Episode 14, Talking South Carolina Podcast Interview with the Professor Harold Ballard with Beach Waves Radio Myrtle Beach, SC

Episode transcript:

Angela Barrett – “Professor, how are you?”

Harold Ballard – “I’m doing well, and I hope you are. It’s good to be here with you.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. It has been a long, long town. Yeah. It has. I got I can’t tell.”

Harold Ballard – “You how much it’s been, but. Well, we’ll be sharing in numbers, so, you.”

Angela Barrett – “Know, I’m going to share. I was going to say winning that in 1986.”

Harold Ballard – No.

Angela Barrett – “85 will go to 80,000.”

Harold Ballard – 18th 1985.

Angela Barrett – Could have been. You’re probably correct.

Harold Ballard – My first day of school.

Angela Barrett – “Oh, really? The 93, as we called it, right.”

Harold Ballard – “Prior to that, before the ownership change in 86, we just called the AC.”

Angela Barrett – “WDC. Gotcha. Yeah, that was a fun town.”

Harold Ballard – It was.

Angela Barrett – We gave away in our Roxy that year.

Harold Ballard –

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. Down at the beach, from all the way from DeLand to the beach I guess. Or in however that worked for. That was fun. It was a lot of fun to drive to.”

Harold Ballard – “I know, I remember Friday night, you know the where the studio was located there on 501. Right. And I always come on and say, Will the last person leaving North Carolina please, off the lights?”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, right. That’s right, that’s right. And speaking of old times, don’t you wish we could go to, Johnny Dollars just one more time?”

Harold Ballard – Yes I do.

Angela Barrett – That was fun.

Harold Ballard – “Like the gator, the razzle dazzle. Dad.”

Angela Barrett – Yeah. Yes we did. For it to be such a small town. We certainly had the nightlife.

Harold Ballard – No.

Angela Barrett – “All right. Now, Harold, you’ve been working in broadcasting since you were 16. I understand.”

Harold Ballard – 1968

Angela Barrett – So how many years is that total?

Harold Ballard – We’re in year number 57 right now.

Angela Barrett – “So, how did it happen at 16 that you went into broadcasting?”

Harold Ballard – “I just was always interested in. And I think it probably started. I had a couple of sources. Well, my dad loved radio, and any time I’d be out with him, you know, we always had to be something on the radio. Back when car radios had to warm up before they would start playing, too. Right, right. Yeah. And then there were those times when, the TV would start acting funny and you had to call the local repair company.”

Harold Ballard – But that was another inspiration to maybe pursue the electronics end of it.

Angela Barrett – “Right. So now you were in North Carolina at 69, and I understand it was an alien radio at that point.”

Harold Ballard – “It was in Kannapolis, North Carolina, not far from home.”

Angela Barrett – “Right, right. And then what were you doing at 16?”

Harold Ballard – “Oh, just working weekends.”

Angela Barrett – On the air.

Harold Ballard – On the air.

Angela Barrett – “Nice nice, nice. Now since then, you have been in broadcasting of all kinds, radio, television, motion picture. So fill me in from 16 to now. Where in.”

Harold Ballard – “Okay. 13. Well, we were at one station in Kannapolis, and then, you know, moved over to the other one, which was, in the downtown area. And, you know, I did afternoons, you know, I’m going to going to high school and driving school bus in the morning and being an afternoon deejay.”

Angela Barrett – You know. Yeah.

Harold Ballard – “And then, you know, doing our best to try to graduate. And in 1970, I did and went on off to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and majored in radio, television, motion pictures. And then, you know, got that done. Hard work, campus radio. We had a little station that went out to all the dormitories.”

Angela Barrett – “Now, what was your deejay name, then?”

Harold Ballard – “Well, I think it was just Harold at that point.”

Angela Barrett – I gotcha.

Harold Ballard – “What happened when I went to, WFMU in Fairmont, North Carolina, if you remember them? I do. Okay. Well, the boss said that I wasn’t going to be Harold anymore, because that just didn’t sound top 40 enough. So he sat with Dave and and, well, he signed the check, so, you know, I didn’t have much room to dispute it, even though mama was opposed.”

Harold Ballard – But it sure. But I bet that hung on for a while.

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. Then so I interrupted you. You were deejay at college. Now? Now keep going, because I interrupted you.”

Harold Ballard – “Oh, that’s that’s quite all right. We were almost in same progression anyway, so. After finishing Chapel Hill, you know, I’d go out and start looking for, a first work, full time job, which was in that part of North Carolina I had never seen or heard much about. And that was Robeson County. Of course, I didn’t pronounce it correctly when I first got there because one on the other side, North Carolina, thought it was Robeson County, and we found out that that was incorrect.”

Harold Ballard – “So I spent a lot of good years there, and, I got to work with some good radio people and, found out about this place called the coachmen for club and Bennett’s for South Carolina, where over the big time legends of soul would come to play. And we did a lot of, new commercials for them and got to meet a lot of stars.”

Harold Ballard – “It was almost like, you know, it was small town version radio.”

Angela Barrett – “Sure, sure. Yeah. And that was in Bennett’s Mill. Yeah.”

Harold Ballard – “Yeah. Which was just a short drive over from where we are. But it seems like when they would have somebody big at coachman, like, maybe Jerry Butler or Billy Scott and Georgia Prophets, Archie Bell, I mean, you we could just about, quadruple the population of Bennett’s ville in one night.”

Angela Barrett – “That’s that’s a. Yeah, sure. That’s that. That’s funny.”

Harold Ballard – “And. Okay, after after the time at Fairmont, I got, offered a chance to go a little further west. So I worked around Hickory and Lenoir in Morganton, North Carolina for a lot of years. And you know, that would that was also good experience, you know, just to see another market. I think the, the goal was eventually to see if we could get something like, you know, Charlotte Winston-Salem, Raleigh, where, you know, all the bigger operations were but my focus got, changed from on air to engineering.”

Harold Ballard – “And, in 1978, I found my first engineering job at a station in Sylva, North Carolina, which was just, a few miles from Western Carolina University in Culpably. And so I, I stayed there for a, a year or so and, building up some, technical experience and eventually, you know, in I think it was 1992, I crossed over from radio into television, and that was the the engineering and master control side.”

Harold Ballard – “They didn’t they will occasionally they would put me on camera, but they used I did that, you know, that was not the best course of action.”

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – “You know, we would I told them, I said, you know, I’ll look after y’all. You you be good and be on camera. You know, I’ll just stay back here and be sure everything’s working right.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, sometimes it is easier back there behind the scenes.”

Harold Ballard – “Well, now, my first television was a TV in Florence. Channel 15. You remember them?”

Angela Barrett – Absolutely.

Harold Ballard – “And I stayed there for about three years, and eventually wound up at a place where I thought I’d always loved work. And that was LTV in Raleigh, and.”

Angela Barrett – Yeah.

Harold Ballard – “Big time. I mean, they.”

Angela Barrett – Absolutely.

Harold Ballard – “Knew how to do it right. And still do. And, the only reason I left was because I got talked into returning to my alma mater, which was the University of North Carolina Center for Public Television, and had the chance to assist in their digital conversion when television was going from analog to a new, new transmission standard. And that was good experience.”

Harold Ballard – “And that led to, 2005 to becoming part of the startup team for Discovery Television’s new facility in Sterling, Virginia, where they originated all their channels, and that at the time was about 14 of them. That every you had TLC had animal Planet, BBC America, again, I’m trying to remember all of them now, but.”

Angela Barrett – There was a lot.

Harold Ballard – “Yeah. We had like control room segmented to where we would probably monitor three channels at a time. And yeah, it was big time stuff.”

Angela Barrett – Yeah.

Harold Ballard – “So then it got to be 2008 and, you know, both, Marilyn and I had decided it was time to come back to North Carolina because, you know, you think about, your parents health. And my mom wasn’t doing all that well at the time. Well, we knew she was getting up there in years, so. Sure. Come on back.”

Harold Ballard – “And I spent, about ten years in Charlotte, and that was initially, they had a facility that was going to be the control point for, Channel three TV, then, NBC 12 and Richmond, Virginia, and their new station, both Myrtle Beach. So, you know what? We we were part of the like, management staff for that for about four years until they decided to, return it the other channels to their own individual bases.”

Harold Ballard – And it just became WB TV Charlotte. So that’s where I finished in 2018.

Angela Barrett – “Gotcha. And now, go ahead, go ahead.”

Harold Ballard – “I was going to say when when it came time to retire, we came down here to, Orry County and. Yeah. So and we fired up the radio again.”

Angela Barrett – “I was going to say you did not retire. No. I said I heard you on the, beach waves.”

Harold Ballard – “Well, I spent, four years, on 94.9, the surf, which, you know, is the the headquarters for Beach Music down here, located in the Ocean Drive beach and Golf resort’s best view out control room window I ever had.”

Angela Barrett – And but.

Harold Ballard – “On,”

Angela Barrett – Right.

Harold Ballard – “Right, then. Well, you know, the way it is. And radio and television, people take different directions. And I had a chance to come over here to, beach waves, the independent, internet based thing. And, we just do it from here in the room every. Every Thursday.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. And it’s a pretty cool, pretty cool to to, So now, out of all of those years in broadcasting, what would be. Well, let’s break it down. What would be the favorite job and then what would’ve been the favorite place? Because that doesn’t necessarily have to would be the same. So what would be the favorite job?”

Angela Barrett – The part you played.

Harold Ballard – “Oh, that is so tough.”

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – “I think as far as management, it would have probably been Jerry and Land or North Carolina because their, their, their GM came to be like older, wiser brother to me, Donny Goodale. May he rest in peace. We lost him in 2018 to pancreatic cancer. And I’ll tell you, he it was laid to rest in Chesterfield County and again court casket just the way he wished.”

Angela Barrett – “I love it, I love it.”

Harold Ballard – “I mean, he he was spurs and feathers for the end.”

Angela Barrett – “Right? Right, I love it. Yeah, yeah. No. What about your favorite? I guess, place? And that may be the same,”

Harold Ballard – “Place. Well, well, Lenore is definitely one of them, but I will tell you, there was. And you’ll probably agree here there was nothing like, that old Radio Shack on highway 501 between DeLand and the latter, right. 1000 watt now. 100,000 watt at the, broadcast transmitter and two incoming watts. Lines for a request.”

Angela Barrett – “I remember well, yeah, I it was for a good place. It was, it was.”

Harold Ballard – Or South Carolina. 1-800-327-9393. And if you’re in North Carolina one 803 two eight.

Angela Barrett – “Oh, I’ve forgotten about the two numbers. Oh that’s funny. I did forget about that.”

Harold Ballard – But you can get most interesting people on the telephone.

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, true. Now let’s talk about because you’ve been doing this a long time. Let’s talk about the changes, like the physical changes of how you got music for people to hear on the radio. Just that alone. From the time you started tennis.”

Harold Ballard – “Started out with turntables? Some older than others. Yeah. And then I think we we migrated around 86, 87 to compact discs. Some of the content compact disc players for radio were not always reliable. And, you know, we we had a little issue with those, but they got better and that now see we went from the compact disc to the digital audio tape.”

Harold Ballard – And somewhere along the way it all wound up on a hard drive.

Angela Barrett – Right.

Harold Ballard – “There, where a lot of it stays to this day.”

Angela Barrett – “Right, right, right.”

Harold Ballard – And I’ll own this dilapidated cardboard box I still miss lives here around.

Angela Barrett – “Now, what do you think has changed other than just, How you get the music out, you know, in the air. So wait and listen. What else have you say? Got?”

Harold Ballard – “We got a lot of different plant forms going on now because used to be it was just a Am or FM. Now you have web based, you know, that that has also evolved into podcasting. Okay. Let’s see, what else, do we have up ahead? You know, and for television, we went from, four by three analog mono audio to, 16 by nine, ten had progressive scan high def this in television.”

Harold Ballard – “And right at that, there’s we we really probably have no idea what’s coming next. Sure.”

Angela Barrett – “But yeah, if I wasn’t trying to keep up with the new technology as things came along.”

Harold Ballard – “Well for fortunately for me, I was lucky enough when I got to Raleigh and WRAL, they were totally committed to high definition and also to computer technology and that was a good it was a good learning base, to be part of an engineering staff and a management that was committed to it. So, I feel like that was an education in itself.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, well, that’s good, because I imagine some of that could not have been easy floundering around by yourself, trying to learn all that.”

Harold Ballard – “Not always. Because when you go from, standard analog television to, what we see today, it was just, you know, like going from, one, one world to another.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. I mean, most of the but, you know, a lot of that people are not going to understand, but it would be the same as, you know, when I used to be the TV remote right before this came along, what? Angel. Angela, turn the TV. And.”

Harold Ballard – “Then there was the. There were those calls that I used to get, run back home. And mama says, Harold, can you explain this TV to me?”

Angela Barrett – The the like the telephones now.

Harold Ballard – “There’s that king channel, and one of the engineers there in Raleigh said, how can you be so patient? I said, well, you got to have a mama.”

Angela Barrett – “That’s right. And I think I walk into dad’s every time and he’s like, I don’t know what I did. I’m like, well, you keep mashing buttons. How’s that for a Dylan work? Mash buttons, Eric, for your stop.”

Harold Ballard – “I still think one of the funniest, illustrations of it was on an episode of South Park where somebody had a brand new TV, and they pushed the wrong button and turned into a transformer. What, so he doesn’t look?”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, yeah. I’ll have to admit, now, when it comes to, some of the technology today, I’m like, I’d just rather not.”

Harold Ballard – Yeah. I totally understand that.

Angela Barrett – “Right? So, tell me what what the North Carolina Broadcasting History Museum is, and then tell me some of the your parts that you had to do with that. Okay.”

Harold Ballard – “I’ll be happy to. Well, a friend of mine, approached me on, on Facebook and said he. You’ve been at this for so long. Don’t you think you need to start writing some stuff down and book? Yeah, yeah. I not thought about that. I said, well, I know people who can read books and some have also written them.”

Angela Barrett – “Look, look,”

Harold Ballard – “But, you know, I got to thinking, I said, well, I think everybody else’s stories would be a whole lot more interesting than mine. So I, I started the North Carolina broadcast History Group on Facebook and just invited everyone that I knew and had them invite their friends because, you know, in the radio and TV business, you know, somebody and somebody else know somebody.”

Harold Ballard – “And then the chain starts developing and then you before you know it, you got a group with some like 2000 people and many of them have been broadcast heroes of mine since day one. Right now, both in radio and television. And what we started doing, you know, I just told everybody, I said, go out and, find some things that we can archive and remember it.”

Harold Ballard – “You know, just like the, the print ads trying to also assemble any air checks we could find, our old radio shows. And, you know, it’s just a matter of trying to keep alive what, you know, made us want to be in this business.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. And so the the museum is, in fact, open today.”

Harold Ballard – “Well, the Facebook group is. But now the the North Carolina Broadcast History Museum, this is still under development.”

Angela Barrett – I gotcha.

Harold Ballard – “Yeah, we’re still, looking. And I’m very honored to have been asked to be on the board of trustees for this because, I mean, you know, I’ve looked around at some of the guys in the one young lady who is, you know, probably a the CEO, one of the premier broadcasting groups that her, her father established many years ago.”

Harold Ballard – “And that is Beasley broadcast. This is, Caroline Beasley. She’s, one of the members of our, board of trustees and along with several others. But, you know, I’ve been to many meetings and I’m thinking, I said, how did I get in here? I said, it was again, the back. Oh.”

Angela Barrett – Did you?

Harold Ballard – “Well, you know, like they told me, they said, no, you’re you’re our guy who has, you know, assembled all this stuff and, given us something to build on. I said, well, that’s that’s a badge of honor right there. Because they we’re thinking that it is important enough to try to preserve it. And I have to say that we got some people in South Carolina doing the same thing to, there is like a group, they called it slobs, which is an acronym for some legendary old broadcast.”

Harold Ballard – “And I work they work out of Columbia, and it’s right about at this point that I want to recognize and remember a couple of, members of that group that we’ve lost recently, one of them being Woody Windham, who for years radio in Columbia, South Carolina, had a beach club in downtown Columbia. And you know, hung out with his brother Leo.”

Harold Ballard – “And they used to do radio together. And then, I know that a lot of, hearts are broken, mine included, because, I mean, there will never be another Joe Palmer.”

Angela Barrett – “Well, I, you know, Mr.. Knows it. That’s right.”

Harold Ballard – “Well, he was in our North Carolina group, too, because, you know, he’s from New Bern originally and also attended the University of North Carolina. And he he was there for far enough back to have went to college with, Charles Kuralt, and a couple of others, one of them, being, big star on NPR, whose name Carl Kasell.”

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – “This to do, all things considered, I believe. And, there was all kinds of the old, old school of broadcasting then. And, you know, Joe took it, to the military and, you know, he was stationed at Fort Jackson, and that’s how Mr. knows it came to be in Columbia.”

Angela Barrett – “Oh, really? I did not know that. Interesting.”

Harold Ballard – “I think he also spent a little time in Jacksonville, Florida, where he met his wife, Peggy, and they they spent a lot of years together. Now they’re going to have a memorial service for Joe somewhere in Columbia, I think on November 14th, I, I suggest if you’re going, you better be there early, because.”

Angela Barrett – Right now he’s.

Harold Ballard – “Standing room only, I hope. Absolutely. They have a big enough venue for sure.”

Angela Barrett – There is one.

Harold Ballard – “I don’t know if there is either, but I’ll tell you. Yeah, I guess I’ve always had a special affection for whist, because I think in 1972, you know, daughter had a, a young lady of interest in Columbia who worked, with Britton Wandell or Lakeview. I mean, I think, and I’d go to Columbia and they’d have on Lewis.”

Harold Ballard – Not here. This boy’s doing this. I’d. His name was Dave Rogers. But I’ll tell you what. It was just almost like you had to stand there and listen.

Angela Barrett – “Right? One of those guys, I just sucked right in. Yeah.”

Harold Ballard – “Had that kind of presence. And, you know, ever since then, I said, you know, this has got to be one special place to work.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, yeah, it’s still, it’s still a big network here for sure.”

Harold Ballard – Really?

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. E absolutely. And, now let me ask you, we just went through, Hurricane Helene. And we’re still dealing with the devastating aftermath, especially up in the North Carolina, you know, mountains area. Have you ever had. Had to, I guess, be cover or announce either in your DJ or any of the broadcasting roles in the ever been had to be the one who broke the news or had to cover those kinds of things in a crisis situation, or been a part of that in any way.”

Harold Ballard – “Well, you know, I returned to our old radio home in Dillon in 1989, and that was the place where we were waiting for Hugo to come in.”

Angela Barrett – Yes.

Harold Ballard – “Oh, what a fun night that was. And there was a whole lot of broadcasting going out, because when we lost power and we could fire the writer up.”

Angela Barrett – “Oh, no.”

Harold Ballard – “Where it was, it was doomed from the start. And that one I remember well. But another one was Hurricane Fran that, came ashore 1996 Wilmington and then eventually got to the Raleigh area.”

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – “I mean, we we’ve got, you know, there, Earl, we’re checking to see if there, there’s water in the basement and we’re doing a live shot from the breezeway that runs between the main building in the administration building there, Capital Broadcasting. And, you know, it’s it’s almost like, you know, we’re having to anchor the the people who were out there trying to report because the wind was so heavy.”

Angela Barrett – “Right? Like a Jim Cantore, you know, flapping around in the rain. It.”

Harold Ballard – “And I’m in Master control that night. And so, we’re we’re getting all kinds of calls. One of them was we were CBS Philly at the end. So we got something coming back from one of the engineers in New York. Can you tell us what’s going on down there? I said, well, there’s a hurricane you on top of us right now.”

Harold Ballard – If you really want to know.

Angela Barrett – “They,”

Harold Ballard – “And, you know, when you’re doing breaking news and live team coverage, it did. This is always a good time.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, I was going to say that’s a whole different. Yeah. Ballgame. I mean, the energy level for one has to be massive when you to cover stuff like that.”

Harold Ballard – “Yeah it really is. And the most, the, the most fun part of it is the, the stuff you’re not seeing and hearing because you got to have a crew and, you know, give it about six hours of doing this thing straight. And so, you know, we love what we do, but we sort of had enough of.”

Angela Barrett – “This stuff, right? So. Right, right, right. So we’ve talked about like, all the technical, changes, for better or for worse, that come along. And now we have social media. What are your thoughts on social media?”

Harold Ballard – “Well, before we proceed into the, world of social media here at Uno illustrate one other change that you have and, and broadcasting that I think is, you know, an important consideration today used to be most of your radio stations were locally owned and operated and as were the TV stations. But now you have these multi conglomerate groups who own.”

Harold Ballard – Countless numbers of radio stations. And you have some groups who have about the same amount of TV stations.

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – “It seems that in that process, you’ve had a lot of stuff that becomes, standardized between the different TV stations all under one corporate banner, and there’s not a lot of individuality left. You used to have that right. You know it. And a lot of what you hear on radio now, is voice tracked because it’s pre-prepared somewhere else and sent in by, by internet to the individual station.”

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – Is just.

Angela Barrett – You.

Harold Ballard – “Know, personality.”

Angela Barrett – Right on it. Right. A lot of the iHeart radio hosts are actually done that way. They’re not actually sitting in that little booth.

Harold Ballard – “Right. And that’s why on Thursday afternoons I am doing my part to maintain live radio because, yeah, the show that I do, you wouldn’t want a voice track.”

Angela Barrett – “It’s, so spun. So social media just in general. Your thoughts, what do you think?”

Harold Ballard – “Some. Oh, sometimes I think it’s been a positive for, the calls for communications, and there’s sometimes I wonder, how did I get in the cesspool?”

Angela Barrett – “Right. Yeah. I’m going to agree with you there. Yeah. I ask a lot of people that are questioning because it’s just, you know, younger kids today wouldn’t have a clue. I mean, we didn’t even have cell phones, much less social media. But they just, you know, have no idea that you did not know what everybody was doing.”

Angela Barrett – And nor do I need to know every time you go to get a cup of coffee. That’s right. It’s not necessary. I mean.

Harold Ballard – I’m the kid who came from the street that had a four party line.

Angela Barrett – “Yes. My grandmother, I can remember picking up the phone and there’d be other people on the phone talking in my grandma over the kitchen, listening she go, Angela, hang up the phone. I was just being nosy, you know.”

Harold Ballard – “We want to know what’s happening in the neighborhood, but now you don’t have to eavesdrop because it’s all out there.”

Angela Barrett – That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. I’m so glad we didn’t have that when I was growing up. Thank.

Harold Ballard – “Yeah, no, I have I have to admit, you know, I, I’m primarily, you know, a, a Facebook user and, you know, I yeah, I, I kind of got away from Twitter because they got crazy. Okay. No, no, I have always said that I’m not going to touch that stuff because.”

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, I haven’t either and not yet anyway. Not at all.”

Harold Ballard – “Not I’m not. So I think it comes from some unknown place in us. And, you know, the less I know, the better, right?”

Angela Barrett – “Right. Sometimes I just the that’s the case. So, tell me your biggest live blunder. What was the worst? Or maybe a couple. Okay.”

Harold Ballard – “Oh, well, there were there will be a few. Hold on. Okay.”

Angela Barrett – “At present, going live and recording. You can’t. You can’t undo. You can’t edit it.”

Harold Ballard – “No, no, live is forever. And, you know, had had some of the stuff been on, on the internet. I would still be haunted to this day. One of them being, one day in March 1981. I will know where I had just taken over, for for my shift, which ran through 3 to 7 p.m.. And, you know, back in the day, you wanted to be sure you had all your tape cartridges, ready to go.”

Harold Ballard – “And you also had something on the turntable. Well, I discovered that I did not have something on the turntable when the bulletin broke. This. Somebody had just tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan.”

Angela Barrett – Oh eight.

Harold Ballard – “And so, you know, I’m trying to reach back into the record box, to, get something on the turntable to roll out of this bulletin.”

Angela Barrett – “Oh, well.”

Harold Ballard – “Yeah. And what what would it be? That I had selected, you know, inadvertently without a, you.”

Angela Barrett – Ask.

Harold Ballard – “It it was a song by Phil Collins. And Earth, Wind and Fire called I Missed Again.”

Angela Barrett – “I know. But that. So not only did we have dead air, then we had, Probably I missed again.”

Harold Ballard – On.

Angela Barrett – You.

Harold Ballard – I totally inappropriate.

Angela Barrett – Right? Right. Do you remember? The station was always dead air. It’s like I don’t I do.

Harold Ballard – “I remember also causing some of it because I’d be doing engineering during your shift. And, you know, not intentionally. Find Roy anything, but, more or less just the trying to get something done. And I said, no, that won’t work.”

Angela Barrett – “If. Yeah. Well, that’s and that’s a pretty big blunder there. But you lived and like you said, thank God we didn’t have recordings and social media back then for it to be passing around endlessly.”

Harold Ballard – “I think the next one was in, probably 2000, when. You know what? We were running, the CBS show Big Brother. And I was on Master Control that night, and, and it had two local commercial breaks in it. And, you know, we we would always get information from the network as to, how long the break times were.”

Harold Ballard – “So the second break in the show, which was live, originating from Los Angeles, The program log said that it was going to be a minute 34. Well, CBS changed their mind, but, somehow word didn’t get to us because they they shortened the break to a minute or.”

Angela Barrett – “Oh, dear.”

Harold Ballard – Let in that 30s that we were not with network. They announced the winner of the competition.

Angela Barrett – Oh goody. Yes.

Harold Ballard – “And I said, well, I followed my program while ago. I said, you know, but it got written up in the Raleigh News Observer about how they missed the, the 30s where the winner was named. I say, well, I guess I’m in the hall of Shame now.”

Angela Barrett – I let them tell I was totally your fault for sure.

Harold Ballard – “No, no, I won’t take a rap on that one.”

Angela Barrett – “Right, right.”

Harold Ballard – “That those are probably my my two greatest hits, right?”

Angela Barrett – “This, that. So now you’re, down in Orange County at the beach, Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Fort Myrtle. Yeah.”

Harold Ballard – We like to think think that this is the better side of town.

Angela Barrett – I don’t tend to disagree.

Harold Ballard – “Only where we got bad Harold’s and ducks and, deckers and the, you know, the galleon snooki’s.”

Angela Barrett – “And, let’s see what else down that way. I think the crown we got.”

Harold Ballard – “All got a good fall, but,”

Angela Barrett –

Harold Ballard – So Archie’s.

Angela Barrett – “Oh, yes, captain. Archie’s right.”

Harold Ballard – Yeah.

Angela Barrett – “That’s right. Live every Thursday. As the professor of beach music, and,”

Harold Ballard – “Bestowed upon me by my friend and brother Mike Worley for more like 94.9, the sir.”

Angela Barrett – “Right, right, right. So and so Thursday’s on beach waves of these waves.com. Y’all also have app. What? I don’t remember the times I think they’re funny.”

Harold Ballard – Noon to three.

Angela Barrett – There you go.

Harold Ballard – Yeah that’s beach waves radio.com. Or you can get our app which is on the App Store.

Angela Barrett – “Yeah. And and listen to surf. It looks like a lot of, like, it looks like you get work with a great group of people. I know that y’all are all doing it individually, but do you ever get to get together? We probably will.”

Harold Ballard – “This year at the Carolina Beach Music Awards. Last year, we all got together out in the parking lot of the Alabama Theater and, spent about three hours before showtime at 3 p.m.. And, you know, we were able to. Just get a bunch of good interviews. I’d see somebody say, hey, if come over here. Actually, I think it got down to being a competition because I was trying to get interviews before surf.”

Harold Ballard – God.

Angela Barrett – “Yeah, right. I can understand that. That’s what you’re sitting there, so. Sure. Well, Harold, thank you for the professor. Thank you so much. As I should say. This has been great. I have been excited about this for a while, and I’m glad that we, called up and were able to get together. I’m.”

Harold Ballard – “All. I’m already planning the sequel, even as we.”

Angela Barrett – “Speak, you know? That’s right. Absolutely. Well, thank you again. And, I hope to see you in a couple of weeks when I’m down your way.”

Harold Ballard – “Well, that would be great. I hope so.”

Angela Barrett – All right. Thanks so much.

Harold Ballard – You’re. You’re welcome. Thank you.