Voices of the Airwaves: Chuck Rice's Journey Through the Heart of Radio Storytelling Episode 50
May 19, 2024
Randy
As the comforting crackle of a well-tuned radio takes us back to the days of storytelling at its finest, we're joined by Chuck Rice—a media veteran whose voice has colored the airwaves with stories of local charm and political intrigue. Together on Hot Mic, we reminisce about Chuck's climb from the modest beginnings at local stations like WMMH and WSKY to the pulsing political beat of WPTF in Raleigh. His tales, brimming with the humanity and wit that only live radio can capture, invite you to experience the nostalgia and thrill of his career, including an amusing, if slightly tipsy, twist of fate that launched him into an 18-year journey with the Associated Press.
Strap in for a sentimental ride through the golden age of radio and country music, as we honor the narrative prowess of individuals like Tom T Hall and celebrate the intimate role of radio in small-town life. Chuck, Randy and Dave share fond memories of grandparents and community connections, from trading post announcements to obituary readings that spoke the language of the heart. They reflect on the craft of distilling stories into 40-second segments and three-minute ballads, emphasizing the raw authenticity that only live radio can deliver—an art as much about what is said as it is about what is felt.
Rounding off our airtime, we beam with pride over the creation of a new radio station in Madison County - WART FM 95.5 - an inception imbued with the same spirit of community and connection that radio has championed for generations. We offer our heartfelt thanks to Chuck Rice for sharing his seasoned perspective and invite you to tune in to more episodes of Hot Mic with Randy Houston and Dave Hogan, where the stories of community impact and the transformative power of radio continue to resonate. Subscribe now, and let the rich, vibrant history of this medium enliven your every listen.
As the comforting crackle of a well-tuned radio takes us back to the days of storytelling at its finest, we're joined by Chuck Rice—a media veteran whose voice has colored the airwaves with stories of local charm and political intrigue. Together on Hot Mic, we reminisce about Chuck's climb from the modest beginnings at local stations like WMMH and WSKY to the pulsing political beat of WPTF in Raleigh. His tales, brimming with the humanity and wit that only live radio can capture, invite you to experience the nostalgia and thrill of his career, including an amusing, if slightly tipsy, twist of fate that launched him into an 18-year journey with the Associated Press.
Strap in for a sentimental ride through the golden age of radio and country music, as we honor the narrative prowess of individuals like Tom T Hall and celebrate the intimate role of radio in small-town life. Chuck, Randy and Dave share fond memories of grandparents and community connections, from trading post announcements to obituary readings that spoke the language of the heart. They reflect on the craft of distilling stories into 40-second segments and three-minute ballads, emphasizing the raw authenticity that only live radio can deliver—an art as much about what is said as it is about what is felt.
Rounding off our airtime, we beam with pride over the creation of a new radio station in Madison County - WART FM 95.5 - an inception imbued with the same spirit of community and connection that radio has championed for generations. We offer our heartfelt thanks to Chuck Rice for sharing his seasoned perspective and invite you to tune in to more episodes of Hot Mic with Randy Houston and Dave Hogan, where the stories of community impact and the transformative power of radio continue to resonate. Subscribe now, and let the rich, vibrant history of this medium enliven your every listen.
Speaker 1:
hot mike with houston and hogan is back on the air again. I guess we're on the air somewhere, we're on the air everywhere. I'll tell you a new one and and we're going to talk about it today we are on the air on a new radio station and we're going to talk all about that today because it's an exciting day here at hot mic with houston and hogan. I'm the randy houston part of that and I'm a little bit intimidated.
Speaker 2:
this morning or this afternoon or whenever folks are listening to this, I'm a bit intimidated because we have a guest. I think I'm in over my head. We have a guest who has some. Even though he's a very young man still has some tremendous accomplishments to his credit. He really does Tell us who he is. You've known him quite a while, chuck.
Speaker 1:
Rice. Welcome to Hot Mike.
Speaker 3:
It's so good to have you here, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be with two radio luminaries who I have admired and considered heroes for a very long time.
Speaker 2:
I'm glad I don't know the definition of luminary, because I don't know what he's calling it.
Speaker 1:
It's the light that shines off your head, that glare, that's right.
Speaker 2:
Charles, or Chuck as he's known, started his working career. Randy, just like you and me, in local radio.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, Marshall, wmmh, that's right With Dean Shields, with Dean Shields, with Dean Shields, and then in Asheville, at the station I worked at for many years, wsky and Zebley and Zebley. You know we had Zeb's sons on the podcast. Yeah, we talked about Zeb a lot. The podcast, yeah, talked about zeb a lot, and every time his name comes up I feel a little guilty that I did not appreciate zeb as much when I was working for him as I do now. You also, after local radio and marshall and in ashville, moved to Raleigh and worked at one of the stations that anybody who knows media in North Carolina is familiar with, and that's WPTF Radio in Raleigh, the state capital.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, we Protect the Family. It was owned by Durham Broadcasting.
Speaker 2:
Really is that.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's way back when I've always been into how call letters came about and Wise was. Wisdom in service endures. There you go. I don't know why I remember that.
Speaker 1:
I forgot that. I forgot that.
Speaker 2:
David, we worked there. Yeah, I don't even know if I've heard that before.
Speaker 1:
There's the pro in this room.
Speaker 2:
There he is, and of course WSKY is kind of self-explanatory Land of the Sky and whiskey. Did the late Senator Jesse Helms not get his start at WPTF in Raleigh?
Speaker 3:
Maybe on TV at a commentary WRAL, wral.
Speaker 2:
WRAL.
Speaker 3:
WRAL channel five, and I can't remember the FM frequency, but he did WRAL.
Speaker 2:
Now working at WPTF.
Speaker 3:
you had an opportunity, I'm sure, to cover the state capital and the governor and tell us a little bit about your experience there well I, I was kind of thrown into the deep end of the pool there, uh the uh historic uh jesse helms, jim hunt uh senate race the most expensive senate race in history I think brutal, brutal uh was happening and jesse was my candidate and so I followed him around the area for weeks, months before the election and I was in the room when he beat Jim Hunt.
Speaker 3:
It was a very close election, but yeah, and then I would cover Jim Martin. Remember Jim Martin?
Speaker 2:
the governor yes.
Speaker 3:
A nice, nice person.
Speaker 2:
Was he not from the Boone area?
Speaker 3:
or was that Jim Holzhauser? That was Holzhauser. Yeah, jim Martin, I think, was from Charlotte area, but I would cover him. I covered Jim Hunt as governor, I would cover various local lawmakers and so forth. It was a really enlightening experience, but it was also something that really prepared me for my next step in my career was the Associated Press.
Speaker 2:
Tell us how that came about, going from WPTF in Raleigh to I guess Washington was your home base for the Associated Press and just about anybody recognizes AP or the. Associated Press, one of the premier news gathering and reporting organizations in the world. Amen, tell us about the Associated.
Speaker 3:
Press. I've never quite told this story and I'm a little hesitant to tell it right now because it's a little bit embarrassing. But I went to DC to see a play just to go up, and I also have relatives there, so I went up to see them. And when I was in DC I wanted to see the Associated Press because WPTF was an affiliate of UPI and AP, so I got a tour of the place and never did see the play.
Speaker 3:
Went back to my aunt's house this was just after the first of the year, so she had a couple of the place and never did see the play. Went back to my aunt's house this was just after the first of the year, so she had a couple of bottles of champagne there and we just started drinking champagne. About an hour into this drinking champagne I got a call from the AP, the managing editor, and he said we would like for you to come in and take our test. We were impressed when you came for the tour and I had no objective to work there, I just came in for a tour and I said, sure, tomorrow. And he said if you can come this afternoon it would be great. I was very relaxed when I took that test.
Speaker 2:
What was that country song? Drinking champagne, yeah. Feeling no pain, yeah.
Speaker 3:
I had to get somebody to drive me over to.
Speaker 2:
DC.
Speaker 3:
I was in Arlington and I was not able to drive, but I got the job.
Speaker 2:
Without the champagne, do you think you would have passed the test? I don't know.
Speaker 3:
I can't believe I got the job.
Speaker 2:
Tell us about the experience of working for the Associated Press and how long you worked for the AP.
Speaker 3:
I worked there 18 years and it's been described like being in the Marine Corps boot camp. It is pretty rough. You have constant deadlines. We had deadlines every three or four minutes throughout the eight-hour workday. I covered the presidents, I covered Congress. What I really enjoyed covering was space shuttle launches. I never covered a return flight but I covered space shuttle launches. But the biggest thrill was going, not because it was in Las Vegas, but going to Las Vegas to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, because I love gadgets and there's no way you can see everything, but you try to find the biggest new things and that was a lot of fun and I got to do that for about 10 years, covering the new stuff that was coming out and trying it out.
Speaker 2:
Now, when you say, you covered these things, what does that entail?
Speaker 3:
That means doing news stories. Sometimes I would do print stories, stories, but more often I would do radio stories. Um, radio stories, as you know, were very short. About 40 seconds is what they give you. Uh, for an hourly newscast. Here's chuck rice reporting from las vegas boom. And then you would have uh me talking for 40 seconds using sound bites, using natural sound, and so forth.
Speaker 2:
And it's easier to write a story 40 minutes long than it is 40 seconds. To condense something and get all you want to say in that short period of time is really a challenge.
Speaker 3:
It really is, but it has prepared me for the future things that I wound up doing, because it makes you more efficient and it makes you write really, really tight. You have to write and you have to summarize things very briefly 40 seconds, you're right, it's not very long.
Speaker 2:
And I always. We talk about country music a lot on this program because randy and I both have backgrounds in country music and I've always admired a writer like tom t hall who could write a book in three minutes. He could tell a story and take, and in your mind it's a book absolutely what dogs and children and watermelon wine is a good example of like a three-minute song that tells a story that, in my mind, is like reading a book.
Speaker 3:
It really is and there is an art to that. You feel like you're right there with Tom T Hall as he's telling you about the preacher or someone else in his stories, and I think that's why I got into radio. I remember as a kid in Marshall my grandfather listened to WMMH and he had a little Motorola radio yay, big, and there was a light inside of the radio.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
And I was like five years old. I was like the people are inside there. That's where the people are and it was really magic it was really like magic. How are these voices coming across here? You know, yeah, and it's like theater of the mind, and that's what tom t hall did.
Speaker 1:
He created this theater in three minutes for your mind, because of the ability to tell a story like that and you got to see the whole play beginning to end. It's such a talent. You talked about growing up and your grandfather and the radio. That was me too, grandfather, and the radio. The radio was so important and I'm much older than you are, so we go back to the 60s when we'd come in from the farm field and in time to catch the noon weather report no internet, no cell phones, no phones period. That radio was so important and I've still got that radio sitting in my living room in there in my museum here, sitting in my living room in there in my museum here, and it's still tuned to 570, where he last listened to the weather report. It'll stay there.
Speaker 3:
That's where it's going to stay Now at noon at our place we'd come in from hoeing tobacco or picking tomatoes. 12 o'clock you listened to the trading post on WMMH oh yeah, that's what we would hear. And my grandmother would listen to the obituary column, the obituary column of the air brought to you by Bowman Rector Funeral Home. Oh you.
Speaker 1:
This guy's dangerous.
Speaker 2:
I've always loved small town radio.
Speaker 1:
That's what?
Speaker 2:
yeah, we love that you take when I was growing up, of course, working in Franklin first and then in Murphy and then up in West Jefferson these small towns didn't have daily newspapers, so something like the obituary column was very important and still is to people in those small towns.
Speaker 3:
It really is the trading post. We would sell that. Dean would sell that as part of the programming.
Speaker 1:
Our friend Dave and our mutual friend John Anderson does a morning show on WPTL in Canton and they still have a live call-in trading.
Speaker 2:
It's the most popular program on that radio station. In fact it is so popular they have it for an hour in the morning and they record that and play it back at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
Speaker 1:
And you have come in here and you listen to it.
Speaker 2:
You're a listener and you have come in here and told me some funny things that you think about something like the trading post and you take these calls from listeners who have something to buy or sell and you and you hear the voice of real people absolutely. It's real people and it's local and I was listening. I, I was listening one day and this lady called and she said my husband died and I've got four fishing poles and a tackle box for sale.
Speaker 1:
You know things like that Real people expressing themselves so authentic it really, really is yeah, that's, hilarious we've all got stories of uh catching ourselves with our pants around our ankles. You know uh on the air because they, we, we, I mean, and the three of us together. Now there's over 150 years of live daily radio shows opening that mic a hundred times each shift and that's a hundred chances for something to go wrong oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
And in, in country music there's not a lot of really long songs if you have to step away for a while. But you know, at WSKY we would put Layla on. It's like seven minutes. It would give you time to go do your business and come back.
Speaker 2:
I remember when Marty Robbins' El Paso came out.
Speaker 3:
Yes, that was about four minutes, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, 4.25 or so, and jukebox operators didn't like it, because jukebox operators like to turn over in songs and Marty's song was four plus minutes, which was at that time I don't know what was it About 1960, 62, when El Paso came out, at that time you didn't have it was extraordinarily long. It was Because a lot of the records at that time, a lot of the songs, were two minutes. Most of them would average about two minutes, two minutes 30 seconds. And then Marty comes along with El Paso, which gave you time to run down the hall and back.
Speaker 3:
And at WSKY well. You were on Church Street, I guess, but were you on Northwestern. I worked both places Because on weekends you had to unlock the door, run down the hall, unlock the men's room door and run in and then run back and lock everything back up.
Speaker 2:
So you know, Marty Robbins was a good thing and, of course, computers. When they came along you could stack your music and go from one song to the other. That's right If you wanted to, and take 30 minutes off and take a nap. I used to pull tricks on. I worked at the AM station over in the Tri-Cities Johnson City, kingsport and Bristol. I worked at WJCW and one of the other stations in that complex. We had five stations and I love. Occasionally. You know, djs played tricks on each other.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
In the old days the trick was to move the turntable speed from 45 to 78 without the announcer or the DJ knowing it, and he'd have a record queued up and he'd introduce it. It'd be 78 speed, but on both ends of the. But I would slip into the FM station and I would fiddle with the computer and you know you could do all kinds of things. I don't have the ability to describe what I did.
Speaker 3:
No, something that we would do sometimes at WMMH was you know you'd get the newscast was a long sheet of paper. Basically you rip it off the thing Right, and Harlan or somebody would be reading the news. You'd light a fire at the bottom of it and it would slowly burn and he's like reading faster and faster to try to get to the bottom before it ended. That happened to me too.
Speaker 2:
We're going to move to more serious talk and learn about your experiences developing community radio stations, not just here in the United States, but in other countries.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I was looking to do something different after the Associated Press and I happened to win this journalism fellowship program to go to Mongolia for a year and I went there and what that was was development work, teaching Mongolians how to do community radio news and things like that.
Speaker 2:
Just where is Mongolia?
Speaker 3:
Out of this world. It's far, far away. It's up in the northeastern part of Asia. It's far, far away. It's up in the northeastern part of Asia, sandwiched between Russia and China. It's about the end of the world, is where it is and cold as blazes in the wintertime 35, 40 degrees below zero.
Speaker 2:
Wow. What is the lifestyle of the local people in Mongolia?
Speaker 3:
A lot of them are herders, but a lot have moved into the city. Ulaanbaatar is the capital. You have what they call gare villages in the city. They're kind of like a ghetto. A gare is like one of these Russian yurts. They're round, made out of canvas and felt and you have your possessions in there and you can break that down and move to a different place using a yak or two yaks and you pull your house along behind you. You break it down and pull it along and you might go hundreds of miles to a different place out on the steppe or the plains they call it the steppe, but it's the plains and you might go hundreds of miles to a different place out on the steppe or the plains they call it the steppe, but it's the plains and you're considered pretty wealthy if you have livestock horses, sheep, goats, things like that. You don't see a lot of cattle. There were development projects there to develop a dairy industry, but they don't drink a lot of dairy in Mongolia, so I don't know how successful that was.
Speaker 3:
But I was there for a year and I was considered a backpacker fellow and that meant I worked, lived in Ulaanbaatar but I would travel all over the country there's 21 provinces, or IMAGs they call them. I was in 17 of them and you would go to the far reaches of place. I went one time to the Gobi Desert in the dead of winter, flew in the plane, lands. The earth is kind of crunching underneath because the temperature is so low. The room that I was supposed to get was not available, so I stayed in a room that had the windows knocked out but I got a stack of blankets like a foot high.
Speaker 3:
My toothpaste froze. It was so cold. The temperature at night was probably minus 40 degrees and those blankets really did come in handy. But it's very cold in the winter. The summer lasts about three days. But what is really interesting is in Ulaanbaatar it's very urban you see women walking around in high heels on the ice, because the ice is there from, say, september to May, june, and those heels dig into the ice and they just walk like they're walking on a fashion runway or something. It's amazing to watch people walk and I'm slipping and sliding and falling and they're just walking along, making me look like an idiot.
Speaker 1:
You know, so you wound up staying.
Speaker 3:
I stayed for two years and, as a fellow, it renewed for another year and then I wound up getting a job with an international media development organization called Internews they're based in California and went to Tajikistan, which is just north of Afghanistan, and I worked there for a couple of years trying to develop community radio. But it was not to be. It didn't happen. Really Very difficult place to work. Everything was state-run. They didn't really want community radio, local voices on the air. We came close but we just didn't manage and I don't think it has ever developed a community radio there even to this day. And from there I went to the caucuses and worked in Azerbaijan and Georgia training journalists.
Speaker 2:
Not the state of Georgia. Yeah, the country, the country of Georgia. Yeah, the country, the country of.
Speaker 3:
Georgia yeah, the country of Georgia, tbilisi and each of these places are so unique. The hiking and the horseback riding in Mongolia, the climbing up to glaciers in Tajikistan, hiking there on the weekends and getting, sometimes going to such a high elevation you hardly can take a step forward. It's the. You get altitude sickness because we would just go up for the week, you know, just for a couple of hours on a Sunday, a day off. And then Azerbaijan has incredible rock art that's thousands of years old, and Georgia has dense forests.
Speaker 3:
I was there just after the Russians had invaded and for some reason they blew the tops off these mountains and just destroyed these beautiful forests, for whatever reasons. And then I was in East Timor, which is near Indonesia, for a few years doing a development project Beautiful, beautiful waters there. The coral is just something. The snorkeling is incredible. I didn't do deep sea diving, but a lot of people I know did, and they discovered fish that had never been seen before. Wow, they would put it on Facebook and places. Then experts would say, oh this, we didn't know this existed. But yeah, it's been a, it's been a fun time.
Speaker 1:
Well, you are developing local radio in all of these places that you're talking about. I mean going in and starting, like I did in this bedroom, starting at zero and building a radio station bedroom, starting at zero and building a radio station.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, East Timor. We put a radio station on the air in this coffee growing region and the main thing there was the lack of health care. So we started a program called Ask a Doctor and they would bring in a doctor and he would answer questions on the radio, On the air.
Speaker 1:
Yeah yeah, I've worked at stations that had a program similar.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, and it was very, very popular. I think the station is still on the air.
Speaker 2:
How did you overcome the language problem, the differences in language? Was that a big?
Speaker 3:
challenge. I should speak perfect Russian today, because that's all I heard for three years, but I don't. Interpreters yeah, the interpreters. And you never make your interpreter angry. Your interpreter is always your best friend because they are your voice and if they are angry at you, they're not going to translate what interpret what you just said? So, yeah, you work through interpreters. Yeah, I've always wondered even in.
Speaker 2:
I'm a big baseball fan and, as you know, some of the top players in baseball don't speak. English and they work through an interpreter and often when I'm watching a baseball game and they have to bring an interpreter out to the mound to talk to the pitcher and the coach, I often wonder if they're interpreting it exactly the way the picture is talking. It's interesting to me.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, when you're interviewing an interpreter for a job, you bring in somebody that you know speaks perfect Russian and perfect English and they're kind of sitting off to the side and you don't tell the person that's being interviewed for the job and you interview them.
Speaker 2:
With that person in the room, With that person in the room and they'll say this person doesn't know.
Speaker 3:
At one point we had an interpreter who we would give them assignments to translate something, and it turns out they were handing the translation to somebody else to translate because they didn't know how, or they would use software to translate from Russian to English or English to Russian, and you could tell that they were using software. I mean, it just doesn't.
Speaker 1:
The human touch was not there.
Speaker 3:
It was not there and some of the stuff didn't make sense and they didn't go back and redo it because they would have to do four or five pages and they would just run it through the computer program and it didn't work. So you really have to kind of have a little monitor over in the corner watching and saying, yeah, this person's good or no, don't hire them.
Speaker 2:
It's amazing to me in the traveling that I did quite a few years ago now in Europe and Russia, how so many people speak several different languages. I have a friend in Czechoslovakia, or what used to be Czechoslovakia it's now the Czech Republic those two different countries now Slovakia and the Czech Republic and he speaks about six different languages because the countries are so compact, close together and they come in contact with so many people outside their own country, and Jan listens to our podcast over in the Czech Republic quite often. Hello, jan. Shout out to Jan.
Speaker 3:
Hi Jan.
Speaker 2:
He speaks about six different languages and he came to the United States to visit me and we went to New York and he became my interpreter because, you know, in New York there are Poles, there are Jamaicans, there are people from all over the world, and so he did more talking than I did because he could speak so many different languages.
Speaker 3:
That's right. I have given one speech in a language other than English. It was in East Timor and I gave it in the local language, Tetum, but I spelled out everything phonetically, Okay, and I was so proud that I was able to do that. But it's the only time I have given a speech and I just felt like it was important because I was talking only to very local people who only understood the local language and I didn't want to go through an interpreter, so I learned how to.
Speaker 3:
It's not a difficult language, but it is a different language, and so I just spelled everything out phonetically and you dealt with that language barrier in the broadcast realm too.
Speaker 1:
So you were teaching people in another language to be on-air people reporting the news.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, and still doing that. We have a project in Malawi right now and one of the main languages there is Chichiwa and when I go to Malawi sometimes I need an interpreter there when we're sending reports back and forth which are kind of mentoring the journalist, because you're asking questions why didn't you ask this question? Of the person, the elected official or whoever you put that and then sometimes it will go through an interpreter there on that side. Times it will go through an interpreter there on that side, but mostly they do speak enough English to where they would understand what you're trying to say and I really admire them for speaking my language, of course because, it's, highly said, one of the most complicated.
Speaker 1:
Well, that brings us up to developing radio partners, and what you're doing now and we're out of time what we should probably do is pick up again in another episode to follow and talk a little bit more about developing radio partners, talk a little bit more about-T 95.5 FM, and we are going to talk because we've recently been added to the lineup there with our podcast, hot Mic with Houston and Hogan every Saturday morning at 1030. So we're excited about being on the air there at 99.5 or 95.5. And we're going to talk about the formation of that radio station and how it's providing a lot of great things for the community in Madison County. So we still got a lot more to talk about. Chuck Rice, thank you so much for spending time with us on Hot Mike with Houston and Hogan thank you, randy, dave.
Speaker 3:
It's a pleasure both of you.
Speaker 1:
Be sure to click the subscribe button for another episode of Hot Mike with Randy Houston and Dave Hogan.