Rock Radio Scrapbook: Aircheck of the Week

Talent: RICK SHULTZ
Station: WHEE Martinsville, Va.
Date: December 26, 1965
Times: Various

All the bells and whistles from that time are here, including an endless stream of sound effects and reverb. And Rick Shultz's hyper-frenetic delivery has to be heard to be believed! The energy never lets up for a second. It's exhausting just to listen to - just imagine what Shultz went through!

"My father started WHEE in 1954 after being in radio for most of his life, so for all practical purposes, I was born in the business. When I was 15 I started my own squeaky-voiced show on WHEE (it was pretty bad) and later when I went to college my voice had matured enough for me to be hired part-time at two stations in Winston-Salem, NC - first at WTOB and then later at WSJS.

I learned Top-40 radio from the guys at WTOB (they were fabulous - the station was tight with split-second timing and top notch DJ's). I wanted that sort of sound back home, and when I returned to Martinsville I put a lot of those ideas to work back at my mom's station (my dad died when I was in college). The problem was that the community had no interest in Top-40 radio and I didn't want to rock the boat for fear of losing loyal listeners (read revenue), so I took all my ideas and put them into one show that ran on Sunday afternoons - that was the show that Barry has sent you pieces of, my centerpiece show at the station, The Sunday Session.

(Rick Shultz, 2009/Courtesy Rick Shultz)

On December 26, 1965, I put both of the station's Ampex 601 tape recorders on double duty and recorded the entire show from 1:45 to 5:00. I still have that recording, although I transferred it over to CD back in the 1980's.

My mom died in mid-1965 and by the end of the year I needed to get away, so I scheduled the trip to Europe and took a friend with me leaving in January, 1966. I took a couple of portable reel to reel tape recorders with me and sent back several recordings, from London, Paris, Copenhagen, Munich and one other place I forget right now. I still have those recordings.

When I got back to the States I continued to work at the station for another few years, but decided to go into TV work at the local cable origination station and did newscasts and movie intros for about five years until starting another family and moving away to North Carolina.

I never went back into radio, but after retirement I tried putting together "The Roots of Rock" (a series of 30-minute programs) without much success and now (as of 2014) I'm doing a little voice-over work, mostly for children's story authors with enhanced eBooks."