Excerpt from “Never In My Wildest Dreams”:
A Memoir
Breaking Barriers: From Print to Radio
Although I was only just beginning to understand the newspaper business, I knew I had to take advantage of this opportunity in the journalistic medium of radio. Herb Campbell was the lone news guy at KSAN-AM, the same call letters that later become the home of the pioneering era of Rock and Roll. Herb was a conscientious man, doing his best to strive for excellence given the sparse resources at the Black-programmed, white-owned R & B station.
KSAN didn’t have wire service, but Herb knew the exact time that each edition of San Francisco’s four newspapers would hit the news racks on Market Street just below his office window. Every few hours he’d dash downstairs, scan every newspaper, and return to his office to clip the articles for newscasts on the hour and headlines on the half-hour. He would then staple each clipping to a piece of paper, where he might do a quick rewrite in the margins, or if time was tight, just read straight from the newspaper. It was fun and exciting, and we didn’t worry about credits or copyrights. One thing segregation did was separate people so much to the degree that no one paid attention to what Black broadcasters did on the “dark side” of life.
Knowing that I had no radio experience, one of the disc jockeys, mellow John Hardy, offered to mentor me. One of the brightest, most well spoken guys at the station (and of course they were all guys back then), John gave me a million dollars worth of advice within a few minutes: “Just take your copy and place yourself in front of a mirror, turn on a tape recorder, and practice reading.” He made it sound so simple.
“At the end of the reading – and this is very important – listen to the tape to hear your breathing pattern.” Here John placed his hand near his stomach and concluded, “Most of all, you should talk from the diaphragm, not from your throat.” So I practiced and practiced. With such good advice and depth of caring, I knew I would make it in this brand-new broadcast frontier.
At first I read from my column on Thursday and Friday afternoons. Then I became fascinated with the way Herb put his news show together. He was determined to give his audience the greatest scope of information he could deliver. Soon I was reading more serious items from the Independent’s front section in addition to social pieces from my column…..
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