Stories From Sam
By Sam Van Zandt
1971 Sam At KTEO Radio In San Angelo Texas
Tonight: “Dad and Radio”
Dad
” If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time…”
That song is my first, foggy memory of my early childhood. Mom and Dad were dancing in the living room, and I was about five years old. Our home was warm and cozy and joyful. Dad loved his country music SO much. The simple sounds of Hank Williams’ songs filled our home and the family car, a 1951 Chevy former taxi. It sparked my imagination – “What’s a Hot Rod Ford? What can you buy with a two-dollar bill? What’s “just over the hill?” Music was everywhere in our home, usually coming from a radio station called KEEN, and played by Dad’s favorite disc jockeys, Cottonseed Clark and Blackjack Wayne. Music meant laughter and dancing at our house. My dad, James Andrew Van Zandt, was a self-educated high school dropout. He had been raised on a Texas farm, which meant he was no stranger to arduous work. He had run away as a teenager to California and somehow managed to survive on his own in the 1920’s. He read books and kept them as keepsakes, so we had hundreds of them in our attic for me to read. He loved music. He owned a guitar, a mandolin, and a stand up piano, which graced our living room all the while as I grew up. I still have his sweet mandolin, and gave dad’s guitar to my grandson Johannes, who loves classical guitar. I’m certain that old guitar sounds much better now than we could ever have made it sound. Dad’s love of music has inspired generations of Van Zandts, and I’m certain that his love of radio spawned my career as a music-loving radio disc jockey.
Dad had lots of hobbies. for a while his hobby was repairing watches. He would spend hours in the evening taking them apart and putting them back together, and he found a tiny watch repair shop, where he would hang out and chat and learn. It was part of a large hobby shop, so when he took me along, I would wander around the hobby shop. One time I found a do-it-yourself crystal radio, and Dad bought it for me. The radio only received one station that could be heard clearly on the tiny earpiece that it came with: KSJO, which later became KLIV. From that point on I was hooked on radio. I entered contests, won prizes, called up my local DJ and made music and listening to radio the center of my young life.
Vague memories keep slipping in and out of my consciousness as I grapple with the odd relationship I had with my father: memories like the time Dad was hospitalized and his roommate turned out to be a DJ for a local station. The impression on me was strong: Dad was so thrilled to be in close company with a real DJ he made me, a young kid, feel weird. He sang to the guy, tried to give him jokes for his show, and acted like a typical rabid fan. This made an impression on me, and in retrospect, no doubt planted seeds in my head that Freud would’ve had fun digging up. He didn’t know it then, but he’d launched a radio career.
My father was a quiet man, eccentric to a fault, but absolutely determined to be a good person. He was wise, intelligent, and enthusiastic about life in general. He graduated from college with an AA degree, even though he’d never graduated high school. Record keeping in the 50’s wasn’t as exacting as it is today, and a smart man slipped through the cracks.
Mom worked as a teacher’s assistant and Dad was a psych-tech at Agnews State Mental Institute. My mother and father wanted the best for me that they could provide. But we didn’t have much money. They bought me an encyclopedia when I was young and I devoured it, and since their goal for me was to be an attorney, they encouraged me to study hard. But lawyers had to know how to talk, to debate, to convince a judge and jury, and I was fearful of public speaking. So, I took speech classes and was hooked the moment I got my first laugh from an audience, telling a story about who else but my dad. That’s when it all changed: my inner goal was to be a disc jockey like the one my father had admired. In high school my mentor was my speech teacher, Ray Kendall, who was also a radio buff, with a studio attached to the class. In senior year I read the high school’s daily bulletin, and thanks to Dr. Kendall got a job as the specials announcer at a local discount store, where I learned how to sell and run a switchboard. After graduating high school, I spent the summer learning how to be a disc jockey. The job looked so easy. Just play records and say whatever comes to mind, right? And a four-hour shift meant I could make money while attending college. It was a perfect plan! Easy? Not really! After I flunked an FCC test and lost my first radio job at KPER in Gilroy, suddenly the future wasn’t looking so bright.
I was out of radio, but fortunate to have parents who backed me up. Their home, and my old room, were always open to me, and they were always there with a few bucks or kind words.
By that time, I had married and had responsibilities, so I did manual labor jobs for a while to pay the bills. For over a year I was blacksmith at a small shop that made harvesting tools for farmers. Then I worked for an uncle taking cars apart in his auto wrecking yard. Then I had my own wrecking yard, but the radio bug was still with me. After a few years I was fed up with that funky life, so I sold my yard and went back to radio. In 1970 I finally earned my First-Class Radiotelephone license from the FCC. That opened possibilities and an opportunity to do a night shift at a little country radio station in San Angelo Texas. Dad had a brother who lived there, which was comforting, but first I had to get the job. That meant making an audition tape and sending it to the station. That’s where dad became my partner in crime. I had no such tape, and no way to make it! But one of my father’s hobbies at that time was recording, and he owned several tape recorders, so together we put together a very crude tape. My fondest memory of that time was recording an audition with him, using the mic on one of the machines and playing music from the family HiFi. The tape was mistake-filled, so, using scotch tape on the kitchen table we edited it, made a dub and sent it off. Dad didn’t cuss much, but as I recall, we bonded by our spontaneous swearing when we made mistakes. I’d swear and it kind of gave him permission to do it too. I had never felt as close to him as I did then. A few days later, Texas called, and I was off to San Angelo to meet my uncle Polk Van Zandt and restart my DJ dream! On the day that I left for Texas, my dad shook my hand and wished me luck. It meant so much to me to have him at my back!
Throughout the years of my career, dad was my cheerleader. I later discovered that he told the neighbors about me and recorded hundreds of hours of my show at KCBS-FM, KIOI and KNEW. After he passed, I found a box with cassettes from many of my shows he’d recorded!
One February day in 1993, I walked into KNEW to do my midday show, and Tom Benner, who was the morning personality, told me someone had called to say my father was in the hospital and I needed to get there ASAP. When I arrived, a doctor told me that they had done all they could, but that dad had passed. He was wearing the shirt I’d given him for Christmas a couple of months before, and they had had to cut it open to try and save him.
My biggest fan had died at the age of eighty-seven, but his positive effect on me continued. He had been such a kind and modest man, serving what he called “the old folks” at a senior center up to the day before he died, caring for kittens and spreading good vibes wherever he could. He would have made a great disc jockey. But he did better than that. His passing led me to examine my life and inspired me to be more like him – and less like me. My father, James Andrew Van Zandt, accomplished so much more in life than most could; he gave me and all of us fortunate enough to know him a guide to help us navigate life’s bumpy terrain.
For me at least, radio is so much more than a job. Thanks to my father, radio is my family.
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