MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO
Ted and Amy of 93-Q
Yet dues-paying is part of the deal for maintaining longevity in this market. Both broadcasters struggled in their early years, but they’ve also witnessed old-school disc jockeys at work and have weathered a sea change of technological advances from vinyl to digital. They’ve handled separate gigs over the years: Robbins can be seen strutting about the Driver’s Village car lot in Cicero for TV spots, while Long boasts a couple of acting credits, including an April 1987 appearance on Lenny Bilotti’s short-lived cable-access variety show Lenny’s Place (Long did a lisping lampoon of WSTM-Channel 3 weatherman Wayne Mahar) and as a costumed bear named Buddy on the children’s series Pappyland.
Still, this Mutt-and-Jeff alliance has remained popular since Bush 41, and they’ve garnered six consecutive Syracuse New Times Best of Syracuse awards for their gabby gusto. They have also accumulated some funny stories about Syracuse radio along the way.
“WNDR had this little building down in Jamesville on Andrews Road {the station later moved to Jogger’s Inn on Old Stonehouse Road}, in the middle of a swamp,” Long recalls. “Eventually it flooded out in 1981. The last guy on the air actually had to get a boat to come in and take him out of the station! We were off the air for a week, I think, while we ferried equipment out, and then we were broadcasting in the offices out of DeWitt. It was just crazy!”
Q: How did both of you get into the radio business?
Ted: I was emceeing a talent show at Marcellus High School in my senior year, and one of the judges was Fran McGrath, sales manager for WNDR-AM 1260. He said, “You’re a funny kid, you have a halfway decent voice, so why don’t you come in and make a tape and we’ll see if there’s some part-time work for you.” So in the meantime I graduated from Marcellus and went to Onondaga Community College for radio and television, and he called me and said, “Yeah, come on in and we’ll audition you.”
I got a job doing the weather one night a week every other hour from midnight on Friday to 6 a.m. Saturday morning. {It was a} “beautiful music” format, which is what 93Q was prior to changing to contemporary music, and it was, like, elevator music. My friends would be out partying and they’d call me: “Hey, we heard you say the temperature, now say my name!” So that was cool. Then I got promoted to the Sunday morning religious shows, changing the tapes on, like, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. We had a Polish show, and I actually queued up the tape backward one day. I couldn’t tell, because it was all in Polish. People called and said, “You’re playing that backward!”
I did that for probably six months, and then a full-time job opened up, so I dropped out of OCC. I’ve been doing radio ever since. That was 27 years ago, unbelievably. So it was either bag groceries or do this. Those are the only two things I know how do to.
Amy: He could always go back to the groceries!
Ted: Groceries, I think, paid a little better back then, anyway. So I was very fortunate in many ways, and I always wanted to do some form of entertainment.
Amy: And you’d been at the morning show years before I was.
Ted: Yeah, well, we changed the format—I believe it was 1983—to an adult-contemporary format, and I was doing afternoons. I moved to mornings in 1984, but I’ve been on the morning show ever since.
Q: What about OCC?
Ted: I never graduated from OCC.
Amy: He’s a Marcellus grad. {OCC} still {cites} him as an alum, though! You should ask for an honorary doctorate in communications!
Ted: Yeah, I graduated from Marcellus in 1979, and it’s funny because Marcellus didn’t have any kind of media courses or broadcasting. But the Dome Ranger {Dennis Brogan} was from there. Gomez {Glenn Gomez Adams from WTKW-FM 99.5 (TK99)} was actually a year ahead of me in high school.
Amy: Well, I’m a 1983 graduate from Camden High School.
Ted: I read to her kindergarten class!
Amy: And I’m a 1987 graduate of Ithaca College’s school of communications; I went four years to study broadcast journalism. For a year out of college I worked at WEZG, which is no longer around {WEZG-FM 100.9, which broadcast with sister station WSOQ-AM 1220 from North Syracuse, later became WKRL-FM (K-Rock)}, but I did just news. I really was not good at it, because you have to be very assertive to cover news stories, and I realized I was not really aggressive enough.
Ted: One of my favorite stories is when she was covering the Lee Alexander scandal trial. We were at a press conference and one of the lawyers made her cry.
Amy: Yeah, and I realized I was not {right for the job}. The Pan-Am 103 disaster happened right when I was out of college. They’re like, “Go on up, and talk to all the students who lost all these people!” and I was, like, “Oh, my God!” You have to be a really assertive person.
So this is much more suited to my personality; we interview people, it’s lighter and it’s about fashion and celebrities and stuff like that. You have to be a very special person {to do news}. I’m 20 years older and I still don’t know if I’d have it in me to do that. There are people who are really good like that.
I didn’t really replace anyone on 93Q. I just kind of joined a two-man morning show doing news in 1988, and our boss noticed that Ted and I had a chemistry right away. We just really worked well together. About six months later the other morning guy left, Dave Laird {who now works at WYYY-FM 94.5 (Y94)}. Ted and I have been together ever since. We hit 19 years in November.
Q: Has radio changed over time?
Ted: When I first started you could only own one FM station, one AM station and I think either a TV station or a newspaper. Now these gigantic corporations own chains of stations. In an ownership capacity, it’s changed a great deal.
Amy: Even when I’d gotten in it, too, it was interesting, because if your radio station sold all the commercials it was supposed to, we’d be able to get free shirts and stuff like that. Now everything goes to the corporate level, so even if we’re doing well in Syracuse it doesn’t matter as much if their Binghamton station or their Buffalo station is suffering. It all goes to the bottom line, so it’s not as immediate in terms of gratification.
Ted: They’ve treated us fairly well. But now you need corporate to approve a clambake.
Amy: Or if you have a low month with the sell, forget it. So it’s interesting.
Ted: Competition-wise, it’s changed a great deal. You had radio and you had records, and that was pretty much it. Then you were competing with people’s Sony Walkmans. Now you have iPods and satellite radio and Internet podcasting. It’s unbelievable.
Amy: We really have survived even with this satellite radio. But I think you’re always going to need morning shows—knock on wood, as I say—because of the local news and weather and traffic. Even though you have a lot of other outlets, I think that’s the reason why local radio still holds its own.
But in terms of other shifts, we all got our foot in the door by doing overnight shifts and weekends and things like that. Now you don’t have as many of those shifts available because of computer technology and voice tracking. Really, 93Q is pretty much live 24 hours a day, except for the overnight position, where we don’t have someone physically running the board, but that’s unusual for a lot of stations.
Ted: Yeah, it used to be like, “Well, I got into radio by answering the phones for so-and-so.” There are still those kind of entry-level positions, but they’re few and far between.
Amy: But then again, we feel like {communications} students are different these days. We get part-timers that come in and don’t want to work weekends and holidays. In the olden days when we started we would have done anything to be in radio. It just seems like these days, I’m not sure if it’s the {lack of} enthusiasm or just something else. You’re young! I think there are a lot of opening positions but you just have to want to do it.
Ted: It’s tough. You get right out of school, and you want to start on the morning show.
Amy: Probably not going to happen. You have to work your way up.
Ted: I’m still waiting to get there someday!
Amy: We’re still waiting for you. You missed your mark.
Ted: We made the conscious choice to stay here in Syracuse. It isn’t like we haven’t been offered jobs elsewhere, but all of our families are from here, and we’re just part of the community, which I think is a big part of our success, too. We’re out and about pretty much every week doing something, either charity work or emceeing banquets or silent auctions. Having our face out in the community is something you can’t get through satellite radio. It’s one of the things we can do as far as competing.
Amy: And you never can let that go. Even though Ted and I have done it for 20 years, you can’t rest on your laurels. It’s constant work to keep you in everybody’s mind. You can’t say, “People know us, so forget it.”
Ted: Let’s face it. We are pretty forgettable!
MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS
Wake-up call: You might be wiping the sleep out of your eyes, but by 5:30 a.m. on weekdays,
Amy Robbins and Ted Long are getting their morning show going.
Q: How has the technology of radio changed?
Ted: Oh, that’s drastic. When I first started all the music was on either 45s or these things called carts; they look like eight-track tapes.
Amy: Or reel-to-reel!
Ted: Yeah, we used to have big reel tapes that we would queue up. Then we went to CDs, and now everything is on hard drive; sound effects, music, it’s all on a hard drive.
Amy: We do our show live, but if we record any stuff, even our voices for commercials, or if we take phone calls to record for playback, that’s all on computer. If our computer goes down, we’re screwed!
Ted: It stinks, because I’d just learned to do a really good tape splice and then the digital editors came along.
Amy: But it saves us a lot of time. The technology has definitely changed.
Ted: Just the physicality of it, too. When I’d come in for the morning we’d pull all the music, we’d pull all the commercials, then we’d line up all the tapes. Now it’s all on our hard drive. It’s a touch screen, and it’s right in front of you.
Amy: When I first started these deejays had posters up, and they were all smoking in the studio.
Ted: There used to be overflowing ashtrays!
Amy: It’s a little more high tech these days!
Ted: To compete with satellite radio and iPods and things, we’ve gone to digital transmitters, where if you buy a high-definition radio the audio quality is unbelievable. And you can do a lot more; there’s side channels and different programming.
Amy: You can listen live on the Internet, too, and that’s great for offices that can’t get a signal because of the metal in the building. And we have people who used to live here and moved down South and they love to catch up. So it’s pretty wild that we’re worldwide now because our Web site does that. That’s something I never saw coming.
Ted: We all know how to do three or four different other things, as well as our on-air shift. I do all our on-air Web site content, and Amy is involved with public service and everything else that’s going on.
Q: Do you think there are advantages to being part of a larger corporation?
Amy: Well, you have more resources. When you work for a big corporation, a lot of stuff is available to all stations, whether you’re in the 150th market or the No. 1 market. They like to share resources, so that’s an advantage.
Ted: We might not be able to get a clambake, but if the transmitter blows up we can probably get a new one the next day. In the lean times, it’s good to have backup.
Amy: If you look at Clear Channel, our competitor, and how much they own in the area, it’s kind of scary. How do you compete with market dollars when they own so many radio stations? Whether it’s fair or not, that’s the way it is, but I’m not sure that’s advantageous. I don’t even know if they enjoy it.
Q: Plus those businesses are owned by larger businesses.
Ted: Oh, I know! But, as long as I have a paycheck in my box. . .
Amy: That’s part of the reason we’ve been here so long, though. {Citadel} treats us very well. You hear horror stories, and that’s not what we want.
Q:How consciously do you think about programming
local content into your shows?
Ted: I think by nature we are local because we have been doing it for so long. There’s no meetings about how we could become more local.
Amy: We have been asked, though, to look into doing a syndicated show because we have had success here. You know, “How would you feel about trying to do more than one station?”
Ted: In more than one market, anyway.
Amy: But we’re nervous about that because we don’t think that we could keep it local. If you mention the smell on Hiawatha Boulevard, you could say that; if you didn’t have a local show, no one would even care! We feel like we’re so local that that sort of thing would prevent us from doing something syndicated. It probably could work. . .
Ted: There are ways to do it. . .
Amy: Not that we’re regretting that decision, but that’s kind of why we stayed away from that: Because when you look at it, two out of the four stations in the building are syndicated {Citadel’s WAQX-FM 95.7 (95X) broadcasts the daily Opie and Anthony raunchfest, while WNSS-AM 1260, an ESPN affiliate, airs Mike and Mike in the Morning} so there are fewer and fewer local morning shows. {Besides Ted and Amy, WLTI-FM Lite 105.9 features a breakfast shift with Dave Allen.}
Olan Mills special: While Amy Robbins aspired to “perm” as a jockey in the late 1980s, she never knew she’d spend 20 years as Ted Long’s straight woman.
Q: Local musicians gripe that there’s not enough local music on the radio.
Ted: Yeah, I know. We actually try to do what we can. Our Christmas broadcast is all local music, which we broadcast live. We do Balloon Fest, which features local acts spliced with the national acts.
Amy: We do Party In the Plaza {Wednesdays during the summer at the downtown Federal Building} and we recently took over the Inner Harbor {sometimes sharing the event with 95X} summer parties on Thursdays, and you’ll always have some of the local bands in it every year to promote that. Truthfully, a lot of the bands don’t like to get up early! That’s the one thing about having them play live. Our program director {Tom Mitchell} says if we have local music, we’d like them to perform live.
Ted: We’ve got so much talent in Syracuse it’s unbelievable.
Amy: I’d love to have the bands in, and I wish we could do that more often. Being the type of format we are—we’re obviously top 40—we play very, very popular songs. We try to promote local music as much as we can.
Ted: It would be great to be able to feature them, like Dave Frisina does with Soundcheck {on TK99}.
Amy: Yeah, he does a great job promoting that.
Q: A lot of radio deejays work in pairs. Do you two think of yourself working in an independent partnership for Citadel?
Amy: We’re definitely more valuable as a team. Plus, you should hear us alone!
Ted: {Laughing} No, but I think of it almost like a franchise, you know?
Amy: It’s very unusual that a morning show has been in the same market for 20 years.
Ted: Some {morning-show jocks} don’t even like each other. We’ve been very fortunate that we actually genuinely like each other.
Amy: Sometimes we don’t, but we normally do. But yeah, both of us had the goal of staying here, and thank God! I think you have really good teams, but if one of you wants to move elsewhere or move on, what do you do? You either have to agree or separate. We’ve been lucky that we both want to stick around.
The Old Guard of Syracuse Radio
Despite what some say about the health of Syracuse radio, broadcasters throughout the Salt City continue to fight the digital tide that has seized the radio industry at this point in its century-long history. Those proud disc jockeys have introduced thousands of musical acts, both local and national, to the Syracuse audience, while maintaining loyal listeners who are tempted by the new technologies of podcasts, satellite radio and the Internet. The Syracuse New Times will dive into the history of Syracuse’s terrestrial radio stalwarts through an ongoing series that will feature interviews with these top-notch platter spinners. Stay tuned!
Q: Are there any stories about the old days of radio that stick out in your mind?
Ted: When I first started in radio Phil Markert was doing the morning show on WNDR, and he used to do sing-along piano things at bars at night {including a long-running gig at the old Tom’s Clam Cove}, and he would just go directly from that to the radio station, and take a nap on the production room’s floor on certain nights. I had to go in and erase a tape or something and I didn’t turn the light on. I stepped right on him! I don’t think he woke up.
Amy: We were both lucky to work with Jim O’Brien. For anyone who’s been in radio Jim was like the 1960s Howard Stern around here. He played the Beatles first and everybody knew Jim O’Brien.
Ted: I grew up listening to him.
Amy: He was at WNDR, our sister station up until the mid-1990s. He passed away a couple years ago, but he was just a legend, and it was nice that we both knew him so well. I mean, having people like that that we both worked with is just amazing.
Ted: It’s funny when you think about Syracuse. We’ve been here forever, but there are still so many people that are in the market doing radio that we either worked with or listened to growing up that are still on the air.
Amy: “Big” Mike Fiss has been around forever. {He’s still is, holding down mornings at WZUN-FM 102.1 (Sunny 102).}
Ted: Rick Gary and Ron Bee. {A mega-popular morning team during the 1970s on WOLF-AM 1490.}
Amy: Ron’s been around for a long time. {He now co-hosts a morning show with Becky Palmer on WBBS-FM 104.7 (B-104.7); meanwhile, Gary does simultaneous afternoon shifts for Galaxy’s Sunny 102 and WZUN-FM 102.5 (Mix).} I don’t know if that’s unusual. Syracuse has a lot of people that just stay.
Q: Ted, you acted on the local children’s television show Pappyland. What was your experience like?
Ted: It was a fun production with a lot of nice people and the show itself was a huge hit with both critics and kids. It’s probably the closest I did that ever came to national notoriety. Wearing a thick, heavy bear costume under hot TV lights is a great way to lose weight too.
Q: Are there other disc jockeys that inspired you to get into the business?
Ted: Oh yeah. Fran McGrath, who was WNDR’s sales manager, used to be on the air. {McGrath handled the disc-jockey aliases of Count DeCreep and Mack and Maude in the 1960s; he later did an “ancient scout” routine, a parody of The Herald-Journal sports editor Arnie Burdick’s “Old Scout” nom de plume.} Big George Plavokis, who was the general manager when I started in radio, used to be on WNDR, as well as the Flying Dutchman {Peter Berry} and Phil Markert. Then when I was a little older and got into FM, I used to listen to 95X a lot, Champagne Lenny {Bilotti} and Ed Levine {now owner of Galaxy Communications}. I used to listen to Dave Laird when he was on Fire 14 {WFBL-AM 1390’s “hot hits” format in 1979 and 1980}.
Amy: The first person who gave me a job in Syracuse was Barbara Gibbons, who had done news in the area for years and years. She actually worked with Ted, too. Barbara was kind of like me, when I was 20 years old, you know? She was in her 40s and kind of took me under her wing, and so I’m forever grateful.
Ted: Here’s a blast from the past: Ed Murphy.
Amy: Ed Murphy, he’s just a legend. Also Charlie Hobart. {Both were broadcast personalities for then radio and TV stations WSYR.}
Ted: We’ve known a lot of people. Like I say, out of all the other radio stations in town, we’ve worked with or we socialize with just about everybody, I think, at some point.
Q: What do you think it means to be a good broadcaster?
Ted: Well, you have a responsibility to the public to serve them, whether it’s information-wise or doing a lot of stuff for our community. So we’re able to use the morning show to promote causes and charities.
Amy: Some people don’t have the choice, but as long as we have the choice, remaining local serves the community.
Ted: If somebody could wake up and turn on songs in the morning and get the information they need, whether it’s news or how to avoid the big accident on the roadway, and they’re entertained by the music and maybe they hear some good deals through the commercials, hopefully we’re fulfilling our duties as good, responsible broadcasters.
Amy: It’s amazing. You meet people who listened when they were growing up, and now their kids listen; they’ve listened to us for 20 years. I mean, that makes you feel old, but that’s also such an honor that they think of us as friends, not only serving the community, but they like us! I think that’s what makes good broadcasters. We are, hopefully, very down-to-earth people and that comes across on the air, and we try to be the same people on and off the air. We’re not talented enough to actually have two different personalities!
Q: Do you ever get sick of listening to the top 40 songs?
Ted: Our format, by nature, is repetitive on purpose. So, when you’re sick of hearing a song, we’re really sick of hearing it. It’s like every hour and a half, you hear it again.
Amy: But that’s the kind of format that we are and it’s generally successful. So when we get burned out we just say, “That’s OK!”
Ted: Hopefully the idea is that you turn it on and you’re going to hear your favorite song in the next five minutes.
Q: What do you guys listen to on your own?
Ted: My kids are into the stuff we play, plus all the indie bands and things. But I’m a little music’ed out, so I listen to talk shows on the Internet.
Amy: I listen to a lot of talk radio, too, but I like classic 1970s. You know, I’m not going to lie!
Ted: Her husband has a vast CD collection, and it’s all alphabetized and everything, but she didn’t bring a lot of music to the table. She has one K-Tel record!
Amy: He hid that, too! I haven’t been able to find it.
Ted: Her husband makes her go to the symphony and she fidgets like a 3-year-old in church. ❏
