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Radio station first tuned this reporter in to news

By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published December 31, 2005

You know you're getting older when you wake up one morning and what you thought was older people's music is your music.

This realization hit me on a recent trip to St. Petersburg. To my dismay, I discovered that a great little radio station, WGUL in Palm Harbor, 860 AM, no longer was "Tampa Bay's Music of Your Life." It had been sold and changed to an all-talk format, and the station's DJs had scattered to 106.3 FM.

Just what America needs: another radio station with wall-to-wall blather, beamed in via satellite, that sounds exactly like the station in Orlando, Jacksonville, Dothan . . .

Give me the old WGUL. With its mature-sounding announcers and live remotes from stores on U.S. 19, it had a warm, comfortable sound. But as we boomers turn past 50, we're becoming an undesirable demographic.

We're all about to get a year older, so I thought this was a good time to reintroduce myself.

As the Times' bureau chief in Tallahassee, I'll be writing a column on a regular basis, sharing observations about Florida government and politics and trying to connect the dots and explain why things are.

The journey to here began 34 years ago, at a radio station on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, where I made $2 an hour covering local news and extra money by spinning Patti Page and Perry Como songs on weekends.

As news director, it was my job to be sure we covered everything: obituaries, false fire alarms, even library trustees meetings.

But if a record skipped, nobody called. That may be why little WKFD is long gone.

It was there that I put into daily practice the lessons learned in journalism classes at the University of Rhode Island about getting it right. If I butchered a name over the air, that lady from Newport was apt to call and correct me again.

When my radio duties disrupted Thanksgiving dinner one year, my mother asked in a disapproving tone: "Is that what you're going to do for the rest of your life? Spin records?" Another radio station followed, then another. I moved to television. Everybody in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut watched WJAR, an NBC station owned by a department store chain.

When a blizzard paralyzed downtown Providence in 1978, people took shelter anywhere they could, even in the store's bedding department below our newsroom. For entertainment, the station projected movies from its film library onto the wall. Snowbound hordes sat on Sealy Posturepedics, watching John Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder, the previous week's Million-Dollar Movie.

Everything changed in 1981, especially the weather.

I headed to Florida for a job at a Miami station. I didn't know the Eden Roc Hotel from my left elbow, but WPLG had a staff that matched its great reputation. The station spent real money in pursuit of political stories and sent me to Iowa and New Hampshire in 1984, to follow Reubin Askew in his lonely quest of the Democratic presidential nomination.

But after more than a decade in broadcasting, I knew I preferred the written word. Writing was harder, but more gratifying. You can't tape a TV news story to a refrigerator.

The Miami Herald hired me to cover local politics. In 1988, the paper sent me to Tallahassee and I found my journalistic home covering state government, politics and the Legislature.

The Times, and in particular Lucy Morgan, whom I am replacing, became the latest twist in this circuitous road when it welcomed me four years ago.

So here I am. And here we all are, as we await 2006.

Steve Bousquet is capital bureau chief of the Times. He can be reached at sbousquet@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 31, 2005, 00:47:16]