hurricane Andrew!

Andrew blew in & out...ok for us...but bad for others

I’ve been through two big storms in recent years of living in south Florida.

Just after about a year of America’s first LIVE all night call in program...we started to get the warnings about Hurricane Andrew. 

It was August 1992 and I was still commuting to the Tampa area weekly to do the show on about 100 stations!

When it became apparent that the storm was going to hit 

the Miami area I instructed the producer to go to tape as I was headed back home to be with the family.

One of the few “perks” of storms was the tolls were dropped on the tollroads and turnpikes facing the storm.

After Laurie and I had married I moved into her three bedroom townhouse in the Jacaranda area of the city of Plantation which is a Ft. Lauderdale suburb.

The place was built well and we didn’t get any real serious damage as the storm blasted into the southern reaches of Miami about 10 to 15 miles south of us...causing wide spread devastation there...but just uprooting trees on the golf courses near us. The  power did go out and we got the usual storm problems around the neighborhood...traffic lights out ..gas stations either closed or out of fuel etc.

I had an old fashioned plug in phone that I kept for power outages.  It worked fine even though the lights were out.

I decided to call in to the network to see what was going on there and was surprised to hear no tape of mine...but a live voice of our news director talking about the storm in Miami. As I held on the phone waiting to talk to him I had no inkling of what was going on.  

I was, in fact, fired from a very successful all night talk show with paid advertising and a hundred stations...some of them key talk stations in major markets.  I just didn’t know it yet.  

They were taking the opportunity of the storm to introduce something other than “The Stan Major Show” which is what those hundred stations expected to get at midnight Eastern time.

I never got on the air, of course, and was told by the board operator that I needed to talk to the network president the next day.

I moved my show and most of the advertising and stations to a second network which luckily was located a few blocks from the old one. That took about 24 hours to complete but we got it done and up and running as if nothing had changed except the 800 call in number.

As I posted on this subject earlier the old network was being de-funded by Willis Carto and the Liberty Lobby and his Spotlight news sheet.

So...Hurricane Andrew was no problem in the area where we lived...but Hurricane Wilma was a “bitch”!

WILMA NEXT!

stanmajor@aol.com