[Editor's note: This column

first appeared in The Citizen just before Christmas 2002.]

Here's a Christmas carol

story.

My first job was playing Christmas

carols. I was hired Dec. 15, 1959 - at age 15 - for a two-hour

disk jockey slot on a little 250-watt AM station not far from the bluffs

of the Chattahoochee River. My first official action was to cue up Percy

Faith's version of "The Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's

"Messiah."

Some may conclude I reached

the high point of my working life early. At any rate, I love Christmas

music, and I increasingly miss hearing the grand old songs of the season.

The way it was in those days

of local radio, Christmas tunes slipped into the record rotation right

after Thanksgiving, roughly a ratio of one seasonal tune every sixth or

seventh record. (Yes, in those far-off days, we spun something called

"records," thin disks of dark plastic with spiral grooves on

both sides which produced sounds when a diamond needle was applied to

the surfaces. They rotated on larger spinning metal platters called "turntables.")

The closer we got to Christmas,

the higher the ratio of Christmas songs to regular records. By Christmas

Eve, every song was a carol, usually about three-to-one religious to secular.

Christmas Day (and I worked from sign-on to sign-off several of them)

we played mostly the great old anthems announcing the Good News.

Elvis was bigger than the Beatles

ever would be, and his "Blue Christmas" was two years old and

already on its way to classic status. Brenda Lee had been "Rockin'

Around the Christmas Tree" for a year, and the year before, an audio

engineer named Ross Bagdasarian called himself David Seville and speeded

up his voice to play all four parts of "The Chipmunk Song."

Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" was little more than a

decade old but already was the bestselling single record of all time.

If you turned on your radio,

you heard Christmas songs. By the way, in those pre-politically-correct

days, eight of the 10 most popular Christmas songs had been written by

Jews, from Irvin Berlin's "White Christmas" to Johnny Marks'

"Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer." I guess those hugely talented

souls lacked sensitivity training so widely available today that would

have informed them that they should have been offended by the mere mention

of Christmas.

Although I was a Top-40 teen,

my first paycheck resulted from my playing hour after hour of Christmas

music, minimum wage, a dollar an hour. Looking back, I see it was some

of the most satisfying money I've ever earned.

we had begun recording whole program segments during the week beforehand.

The idea was to allow the DJ to sit back while a 30-minute reel unwound

with the prerecorded music and commercial holiday greetings - "The

next 15 minutes of Christmas music is sponsored by Neal Logue Company,

headquarters for all your clothing needs, wishing you a joyous Christmas

and a blessed New Year."

If it was meant to save the

DJ trouble, it didn't. But we did it anyway. Dec. 24 and 25, reel

after reel of audio tape lay around the control room, in some semblance

of order. (It never failed that some segment was missing, requiring us

to "go live" for 15 to 30 minutes. We had a spiral notebook

with stock holiday greetings and we plugged in the blanks with whatever

sponsor had that segment.)

So it was that long Christmas

day of 1960: low man on the totem pole, I had the afternoon, evening and

sign-off shifts. United Press International had moved a teletype wire

feature a few days before to be used Christmas Day: "Somewhere, far

to the North, a very old gentleman lies fast asleep ...."

I was taken with the sentiment

and recorded it for use as my sign-off segment. I hunted just the right

background music for the piece, choosing orchestral leader Percy Faith's

"Hallelujah" album (one of those dark circles of plastic with

six or seven "cuts" per side).

The first song "bed"

was - I think - "Angels We Have Heard on High," back-timed

to allow the final song to conclude just after my last sentence. That

last song was "Angels from the Realms of Glory."

Sign-off was 11 p.m., so in

the otherwise darkened and deserted radio station two miles south of town

center, I rolled the tape at 10:57. I think the final words about Santa

were echoes of that famous poem, "The Night before Christmas":

"... and to all a good night."

It came off flawlessly, pretty

good production work for a 16-year-old, if I do say so myself. I was hugely

satisfied. I hit the power-off button on the transmitter and turned off

the switches on the audio console.

Nothing should have remained

on but the lights as I prepared to lock up and ride my bike home. But,

I heard music.

Now, I was a pretty agnostic

teen. It wasn't that I believed that there was no God. It was just

that I had no notion that all that stuff had anything to do with me.

But here I was, just after

11 p.m. in a radio station that had been silenced by the only switches

connected to any audio sources, hearing music: Christmas music.

I remember shaking my head,

as if to clear it. I remember a slight chill running up my back. I was

a rational being, but I was quickly running out of checks on my checklist

of audio and power sources to account for the music that floated through

the several rooms of the station.

"I know! It's that

radio in the lobby," I thought at last. We kept it turned on during

the day so visitors could hear our broadcasts while they waited. "Now

that we are signed off, some other station on the same frequency is coming

through on our receiver."

I found the pink plastic radio

broadcasting a low level of static in the lobby. I turned it off. I could

still hear the music.

I had no other explanations.

All the power was off to all the audio and radio equipment. The sound

was generalized, not confined to one office or area. I had no explanation

for it then. I still don't.

I turned off the last lobby

lights and locked the front door and got on my old 26-inch Schwinn to

ride the deserted Highway 431 to and through downtown.

I no longer heard the music

now that I was outside, under the stars. I looked up at those twinkling

lights in the final minutes of Christmas Day, 1960. Not another living

soul was in sight. I still felt a prickle up my back, but it was not fear.

It was curiously peaceful.

I pedaled home, now hearing

the music in my mind, the music of voices without words, from a tune first

set to guitar in a Bavarian church so many centuries before. It was "Silent

Night."

That's my Christmas story,

and I'm sticking to it.