Broadcast news: Gregory ready to get back on air

Decades ago, if you wanted a job in radio, you hung around radio stations, and, eventually, you’d learn enough to become a broadcaster.

That’s what Ron Gregory did. Growing up in Washington D.C., his parents would drive him to a radio station where he’d walk into the lobby and say he wanted to watch Willard Scott do his show. They’d let him in, and for two hours, Gregory would watch Scott at work.

Try that today.

Radio station owners back then were people with deep pockets. Chris Larko was never one of those. He grew up on the south side of Fort Wayne and never had any money, he says. Still, his dream was to own a radio station.

Gregory and Larko both saw their dreams come true.

Anyone who lived in the Midwest in the 1970s to the 1990s heard Gregory at one time or another on WOWO, back when it was a clear channel powerhouse with listeners all over the eastern half of the country. He started there at 23, a dream job for a broadcaster.

In time, his unmistakable voice became known to people all over the country. People recognize him at fast food drive-up windows, and a Nevada blackjack dealer who had lived in the Midwest once looked at him when he asked for another card and asked, “Are you Ron Gregory?”

Larko, meanwhile, was a broadcast engineer and programmer.

Larko’s first opportunity came in 1992. Someone had asked that a license for a certain frequency be made available in Warsaw. The Federal Communications Commission agreed and invited people to file for it.

That’s the way the radio business used to work. Lots of people would file to get a license, and the one who wanted it the most would pay the others to go away. In the case of Warsaw, though, no one else filed, and three years after the license was granted, the owner was about to lose it because it was not being used. Larko offered $1,000 for it, and the license holder accepted. Larko was finally a radio station owner at a bargain basement price.

Now he just had to put his station on the air.

Scrounging for used and discarded equipment, wheeling and dealing for a tower and other equipment, and finally finding a financial backer to pay for a transmitter, Larko went on the air in 1992 in Warsaw with WLZQ (Q101 FM), broadcasting to Warsaw, Columbia City, North Manchester and Wabash.

Then in 1998, when a Huntington radio station, WBZQ-AM 1300, ran into problems and the owner unexpectedly died, Larko bought the station for the price of the real estate, minus some expenses.

Suddenly, he had two radio stations.

But he was the disc jockey.

A few months ago, a man walked in the door of his station with a resumé. It was Ron Gregory, hoping to get back into the broadcast business after leaving WOWO in 1993 and working six years at another station in Fort Wayne before he was ousted when new owners changed the format.

To Larko, it was like a fledgling art gallery seeing Picasso walk in the door. Larko agreed to hire Gregory before the seasoned broadcaster could change his mind.

Monday morning, for the first time in a year, Gregory’s voice will be back on the air, full time, doing a live morning show, simulcast on Larko’s two radio stations.

Sure, the stations are smaller, nothing like the old clear channel where Gregory once worked, but it offers something that is fading away in the radio industry. He can be a radio personality and play a mix of music, actually having some say in what goes on the air.

Radio DJs will tell you that radio isn’t what it used to be. There’s no picking your own songs and creating your own rhythm. DJs don’t make stars anymore. They are confined to playlists compiled by consultants, and they play a mix of music that is narrowly designed to appeal to a particular segment of the population.

“He’s giving me the latitude to be a personality,” Gregory said, “and that’s almost non-existent anymore.”

The mix of songs is unlike anything he’d be able to find anywhere, Gregory says. Most stations have a playlist of a few hundred songs at most. Larko has a playlist of 3,000.

That, of course, is not the way you’re supposed to run a station these days.

“He’s blown all the rules out the window,” Gregory says.

Although the AM station (1300) comes in strong in the south of Fort Wayne, and the FM (101.1) is reasonably strong in Aboite, most of Gregory’s listeners will be in Warsaw, Whitley County and Huntington.

It doesn’t bother Gregory, though. People in Warsaw and Huntington grew up listening to him, he says.