Behind the Microphone
People sometimes ask how a lifelong radio guy ended up creating a comic strip.
The funny thing is...they've really been traveling together all along.
I've spent more than forty years behind a microphone, talking to people I couldn't see. Along the way I've worked at little hometown stations, network studios, interviewed country music artists, pop stars, music legends from all types of music, met unforgettable listeners, and collected enough stories to fill several lifetimes.
But long before any of that, I was the kid who never missed the newspaper comics.
I loved the characters that felt like old friends. The kind that made you smile over your morning coffee. Somewhere along the way I realized I wanted to create a place that felt like that.
Broadcasting in Paradise is where those two worlds finally met.
It's part radio station, part tropical daydream, part comic strip... and completely from the heart. The Island is filled with the kind of people—and pelicans—you wish lived just down the street. Life moves a little slower here. Coffee tastes a little better. The ocean is never very far away.
If you've stopped by for a visit, I'm glad you're here.
There's always another story waiting just beyond the next wave.
Thanks for stopping by.
— Hugh
The Feds
When I was in broadcasting school, they had a requirement that we had to wear suits every day in order to demonstrate our ‘professionalism’. I loved it. It gave me the chance to dress like a business man every day. It is true that when you put on a suit, you feel better. Anyway, we had ‘assignments’ in the field where we were given temp jobs, (usually 1 week and not paid) in the real world of broadcasting to get used to what it was really like in the trenches.
On one assignment, I was paired up with another guy and we drove into the city to find the location of our mission. We both were in our early 30’s and looked, for the most part, like a couple of TV detectives. When we finally found the location, we went looking for our ‘point man’ (our contact) to give us instructions as to what we were expected to do. As we strolled a cavernous Conference Center with only the guy’s name and a description, we noticed a ton of other well-dressed attendees scrambling around as if to get somewhere important.
After some time searching, we approached a table that had been set up as a welcome table for all conference attendees. Behind the table sat several individuals who were logging people in and handing out welcome packages. Obviously, this was some kind of enormous conference. Neither my colleague or I had any idea what we were assigned to do, we were just told ‘to show up’. When we approached the table, and one gentleman in particular who looked like he was in his early 40’s, was apparently the main guy (and he fit our profile we were given), we simply looked at him and said, ‘Are you Michael J. Tremboll?’ He looked up at us from a seated position with a terrified stare. The color immediately drained from his face and he stuttered, ‘You guys’ Feds?’ It didn’t help that my colleague and I whipped out our identification badges the broadcasting school had given us to present to our contacts. For a moment it looked as if Mr. Tremboll was about to jump up and run. My colleague and I shared confused looks and then said, ‘No. We’re here from the Broadcasting School. You requested help?’ At that moment, Mr. Tremboll fell back into his chair and as the color returned to his face I still, to this day, believe he had crapped himself right there.
Once the air cleared and Mr. Tremboll was assured that whatever illegal things he was doing were not, at that moment, about to get him a long extended stay in the ‘Stoney Lonesome’, he showed us to our stations to operate cameras to film the guest speakers for the entire 2-Day conference. All the while he was trying to show us what he needed us to do, he was shaking, sweating and all but incoherent. It almost made the both of us sad for him but at the same time, my colleague and I joked privately that ‘This guy must be up to some REALLY bad stuff!’.
In the end, we did our ‘jobs’ and chalked it up as another experience in the wacky world of broadcasting. However, I can bet that Mr. Tremboll went home that night with a lot on his mind. Quite a day.
No A/C
At one time I was DJ’ing in a tiny station on a diminutive spit of land in the middle of a vast stretch of water. I mean, the midpoint of an ocean sized Bay. As far as I was concerned, we were broadcasting from the middle of nowhere surrounded on all four sides by water which you could not see past in any direction. It truly felt as if we were on that proverbial tiny island with one solitary palm tree. Anyway, the studio was old and falling apart. A double-wide trailer that hadn’t moved in over 100 years. One toilet and some sketchy electrical wiring and the studio. Dirty, smelly and unkempt, it was a far cry from the luxurious studios of television and movies. It also had a central air conditioner. Yep. The kind you see on a normal home. Surprisingly, it actually worked! That changed one dreadful day when I reported for my daily on-air duties.
When I showed up for another day behind the microphone, I was immediately hit in the face with a wall of heat when I walked into the studio building. I should have know when I turned the corner to the parking lot when I saw the front door wide-open that there was trouble. We never did that. When I walked in, the ancient box fan was on full-blast and the air was like an oven. There, standing in the broadcast booth, door wide-open (again we never did that) was my boss, standing there in nothing more than a bra and a pair of panties with her headphones on talking to the listeners. The sight of my boss, who had a very nice body, barely dressed, shocked me but I immediately realized why: It was over 120 degrees in the booth! The booth was shoulder to shoulder with the two transmitters. Those transmitters were humming along nicely creating about 300 degrees of heat! The air conditioner had apparently stopped in the night and now with the summer sun beating down and no air moving…well you can guess the brutal conditions. I looked at my boss and before I could utter a word she simply said, “Don’t laugh. You’ll be like this in an hour!”. It is truly amazing how extreme heat can completely devoid a person of inhibitions such as the need to cover up your privates. You get so uncomfortably over-heated that your overall feeling is one of, ‘Who the hell cares?!’
She was right because within the space of one hour I had stripped down to my boxers and was sweating like a drug addict. You could feel the heat emanating from every inch of the consoles and the walls. If you have ever been in a human sized oven, you know that it is nearly impossible to concentrate. The next 12 hours was a contest of wills. I did my usual Djing and trying to sound normal while in reality I was worried about passing out. Even after the sun had gone down and the mosquitoes decided to fill the building, the temperature stayed at over 99 degrees. In retrospect, I honestly think I donated about a pint of blood to the local mosquito collective that night.
On my drive home I was one exhausted, itchy, giant welt of countless mosquito bites and soaked in sticky, presumably stinky sweat and about eight pounds lighter than when I showed up for my shift. Needless to say, when I got home, I showered and fell asleep practically on top of my window air conditioner on full blast. Mercifully the a/c was repaired by the time a returned for my next shift.