It's All About Me

I had the privilege to sit down with WRVA's Jimmy Barrett and Mac Watson, hosts of the station's (1140 AM) morning and afternoon drive programs, respectively. We'll be featuring the two in the Summer issue of West End's Best Magazine. Both of these guys do a great job, and, in person, come across like real people, very down-to-earth. One of them made the comment about how much he enjoyed working at WRVA, saying there were no egos among the personalities.
Now, while both Jimmy and Mac are credible folks, I have to wonder just a bit about that one. I've worked in radio, and it's a seething hotbed of egoism. At least it was back in my day.
I started in radio as a pimply-faced 18-year-older, and even though my first job was putting a long-playing Mantovani album on the turntable, and then replacing it with a long-playing 1001 Strings album when it was done, I still thought I was the coolest thing in town.
I was a disc jockey! Here I was, some fat, dorky guy, with a face for radio and a voice for print and I had an ego. So, it's just a tad bit hard to believe there are no egos at WRVA. Why, even the guy that came in once a week and scrubbed the toilets, had an ego.
I worked at one station where the program director/on-air afternoon drive guy had to be the dumbest human alive. This was in West Virginia, and even the natives living way back in the hollers (hollows, for East Virginians) shook their head in disbelief at some of the things this guy would say. He couldn't read one sentence without stumbling over the big words, and for him, "West Virginia" was a big word. And yet, he had a massive ego. Every time he would complete a sentence, he'd lift his head up, in a proud-peacock-like way and look towards the window separating the studio from the lobby and beam. You could tell he fully expected legions of fans to be gathered at the window just for a chance to see him in action. The fact that nobody every paid him a bit of attention was no deterrent.
The guy was a real slob, too. Watching him eat, which he did incessantly, stopping only long enough to introduce the next record, was disgusting. He would end up with about a third of his sandwich dangling from his mustache. Actually, that was a good thing, because the sandwich would hide other disgusting items that were in his moustache. I never looked closely enough to prove it, but I suspect those other items had been hurled from his rather bulbous nose. Another third of the sandwich was left lying on the control board.
Whenever I had to follow him on-air, I'd have to hose down the studio before I'd touch anything. And the studio always smelled like a deli...a dirty deli, but a deli none-the-less.
There was only one other jock at the station who had a bigger ego than this guy, and he was that fat, pimply-faced teenaged dork from Richmond. So, Jimmy, Mac, it's not that I don't believe you, but I've been there. I've seen the ego (from both sides now, to quote Judy Collins). Of course, that's just my opinion, but don't forget, I'm most always right. I am a former disc jockey, you know.