Hot CDs

By Sharon Bass

It was a first of its kind for the Hamden PD yesterday when they raided Urban Clothing at 897 Dixwell Ave. and seized 4,000 pirated CDs. The crime is a felony.

"It's the first time we've focused an investigation on this type of crime," said Deputy Chief Tom Wydra.

Stacey Houston, 37, of New Haven and owner of Urban Clothing, was arrested at 1 p.m. for manufacturing, distributing and selling music CDs. Wydra said the crime is a felony because over 1,000 CDs were confiscated. Houston was allegedly burning them in the store's basement and selling them for $5 apiece.

He was released on $2,500 bond and his store, which sells other stuff like clothes, is open for business.

Wydra said the department received information about the pirated CDs and an investigation by the street crime unit and the Music Industry Association of America ensued. The industry loses between $300 million and $500 million a year because of people like Houston, he said.

The deputy chief said he didn't know how long Houston had been selling the illegal CDs. He's due in Meriden Superior Court Jan. 13.

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Only 5 Days Left

The town's holiday candelabra -- just lit last night for the first time -- stands close to the holiday tree.

Words and pictures by Sharon Bass

On the third night of Hanukkah, Rabbi Menachem Piekarski lit the town menorah. A small group of tiny kids to very senior citizens huddled before him on Dixwell Avenue as he sang Jewish prayers into the cold air. He then said, "Let's get warm!" And everyone dashed up the street to the Miller Library to party.

Rabbi Piekarski lights the menorah. Brothers Driebeek: Kyle, 5, and Julian, 7, of Hamden.

A room inside was decorated for the eight-day Jewish festival of lights. Three arts and crafts tables were set up for children. There was a table of latkes (potato pancakes), applesauce and doughnuts. Rabbi Piekarski lit another menorah and the room filled with melodic prayer as a bunch of energetic toddlers munched on huge doughnuts, promising to make them even more hyper.

Piekarski is with the international organization Chabad, which brings Judaism to Jews, such as last night's menorah lighting and Hanukkah party. Three years ago, the town joined with Chabad to put on the Hanukkah celebration.

Hey, Sy Hatkin! Your applesauce is about to run off your plate.

The highlight of the party was Jewish "Jeopardy." Older kids and adults played. Squares of paper were taped to a wall, five across and four down. The top row of squares bore the name of a category: Miracles, Menorah, Etc., just like in the real game. Underneath were the numbers: 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600.

"I'll take Menorah for 200," called out Ira Caplan, a Republican who unsucessfully challenged Democrat Curt Leng for the 5th District Council seat this year.

Levi Jaroslaw, 21 months, seems to be serenading his chocolaty doughnut. He lives with his parents, Joseph and Holly, on Washington Road.

Mayor Craig Henrici joined the outdoor lighting and stopped at the party for a spell. He ate one latke and said he is somewhat accustomed to Jewish holidays because his brother Ken Henrici (school super for Wallingford) married a Jewish woman.

The rabbi and the mayor.

Asked to take another latke already, the mayor said he couldn't. "My son wants pizza, so I'm off."

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December 22, 2005

Two Arrested, So Far, in Fatal Choking Case

By Sharon Bass

On June 11, a woman who was mentally retarded and in state custody was inappropriately left alone in a van in the Stop & Shop parking lot at 2335 Dixwell Ave, and began choking on a hamburger. Rosemary Hicock, 52, died the next day at the Hospital of St. Raphael.

Yesterday, Hamden police arrested Kimberly Rivnack, 40, of Waterbury, charging her with manslaughter and reckless endangerment with a bond of $125,000. The day before, Barbara Williams, 46, also of Waterbury, was arrested on the same charges and bond. Both women were state workers assigned to care for Hicock.

They allegedly left her alone in the vehicle for about an hour while they shopped, knowing there was food in the van, that Hicock ate way too fast and had choked on previous occasions, requiring constant supervision around food.

"There was an actual jurisdiction issue because it happened in Hamden," said Capt. Robert Maturo, explaining why Hamden is investigating. Hicock lived at the Southbury Training School and was in the custody of the state Department of Mental Retardation.

Hamden police have not concluded its investigation. "There were three people on the scene so there's a likelihood of a third arrest," said Maturo.

According to reports, the DMR has fired the three workers.

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December 21, 2005

A Cook For All Eaters

Veteran chef John Aftosmes runs St. Ann's Soup Kitchen.

Story and photos by Sharon Bass

At 7, he stood on a wooden soda box in front of the grill at his father's restaurant in Pennsylvania. He flipped patties and dogs. Sixty-four years later, John Aftosmes is still cooking for the masses but he no longer needs a box. He's a big man, in more than one way.

After a long career as a chef, Aftosmes hung up his apron only to be pulled out of retirement two years ago to run Hamden's only soup kitchen in the basement of St. Ann's Church at 930 Dixwell Ave. The affable man who seems at least 10 years his junior not only makes sure that poor people get a good meal Monday through Friday, he also makes sure that his guests at St. Ann's are treated with respect.

"It takes a lot of nerve to walk down those steps to come in here," he said during a recent interview at the soup kitchen. "So I try not to ask anybody questions that would put them on the spot." Such as where they live, where or if they work, why they come to the kitchen. It was founded in 1989 by St. Ann's former priest Father Bonadies.

St. Ann's dining room, ready for Christmas dinner (in the far back is a holiday tree).

Aftosmes and the other two paid staffers -- Marshall Jackson and Pat Poole -- will serve a Christmas dinner this Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. They've put up a Christmas tree in the dining room of long blue tables and chairs. They've also got a battalion of volunteers who will help serve the holiday meal.

"It really was a big awakening for me to know there's such a large need for this operation," said Aftosmes. "You think, 'Why are they coming in here?' And you realize they can't get enough work."

Most of his guests work, he said. They're underemployed and underpaid. Men come in wearing tool belts and work boots. "These are people who have jobs, maybe work two to three days a week and earn minimum wage," said Aftosmes. And then there are the elderly, the children, the disabled, the homeless who frequent St. Ann's soup kitchen.

About 100 a day come for lunch. It's busiest at the end of the month when food stamps and money run out. Sixty percent are men; about 5 percent are elderly; 3 percent are homeless or have addiction problems.

John Carusone walked in during the interview. Not the former mayor but his cousin, who lives on Blue Hills Avenue. He was dropping off some non-edible donations. He said he'd be back the next day with Christmas dolls and stuffed animals.

"It's helping out a lot of people. I'm the kind of guy if someone says, 'I'm going to throw something in the dump,' I can find someone who needs it," said Carusone.

Donations are always in demand, said Aftosmes. He rattled off a list: nonperishable canned food -- "We have so much pasta and rice we try to discourage it" -- toothpaste, toothbrushes, shaving cream and razor blades, shampoo, soap. "Anything you'd have in your medicine cabinet in your bathroom," he said.

Volunteers are also needed to prep and serve meals. Most of the food is donated by area schools, said Aftosmes. "The schools in this area have been super to us," he said. He also gets victuals from the Connecticut Food Bank in East Haven every Wednesday morning.

And monetary contributions are always appreciated to help pay the utilities and salaries and to buy stuff Aftosmes can't get at the food bank, like aluminum foil, garbage bags, Clorox and ammonia.

St. Ann's kitchen is a far departure from what Aftosmes was used to. After leaving his native Pennsylvania, he was a chef at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md. Next job was assistant chef at the DeSoto Hotel in Arkansas. Then he moved to Connecticut to cook at the Ramada Inn in North Haven (he and his wife moved to Hamden in 1972). His second-to-last cooking job was with Servamation, a food service company that ran corporate and college cafeterias.

"After that I was told I was overqualified because I was 55," he said. "I was bitter."

So he switched fields and ran a small cleaning service. And then retired. Until his priest at St. John The Baptist Church on Dixwell Avenue in New Haven -- just two blocks from St. Ann's -- told him the Hamden soup kitchen needed a manager.

"I haven't regretted it at all," Aftosmes said. "First of all you're fulfilling a need. I'm 71 and I feel like I'm still productive. You wake up every morning and you know you're here."

Asked how much longer he'll toil at St. Ann's, the veteran chef said, "As long as I'm able, I'll be down here."

It's not for the cooking, he made clear. It's for the people. He's got five regulars who always sit at the first table by the door. Aftosmes calls them his board of directors. They talk politics and current events.

A couple of days ago a man and woman descended the dark steps to the soup kitchen to offer donations. Aftosmes said he recognized the woman but said nothing. "She said, 'Do you remember me?' I said, 'Yeah.' I remember her coming down here to eat and now she was here giving back.

"When you're in the workforce you're in your own little world," he said of his previous jobs. At St. Ann's, Aftosmes's world has greatly expanded.

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December 19, 2005

Out of the Mouth of Radio Legend Bud Finch

Finch. Photo/J.R. Morton

The Hamden octogenarian talks about the evolution of the medium to which he dedicated his life

By J. R. Morton

Hamden's Bud Finch began his radio career in 1939 on WELI while a student at Yale. In 1996 -- when the corporate takeover of WELI occurred -- he retired from radio, having spent 60 years at that station, often developing innovative programming that remains a mainstay on contemporary radio.

However, he hasn't completely abandoned the medium. Every Saturday from 10 a.m.-11 a.m. on WQUN 1220 AM, you can catch him on "Once Upon A Bandstand."

Finch was born on New Haven's Dixwell Avenue in a house that no longer exists. He graduated from Yale in 1940, just in time to join the military. He was one of the first called when the Selective Service reactivated the draft, anticipating America's involvement in World War II.

I've been "interviewing" him for about four years. Usually we talk over lunch in his Mount Carmel home. What follows are his reminiscences of radio and his place in its history.

"We were called The Swing Shop. We had a trio and a singer, Dave Wrinn, who sang like Bing Crosby, who was very big at the time. I played piano. We had a very nice little show at 7 o'clock in the evening, one or two nights a week, which was on WELI, on the second floor, at 221 Orange St. in downtown New Haven. WELI is no longer located in New Haven. Where the studios were, there is a vacant lot and a small building where they have recording for the blind. That's where I do my volunteer work. It's interesting how the cycle goes. They say you can't go back, but you do.

"I had WELI on my mind when I was at Yale, and I had done a little radio but I wasn't really thinking about it seriously. One day, I was going down Orange Street and the WELI sign on the door caught my eye. I went upstairs and applied for a job. They didn't have any openings, but in talking with them and the fact that I had played there, I had some contact with the program director, who was Charlie Wright, and the station manager was Jim Milne.

"They were looking for someone to take the place of their regular organist Marion Reynolds, who was going on vacation. In those days everything was live. Every morning WELI had a program of live organ music from the Paramount Theatre. I told them that I could play the organ. As a matter of fact, I had played the organ only once in my life. Jim Milne and Charlie Wright said that they would have to hear me, so we made a date to get together in two weeks. In the meantime, I went over to the Paramount Theatre. Jim Darby was the manager of the Paramount. I asked him if I could practice on the Paramount organ. There was a great, big Wurlitzer with multiple keyboards that rose out of the orchestra pit on hydraulics.

"Eddie Weaver, who was very famous at the time, would play every show between the movies and the live performances on the stage. And there were sing-a-longs, when the audience would sing while the lyrics were projected onto the movie screen. The Wurlitzer organ was massive. It was all white and Eddie Weaver was dressed in a white suit. And when the spotlight was put on him, it was spectacular.

"Jim Darby let me practice on the organ in the morning for two weeks and I passed the audition. I played the organ Monday through Friday on WELI, for the two weeks that Marion Reynolds was on vacation. That endeared me to the management, so that shortly after that when they had an opening for an announcer, I got the job. That was the summer of 1939.

"In those days, when you were an announcer, you did everything. You might do news, you might do music shows or you might go on location. The term disc jockey hadn't been thought of. Records were played, but not very often. The legality of playing phonograph records over the air hadn't been established. Most radio stations were playing transcriptions, which were 16-inch plastic discs that revolved at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. All other records were 78s.

"When I got out of Yale in 1940, I worked at WELI briefly. I also had a band that played at the Hotel Taft in New Haven, which was the most elegant spot in town. We played in the Colonnade Room, which was a basement nightclub. We had a good band and we were very well received with capacity crowds. Between working at the radio station and the band, everything was going very well. When my number came up and I was drafted into the service, I tried to get into a branch of the service that would be exciting. It was in 1941, and I was working the Sunday afternoon shift. A man came in and said he had a public service announcement he wanted us to broadcast. We used to do a lot of community announcements without giving the content much thought. The usual notices about an organization having a meeting or a supper, or a church is having a musical event. Radio has done those over the years.

"The man wanted me to put his announcement over the air right away, and he left. I read the thing over a couple of times and I was a little suspicious. There was something about it that struck me as being not just right, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I couldn't reach anyone from management, so I called the police. The police said they would have someone call me back, and it turned out to be the FBI. They came up and wanted to look at the announcement, and they said that I had done the right thing by not putting the announcement on the air because it was part of a German spy ring that was trying to sabotage the largest defense plant in the New Haven area, Winchester-Western, which was supplying guns and ammunition to our allies prior to the United States' involvement in the second world war.

"The FBI believed that the announcement was, in reality, a coded message that was intended to reach German infiltrators. The agents said that I had done a great service, and then they asked if I would like to talk to them about working for them. They gave me an address on Church Street. The following week I went to that address. It turned out to be an office with a blind door, and when I got inside it was the local office of the Counter-Intelligence Corp., very well disguised.

"Several agents and I spoke for a while and they asked if I'd like to go to Boston, to the regional office. So I went to Boston and I signed numerous waivers, essentially discharging the government from all responsibility. If my parents had known what I was doing, they would have killed me. But I didn't tell anyone. I wasn't supposed to. I completed the exam, then my number came up and I went off to Camp Devens where I waited to hear from counterintelligence. When I did hear from them, it was a rather cryptic message turning me down. They were looking for someone who spoke Italian. No one knew at the time that the plan was to go into Anzio and complete the invasion of Italy. The agents wanted someone who could go behind the lines and could speak the language like a native. If I had gone I would have probably gotten killed as half of the spies did.

"Instead of being a spy behind enemy lines, I ended up in the ground forces in the meteorological section and doing reconnaissance, flying small planes, reporting artillery fire, which was something I didn't enjoy. The planes were unarmed, little one-engine Piper Cubs, flying a thousand feet above the guns. Very, very exposed.

"I wanted to be transferred into the Air Force because Glenn Miller, a very popular band leader, had taken over the Air Force music program. Miller had his organization set up so that he had a front line orchestra and a backup orchestra. The front line organization was made up of all the musicians he could grab from his highly successful civilian orchestra. That was in 1942, and Glenn Miller and his group were stationed at Yale University. The orchestra often played on the New Haven Green and people still talk about the great concerts.

"When I came to see Glenn Miller, he was living in the Taft Hotel, but the rest of the band was living in the Yale dormitories. Glenn Miller was supposed to have his headquarters in North Carolina. When I first was transferred to North Carolina, my orders stated that I was to work with Glenn Miller, but he never showed up. Miller stayed with his main band in New Haven, and his second band was stationed in North Carolina. The plan was that Miller was going to Europe with his main band and our band would go to the Pacific to entertain the troops. That's the unit I was with. In fact, we spent all our time planning for that transfer. Our orders came that we were going to the Philippines in August of 1945.

"I was all set to leave when the crew of the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That changed the war and all our plans. We ended up at the Air Force base in Greensboro, N.C., until the end of the war. It worked out very nicely for me. I did a lot of radio programs and played a lot of music. With all the contacts I had made, I thought I would go into music once the war was over, but I came back to Connecticut. My parents were here and were getting older, and I was concerned about them. Also, I got married and I didn't want to travel. Band business meant being on the road all the time. This was in 1945 and '46. I decided to go back to the radio station. They had to take me back because I had been working for them when I was drafted. Once your term of service was over, your employer had to rehire you at no less a job than the one you had when you were drafted and keep you for at least a year. That was the law.

"WELI didn't want to take me back because there had been a change in management and ownership. I wrote a letter saying I was coming back, and, in essence, management said, 'Don't bother.' I went down to the studio on Orange Street and told them that I thought I could be helpful to them. After all, during the war I had done a lot of radio work, going coast to coast and around the world. I had been on Mutual and then CBS on a program called 'On The Beam.' It was an Air Force show and I had been musical arranger and announcer. I worked with Lon Chaney, Tyrone Power and a host of people who were great contacts. I told the management team that if they didn't want me at the end of six months, I would leave voluntarily. I knew that there was another station starting up across town, WNHC, and it was made up of people who had worked at WELI prior to the ownership changes. After three months, I was given a raise with increased responsibilities.

"When I came back to WELI they wanted me to write copy, produce some commercials and do staff announcing. There was much live programming and very little recording. And don't forget, recorded tape wasn't in existence. If you wanted to do a program ahead of time, you had to transcribe it on a 16-inch disc. The discs were aluminum with an acetate coating. The recording process was a very cumbersome one, almost a Rube Goldberg-type of process. The prerecording was done only in extreme urgencies. Management didn't like to go to prerecorded programming because the fidelity wasn't up to usual live broadcast standards. And with those discs, anything could happen, and often did.

"One time my dear friend Bill Hanrahan was at WELI. He worked the Sunday morning show. We used to have religious programming on Sunday mornings, as most stations did. The shows were all on transcription, on 16-inch discs. Bill was a very devout Catholic and he had to go to mass on Sunday morning. Bill worked out a deal. We had an hour show, which was two sides of a 16-inch disc, playing at 331/3 rpm. If he started the disc at 8 o'clock and he could get the engineer to turn the disc over after a half-hour, Bill would get to St. Mary's Church for mass, which was only a few blocks from the radio station, and come back in plenty of time before the disc ended.

"This particular Sunday morning, Bill set the disc in motion and headed over to St. Mary's. The engineer who assured Bill Hanrahan that he would turn the disc over at the proper time was inclined to celebrate sometimes on Saturday nights. The engineer was a little hung over and he had dozed off. Unfortunately, the disc got stuck. And it got stuck just as the reverend was giving this real exhortative-type speech where he was saying, 'And so will God damn the angry sinner,' but the needle got stuck at, 'God damn, God damn, God damn,' over and over again. Of course in those days, any swearing was prohibited. You couldn't say hell, you couldn't say damn, so this was awful. The station manager was home listening, Bill Hanrahan was blocks away in church and the engineer was passed out in the studio. The station manager called up the station and wanted to know what was going on. He woke the engineer and wanted to know where Bill was. The engineer said, 'Well, sir, I don't know. I'll look for him.' He was just trying to make excuses without getting Bill in trouble.

"When Bill got back from mass, he learned what had happened. He was sweating bullets. The next morning when Bill came into work, he thought he was going to get fired. But he told the station manager that he was a loyal Catholic and he absolutely had to go to mass, and the station manager gave him a second chance. Later, Bill Hanrahan went on to success at NBC. Things like that happened all the time in those primitive days of radio.

"Radio was fun in those days. So much of it was live. There was a performance ethic in those days, which you don't have today. You had to be right, so you had to prepare yourself. If you weren't sure of something, you had to check it out ahead of time and rehearse, as well. Everything was done in one take. Everything had to be done right. It was much more of a challenge for a performer and they had a higher degree of skill or perfection in those days, out of necessity.

"That was the process we used in the late '30s and early '40s. When we came out of the second world war in 1945, wire recording existed, but it wasn't very clear or reliable. We had stolen the idea using ionized tape from the Germans, and so magnetic recording tape began to appear a year or two later. By 1947, we were using tape on 7-inch reels to record programs, and that transformed broadcasting. More prerecorded shows came into being, and you could edit. We no longer had to haul those large 16-inch transcription discs around. They were history.

"Early on, most of the shows were 15 minutes. No show was ever longer than a half-hour. It wasn't until we started having morning shows, which I started in 1947, that we had longer shows, say three or four hours. At WELI, we had two studios. Just two. We would have a band in one of the studios playing a live 15-minute show, and there would be a singer in the other studio rehearsing to do the next show. At the same time, a band that would come on after the vocalist would be rehearsing in an office down the hall, or even in the men's room. Everything was going on all at the time on the second floor at 221 Orange St. In every conceivable space, someone was getting ready to go on the air. It was a lively, exciting time to be working in radio.

"In the early days at WELI, the morning schedule tended to be mostly Italian programming because New Haven had a large Italian population. There were Italian announcers speaking Italian sponsored by Paramount Macaroni and other Italian products. Sunday evening we had a Hungarian hour, and we had Hebrew hour. On Sunday mornings we'd have an hour of Polish music.

"The foreign language programming was in the pre-1942 era. When 1942 came along and we were at war with Germany, Italy and Japan, the government didn't want any foreign language programming aired because of the fear of messages and propaganda being inculcated, and the FCC couldn't monitor every station and every broadcast. The foreign language program hosts, headed by Aldo Bonnevini, found an AM frequency available in 1943. That became WNHC, which later became New Haven's first television station, Channel 6, which is now WTNH Channel 8. When I came back from the war, radio had changed significantly. The shows were all English, and more of our programming came from the networks.

"By the late 1940s some of the morning programming was from the network. Then there was local news from noon until 1. Then the networks took over in the afternoon with soap operas and quiz shows. But that didn't last very long. By the early- to mid-1950s our programming became local again as fewer network shows were being produced. There were some nighttime network shows such as 'Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,' and they lasted into the early 1960s.

"In 1954, I started doing the morning show, actually by mistake. Ben Hawthorne used to be on in Hartford, and he was carried in New Haven, as well. His show was called the 'G. Fox Morning Watch.' In 1943, he went into the service and was replaced by Bob Steele. For some reason WELI didn't carry Bob Steele in New Haven. WELI decided to go local with Jack Ryan and Clyde Dill in the early morning. This was in the winter of 1946-47. Jack Ryan was notoriously late much of the time, and you couldn't be late for a radio show. I was announcing in those days, so the station manager would have me cover for Jack Ryan. And that was with no preparation. Eventually, the station manager's patience wore out and Jack Ryan was fired. They put me in his slot, from 8 to 8:15. The show became sponsored by the W.T. Grant Company. Grants was a five-and-10-cent store in downtown New Haven, along with Kresge's, Woolworth's and A.J. Newberry's. The show grew to a half-hour. Whatever I was doing was successful and my segment kept growing. Eventually my show ran from 5:30 until 9 in the morning, followed by the ABC network Don McNeil 'Breakfast Club' show, from the Sherman Hotel, in downtown Chicago. Later on, my show ran from 6 a.m. until 9:30.

"I did the morning show from 1947 until 1972. Twenty-five years. In the meantime, morning radio became the hot time of day because television began co-opting the rest of the day. If you were doing morning radio, you became famous. All kinds of good things began to happen.

"I had a very smart boss. He said, 'Look, you have to please the people. It's the people who determine what music you play, not you. You're a guest in their home and you have to behave like a guest.' That was his concept and I think it was a good one. That's not the trend today at all. Today it's all shock radio. You're not a guest. You're an intruder. Because it's become so competitive today and there are so many people going shock radio, the one who gets the attention is the one who shocks the most. It's a different profession today.

"In the late 1940s I had my competition as well. I was up against 'Bob & Ray' on various stations, Arthur Godfrey on CBS, Bob Steele was on WTIC, Bob Crane on WICC -- who later starred in 'Hogan's Heroes' -- Steve Allen and Dave Garroway, who was the first emcee of NBC's 'Today Show,' and later Jack Sterling. I was successful to the point that I received job offers from radio stations in Washington, D.C., and New York City to do morning shows, but my wife and I had our first child, and I was never one to be overly ambitious. Those offers were huge opportunities, but I was satisfied with the balance of working on a great radio station with some independence and not having to move my family. I stayed in New Haven and I'm not sorry. A number of people made the New York scene and wound up in trouble. It was such a tough market. A lot of problems and pressures.

"I was the first person to ever broadcast from a train, a submarine, a blimp and an airplane. The train broadcast occurred around 1955. Jayne Mansfield was premiering a movie in Rhode Island. Her publicity people were running a special car for her and had it set up the interview . I got on the train and went into her private car. Jayne Mansfield took me into her bedroom and said that we're doing the interview sitting on her bed, traveling from New Haven to New London, live on radio.

"In 1956, there was a blimp on the New Haven Green and someone suggested that I broadcast from the blimp. I had never been on a blimp before. It was a very funny feeling because you go straight up in the air and we did the broadcast while floating over New Haven and the harbor.

"In 1962, I created a program called 'Beautiful Music Radio,' and the Navy had just begun producing atomic-powered submarines in New London, Conn. I don't know who got us involved with it, but someone loved 'Beautiful Music Radio' and they wanted us to program tapes that could be played on the submarine when they went on long cruises under the North Pole. When the subs were underwater for months at a time, they were out of contact with commercial radio, so we started furnishing the atomic subs with our programs. Months and months of tapes at a time. And when they returned to port, we had a new supply ready for them.

"One day, the submarine base had a special VIP event where they wanted to publicize the success of their submarine program. I was invited on board the Abraham Lincoln, along with several politicians, to go to New London and cruise Long Island Sound underwater. When we surfaced, I sat on the bridge with the captain and asked him how fast were we going. He said he couldn't tell me because that was classified information but that we were doing better than 20 knots.

"Then came the broadcast from the airplane. Eastern Airlines announced they were going to start providing air service to New Haven by flying into Tweed Airport. This was in the winter of 1956. Someone from WELI suggested that I broadcast from an airplane. The station was going to provide me with an engineer and a short wave link. Eddie Rickenbacher, the World War I flying ace, was president of Eastern Airlines, and he was going to take the first flight from New York to New Haven to inaugurate air service between the two cities. There was a major reception planned with a band and a number of politicians and business leaders scheduled for Tweed Airport. It was going to be a big deal.

"I said I'd broadcast from the plane. Steve Tabor, my engineer on the morning show, went down to New York with me. We loaded his station wagon with all the radio equipment we would need. We were supposed to leave Laguardia at 8 in the morning, and fly into New Haven around nine for the reception. That meant we had to leave New Haven by 6 in the morning because in those days we were traveling on the old Route 1. As you would expect, there was an ice storm. I woke up in the morning and I called Steve. I asked him, 'Are we going to go?' Steve said, 'Well, we have to. All the plans have been made and we're going to fly in with Eddie Rickenbacker.' Steve came by and picked me up around 5:30. We drove about 10 miles an hour to New York. The road is a sheet of ice all the way and we were both scared to death.

"Finally, we made it to Laguardia and we drove out to the field. We met the crew and we started setting up for the broadcast, but conditions were terrible at the airport. I found out that Eastern is the only airline that relies on the flight captain to determine whether the plane should fly or not. It doesn't depend on management or air traffic controllers to make the decision. We were talking about whether we should fly, and the captain didn't see a problem. The plane was a DC3, a big, prop workhorse during World War II. We loaded the equipment on the plane. With all the ice, I wasn't worried about getting up in the air, but I was worried about skidding across a runway when we touched down.

"As we got ready for takeoff, I asked, 'Where's Rickenbacker?' The pilot said, 'Oh, he called up. He's going to New Haven by train.' I turned to Steve Taber and said, 'He's going by train and we're flying. What's the matter? We crazy?' It happened to be Steve's first flight. We did the live show, the descriptions, but there was no World War I flying ace. Eddie Rickenbacker was picked up at the Union Station and driven to Tweed Airport for the ceremonies. I never got to do the interview with Captain Rickenbacker because by the time he got to the airport he was mobbed by the mayor and members of the chamber of commerce.

"Management always wanted to expand when something was successful. The morning show was called 'The Coffee Club,' so we started 'The Bud Finch Show' from 1 until 2:30 in the afternoon. My boss, Dick Davis, a wonderful man, was general manager and a very bright and farsighted guy. He said, 'Live music used to be great.' The last live band on radio in Connecticut was Norman Cleaudea, who had a live orchestra on WTIC in Hartford. He used to broadcast from noon until 1 on weekdays until just after the war, around 1946 or '47. The station couldn't sustain the cost of paying a full orchestra of 15 or 20 musicians.

"I continued doing live music on my morning show. I had a piano, an organ and a Celeste in addition to records. I called the piano Sammy Steinway. Dick Davis said, 'Why don't we have a live show in the afternoon with a small group of musicians that wouldn't cost too much.' I got a guitar player and a bass player to go along with my keyboard playing. Charlie Wright was program director at the station and he could play the drums with brushes. Allen Delay had a disc show in the afternoon who was a singer, and we had a woman working in the office named Susan Bardo, who was a fine vocalist. We got together and every afternoon we had a live show. The show was so successful, that we took it on the road. We'd play at local clubs and civic organizations, and we really built up our audience.

"Dick Davis believed that one of the responsibilities of a radio station was to build up good public relations. WELI was probably the first station with a segment devoted to women. It was called 'A Woman's Point of View' and that was started by Jean Slayton, probably in 1939 or 1940, and it carried on into the 1960s with Jean Porter and later by Jean Loucks. We kept the afternoon music show going until late 1957. We did gags and dramatized spots along with our music, and we were the last radio station in New England to perform live music.

"I had a pretty tough working schedule. I'd start broadcasting at 6 in the morning, and finish at 9:30. Then I'd start writing and rehearsing for the afternoon show. We had to rehearse because it was live, all one take, so it had to be right. I was happy, in a sense, when we had to give the show up.

"As I've mentioned, Dick Davis was a farsighted individual. In the 1960s virtually every station was playing rock 'n' roll. Dick had a consultant who was promoting the concept called 'The Theater of Beautiful Music.' His idea was that there was room in every marketplace for a station to play a wide variety of good music. We decided that with every other station in the state playing rock 'n' roll, we would do something else. That's when I started and coined the phrase, 'Beautiful Music Radio.' During the night we played a mixture of semi-classical music, and during the day we played popular music, but no rock. That worked out very well, and we carved our place in the radio market because we were the only station doing that. After a few years, other stations copied us. I brought in a man named Nick Papp as music director, who as a musician had played trumpet in my band. I knew I could trust him. He had good taste and he knew what we were talking about.

"In the 1950s and early 1960s, the record companies would send their releases for free. In fact, the record distributors came around to the radio stations to wine and dine us so we would play their records. They couldn't do enough for us if you gave their records airplay. They'd give us theater tickets, pay for trips to New York. In lots of cases in bigger markets, they were paying deejays, getting them dope and women and things like that. I didn't get involved in anything like that but I did take two of my daughters to New York, saw some plays and went to recording sessions that the representatives had set up. They did that all the time. By the late 1950s during the payola scandals, people were taking gifts and money under the table, but I never got involved with anything like that.

"Al Ham, who came up with the concept of 'The Music of Your Life,' which is very popular now, lived in West Haven within earshot of WELI. He was a bass player who played with my band when we played at the Hotel Taft. He had a real gift. I taught him how to arrange, and after the war he worked with Mitch Miller at Columbia Records as an A&R man. He got the idea for 'The Music of Your Life' from listening to 'Beautiful Music Radio.' In fact, he tried to get me to go to work for him. He began to produce 'The Music Of Your Life' in his garage, then he syndicated the concept, rotating the tapes. His organization sends the tapes to radio stations every month and the stations have an automatic program. They don't have to hire people.

"By 1962, my 'Beautiful Music Radio' show had been running six years, and I was concerned about the number of stations that were copying us. I began to think about another format. We had done request shows where people would call in and tell us which songs they would like to hear. Based on that, I developed a show called 'RSVP.'

"It was to be a talk show where we would have an expert in a particular field or a famous person on as a guest and invite listeners to call in and ask questions. That seems like a very common format now, but when I conceived the idea, there was nothing like it on the air. 'RSVP' came on the air the same week that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, late November of 1963. One of the first 'RSVP' segments we did was a roundtable discussion on Kennedy and his presidency. That show lasted for quite a few years, before everyone began to go into talk radio.

"I stayed on the air until 1972, when WELI was sold. I was offered the post of assistant general manager, but I didn't want to do that job. I did stay on the air doing editorials and point of view. Over the years, WELI was sold and resold, but I stayed on.

"After WELI was sold to Clear Channel Communications I left, in 1996. They own 1,200 radio stations. When they took over WELI, they took out the entire music library and made the area into offices. They threw out all the music, all that history. It was a big corporation with little consideration for individuals, so that's why I stopped. Because now, radio is a whole different ballgame.

"Corporations buy stations to sell them. Put stations together and make deals like car dealers. There is no personal interest, and no real commitment to the communities in which they broadcast. There are very few independent radio stations left.

"There was a philosophy I remember. We were taught that when a radio station applied for its license from the Federal Communications Commission it had to guarantee that that station would 'operate in the public interest.' Today, there is no public interest. A radio station had to provide so many hours per week of religious, agriculture, education and a number of other subjects beneficial to the community that the station served. When a radio station filed its renewal application, the station had to go through a thorough process to prove that it was providing services and operating in the public interest. The FCC could come in at any time and inspect the radio station, review the station's logs, or monitor you and take away your license.

"Today, a radio station renews its license to broadcast by postcard. It's automatic today. There is no accountability. The only way a station could lose its license today is if someone used one or more of the seven forbidden words on the air. And I hear some of those on the air. Public taste is so low today, it doesn't matter. Shows such as 'Entertainment Tonight' pass as journalism.

"At the end of World War II there were around 2,000 radio stations, with most of them focusing on local programming. Now there are more than 11,000 radio stations in the country, and except for a precious few, the vast majority of stations play the same music and recite the same news. Outside of public radio, there are precious few exploratory or serious efforts to serve the public. That's about it. I could see how much radio had changed and that it was never going to return to local programming, back to its commitment to public service. And that's when I retired.

"Once I got into a discussion with Les Brown, the radio and television historian and critic. He said he believed that I had the national record for length of service with one radio station, nearly 60 years. I cared about the station and about the quality of the programming we gave to the community. I developed numerous formats that are still with us, and I pretty much gave my life to radio. When I left, I knew that I had given it everything I could."

J.R. Morton is a pen name.

December 1, 2005