Expo Saturday

The WNEP Home & Backyard Expo is underway at the Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre Township.

There are so many people to thank, who made my Friday morning visit a pleasant one.

First, so many nice people came up to say hello.

Our art department put together some really cool signs.

The people at Creekside Gardens provided a great space at center court, where I spent the majority of my time.

So many vendors and exhibitors showed tons of creativity in designing their displays.

And, it's free.

My weekend work schedule is an odd one, so my visit was limited to Friday morning.  The Expo, however, goes all weekend long.

All the information you need is at www.wnep.com.

Unfinished Business

We'e back on Daylight Saving Time, and I didn't write my usual pre time change rant this year.  Here's the abridged version.  Time changes are an archaic concept, and they should be abolished.

It looks like the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees saga is the never ending story of 2012.  The latest item made me laugh and cry at the same time.  One of the Lackawanna County commissioners is asking the team's management company, Mandalay to "begin building confidence."  Hey, last time I checked, Lackawanna County still owns the team.  Mandalay works for us, not the other way around.  Have we forgotten that?

Former State Senator Bob Mellow was once one of the most powerful people in the state of Pennsylvania.  Now, he's an admitted thief.

Who was minding the store in the Wilkes-Barre Area School District?  The former solicitor, a man civilally accused of stealing thousands, maybe millions of dollars, billed the district more than $ 300,000.  For what?

Those who allowed Mellow and the solicitor to get away with it for so long are just as guilty.

Wow, am I sick of Peyton Manning!  He showed a lot of class in the news conference last week, where he separated from the Indianapolis Colts.  If I ran an NFL team, would I sign him?  No.  It's an easy call.  He's a 36 year old with four neck surgeries, and there's still plenty of recovery time ahead.  I'd rather take my chances drafting a quarterback out of college, and it's a lot less expensive.

I took some new photographs for the blog last week, and I also spent a little time going through the archives.  You'll see all that stuff in the weeks to come.  Also, the 20th anniversary of "The Great Implosion" in Scranton is approaching, and I have a few days of photographs and stories dedicated to that event in the queue.

March Madness is here.  I'll get interested in the NCAA tournament if an underdog team makes it in to the final rounds.  Please, I don't want to hear about your brackets.

In Touch

I will never understand the cell phone/text/Twitter culture.

Case in point:  last week.  I developed a massive afternoon headache. It's happened before.  My brain was sending me a sign that I was spending too much time reading, and too much time in front of a computer monitor.  I had to get out for a while, so I decided to stroll around a local mall.

It was a nice trip.  I saw a few people I know, and a found a couple decent sales.

As I walked around the mall and its stores, I was struck by the number people looking down at a smart phone, or holding a phone up to their ear.

It wasn't just kids.  People my age, and older, had phones clutched in their hands.

I'm sure a few of those calls were important.  The rest?  The conversation could have waited.

I went to the mall to escape for a little while.  The cell phone junkies were happy to remain captive.

Six Months

The actual Tropical Storm Lee flood lasted only a couple days.  It was six months ago, and we'll feel the effects for years.

There is one place where the recovery is moving along nicely.  Below is a photo of Holy Rosary school and church I took in September of last year.  Stephenson Street, and the rest of the neighborhood was a mess because the Lackawanna River spilled over its banks.

The sidewalk was covered with items ruined by the flooding.  Volunteers and clean up crews were saving what they could.

As for the school itself, it needed a lot of work to get it back to normal, and it would take time.  The Diocese of Scranton moved the 280 students into the old Saint Mary's School in Avoca, just a few miles away.

Yesterday, the clean up was officially complete.

I took the photo you see above about 8 AM yesterday.  Some parents brought their children to school, in Duryea, for the first time in six months.  School buses brought the rest.

I had a chance to look around inside the building.  The basement cafeteria and a classroom were re-done, and they look great.  Upstairs areas looked the way they did before the flood, and everyone seemed happy.

The flood cleanup is taking longer in other parts of our area, and I realize that not everyone has the resources of the Catholic Diocese of Scranton.  There is a long and difficult road ahead.

Nostalgia

I've become fond of one of those local indoor flea markets here in our area.  I don't visit often, and I rarely buy anything.  So why do I go?  It's like a museum of my childhood.  I often see books I read as a kid, toys and games I had, records, old radios and tv's, appliances, etc.  So many memories...

During a visit last week, I spent some time looking at a couple old Coke vending machines.  The one on the left looks like the one we had in my junior high school.  Yes, we were allowed to drink soda in school back then.  Imagine the horror!  Are schools that much better now because kids can't have a Coke between classes?

I apologize for the quality of the photos.  They are from my camera phone.

It was the machine on the right that really caught my eye, and not for the Coke.

Take a look at the bumper sticker on the side.  As you know, I'm a sucker for old radio stuff.

Someone slapped a WBQW bumper sticker on the side.  It has to be at least 30 years old.  It was a sticker promoting the station's Notre Dame football games.  It was a nice move.  I'm not sure if WARM or WILK had the Penn State games back in those days.  Notre Dame was the consolation prize-- the games you carried if you couldn't get Penn State.

WBQW is the old WSCR-AM 1320, a station licensed to Scranton.  The studios and towers were on North Keyser Avenue.  Both are long gone.  AM 1320 is off the air, never to return.  The call letters now belong to an all sports station in Chicago.  WSCR was a top 40 type station for a long time.  It had a string of different owners and formats before going off the air, for good.

WSCR was a nice little station for a long time, and it had a loyal audience in the Scranton area.  It was hampered by a less than stellar signal-- 1,000 watts during the day, dropping to 250 at night.  The great Tim Karlson worked there before moving to WARM, WBRE, and WNEP.  My good friend and Mid Valley classmate Jerry Padden is also an alumnus.

Management dropped the heritage WSCR call letters in an attempt to reach out beyond Scranton-- a more regional approach.  It wasn't a bad idea, at least on paper.  Unfortunately, the station didn't have the signal strength to be a regional powerhouse.  It didn't work.

I guess that's why there are so many flea markets locally.  It's the adventure.  You never know what you're going to find.

Mr. Lucky

I've always said I've been luckier than I deserved.  You'll hear that phrase a lot in a couple weeks, when I have a few blogs dedicated to the 20th anniversary of "The Great Implosion" in downtown Scranton.

Today, a little more history.

I lucked on to a part time job at WARM in April 1981.  It wasn't much-- just keeping an eye on the controls while the religion and public affairs shows ran on the weekend overnight shift.  A friend who already worked there reccommended me for the job.  I passed the interview.  It appeared the number one requirement was a willingness to work weekend overnights for very little money.  Nonetheless, it was a foot in the door, and I was thrilled to have the job.

WARM was number one when I arrived, but it was slipping badly.  FM was coming on strong.  The station was tired and stale.  A couple years after I started, WARM changed program directors.  In came Bill Kimble, a Sunbury native, who last worked at the legendary WHAM in Rochester, NY.

Bill saw the talk radio revolution coming to AM radio, and he added some talk to the station's line up.  He took some of the jocks and paired them up to take phone calls, and read newsy little features.  Some of the pairings worked.  Most didn't.  There was a mix and match thing going on for a while.  The audience never knew who they would hear and when, outside of Harry West in the morning.   It was talk for the sake of talk, not talk because you had something important to say.   It was all wrong.  A few of the guys left for other stations, and I don't blame them.  It was a difficult atmosphere.  I will give Kimble credit for NOT cleaning house.  He could have fired everyone and started over.

Bill loved Larry King.  At the time, King was doing an overnight call in show, and it was the "hot" property of the time.  Another station in town had the rights to the show, which was distributed by a network called the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Let me divert a bit.  At one time, Mutual was THE radio network.  It had a strong line up of shows and newscasts.  By the early 80's, Mutual was owned by Amway and it was a wreck, bordering on unlistenable.  Larry King was the only thing Mutual had going for it.

To pry Larry King away from the other station in town, WARM and Kimble agreed to air a lot of Mutual's features, plus network newscasts at the top and bottom of the hour.  Part of WARM's legendary strength was its news department.  The audience tuned in for live and local.  When they got non local and network, they started tuning out.  Eventually, a lot of the Mutual stuff was dropped, but the damage was done.

Kimble was right in instituting some changes at WARM.  Change should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.  Kimble pushed for too much, too fast.  Listenership wasn't the only thing that declined.  The station lost some good employees.  Morale was shot.  Kimble was replaced after two years.  Two long years.  There was a decent revovery in the late 80's, under a program director named John Hancock, but the glory days were never to return.

After leaving WARM, Kimble had a very successful 14 year run at WPEN in Philadelphia.

Bill Kimble died last week.  He was 81. 

Bill Kimble was a nice man, and was blessed with a great voice.  We disagreed on  lot of things, but he was always willing to listen to opposing viewpoints.  That's rare in a boss.   Bill Kimble had the onions to come and make changes to a legendary, albeit sleepy radio station.   He made many positive contributions to broadcasting, and my sympathy to his family and friends.

I thought about Bill a lot after his passing.  It came down to this barometer.  If we ran in to each other, would I offer a handshake of friendship?  Would I enjoy bumping in to him?  Yes. Yes, I would.  There are some former bosses who wouldn't receive the privilege, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual.

One of my favorite Bill Kimble stories goes like this--a Phillies game was rained out one evening, and I re-scheduled all the commercials that were supposed to run in Phillies game into regular programming.  I saved the station a few bucks that night.  Bill left me a nice note.  The next night, I was walking in to the building in Avoca as Bill was leaving.  I thanked him for the nice note.  Bill replied "Any time, Brian."  I let it go, not getting angry or upset.  It was just Bill being Bill.

As for WARM, it had a succession of programmers.  I left in 1991, and after I departed, there was a sad parade of formats and owners.  You now need a microscope to find it in the ratings.  WARM was never going to pull the numbers it had in the 60's and 70's, but I will always believe there's a lot of wasted potential here.

Bad Photography Sunday: The River

I know I've been sticking a lot of river shots on the blog this year, but fear not, there are different things in the queue in the coming weeks.

This is a late winter shot of an ice-less and snow-less Lackawanna River in Scranton.  The Albright Avenue Bridge is downstream and at the far left of the photo.

Bad Photography Saturday: Morning

It's one of my favorite places to play with my camera-- Nesbitt Park, looking back over the Susquehanna River toward downtown Wilkes-Barre.

I took this one on a recent morning-- when the late winter sun was hitting the Citizens Bank building and the Market Street Bridge.

It's always been my goal to get here in the afternoon, when the sun would be at my back, and giving Wilkes-Barre's downtown a golden glow.

Again

Broadcasting can be a dangerous activity.

During a recent birth control discussion, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh called a woman a "slut."

Rush has apologized.  Still, he's lost advertisers and stations.  Is the apology enough?  I'm not so sure.

I'm not defending the comments of Mr. Limbaugh, but he has three hours of air time every day.  That's a lot of opportunity to say something regrettable.

Rush's comment angered a lot of people, and rightfully so.   You can forgive a momentary slip.  The man has a history of saying awful things.

I used to be a big fan.  Whether or not you agree with his politics, Rush Limbaugh is a skilled broadcaster who produces entertaining radio.  Limbaugh changed several years ago.  He used to playfully poke fun at his opponents.  Now, he's just downright mean and nasty.

Don Imus knows a lot about trouble.  He lost a couple of jobs when he called a college women's basketball team "nappy headed hos."  He should have been fired.  I can forgive an isolated mistake.  Like Limbaugh, Imus has a history of saying mean and hurtful things.  Imus had the brass ones to criticize Limbaugh on a recent morning.

I've seen people get in major trouble over Twitter.  While Twitter can be a valuable tool, it is the internet equivalent of an open microphone, without the benefit of a delay system.

You've heard me use this line before, but these days, it's not what you say that's important.  It's what you don't say that really matters.

Are You Kidding Me?

For an organization constantly denying it plans to move the team out of town permanently, it's a bizarre, and some say, insulting move.

The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees will be the "Empire State Yankees" for the 2012 season.  The team will play most of its games in Rochester while the stadium in Moosic is being renovated.

By the way, I dropped by the stadium yesterday to take a look around.  Other than boulders blocking the driveways, there is zero activity.  If this place is going to be ready for the 2013 season, they'd better get on their horse.

The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees have been struggling at the gate.  Attendance was awful, so now, insult is added to injury by changing the name of the team.  It's not the way to keep fans.  This is just another public relations blunder by Mandalay, the organization that manages the team.  This is the same bunch criticized by the past county commissioners for a lousy promotions schedule.

On top of that, there's the arrogance of this bunch.  Newswatch 16 reported that Mandalay never bothered to inform the Lackawanna County commissioners and the stadium authority of the "temporary" name change.

This is clearly an attempt to get the fine people of Rochester, NY to come to the games and buy merchandise.  I get that.

What about fans and taxpayers down here-- the ones who paid for the stadium, the ones who will pay for renovations, and the ones who supported the team?  That team is still ours.

I can't wait for that big "welcome home" party, if it ever happens.