Sept. 23, 1977 Nightlife: Radio disc jockeys on the all-night shift

Under the cover of darkness, a venture into radio’s untamed frontier. 

Sept. 23, 1977 Nightlife 

3 AM – What’s Happenin’? 

          The all-night disc jockey is one of the mythic figures of the modern age. Ennobled by lonely, darkened radio offices, freed from constraints of daytime programming, the solitary announcer has the power to take the airwaves and conjure with them.

          Deejays have done wild and wonderful things with the night. Public TV raconteur Jean Shepherd started out spinning tales into New York City’s wee hours in the ‘50s. And it was fitting that the final quest of “American Graffiti’s” young hero ended at the studio citadel of one of the original jive-talking big daddies of rock ‘n roll, a role custom built by Wolfman Jack.

          Like everything in broadcasting, there are commercial reasons why nighttime radio is the way it is. For one thing, the major ratings service doesn’t count what happens between midnight and 6 a.m. Neither, for the most part, does the Federal Communications Commission. Sponsors are few. And the audience is too diverse to put a yardstick to.

          Who’s out there at night? Guards and nurses and service workers on the graveyard shift, drivers and revelers, insomniacs and students burning the midnight oil. As far as station managers are concerned, the best thing the night deejay can do is keep them from turning their dials somewhere else.

          “I kind of have a feeling,” says WKBW’s Norm Schrutt, “that if you have a good all-night person, it’s a good lead-in for the morning show.”

          Of Buffalo’s nine first-line all-night deejays, WBEN’s Dick Rifenburg has the most intriguing position. He commands “what I laughingly refer to as my 747 control panel” – a mind-boggling, million-dollar computerized console that appears to run everything but the coffee machine.

          Rife rolls in from his home in Clarence about 10:45, 45 minutes before he takes over from young newcomer Chris Tyler. Plenty of time to sample a banjo album (“I just love a banjo,” he says) and visit the newsroom, where he trades wisecracks with another WBEN veteran, newsman Fran Lucca.

          Buffalonians generally know Dick Rifenburg best as a TV and radio sportscaster. Of all the mainstays of WBEN’s golden days of personality 20 years ago, his voice is the last remaining link.

          “I’ve been here practically all my life,” Rife remarks. Actually, it’s been since 1951. Before that, he was an All-American end for the University of Michigan, spent a year with the Detroit Lions and did sports for Detroit’s WJR.

          If Rife had his druthers, he’d be playing music for housewives on the midday shift. Instead, he sees his four children, aged 16 to 7, off to school. His wife, too. She’s resumed teaching. Then he sleeps until they come home again.

          His preparations are simple. He brings a thermos of coffee, a pack of low-tar cigarettes and a sandwich, picks up a few ball scores in the newsroom and inherits the Batavia Downs results from Tyler.

          “I used to play Frank Sinatra stuff for the first half hour,” he says, “but I found out my program director didn’t enjoy it. Now I go along with whatever they program.”

          Aside from an occasional comedy number and the phone requests he fields between 1 and 2 a.m. (this evening he takes one, a woman who wants Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”), his entire evening is laid out on mimeographed sheets. There are no records. The turntables are concealed under a countertop, out of the way. The music and the commercials are all on eight-track cartridges, each one encoded with a signal that flashes lights just before it finishes.

          Rife clearly has an electronic marvel at his fingertips. Should he need to duck away, he can activate a sequencer that plays up to nine cartridges in a row. A teletype logs the transmitter automatically. The time and temperature are digital read-outs. An overhead panel controls automated WBEN-FM while a video screen checks off its upcoming selections.

          Another screen flashes messages from Erie County REACT, the amateur radio emergency team, which has its trailer in WBEN’s parking lot. There’s a fire on River Road. Rife passes that along to his listeners.

          “I think you can do just about anything you want to with a nighttime show,” he says. “I like the idea of having some facts people can look forward to. And I think they like the company. I hate to tune into a station where people have nothing to say. I do a lot of talking about my family and stuff like that. You’d be surprised at the people who know our pets.”

          There are no ratings to prove WKBW’s claim that it has Buffalo’s biggest nighttime audience, but there’s one thing for sure – it’s the furthest-flung. Beverly, who’s hosted the midnight to 5 a.m. shift for more than two years, has gotten letters from listeners in Greenland and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She picks up the phone randomly and it turns out to be a high school kid named Harold. He’s calling from Baltimore.

          “Radio is such a terrific illusion,” she says as she re-catalogs commercials on cartridges for the upcoming day, “but it works to the advantage of the one who’s listening. People call and say: ‘Would you describe yourself?’ I tell them I’m not Farrah Fawcett.”

          Beverly’s bold and bright on the air, a Sagittarius, the kind of forthright woman teenage boys dream of dating but never get the nerve to ask.

          “This is Beverly into an all-night thing,” she grins at the microphone. “Strawberry Letter 23, 24, I don’t know, I’ve lost track. I’ve written this guy so many times.

          “I try to be general,” she explains as the cartridge plays. “I imagine I’m talking to a guy for the most part, but I get more compliments from women than from guys. It took me a while to find my style. First I tried a loud style and ruined my throat. Next I tried to be sexy and it even made me sick.”

          Beverly’s from an Air Force family, studied commercial art at Mohawk Valley Community College and drifted into radio in Rome, N.Y., while looking for ad agency work. At Syracuse’s WFBL, she went from minority news reporter to production director to early-evening deejay. Here she lives with her younger sister, who attends Medaille College. She says she’d like to have her own TV talk show.

          “Sleep, that’s the rough part,” she observes. “My body has never adjusted to nights. When I go home, I sleep three or four hours, then I get two hours more before I come to work. Tonight I had company from out of town, so I didn’t get to sleep. I don’t drink the coffee here – it’s sludge. I dance. I sing. I run up and down the hall. When I grab the stool to sit down, I know I’m dragging.”

          The show that best fulfills the anything-goes theory of all-night radio is WBFO-FM’s “Oil of Dog,” an allusion to Ambrose Bierce. Unpaid host Gary Storm, armed with bread, cheese, fruit, nuts and tea bags, hits the UB studios about half an hour before his 3 a.m. theme song – a punk-rock ditty called “I Hate You” – and searches the station’s record library for surprises.

          “I could do 1½ hours of versions of ‘Hey, Joe’,” he speculates.

          “He has!” retorts his predecessor, jazz deejay Steve Rosenthal.

          “It’s fun if you know the groups,” Gary continues. “The Standells, the Shadows of Night. I was brought up during that period of time, the psychedelic era. I have a real nostalgia for the stuff.

          “I’m the only music programmer in the world who’s right. My policy is, if it’s on vinyl, I’ll play it. If it’s on acetate! Time and temperature? No, I don’t do things like that. I know I wouldn’t enjoy doing it. Whether I’m obliged to, that’s still a question in my mind.”

          It turns out “Oil of Dog” has a few restrictions after all. Sobriety is one of the rules. Nothing obscene after 5:30 is another. After 6:30, it’s classical music mostly. Gary, a cellist, says he knows classical as well and takes the same delight in the unfamiliar. Computer music. A piece by a 15th Century composer named Dufay.

          Frustration with all-night radio Albuquerque, N.M., led to his own show on a college station there. Here for three years, he’s nearing a doctorate in English, writes poetry and teaches a poetry-writing class after he leaves the air at 8 a.m. He sleeps noon to 5 p.m.

          “I’ll probably be doing this for quite a while,” he notes. “A PhD in English practically guarantees that you’re unemployable.”

          The master, Gary says, is WBUF-FM’s John Farrell, who lays out his moods on the turntable nightly from 1 to 6 a.m. John helped introduce progressive rock to the Buffalo FM waveband 10 years ago. He meets the dawn with coffee and yogurt and wouldn’t have any other job, except maybe chief station engineer.

          “I insist on working nights,” he says. “People are more receptive at night to the things I want to play. Nothing but strange and weird things happen at night. The transmitter has a fondness for breaking down in the middle of the night. I used to get lots of strange phone calls, some bad ones too. Every couple months, I used to get suicide calls and I’d have to try to talk them down. I haven’t had any of those in a while. Things are a lot more normal now.”

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IN THE PHOTOS: WBEN’s Dick Rifenburg and WKBW’s Beverly.

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FOOTNOTE: After 30 years with WBEN, Dick Rifenburg was replaced with Larry King’s late-night talk show by the new owners of the station. According to Rife’s Wikipedia page, he went on to deejay at WEBR, teach communications at Medaille College, sell ads for the Buffalo Courier-Express and supervise inmate training at the Erie County Correctional Facility. He died in 1994 at age 68 and was inducted into the Buffalo Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2007.

          Though Beverly was known to her listeners only by her first name, broadcasting historian Steve Cichon notes that her last name was Burke and she was WKBW’s first woman deejay. Cichon also reports that she got to do talk on TV. Leaving KB in 1979, she replaced Oprah Winfrey in 1984 as a news anchor on WJZ in Baltimore and left that city in 1994 to be a weekday news anchor at KCBS in L.A. Her Twitter page adds that she’s a media consultant and former XM radio reporter.

          Gary Storm did overnight stints on two free-form Buffalo radio stations – WZIR-FM (Wizard) and WUWU-FM – while aiming for steadier employment by going to law school. He moved back to New Mexico and just retired after a long career with that state’s Supreme Court in Santa Fe. He still does “Oil of Dog” on the Internet.

          As for John Farrell, he got his first-class radio engineer’s license while working at WBUF and went on to engineer at WZIR. In the 1980s, he was an engineer at a station in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., then returned to engineer for his good friend Pat Feldballe’s production company. He also took a position at Empire State College, where he was a technical support specialist and computer expert traveling to campuses in Western New York and elsewhere in the state. When he died in 2013 at the age of 63, I wrote his obituary.