Merry Christmas To Me

Christmastime at 101-Q was underway. The staff Christmas photo was out and the yuletide music was being filtered into the playlist. I put a Rudolph's red nose on the hood of my Blue Beast to display my festive mood. We were busy recording holiday commercials with the weather getting unusually cold for Coastal Georgia and it actually felt like Christmas to me.

The first week of December was completed and Dick approached me as I exited the studio after my show and asked “have you got a minute? Come to my office.” I didn’t think much about it. Dick's office was a place where we all wandered in and out of continually. He had taken me on some sales calls to meet some of our advertisers in person. I was heavily involved in producing a lot of our radio ads for a diverse client list. Maybe he wanted to discuss ads. Perhaps that’s what it was, I briefly surmised.
Dick closed the door and motioned to a chair facing his desk. I sat and he went right to the point. “I’m going to have to cut you loose. I can give you two more weeks and that’s it.” I repeated what he said. Cut me loose? He continued that I had been a valued member of the station, but the ad dollars weren’t there. He said they had to let my News Lady Linda go too. They couldn’t afford the morning show. If I was numb upon reading the Kinosian critique, I was crushed by this news. It was so disappointing because I felt like we had some momentum on the show with a feeling of real progress.

I left the station like a dead man walking. Understandably, they said Linda didn’t take it well. She was very talented and an absolute joy to work with. I was really going to miss her.

This news was a true blindside. 101-Q was the number one radio station on the Georgia Coast. How can a station of that kind of stature have money troubles? This was how bad the economy was in 1981. The Q was my second station in a row devastated by a lack of ad dollars. I will always remember how painful it was to pay $1.29 a gallon to gas up my fuel hog Pontiac. The economy was really wrecked. This stop on my radio road went from stellar accommodations on the beach to an impending scramble out of town.

I went directly to The Bank Saloon to wallow in my misery. Pembroke was the Bartender on duty and he recognized that something was real off with me right away when I walked in. I told him of my sudden demise at the station. As customary in happier times, he dropped a quarter in the jukebox and hit the buttons for “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” by Hugo Montenegro. When that song played, the shot glasses and the Cuervo Gold Tequila came right up. I pounded my shot and smacked the glass on the wooden bar. Pem poured me another and leaned closer to me and said “you’re going to be alright.”

I pounded a few more and by the time the night was done, I was in no shape to do a Morning Show the next day. My trusted friend, Terry Grove covered me and I gathered enough courage to do two more weeks at Coastal Georgia’s 101-Q. Dick had enough confidence in me to let me go and do those weeks and exit with dignity and some sort of pride. The hard part would be to actually do those two weeks and not know what was next. “Although it’s been said many times, many ways…Merry Christmas to you.” Merry Christmas to me. I’m fired.