The Sunday Memory Drawer - The Birth of Diploma City

I had a better typewriter than this one in college. But, the picture alone propels me back to some great times in my life.

It was a radio show called "Diploma City."

I had spent my freshman and sophomore years at Fordham University's WFUV. Doing a little of everything and a lot of nothing. Not gifted with the voice of Don Pardo, my airwork was limited. I did some news writing and reporting for the evening news report. I attempted sports play-by-play and quickly gave up when I realized that, during a football game, I could never tell which player had the ball.

I developed a little bit of niche when I became the station's official "television reporter." I got to do some celebrity interviews with folks like Tony Randall, Alan Alda, Paul Lynde, and Karen Valentine. But, still, there was something that seemed a little off reporting on the medium of television while on the radio.

A bit directionless, I might have given the 50,000 watt antenna and its surroundings a huge heave ho, except that I had made a lot of good friends there. So, for the sake of my wonderful comrades, I stuck it out. A supporting player, but clearly not a star.

But I still wanted more.

I was a sitcom junkie. Most particularly, I was in love at the time with the comedy stylings of such classics as "All in the Family" and "Mary Tyler Moore." I fantasized about working in the writers room at MTM Enterprises, even if it was just to take orders for late night pastrami sandwiches. So, I thought, how do I start myself on that esteemed path while playing the flunky at WFUV?

How about a sitcom on the radio? It's not like it was an innovative idea. After all, the sitcom was born on the AM band in the 30s and 40s, thanks to people like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Fibber McGee & Molly. Gee, I could do that on WFUV. So, I told the station program director. His reaction was not what I expected.

"Huh?"

He was more used to fielding program ideas from would-be rock disk jockeys who wanted to devote two hours of airtime to the "Best of Foghat" with such ridiculous show titles like "Vaheavela," "Anybody's Guess" or "As Time Goes By." Nobody had ever showed up with this notion before. And, as I did my research, nobody had done such a show at WFUV for a long time. The last guy who had mounted a comedy show on the station? Alan Alda.

I was even more determined to pick up the gauntlet that the vintage WFUV program guides had hoisted at me. Now was the time to bring a situation comedy back to WFUV, Mr. Program Director.

"Huh?"

Probably to get rid of me, he gave me a half-hour every Sunday night starting in October. 1030PM. Bedtime for most, primetime for me. It was my junior year and I finally mattered at WFUV. The coach had given me the ball.

Now what do I do?

I got hold of some old Jack Benny radio scripts and studied the format. You have to be more descriptive in the dialogue and rely more heavily on sound effects. Instead of simply walking across the room, you have to actually say, "I'm walking to the other side of the room." Well, there are more creative ways to do that, but you get the idea. I decided to devote my summer months to writing scripts for my production.

Except I still didn't have a concept. Being uncommonly devoted to "Mary Tyler Moore," I decided to use that as a model for my show. Well, more than a model. I blatantly copied them. As I typed away, I was convinced that MTM lawyers with full briefcases would be showing up at my door any minute. I countered to myself that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. It was also a great shortcut for an idea-less writer.

Since we were in college, I adapted the MTM show to a university setting. Two male freshmen roommates at a fictitious Philadelphia campus called Taft College. AKA Diploma City, or, as it became affectionately to most of us, Dip City. Steve Marshall and Allen Siegel were Mary and Rhoda. Steve worked at the campus newspaper with Kathryn Engel (Lou Grant), Cindy Wellington (Murray Slaughter), and Milton Harper (Ted Baxter). I was so tuned in to Mary's show that my characters' last names were culled from the last names of the actors on that program. I was a complete nut.

In those early days, I really didn't know what the hell I was doing. Luckily, one of the station engineers took a liking to the idea and fashioned a whole bunch of sound effects that would set the scene for wherever my characters were. Rock music would be background in the dorm room. A teletype would denote that you were in the school newspaper office. And a college juke box, mixed with crowd noises, would tell us that our characters were hoisting a cold one at the college bar, the Chem Lab. Of course, I hadn't researched well enough to know that the drinking age in Pennsylvania was still 21. Oh, well. Perhaps my very first use of the "creative license" rule.

When it was time for me to play Louis B. Mayer and start casting, I probably should have sought out Fordham's acting troup. Instead, I decided to troll those already working at WFUV for some diamonds in the rough.

Rough indeed.

I found one guy on the air butchering an intro to a classical concert. He was horrible. For me, he was perfect to be my freshman from the Bronx.

I culled other "actors" from the ranks about me. "Hey, you wanna be on a radio situation comedy?" Most shrugged and said "sure." They had no idea what they were getting into. As I went about my casting calls, I started to make up characters as I went along. One guy could do an Irish accent. He became the bartender of the Chem Lab. I discovered another girl could do an Irish accent as well. She became the bartender's sister. And so on and so on. Before long, all my friends wanted their 15 minutes in front of the microphones.

And friends of friends got worked in. One of the leads started dating another girl at the station. She soon became his girlfriend on the show. Of course, the faux relationship would last only as long as the real one did. There was one young lady who I had a crush on. She didn't even work at the station. I created another new character to get her involved. With the show and then maybe with me. This was all easy to manage, as I wasn't paying any of these folks a dime. The only acting expense I had to endure was a specific request from one of the potential regulars. He needed to be supplied with a can of Diet 7Up for every taping.

During the first season of Diploma City, we did all our rehearsing or taping in a single midday hour. The so-called student activity hour as designated by the campus. This was the equivalent of trying to stage Ben-Hur's chariot race during a coffee break. Eventually, rehearsing gave way to virtually no rehearsing. Most of the time, the cast hadn't even read the script before we hit the mikes. Between my typos and their lack of preparation, you had bloopers like this.

"Gee, this coffee is too string."

"Uh oh, I'm going to be late for my clash."

"Hey, bartender, I'll have a cold pint of male."

You get the idea. Complicating the legibility of scripts was the fact that I did them that first season on mimeograph paper courtesy of the bursar's office downstairs. Not only were words misspelled and tough to read, my cast usually got completely high on the fumes. An already tough situation turned into the Hindenburg.

Editing all of their and my mistakes was a challenge, especially since I had no clue how to work a tape editing machine. I figured it out pretty darn fast and soon became a whiz. With the razor blade cuts on my fingertips to prove it.

In that first year, we were making up this shit as we went along. And, since we didn't know what we were doing, we were usually taping during the week for airing the following Sunday. With that tight a schedule, I started to lose cast members to homework, pop quizzes, etc.. Schooling was getting in the way of my craft. Fast rewrites were done all the time. Lines that were to read by a girl were switched to a guy. Sometimes we didn't catch all those nuances and some guy on the hockey team would be talking about shaving his legs.

One week, I completely forgot to book studio time to tape the show. Faced with no new taped episode for Sunday, we jimmied together the strangest taping ever. We lugged a boom microphone and tape equipment to somebody's dorm apartment and did the show in his living room. It was "fly by the seat of your pants" radio. And it certainly sounded like a radio show that was taped in somebody's living room.

For the most part, that first year of Diploma City was innovative, exciting, and pretty terrible. It took me a long while to find the character voices and then match them to the actors' style of speech. The writing was juvenile. The acting, except for two players, was uniformly awful.

But we had tons of fun.

Except we found ourselves with another nemesis. This one on the air. The program that followed Diploma City was a live discussion group conducted by some assholes from Student Government. Instead of focusing on the lack of parking spaces or cockroaches in the dorms, they preferred to use their air time to rip the show that preceded theirs. Ours. The anchor of these diatribes was some tub of shit named Rich Conaty. I use his name here because he deserves all this venom. Conaty was particularly cruel to us in his role as God's gift to broadcasting. Eventually, his cohorts got tired of staying out late on Sunday nights and left his show, which Rich turned into a big band music program. The scratchiest Bing Crosby records played ad nauseum week after week. But, ultimately, we all had the last laugh.

Years later, in 2009, Rich Conaty is still on WFUV every Sunday night spinning the 78s. You've come a long way, Asshole.

As for our little radio sitcom, we had such a delightful time during the first season that we couldn't wait to do it for a second year. Luckily, the program director didn't care either.

"Here's your half-hour. Don't break anything."

We would press on. With some significant changes. And that story comes next Sunday at this same blog site and the same blog time.

Dinner last night: Proscuitto and provolone panini.