One of my radio pranks

As a long time radio guy I’ve pretty much done it all. I’ve been a disc jockey on numerous formats (Top 40, classic rock, rock of the ‘90s, oldies, chicken rock, country-western, standards, beautiful music, Broadway), talk show host, sportstalk show host, movie critic, newsman, field reporter, play-by-play, disaster coverage anchor, charity radiothon anchor, host of swap meets, and even co-host of a car talk show (despite the fact that I know nothing about cars).

And then, a few years ago, I did traffic reports.

At this point, let me pause and say part of the fun of radio is pulling pranks – either on other jocks, other stations, or the listeners. But for the most part these are done in small markets. There is too much money involved and too much scrutiny to be pulling shit on major stations in Los Angeles, New York, and Boca. If you get fired in Modesto you can probably find a comparable job. If you get canned in Chicago that’s a different story. Of course, I never adhered by that rule.  Just this weekend I shared a prank I pulled once in San Francisco.  Gee, and you wonder why I got fired from so many stations.  Okay, back to today’s post, but this paragraph will tie in.

From 2008-2010 you might remember I co-hosted Dodger Talk with Josh Suchon on KABC, Los Angeles. It was a fun gig and I only left to do play-by-play for the Mariners. In 2009, one of the salesmen at KABC sold a nightly traffic report to be done during each Dodger pre-game show. Traffic reports are big deals in LA where everyone commutes by car (despite the subway system that no one knows about and rarely goes anywhere anyone would want to go). Stations in LA boast “Traffic on the 2’s”, “Traffic on the 4’s”, “Traffic on the 8’s.” Some stations have helicopters. Smarter ones have helicopter sound effects.

So KABC sells a traffic report in the Dodger pre-game show, but who’s going to do it? The Dodgers announcers sure aren’t. I’d like to see the salesman who asks Vin Scully if he wouldn’t mind reporting on fender benders. Since I hosted Dodger Talk after the game they thought, why not dump it on Ken? I graciously declined. They said they’d pay me double my salary. I graciously accepted.

How do you do traffic reports? There are websites you log onto that have the latest traffic info for every major city. I’d log on, enter my password, click “Los Angeles” and cut and paste the most pressing traffic slowdowns. I asked the salesman how long the report should be and he said, “I don’t care. A minute. Forty-five seconds. Whatever. All I give a shit about is that you read the Sprint commercial at the end of it.”

So that’s what I did. It took maybe five minutes to prepare and a minute to deliver. I was usually reporting from the “Massive high-tech space age KABC traffic center sequestered in a secret location.”

Doing this was no problem during home games because I was at the stadium, but when the team was on the road and I wasn’t traveling, I’d have to go to the station to do them. I wanted to record a week’s worth at once and just air them over the course of seven days but that idea didn’t go over very well.

But I always wondered – was anybody actually listening to these traffic reports? One evening, late in the season, the Dodgers were in San Francisco and I was at the station preparing for my big minute. I was hanging out with Howard Hoffman, the production director, and I suggested a way to see if listeners paid any attention. He laughed and said, “you wouldn’t dare.” (This is where that paragraph on pranks pays off.) I gave him a sly smile and headed for my booth.

I opened the report by saying, “If you’re going to the Dodger game tonight, there’s a fifteen minute delay on the Golden Gate Bridge, the 880-Nimitz in the east bay reports slow and go from Concord…”

I just gave the San Francisco traffic report. Super straight, as if this were a San Francisco station. And I tagged it with the Sprint commercial.

Howard came into the booth hysterical. Now we waited to see how many phone calls we got. This was 6:45 in the evening, during the peak afternoon commute.

So how many did we get? I bet you’re ahead of me. That’s right. None. Not a single one. Zero. The big goose egg. No one from the station ever called me. No one from the Dodgers. Nothing.

The following year there was no traffic. I hope Sprint took that money and used it to buy another repeater tower.