A Good Year for the Outlaw

Ah, April 1st. My favorite holiday!

In the past few years, I’ve been known to play some pretty elaborate pranks on the radio stations I’ve been working at, either as an on-air host or as a behind the desk manager.

Some of my favorites:

Kenny Chesney’s stoppin’ by! - A few years back, while doing afternoons on WXCL in Peoria, I announced at the beginning of my show that Kenny Chesney had just called me from his tour bus, and the hottest-at-that-time singer in the world was coming by the studios to just say “hi” something between 4 and 5pm. I claimed he was between concerts, traveling on I-74, and just decided last minute to stop by.

I then invited listeners to call in and help we with interview questions they’d like me to ask Kenny, because I really wasn’t prepared to do an interview that day. I got dozens of calls.

But even better yet, at 4:30, when Kenny’s bus was supposed to pull in, we had a parking lot full of cars waiting for him, thinking they might just get to see him up close. I put on a long Chesney song or two, and went outside with a box of Chesney’s latest CD and passed them out, letting folks in on the joke. It worked well.

The Cubs are Coming! - Again during my WXCL days, my all-time classic, I got Rocky Vonachen to play along, and we announced that since the Cubs’ last spring training game was rained out, they’d broken camp early and were going to be arriving a day early, so they worked out a deal to stop in Peoria and have a little intrasquad scrimmage at the beautiful new O’Brien Field.

Without going into too much detail, the setup was beautiful, Rocky and I sold it big time, and the Chiefs’ front office was inundated with ticket requests, giving each caller a hardy “April Fools” and then offering up a couple of vouchers for Chiefs tickets anytime that year. I know an April Fools’ joke works when people get mad. And several fooled people were not happy. It was awesome.

Tony Stewart Buying Spoon River? Last year, my first April Fools Day as GM in Canton, brought us this whopper: “Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. are in town this morning testing their dirt track cars for Tony’s upcoming celebrity race at his track in Ohio,” I told Leon and the morning show. That later stretched to “Tony liked our track so much we talked about him buying it,” from the owner of Spoon River Speedway, playing along, followed by “I saw them at Sirloin Stockade…”; “they’re in a white Escalade…”; they’ve got several other drivers with them…” all called in by listeners wanting to play along.

We had reports of guys trying to get out of meetings to run over to meet them at the Stockade, and one guy called us to make sure it was true before he ran down to school and pulled his son out of class to take him to meet Tony and Dale. Great fun. Leon got calls at home later that night from people upset that they got fooled. That’s what’s it’s all about.

Over the years, I’ve either pulled off myself or been part of morning shows that went with these scams:

1. A zoo semi overturned, several gorillas and lions are running loose in downtown Waterloo.
2. A plane left the airport this morning with a cargo door open, and a large shipment of Diamonds fell out. Rewards are being offered. (we had people sifting through two fresh inches off snow off the end of the runway…awesome)
3. Bruce Springsteen is filming the opening video for an upcoming Jessica Lange movie, “Farm of the Year”. The beauty of that one…she WAS filming that movie within 10 minutes of Waterloo, and Springsteen in 1986 was the hottest thing this side of Bon Jovi. We scored big with that one. People were running all over NE Iowa looking for the Boss.

Today, we’ve decided not to do one. Instead, we’re very busy with new technology on our AM station, WBYS, called AromaRadio.

Read more about it at our WBYS website.

But we’ll come up with something big for next year, I’m sure.