This week, I’m sharing three stories from my radio broadcasting career. I posted the first one yesterday, and here’s the second…
When I worked at WRCN on the east end of Long Island in the late seventies, we did a lot of promotional appearances at local fairs and carnivals, car dealerships, schools, or sometimes at beaches in the Hamptons. As a station with a limited budget, we couldn’t afford to set up live remotes, but the disc jockeys would take the station’s van and hand out bumper stickers, give some stuff away, and chat with listeners.
But we needed more, so someone on the staff came up with the idea for the Mumble Mouth.
This was just a mono Ampex reel-to-reel tape machine, which our engineer wired so that a person’s speaking voice would go from a microphone through the record head and then the play head, with the audio output of that sent to headphones we had them wear. The effect caused them to hear their voices delayed by a fraction of a second. We had the headphones turned up loud enough so they couldn’t help but hear it as we had them read a tongue twister off an index card.
Nearly everyone who tried it stumbled at some point, and many were overcome with giggles. That brought more people over to try it, word of mouth spread, and before long there was a line of listeners champing at the bit to win whatever we were giving away (maybe movie tickets?). It wasn’t something we could do on the air, but with a logo of a big mouth painted on a piece of plywood which was attached to the front of the Ampex, the Mumble Mouth helped burnish the station’s reputation for fun.
Yes, that was once a part of radio’s appeal — even off the air.
Tomorrow: turning off the stereo light on your radio.