink.

The Program Director thought he was getting drunk too slowly and chugged a bottle of Jack Daniels.  That sent his blood alcohol reading zooming up at such an alarming rate that the State Patrol officer took away the bottle. He said that presiding over an alcohol poisoning would not bode well for his career.

Before the Program Director melted to the floor and passed out, I gave him drinking and driving public service announcement to read and rolled a tape on him.

After the show, I recorded the PSA over to a commercial cartridge and scheduled it for heavy rotation the rest of the night.  He sounded like a choir boy going through puberty as he dizzily reeled from falsetto to bass and all points in between. He even belched.

I doubt that any radio station in America has ever had a public service announcement become the number one requested song.  This one got calls for days and we DJ’s gleefully acceded to every request.

The self-administered coma lasted over 36 hours and he was so weak from it that he came down with a nasty cold and missed an entire week of work.

When he got back, he erased the PSA.  I kick myself for not having made a back-up copy for my own reel.   It would be approaching its millionth play on You Tube by now and there would be nothing he could do about it.

Somewhere in America a Program Director has ordered a Disk Jockey to get painfully drunk for New Year’s Eve.  Monkey see, Monkey do.