"Pretty quick thinking," Nicole observed, making a note. Later she would write up a report and share it with Allison.
Aaron shrugged. "If you work in live radio, you have to be quick on your feet. Thank goodness Greg was. He flipped the switch to the national feed, so we were never off the air. And locally, we were back up with a cobbled-together program within four hours. We came back here last night after you guys gave us the all clear, but there was never a gap in broadcasting. If you're off the air for more than sixty seconds, you're history. Listeners will change the dial, and you might never get them back."
"So what does a program director do?" Allison asked.
"Just like it sounds. I direct the programming. I'm responsible for hiring, firing, and overall supervision of staff. It's everything from controlling the on-air sound to the really important stuff, like deciding who gets stuck working on Christmas." He managed a weak smile.
"And how long have you known Jim Fate?" Allison asked. "His name's not Jim Fate."
"It's not?" Allison said. She and Nicole exchanged a look.
"It's Jim McKissick. That rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? All those s's don't sound too good hissed into a microphone. When I hired Jim twelve years ago, I told him to change his name. Not only was it wrong for radio, but it was already associated with the other station in town where he'd worked."
"Did he leave that station so he could get his own show on yours?" Nicole asked.
Aaron snorted. "He left that station because he got a pink slip. Him and all the other on-air folks. A big chain of radio stations bought it up. That's their standard operating procedure. Buy a station, fire all the talent, and then use one guy sitting in Texas or Nebraska or whatever to do shows for towns in a half-dozen different states. It's called voice tracking, but what it means is it's all robots and computers and prerecorded, and the only real people in the studio are the traffic reporters. They try to customize the program to make it sound as if the host is actually local, but when you listen, they can't even say the names of nearby towns and roads."
Allison tried to lead him back onto the path. "You said Fate's real name was Jim McKissick?"
"Yeah. I told him he needed something punchier, something unique to our station. I didn't want people thinking we were taking somebody's leftovers. Of course, who was I kidding? That's all our station was at that point. Leftovers. That was back when we were one of those stations that plays classic hits from the sixties, seventies, and more!" Aaron boomed out the last few words like a hammy announcer, then sagged back in his chair. "This was way before he was `Jim Fate with The Hand of Fare, heard in thirty-eight states.' I thought I was doing Jim a favor when I hired him, but it turned out that he was doing me one."
"What do you mean?" Allison asked.
"It was kind of an accident, but Jim has ended up being this station's bread and butter. When I hired him, our Arbitron ratings were in the toilet, and we were hanging on by the skin of our teeth."
Allison winced at the mixed metaphor, but Aaron didn't notice.
"At that time, Jim did pretty much what you would expect for the kind of station we were back then. Took requests, did a little bit of patter between songs--nothing that anyone would remember the next day, let alone the next minute--and read the news at the top and bottom of the hour.
"Then one day the lead story was about an old lady who had been dropped by the nursing home staff on the way back from the bathroom. But they didn't fess up about what they had done. Instead of taking her to the doctor, they just put her back in bed and tried to convince her that it had all been a bad dream. Yeah, right. A bad dream that left her right leg broken in two places. Eventually gangrene set in. When they finally took her to the hospital, it was too late, and she died."
Allison was sickened. "That's awful."