Sitting in the waiting room of the General Manager's office at WMEX radio on a rainy day in 1975, Glenn Ordway could barely contain his excitement.  After several years toiling away at a small local radio station in Beverly, Massachusetts, he was about to interview for an on-air position at one of Boston's legendary radio stations.  As incredible as this moment would have been for anyone trying to make it into a major market, it was extra special for Ordway, for he, like hundreds of thousands of other Boston-area youths, had grown up listening to Boston's number one pop station.

As Glenn continued to wait, the excitement building, he closed his eyes and thought back to those nights he stayed up past his bedtime, listening to a small transistor radio he had hidden in his bedroom...

 Gather 'round everybody, for you're about to hear,
 The show that's gonna make you, grin from ear to ear,
 It's Arnie Ginsberg, on the Night Train Show.
 He plays the old and new, the swinging and the blue,
 He plays all the records, especially for you,
 It's Arnie Ginsberg, on the Night Train Show.

"And a frantic Friday night in Boston-town.  Old aching adenoids, Arnie Ginsberg, Woo-Woo for you-you, on the Night Train Show all set with all the tops in pops.  Brand new W-M-E-X Top-20 tunes comings your way.  Number seven sound this weekend, the Marcels, and Blue Moon!"

 "Mr. Richmond will see you now," the secretary said, as Glenn mentally shut off the radio and hid it beneath his pillow.  The moment that everyone in radio dreams about had arrived.

 "And I walk into his office," Glenn recalled recently, "and there are at least sixteen or seventeen galvanized pails all over the floor spread out in the room.  I sit down in the seat and the next thing I'm hearing is the dripping of the water as the rain hits these galvanized pails.  I look over at a pail that must have been three inches deep full of water.  It was the most bizarre thing to be sitting in this room.  I'm this young pup in the industry from a local Beverly radio station thinking 'Boy, I'm going to get my shot at the big time,' walk in to negotiate my first contract, and to be surrounded by all these pails and to hear the drip, drip, drip sound like in those Maxwell House commercials.  And Richmond never said a word about it."

To say that the reign of the Richmond brothers, which began in 1957 and lasted for over twenty years, was unusual, even by radio terms, is an understatement.  Although they hired a series of General Mangers and Program Directors, it was older brother Mac who ultimately ran WMEX and fretted over every detail of the station's operation until the day of his death in 1971.  His uncanny sense of radio, promotions, and public taste made WMEX one of the country's most successful radio stations in the 1960s.  But, as every former staffer will tell you, his paranoia, parsimony, and need to be involved in every detail (down to what the disc jockeys said on the air) made WMEX simultaneously one of the most frustrating and rewarding places to work.

Arnie "Woo-Woo" Ginsberg was heard from 7pm until 10pm between 1958 and 1965, making a name for himself and the sponsors who advertised on his show with a classic high energy Top-40 music program.  From Revere to Wollaston Beach, the kids tuned in to hear the Jive Five, the Playmates, Buddy Holly, and Elvis interspersed between sound effects, jingles, station promotions, and commercials.  Lots of commercials.

Oh Adventure Car Hop is the place to go, for food that's always right,
Adventure food is always just so, you'll relish every bite,
It's out on Route One in Saugus, come dressed just as you are,
Adventure, where the service is tops, and you never gets out of your car!

"Hi there, this is Arnie Ginsberg telling you that Adventure Car Hop presents for the first time anywhere the GINSBURGER!  That's right, the Ginsburger is now being served at Adventure Car Hop.  I designed it, I planned it, I tested it, but you're going to eat it.  And what a delicious mouthful it is.  And adventure Car Hop is serving the Ginsburger on a record which you get to keep for your very own.  If you say Woo-Woo Ginsberg with your order, you get another Ginsburger free of charge.  So how can you miss, stop by the Adventure Car Hop, Route One in Saugus!"

Arnie was big.  But Mac was always looking for ways to make him (and the station) bigger.  "Mac used to listen to out of town radio stations late at night," Arnie recalls.  "He's go into the diner located across the street on Brookline Avenue and he'd bring his little transistor radio and eat with one hand and hold the radio up to his ear with the other.  One night he came in while I was on the air and he scribbled something out and handed it to me and said 'Announce this every half hour...we're going to give away a pony starting tomorrow.'  He heard another station giving away a pony.  So I announce it every half hour that night.  The next day I went up to him and asked 'So how are we going to give away this pony?'  And he just says 'Oh, I decided not to do it,'" leaving Arnie to explain the missing pony to his listeners.

Working for Mac was always a good news/bad news proposition, for while he always hired the best DJs in the business, he know enough to leave them alone.  Al Kennedy worked for six years as a newsman at WMEX and recalls that "We had two different telephone lines, but because of the live microphones the phones wouldn't ring, we'd have big spotlights come on instead.  One was red and one was blue.  When the blue went on, you knew it was Mac, and it was like Pavlov's dogs.  But we wouldn't salivate, we'd get angry because you'd know Mac was going to take up your time.  You'd pick up the phone and say 'Good Morning, WMEX,' and he'd say 'Take this down.'  These would be little funny things for the disc jockey to say.  I'd type them down and bring them into the studio and the jocks would look at the paper and say 'Get the hell out of here!'  And you couldn't blame them."

 "Richmond...started sitting with me in the control room with me during my show," wrote Larry Lujack of his short-lived WMEX stint during the 1960s in his autobiography Superjock.  "He started ... writing out things he wanted me to say on the air.  It was never just a Monday; it had to be 'Marvelous Monday.'  'Terrific Tuesday.'  Wednesdays were 'Wacky.'  It was 'Thrilling Thursday.'  On Fridays I got a choice of 'Fantastic' or 'Fabulous.'  He wrote a lot of the station's commercials himself, since he thought he could do a better job than his salesmen and copywriters.  They contained outdated slang phrases like 'crazy' and 'daddy-O.'  Even James Dean would have blushed in embarrassment if he'd have to read that stuff."  As it turned out, Lujack didn't have to read it for long.  After just a few months at WMEX, he "escaped" to Chicago, where he became one of the midwest's biggest air talents.

Mac's devotion to minutiae did not keep him from making major decisions that put WMEX on the map.  One of his most important was hiring Jerry Williams whose talk show, when it made its debut in 1957, was the first in Boston to take on controversial issues and put listener phone calls on the air.  "Mac invented the telephone talk show," says John Garabedian, who programmed WMEX in the early seventies.  "Nobody ever did it before he did.  People wouldn't put phone calls on the air in 1957 because they said it wasn't broadcast quality.  He said that was crazy, people want to hear what other people have to say.  Mac's special gift was that he really understood entertainment and what the audience wanted."

Talk radio, a completely different form of entertainment from what the disc jockeys were doing, attracted adults instead of teeny-boppers, yet Jerry was also a monstrous success though he followed Arnie Ginsberg every night on WMEX.  "We talked about birth control, abortion, race, and communism.  I didn't know from one night to the next if I'd be on, that's how controversial it was," Jerry recalls.  "In the days before there was any discussion about race we used to talk about race almost nightly.  Malcolm X came on about twelve times...the last time just a month before he was killed.  One night he was on our transmitter tower was bombed and we were thrown off the air!"

Steve Fredricks, who took over the 10pm to 2am shift when Williams left for Chicago, believes that despite his eccentricities, one shouldn’t underestimate Richmond's skills.  "You have to understand that this was a 5000 watt radio station with a lousy signal and a hideous dial position at 1510 that was the number one station in the sixties.  Jerry had the top rated show and you couldn't hear the station at night.  Moe Ellis, who owned Ellis the Rim Man (1001 Commonwealth Avenue, the home of 1001 automotive items!) lived in Brookline, and he had to go out into his driveway and sit in his car to hear his commercials.  Think of it.  He couldn't get a local station in his house.  So to say that the guy who ran it did not have skill as a broadcaster is ridiculous."

Garabedian agrees, and is quick to point out that "most Mac Richmond stories, no matter how bizarre, are probably true.  But behind each of those stories is a rational answer."  A classic example was forcing newly hired disc jockeys to take the on-air name of the man they had replaced.  To many this seemed like a cheap way to avoid buying new jingles and promotional material.  But according to Mel Miller (who later went on to program all-talk WRKO in the 1980s), "it made a lot of sense... what happens is a station gets going and they have consistency because people didn't really know that the voice behind the name was different.  The people didn't really care when surveyed by the ratings.  'Sure, I know that name Dan Donavon, it's familiar.'  When I left WMEX... in 1961... I was known as Melvin X. Melvin on the air.  After I left, they went through two Melvin X. Melvins... they were doing record hops with Melvin X. Melvin advertised, and there was nothing I could do about it."

In 1967 the airways in Boston began to sizzle with a ratings war that began when WRKO switched to Top-40.  Backed by a nationwide network, blessed with a stronger signal and better dial position (680 AM), WRKO soon became the number one Top-40 station in Boston, a position it held firmly until 1971.  That year, Mac Richmond gave afternoon drive DJ John Garabedian the chance to program WMEX.  Once again, Mac's instincts for radio talent proved uncanny.  In only three months WMEX replaced WRKO as the number one station among teenagers.

But Mac Richmond died in November of 1971, dashing any hopes WMEX had in surviving the ratings war.  For while Mac's successors maintained his parsimony and retentiveness - the list of people who took Mac to court in order to collect pay and benefits is almost as long as the list of people who worked there - they lacked his innate understanding of the business, which for many staffers made Mac's personal sins, if not forgivable, than at least acceptable.

Bob Howard, Mac's immediate successor, banned food and coffee from the station (the latter almost as important to disc jockeys as air), and threatened to fire one DJ he found eating a cookie in the studio.  He issued a memo to the news department that the word Communist would be replaced in all newscasts with the words "Commie-Reds."  Howard then had the request lines used by Garabedian to identify public taste in music (and, for a short time, bring WMEX back into competition with WRKO),  removed.  He later fired Garabedian for refusing to issue a memo ordering the disc jockeys to say "WMEX Number One" before every song, even though the station was still behind WRKO in the ratings.  Without Garabedian, without the phones, without the coffee, and in the face of stiff competition from old foes on the AM dial and new threats from the FM band (from stations like WBCN), the ratings tumbled.

Several years later Mac's brother Dick sold WMEX to a broadcast group from Cincinnati that changed the station's call lettes to WITS, and the format to talk.  With Red Sox and Bruins games (as well as a show hosted by now-radio veteran Glenn Ordway) the station managed a modest revival.  But a poltergeist must exist at 1510AM, for after a series of public embarrassments (most notably the public flogging that occurred after station manager Joe Scallan fired beloved Red Sox broadcasters Ned Martin and Jim Woods), the station tumbled into ratings obscurity.  After numerous sales, call letters, and format changes in the 1980s and 1990s (Big Band, Spanish, and Christian, to name three), the station changed to sports-talk, although only four hours are local, the rest of the day coming off a satellite.

Today, the FCC rules that allow for multiple ownership of stations within a market have seemingly led to a “gentleman’s agreement” between the four companies that own most of the major AM and FM stations in this market.  The great “radio wars” of the previous three decades - between AM Top-40 stations in the 1960s and 1970s or FM rock stations in the 1980s - have been skillfully eliminated by corporate programmers who have sliced the market into easily sell-able demographic pieces.

While everyone might be making money, one looks back whistfully to the days of Mac Richmond when radio stations were reflections of people, instead of corporate bottom lines and realize that we, the public, was better served.  Though we may never get that pony, we did get a better brand of radio.