That's how Steve Elman and Alan Tolz, two of Jerry Williams's talk-radio producers, put it in "Burning Up the Air," describing the way it was in 1957 when Williams first went on the air on WMEX-AM in Boston.
And the fun began, they write, because Williams, a pioneer in the talk radio form that continues today, didn't just listen to callers and then paraphrase their comments, as earlier radio hosts had done, but put them on the air in their own argumentative voices - with just a delay button to keep it clean and legal.
The authors track the controversy surrounding the emotion-choked call in September 1972 from a man identifying himself as a Vietnam veteran, in which he described the horrors of the war he had seen.
Williams replayed the call, night after night. Then, in mid-October, he gave a tape to George McGovern, who was running for president as an antiwar candidate. McGovern played the tape on his campaign plane, and then to "stunned silence" at a rally in Minnesota. The tale of the tape became a national news story - and angered Williams's network bosses who threatened him with disciplinary action for releasing it.
After a few weeks, events in Vietnam made the call look like "yesterday's news." But the story resurfaced in 1998 when Jim Braude wrote in The Boston Globe that he had recognized the caller's voice as that of a local labor leader, who denied being the caller.
As Elman and Tolz track the story, they found themselves left with the question of whether Williams had known the call was a fake and, if so, "would that have cast a shadow over all his other great work."
Williams's work included campaigns on seat-belts, school busing, "fees, fines, and taxes," and Michael Dukakis over the decades before his final broadcast for WROL in 2003, two months before his death.
It's mud season in northern Maine when naturalist Todd McLeish sees his first Canadian lynx, as it "calmly waited for its expected release" from a trap set by state wildlife biologists.
This particular lynx, collared and labeled "L18," had been caught so often, McLeish reports, "that it may have learned the trap contained a free meal with only the minor inconvenience of being enclosed for a short time."
