Blast From The Past Is Business With A Future

By

Terry Kohl

     Want to feel like a kid again?   No, it’s not a new pill, diet, or exercise program.   In fact, it’s about putting your feet up, closing your eyes and dreaming back down the corridor of time.

     Remember when the ear plugs of your transistor radio were all you needed to “escape”?   Remember listening to the Beatles, the Doors, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones?   Some of us even remember the DJ’s who “programmed” our young minds back then.  Clark Weber in the morning, Ron Riley, Dex Card, Art Roberts, Larry Lujack, Bob Sirott - names that practically put you in a premeditative state as you drift back in time.

     As a young man, Tom Konard was captivated by the radio dial and all the channel powerhouses he could pick up at night.   As his hobby of finding and listening grew, so did the map he tacked to the wall, pins showing the cities his radio dial discovered.  A radio nut was born!

     In 1970 Konard landed a job in the mailroom at WCFL, the chief rival of Chicago’s very popular WLS, and was often seen hanging around teen dances with some of the DJ “biggies” - Biondi and Barney Pip, for example.  Konard began saving aircheck tapes.  In radio “speak” an aircheck is simply a recording made off the air.  Airchecks can be scoped or unscoped.   “Unscoped” means the recording runs continuously, uncut, and without breaks.

     This material grew as he began mailing blank tapes to engineers around the country asking them to run airchecks.  That led to a service Konard offered called, “Around The Dial”.   This was a feature based on Buddy Blake’s old, “Around The Country”, from Programmer’s Digest.   Blake would use scoped airchecks from around the U.S. to sample what was happening in radio the previous month.  Though unplanned, a career was emerging for Konard.

     Each month, beginning in October of 1976, Konard put out a cassette (actually, for the first year they were on reels as well) with radio snippets introduced by a DJ and narrated by Michael Black, a DJ in San Antonio.  Eventually, John Quincy in Charleston took over narration duties until “Around The Dial” ended in 1989.
 

     Konard began adding other jocks from different markets and sold them to station programmers so that they could all eavesdrop on what each other was doing (a common practice at the time).   He even sold DJ’s tapes of themselves from work they had done in earlier years.   His collection of airchecks grew almost as fast as the business, now known as “The Aircheck Factory”.

     The Aircheck Factory (www.theaircheckfactory.com) offers tapes of the young Don Imus, Barney Pip, The Real Don Steele, Alan Freed, Murray the K, Mad Daddy, “Big” Ron O’Brien and of course, Wolfman Jack to name a few.   The 1 hour issues of “Around The Dial” are all still available as well as radio jingle packages from the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s.   Konard has even been preserving the original reel-to-reel tapes of valuable airchecks by duplicating them to digital mini-discs.  You can also find Top 40 survey reproductions and photo’s of DJ’s in their heyday.

     In 1981, The Aircheck Factory moved from Chicago to Wild Rose, WI., a beautiful pine covered, rural area where Konard restored an old barn to house his work.   It’s from here that orders are shipped all over the world, insuring that the voices of radio live on.  Konard is proof that the past is everything it’s cracked up to be!

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