FROM THE CRATES
Remembering a day on the town for the staff of Atlanta’s own version of ‘WKRP’ from the crates Kelly McCoy is a veteran Atlanta broadcaster who writes about the days popular music only came on vinyl records, which often were stored in crates. The best pair in Atlanta. I’m talking about two of Atlanta’s best radio stations ever, WQXI AM 790 and WQXI FM 94.1. The two — known as “Quixie” and “94Q” — broke the molds, wrote the playbooks … add your favorite cliché here. If you ever watched the TV show “WKRP in Cincinnati,” that fictional radio station was patterned after WQXI. I could write five columns on Quixie and 94Q, but for this piece I’ll share an adventure that wasn’t typical of radio stations then, and completely out of the universe in today’s world of radio.
In those days, to motivate us for big ratings periods, The Big Guy, Gerald S. Blum, known as Jerry, always did something to motivate the staff to do their absolute best on the air, and any time we represented the stations. Quite often, this would entail having a prominent speaker join us at a fancy restaurant. For example, we once were wined and dined at The Coach and Six restaurant, with U.S. Sen. Max Cleland as our “guest motivator” for the evening. In September 1983, the onair staff for both stations got a memo to mark our calendars for a special day when Blum would gather a group of motivational speakers at hotel in the airport area. Jerry would provide transportation. This meant limousines of course. Radio was show business in those days and limos were a treat, but not uncommon. On “motivation day” three limos carried us south. As we got closer to the airport, we noticed we’d passed the last hotel of any size with a conference room. Is Jerry
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flying us somewhere? The “new” airport had plenty of room for three fine rides to pull up and unload. Jerry hustled us inside like a school busload of excided students and shouts, “Let’s go…follow me!” In a few moments we’re in the Delta Crown Room giddy for this unknown adventure. After he calmed us down and we were seated, Jerry handed each of us an envelope with our name handwritten on the outside. Once he told us to open them, we were in complete shock and over the top excited about what
we were about to do. There was a photocopy of a personal note, handwritten by Jerry. “I just wanted to say thank you for busting your butts
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