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At the start of my freshman year at Lehigh I got my own classical music program on WLRN, the student radio station.
The only downside was that The Ted May Show aired on Sunday afternoons from 2:00 to 6:00 P.M. This was a sort of graveyard shift, for many students went home for the weekend and had not yet returned. Indeed, there were not any other station employees in the studio during that period of time: no engineers, no program directors - no one. I cued up my own records and gave unprepared inane blatherings about the various composers and their music I played. (I did not even resist doing voiceovers of classical pieces I was playing: 'This has been Marche Slav. Thank you for listening to the Ted May Show today!')
Now the radio station was located in the basement of Packer Hall, the building in which the dining hall resided as well. At that time (1961) there was a rule in force that a tie and jacket had to be worn at dinner. I never seemed to remember to dress for dinner before I came to the studio; as a result, I had to run back up to my dorm to dress up after I finished my show.
But one Sunday I had a brilliant idea: I would put on a recording and then, while it was playing, run up to my room to dress and then rush back before the record had finished. After all, I reasoned, one side of a record takes about twenty minutes to complete...
So I cued up the opening of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, gave my silly spiel about the poor doomed composer gulping a cholera-infected glass of tap water as he was finishing the symphony ("That is why it is called 'Pathétique'!"), started the turntable - and bolted for the door.
I arrived at my dorm in good time and was tying my tie ("That is why it is called a 'tie'", I would have said on my program) (and, who knows, I may have been right!), when I had a grand inspiration: I would listen to my own radio show live in my dorm room!
So I turned on WLRN. And I heard the following: the first one-and-a-half bars of the famous theme from that Tchaikovsky symphony, followed by a click - and then a repetition of that - ad infinitum.
Yes, the record was stuck. And I realized that I was at least seven minutes from the studio, with no one there to rectify the situation for me.
I rushed back, unstuck the record, and at the end gave my listeners a pathetic rationale, viz: "I wanted to demonstrate what happens when a composer gets writer's block." Yes, pathetic!
But do you know the most pathetic thing of all? I never heard about this - faux pas - from anyone. No - apparently, no listener ever called the station to complain, for my superiors never mentioned the incident to me. I was forced to draw one conclusion: no one (except, ironically, for my inept self) had been listening to my show that afternoon. Or, if someone was, they didn't care enough about what happened to complain.
I got the message. And, despite my obvious talent for this sort of work, I quit my radio show at the end of the first semester.
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