I remember long ago hearing a story about the great sportscaster Vern Lundquist.
Lundquist started out in TV in Dallas, and one of the programs he hosted was called “Bowling for Dollars.” Eventually, Lundquist got big time. He was broadcasting Southeast Conference football, national games of the week, and the Masters golf tournament, but people never forget him in Dallas as the guy who did “Bowling for Dollars.” He said he got recognized in airports a whole lot more for that show than for anything else he ever accomplished.
If you start out in radio or TV you are probably going to get some programs like that hung around your neck. I actually had three of them when I started in radio. I had Gandy’s Radio Auction, I had Radio Bingo, and then I had the Trading Post.
Gandy’s Radio was an interesting show. You got so many points for every container top or container label that you were able to collect. People would then exchange those for gifts. They would bring in boxes, sacks, and arms full of container tops and labels to the radio station. To win prizes people had to bid on them.
There was nothing terribly complicated about the game except the rules. The rules stated that your bid had to be at least 50 points higher than the previous bid but no more than 100 points higher. It became very obvious to me pretty early on that some people had trouble with math in school. I continually had to repeat those rules over and over and over again. I finally gave up and just let them bid what they wanted.
Radio Bingo. I really kind of enjoyed the thing to be honest with you. I got to sit at the control board in the control room and I had a bingo cage in front of me (I still have it at home).
There wasn’t any way to rig it except for the fact that you could get the money as high as you wanted to. They did, however, calculate the odds of getting a winning card depending on how many numbers were called out. So, you could almost dictate when someone was going to have a bingo. In other words, if the odds were astronomical that you couldn’t get a winning card with say 25 numbers called, then you would do that for a while and build the dollars up. Then, if your boss came in and said, “Let’s have a winner today,” you would simply make sure you called enough numbers to have a winner.
Then there was the Trading Post which ran for years and years and years. I did it for a long time. People literally sold everything, I mean everything you could possibly imagine. Probably the best advice I could give someone doing a similar program would be to read everything over before you start the program. Me? I never did.
One day the office staff decided to teach me a lesson. They put my car on the trading post to sell. It sounded like a fantastic bargain. Like a dummy, I am reading about it over the air. I thought when I read the price, “You know, that’s a heck of a good deal for that vehicle.” Then, after putting it on the air and getting a lot of phone calls, I went back and re-read it and realized it was my car that I was selling. Well, needless to say, I didn’t sell it.
I have great memories of all three of those programs. I’m not sure anybody else even remembers them, but they are embedded in my mind and always will be.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].