Reno Bailey

Around 1960, I was in UNC's school of Radio, Television, Motion Pictures and Mimeograph Repair. We radio rats studiously kept up with who was on the air in the big stations in the Carolinas. At that time Alan Newcomb was a nighttime DJ on BT (just before Uncle Douggie's show). Among us students, a myth had spread that Alan was so meticulous in preparing for his show, he chose the records so that an upcoming song would begin with the same note the previous song had ended with. We visited BT for our annual "seminar" one spring, and we asked him about that. He almost fell in the floor laughing. "Hell," he said, "I wouldn't know one note from another."

Remember Mildred Clark who used to work at the switchboard? About 1963, Mildred was in her fifties but tended to dress and walk like Marilyn Monroe, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. A group of us just happened to be walking behind her on the way to the Pine Terrace. I think Bill Melson, Bob Rierson and Nat Tucker were in the bunch. As we enjoyed the view, I broke them up by saying (in all sincerity, I might add), "Damn, if I were only 20 years older!" 

In 1962 and '63, in order to augment my $80 per week income, I would work the Saturday night "announcing" shift on BTV for $1 an hour. Those were the days of The Jackie Gleason Show (with Crazy Guggenheim), Death Valley Days (hosted by Ronald Reagan), etc. My sole responsibility was, between shows, to flip on the mic in the announce booth and say, in stentorian tones, "Channel 3, WBTV, Charlotte." Sometimes, I would bravely ad lib other terse but informative comments, such as "It's eight o'clock."  But on the 5:58 break I'd get to announce the winner of Championship Wrestling, which had just ended. Wrestling was taped the previous Thursday night, and inevitably ran longer than an hour. On Saturday WBTV would play only the first 58 minutes of the match as recorded, then, at 5:58, dump out of the show, leaving thousands of anguished wrestling fans ignorant as to the winner of this momentous contest. So, after much rehearsal, and with great authority, I would announce something along these lines: "The Championship Wrestling match you've just seen was won by Haystack Calhoun." I never got any fan mail, but  Andy Anderson and other master control engineers always seemed to be impressed. 

Once while fooling around on Bill Curry's afternoon drive show on BT, I complained that my wife Betty had spent our vacation money on curtains for the bedroom and I was thinking of making her go to work in a dance hall so we could go to the beach. When I got home there was a big sign in our front yard out by the street: "10-Cents A Dance."

Rich Pauley, a BT announcer in the '60s, lived way down the street from me. Each day I would leave the station an hour or so before Rich did. Inevitably, if I were out working in my yard when Rich went by on his way home, he would honk his horn long and loud, make rude noises and issue colorful epithets. One day I decided to nail him. When I saw his car approaching a block away, I turned on the garden hose and raced out into the street with all intentions of thoroughly soaking him. I was five yards from the target when I realized it wasn't Rich. It was a very startled stranger with a similar car, who probably vowed never to travel this street again.

Speaking of Rich, he had worked in a lot of markets and if you mentioned any celebrity he would claim to have interviewed him. Curry and I got tired of this, sure that Rich was full of crap and was "padding his resume." So we made up some phony "celebrity" names and sprinkled them into our conversations with Rich. For example, if we knew he had not watched Johnny Carson the previous night, we'd talk about how funny the old comedian "Belyer Fortson" had been. After weeks of this we finally gave up; he never claimed to have interviewed a one of our fake celebrities. 

During the great Belmont Tunnel scam of '64, we'd get mail from a Sid Green, postmarked Reno, Nevada. Every few days he'd write us cards and letters referring to things we'd done or said on the Tunnel bits. He even sent one of those tourist-souvenir newspapers, the Comstock Miner, with the headline: "Reno Bailey Feared Lost in Tunnel".  This went on for months. Curry and I would sneak around comparing the handwriting of possible suspects at the station with Sid's. Was someone in the company (Joe Young? Bob Rierson?) sending prewritten cards and letters to someone in Reno, who would drop them in a mailbox? No one 2,000 miles away could know what we were saying on the air, or could they? In August, one of our newsmen, Joe Epley, maybe, or Robert Hager, passed through the Reno airport on his way home from that year's Republican Convention in San Francisco. He was standing beside his camera case with a big WBTV logo when a man came up and introduced himself as "Sid Green." He asked Joe/Robert to say hello to Bill Curry and Reno Bailey and the entire Belmont Tunnel staff. One Saturday a few months later, Bill--on the air that afternoon--called me at home and urged me to come over to the station and meet someone. I was tied up with something and couldn't go. So he told me that Sid Green had just walked in the door. Sid was a real person, in the Air Force in the Reno area. His wife, who lived in Hickory, would tape our broadcasts each afternoon, and mail the tapes to Sid. That's how he could make references to the current goings on at the Tunnel.

Good ol' Paul Marion, General Manager of BT in the '60s, would hold a full staff meeting every couple of weeks in Studio B. In those days the big stations in Charlotte were WBT, WSOC, WIST, Big WAYS, etc. and the competition was fierce. It never failed, in every meeting Paul would remark that Charlotte radio "is not the same today as it was last year, last month or even last week." Few if any of us knew what the hell he was getting at, but we knew he meant well, so we would nod in agreement. If Paul could hear the WBT of today, he'd turn over in his grave. 

One of my favorite people was Lon Chaney, a TV engineer. Soon after I arrived at the Company, he and I were introduced. I asked him if he was related to THE Lon Chaney (the famous "man of a thousand faces" of silent films). "Hell," he growled, "I am THE Lon Chaney."

The most rewarding day's work I ever did in WBTV's Creative Services was when I created a 30-second promo for BT's morning drive show. The set was an ornate white gazebo sitting in front of a white limbo cyc with the floor covered with white and black checkerboard tiles. Standing in the gazebo in white tie and tails were the very solemn stars of the morning show: Ty Boyd, Dick Taylor and Carl Capps, the newsman. (It was a "beauty" shot, softened by a little cold cream smeared lightly on the lens.) With the radio stars motionless in the background, scrolling slowly up the screen were words--in a fancy decorative font--being read by a pretentious, slightly-British male voice. It was like an elegant, lacy, embossed wedding invitation that might have come from Princess Grace. "You are cordially invited to hear the Ty Boyd Show..." the announcer intoned. We're talking serious, high-class stuff here. By the time the script ended and the scroll finished, we had pushed in to a medium head-and-shoulders of the three. Ty, Dick and Carl simultaneously broke out into a wide, warm smile. Each was missing one front tooth. Fade to black.