BEING ON THE AIR IS CHARLIE COOPER'S LIFE
 

by SANDY WELLS

Tape recording came to America in 1946, the year Charlie Cooper was born.

"I've been an announcer all my life,' he said.  "I'm one of those people who always knew from day one what he was going to do.'  Now you hear him on commercials, pitching everything from Dodge trucks to political candidates.  You hear him announce movie breaks on Fox 11.  You hear his traveling disc jockey show at reunions, weddings and dances.  You used to hear him on WKAZ-AM radio as "Super Duper Charlie Cooper.' 

When he was a kid in Akron, Ohio, his family had a vintage radio-phonograph console with wooden doors.  "If you let down the shelf in front of the tuning dial and opened the doors, it made a little house where a kid could crawl in, right in front of the speakers.  That was neat.  I always thought there was tremendous romance to radio.'  

By the time he was eight years old, he was creating radio shows on a new-fangled thing called a tape recorder.   In 1954, he spied one of the first home models in the window of a neighborhood jewelry store.  "Heaped all over it, they had all kinds of loose recording tape.  If you guessed how much tape was piled in the window, you would win this tape recorder.'  Every day, he went to see that tape recorder, peering longingly into the window, entering the contest again and again. "It would make a good story to say I won.  I didn't win. But I was so disappointed, my father bought one for me.'

The proud little boy trudged up and down the street, lugging his prized possession.  "It was about the size of a portable typewriter,' he said, "and it weighed about 18 pounds. I lugged that thing everywhere I went.'   Playmates, teachers and other adults oohed and aahed over the mysterious machine that repeated anything they said.  "They never had any expectation they would ever deal with it.  Most people had never heard their voice recorded, so it was really an esoteric thing.'

He found a magazine of one-act plays at the library.  His friends were too young to read, so eight-year-old Cooper, a precocious reader, recorded the parts with his mother.  Using the traverse curtains as a makeshift stage for the plays, he taught his friends to move their mouths to their parts in the taped play.   In high school, Cooper worked with the stage crew that operated the elaborate auditorium.  "Naturally, my emphasis was sound.' As a college freshman, he managed the campus radio station, but dropped out during his second year to look for a radio job.  "Luck has been a big part of everything I've done,' he said.

Walking up the steps to apply for work at an Akron country station, he glanced through a huge window into the newsroom.  He heard the fellow inside saying to the boss, "If you feel that way about it, I quit!'  Hired as a news announcer and writer, Cooper moved quickly into writing and producing commercials.  Within a year, he became production manager.  He started a record company on the side, recording after hours in the station's studio.   Late at night, he drove out to the transmitter to give the partially blind transmitter operator a ride to town.

"I can't tell you how much I loved long-wave AM broadcasting,' he said.  "It was so romantic because the transmitter was out in the middle of a field, and at night, you were out there with nothing but the hum of the transformers and looking in the window in front of the transmitter, the big old tubes would all light up purple inside and the purple glow vibrated with your voice. There were two big, beautiful self-supporter towers, and you could just imagine the waves going out through the air and reaching into people's living rooms.'  

He quit the country station when management took issue with his lengthening hair, deemed inappropriate to the country scene in the mid-'60s, he said.  He moved on to another country station, but his long hair eventually cost him that job, too.  "I always found haircuts to be really annoying.  I never liked to go, and I was never happy with the result.  It was easier to let it grow.  Then my barber died, and that sealed it.'  Today, his ponytail measures 22 inches.

In 1970, he decided he needed a new name, something common enough for everyone to remember.  He became Charlie Cooper.  He won't discuss his real name.  That's someone else, he said, a private personality different from his gregarious disc jockey image.  "The other guy doesn't like being around people much, except for a couple of close friends.  I keep them separate.'

In 1973, he was hired by 95 WKAZ in Charleston. "After several months, the program director decided to leave and they made me program director.  Luck again.  I have a real talent for chasing off the boss.'  

But luck couldn't hold back the advent of FM radio. "I'd worked for WKAZ for about nine years when radio changed.  FM started to get popular.  People were listening to V100 on FM.  At that time, it was a religious station that had started playing album rock in the afternoon.  It was really bizarre.  They'd have preachers on until 3 o'clock, then go to "White Witch' and all this stuff.  "WKAZ thought FM was too far off the edge, but in a few years, people started turning to FM, to album-type rock, to a whole different way of presenting radio that didn't interest me at all.  I've never been interested in or cared about music.  I'm interested in the process of radio.

"I was what used to be called a screamer,' he said. "I was the kind of disc jockey who said things like, "GOOD AFTERNOON FROM 95 W-K-A-Z !".   Well, people got into album-oriented rock music, which wasn't really compatible with that kind of disc jockey.  The company wanted to replace me as program director with somebody who understood the new kind of music to better compete with FM.'

By the late 1970s, Cooper had established his own successful sideline production business for radio commercials, thanks to jobs from Charlie Ryan's new advertising agency and show promoters Phil and Gary Lashinsky.  He also had his traveling disc jockey show.  "At one point, a third of my income was coming from the radio station, a third from dances and a third from the recording studio.  I decided to cut myself loose to make my living with the recording studio and dances.'  He left WKAZ in 1982.

His Admix Broadcast Service, on Woodward Drive in a building he purchased in 1977, specializes in radio commercials and other business-oriented audio material.  Soon the reel-to-reel tape he grew up with will be replaced by computers.  "Technology is changing,' he said, "so I'm going to re-equip the studio and do away with tape.'  He looks to the future, but his heart belongs to the past.  "If I could have worked in the '30s and '40s, done live network radio, I would have loved that.  The romance has pretty much disappeared.'

from an article in THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE
Published: November 20, 1992