Back Then…The Unofficial History Of NJ 101.5

It was early 1990, and our keepers, Press Broadcasting, had just formed this new thing, New Jersey 101.5, out of the clay of Ewing Township.We all worked out of a big house, (well anyway, it looked like a house), and although it was a big house, we all quickly came to realize it was cramped for our purposes, with studios, programming, sales, promotions and the business office all stuffed into this building.

Back then, when we began, the newsroom was this tiny little place with thick carpet on the walls for sound insulation. We had three workstations that were essentially places for a typewriter and a couple of tape recorders. Yes, tape recorders. Again this was still "analog 1990."

Back then, the station hired New Jersey 101.5's first news director, Mike Hyde. Computers, PC's, had been showing up in the workplace for a few years at that point, so one of Mike's first decisions was to bring one of those new-fangled com-pyooooters into our newsroom. Well, the first one was a simple machine, prehistoric, actually, by today's standards. No internet access, no windows, no e-mail or multitasking. In fact, our first newsroom computer was little more than a blue-screened glorified word processor. And there was one and only one.

Back then, I was still anchoring morning news on our AM station, WBUD. Mike was the news anchor on New Jersey 101.5. Since we both had to do a newscast every half hour in the morning, Mike would sit in the newsroom with the keyboard on his lap, (no mouse, these were the early days), and quickly hammer out a report. Then Mike would hand the keyboard to me so that I could hunt and peck my newscast. And that is the way we rolled all morning long.

We eventually got Press to spring for more and better PC's. But back then, morning drive news was literally, 'touch and go."

If you sneezed, you fell behind.

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