Howzit Howard

What really happened to Aloha Airlines

Entering its final two years of existence, Aloha Airlines was a company with two key weaknesses and two key strengths. The former overwhelmed the latter when two new negative factors came into play, leading to the collapse of the carrier one year ago today. Aloha's weaknesses were these: old planes, and insufficient cash to replace them. The jets were gas guzzlers, a particular problem on interisland flights, since the lion's share of fuel spent on a flight is spent getting off the ground, and the most fuel-efficient part of a flight is the middle when you're cruising. On interisland flights, you take off and then you land. There is no middle. The airline's strengths were its management and its employees. Its top executives were highly experienced and CEO David Banmiller had run a number of airlines with similar issues. At the next level, Aloha managers were focused and responsive. Together, and with extra effort by rank-and-filers determined to save the company, they improved performance to the point where they occasionally bumped Hawaiian Airlines from its accustomed position as the nation's on-timest airline. Then Mesa Air Group came into the market. Mesa, which makes most of its living on the mainland as an outside contractor providing regional feeder flights to larger airlines, presented itself as a potential buyer of both Hawaiian Airlines and Aloha Airlines during their last bankruptcies. Though it never bought either carrier, it got to see their books, including their strategic plans, the terms of their contracts with suppliers and codeshare partners, and the expiration dates for such contracts. One of the things this information made clear was that Aloha had a lot less cash than Hawaiian did. Mesa CEO Jon Ornstein would later tell some of his own prospective investors that he knew his go! project could succeed because he had seen the inside information on its two legacy rivals. His chief financial officer wrote and emailed a memo which said the market could not support three interisland carriers but Mesa could become one of two by using fare wars to drain one of the legacy carriers of its remaining cash. Ornstein once told me the email was a joke, but it turned out later that the email was not a few dashed-off lines but a full report with charts and everything. Ornstein later said Mesa management later came to feel the market could support three carriers. But Hawaiian Airlines later sued Mesa and won roughly $80 million in damages (settling for less in order to get cash to cover its fuel bills when jet fuel peaked last year) in a judgment that left out damages beyond the date of the decision, allowing for more damages later. Aloha also sued, and after it collapsed the prospect of damages from that suit proved to be an asset. Its mainland shareholders acquired the suit and settled for cash and part-ownership of Mesa. Mesa denied engaging in predatory pricing for the purpose of driving Aloha out of business, but I am surprised that the feds never went after the company for it. Predatory pricing is notoriously hard to prove, but this is a rare case where a memo seems to be a smoking gun. Though Aloha may have survived without the go! factor, there was a second additional negative factor, and that was the incredible run-up in fuel prices last year. As we shall see, this did not merely add mightily to Aloha's own costs, it also disrupted efforts to find a buyer for the airline. Media reports of recent days have referred to a mysterious prospective buyer for Aloha, but there is no mystery to it -- I reported many months ago that the buyer was United Airlines. The principals can't openly confirm it because they signed documents at the time promising to keep the talks confidential. But United it was. United was then the second largest airline in the world (since overtaken by Delta/Northwest) and could easily absorb Aloha's costs. United also was and is the largest single provider of air seats to Hawaii, so it could benefit more than any other mainland carrier from owning an interisland airline here. Owning Aloha would have given United the option of replacing some direct flights to neighbor island airports with service to Honolulu and an Aloha transfer to Lihue, Kahului, Kona or Hilo. This would, I might point out, save United a lot of money right now, in this recession. Aloha Senior Vice President Thom Nulty, a former senior executive of American Airlines, made a number of trips to Chicago at about this time, so I assume he was actively involved in the talks since United is headquartered there. And it's now known that Aloha's unions were involved because the two airline's union leaders had reached agreement on a structure for Aloha to continue to operate as an independent entity rather than being absorbed into United.  It all came apart in March of last year because United began to have its own cash flow problems with soaring jet fuel prices. Aloha CEO David Banmiller spent the next several days speaking with virtually every conceivable merger or acquisition partner.  Aloha had been operating with cash from its California investors, and this is when they decided to shut off the financial spigot, triggering Aloha's sudden bankruptcy filing and collapse. It could be that Aloha was doomed, with its old planes, its fuel bills, and its upstart rival prepared to operate at a deficit for longer than Aloha could afford to do the same. But it is amazing to consider how close it came to surviving anyhow.

Does the perfect landlord exist?

Let's talk about two landlords. We'll call them A and B. A is the perfect landlord. B is the kind every tenant hates to run into. Landlord A knows you're downsizing, moving from larger quarters in a "better" building. He wants you, not merely to lease his space, but to be happy with it, happy enough to stay there after the economy improves. So he offers you a deal on parking spaces, always an important amenity. He offers to do some buildout at his own expense, to make an already suitable space even better. And he offers to give you three months rent free because that will cover your moving costs. Such landlords exist, but only in collapsing markets. Honolulu, according to a new CB Richard Ellis report, has risen to 10% vacancy for office space, the magic point at which landlords typically begin to offer deals or cut their asking rents. No sign of that yet, though. Which brings me to Landlord B. Landlord B is not a reasonable person. He has come to regard the income from his property as an entitlement, and the idea of reducing the rent or cutting any other sort of break to help a longtime tenant is anathema to him. He is capable of demanding more rent even when any reasonable person could see that his tenant cannot pay what he's asking and will have to move. He would rather have the space go empty than back down. Renters, whether commercial, retail, industrial or residential, all have horror stories of such people. Not having rented myself in a long time, I have the luxury of a more detached view, and from my perspective the most interesting thing about the greed of such landlords is that it often reduces their income, and normal people can see that outcome clearly. It is, in other words, not about business, not about mathematics. It is psychological, perhaps. I'm not sure the perfect tenant exists -- the one who remembers the deals he is offered, and responds with loyalty in better times, remaining in the space and agreeing to higher rents. More likely, especially at the business level, some executive of the company will say the company really appreciated all that help, but now feels the need to move, nothing personal. So a landlord can be forgiven for taking a cold look at the arithmetic. But in this economy, a number of landlords have misjudged the situation, demanding more than their tenants can pay, forcing them out, and finding no one else to move in. Question for residential renters: is your landlord making long overdue improvements now? It's the best time to do it. Tradesmen who can fix rooves, paint apartments, upgrade plumbing and repair electrical systems are looking for work. Such repairs can be done more rapidly and more cheaply now than in a busier economy.

Aloha alumni and an unemployment rule of thumb

A year after Aloha Airlines shut down its passenger service forever, we find that 20% of affected employees are still out of work, based on a state analysis of laid-off workers who have exhausted all their unemployment benefits. Aloha Airlines, even through its years of losing a lot of money, paid good wages and had a decent pension program. Any furloughed Aloha employee who decided (a) not to move away from Hawaii, and (b) not to seek a different kind of work, effectively made a decision to run the risk of not finding work at all. It is human nature that we do not ever feel comfortable working for lower wages than the highest wages we have previously made. And who would want to leave Hawaii? The lucky ones got aboard at Hawaiian Airlines, which picked up the lion's share of Aloha Airlines business. Some others were hired by Mokulele Airlines, either directly by the airline or indirectly by Republic Airways, which provided and crewed the jets, and which now controls the airline as well. Others did look for airline work elsewhere, and some former Aloha pilots are now working in Asia-Pacific or the Middle East. There is a rule of thumb, bandied about during normal economic times rather than in recessions, that the average professional, when thrown out of work, can expect to remain out of work for one month for each $10,000 of income sought. This is not a real rule, and in slow economic times it is reasonable to assume that finding a comparable new job will be harder than in busy times. But in the case of ex-Aloha employees, the general economy was not the main factor; the main factor was the shakedown in their own business. There is a lesson in this for people working in some other industries. In the modern global economy, anyone who makes good wages in the private sector is at some risk as a generation of managers who know more about cost-cutting than revenue-raising look for ways to improve the bottom line through outsourcing and downsizing, while companies that try to maintain a generous wage structure are vulnerable to rivals that don't. From the Roaring Twenties through the end of World War II, some 25 years, big city wages ran very high for performers in radio. Then television came along, and 25 years later when I broke into radio, it had become a notoriously low-paying medium. Newspapers are now being supplanted by the Internet and a more complex shake-up imperils newspaper jobs. In the auto industry we are seeing economic turmoil caused in part by the fact that Big Three sales no longer fund wages that are higher than those of non-U.S. automakers with factories in America.  If you don't work for the government, it would be folly to believe that your decent wages and comfortable pension will be there for you from now to retirement. The world isn't so congenial any more.

Fallen flags of the airline industry

When I was a child they called it Friendship airport. What a nice name, though it came from the pre-existing name of the area rather than any spirit of amity. In the early 1970s someone decided to rename it Baltimore-Washington International to remind airline planners that Baltimore's airport was no farther from Washington, D.C., than the then-new Dulles International on the other side of the Potomac. More recently it was named for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, but since I live in Hawaii now I don't know how many Baltimoreans actually call it that. For me BWI will always be Friendship airport, and it carries some interesting memories. Like many airports built in the 1950s it has two main runways that cross each other. Overlooking the crossing from higher ground, and still intact so far as I know, is Friendship Cemetery. My paternal grandparents are buried there. A long road leads to it from the south. The gate is probably locked all the time now for security. In the old days it was routinely left open on Sunday for people to pay their respects. The first time I drove a car on a public road was when Dad pulled the VW bus over on this road and said, "Howard, you take us the rest of the way." I remember thinking at the time that there was some mischief in Dad offering me my first chance at driving on a road to a graveyard with the entire family watching, but Dad is more straightforward then that and probably was just thinking it would be easier for me to do this on a road with no other traffic. I managed the trip without mishap. Soon we were staring at the headstone of Fletcher Aaron and Hazel Dennis Dicus. And soon after that, we kids did what we spent most of our time doing on these cemetery visits -- watching the jets take off and land. There were dozens of airlines in the 1960s, all striving for top-of-mind awareness with distinctive warpaint on their jets. American, Delta, United and Continental are the few that still exist under their original names, now that Delta is retiring the Northwest brand. In those days it was Northwest Orient. What today is US Airways was then Allegheny and Piedmont, both small regional carriers with lots of Friendship flights that went mostly to cities in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. (When they merged there was a local joke that US Air stood for "Unfortunately Still Allegheny in Reality.") The biggest carriers back then were Pan Am and TWA, for years the only two airlines with flights circumnavigating the globe. Another big carrier was Eastern, inventor of the hourly shuttles to New York. These are all fallen flags now, along with Braniff and Western Pacific and others I can't even remember any more. It surprises people who know about all my model airplanes but I'm a railroad buff at heart and the same thing has happened in the railroad industry, which had 50 storied railroads through the 1960s. Today four rail giants cover almost the whole country. In the East, CSX Transportation encompasses the former Chesapeake & Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio, Atlantic Coast Line, Seaboard Air Line, Louisville & Nashville and others. Norfolk Southern encompasses the former Norfolk & Western, Southern, Wabash, Nickel Plate, and others. In the West, Burlington Northern encompasses the former Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Burlington Route, Santa Fe, and others. Union Pacific, the only original name that survives, now also includes Southern Pacific and many others. For people, especially kids, who get into this sort of thing, it is like losing friends to see companies you learned about ceasing to exist. Effective Monday, Northwest employees will all begin wearing Delta uniforms.

Peripatetic or diabetic

The jury is still out on whether I am diabetic, but even if, as now seems to be the case, I am not, I have learned some interesting things about blood sugar, diet and physical movement. As everyone knows, too much sugar in the blood is bad for the eyes and for small blood vessels, and can lead to nerve death in the extremities, leading to injury and amputation. Diabetes is bad. Less well-known is that indolence impairs the body's ability to regulate insulin, which deals with that sugar. Many fat people may become diabetic, not because they're heavy, but because they don't walk enough. This is important because it is hard to keep weight off but easy to walk more. There is a great deal of evidence that any big person who hopes to get away with it needs to become more peripatetic -- move around more. And other studies have shown that just walking provides most of the benefits of more strenuous exercise. I could probably significantly improve my health just by getting off on the wrong floor and walking up a flight or two of stairs when I go home. In this, my second encounter in seven years with a serious leg infection, my blood sugar shot up while I was feverish -- the body raises blood sugar to fight physical trauma -- and both times I was assured I was diabetic, only to have the blood sugar return to normal range after the fever ended. However, I'm at the high end of normal. They didn't used to get worried until it hit 200. These days if it regularly tops 120 they want you to do something about it. This week past, sedentary and suffering physical trauma but also avoiding all sweetened foods, I tested 121 to 137 depending on the morning. At this stage it doesn't matter whether I am diabetic or not -- either way it makes sense to avoid sugared foods and cheat rarely, and do more walking. Diabetics also watch carbohydrates because they are readily converted to sugar. If you are watching your blood sugar it helps to like meat.

My favorite pieces of classical music

This Saturday's edition of "Howard's Day Off" was prefabricated due to my recuperation from illness, which prevented me from getting down the stairs to the Cultural Crypt to do the show live as I usually do. Instead, Hawaii Public Radio's Charles Husson brought a nice portable digital recorder over to the condo and I tannyabed my parts, handed him a stack of CDs, and he assembled it back at the studio. I sometimes play more than two dozen separate tracks on the show, but to simplify it for Charles I programmed a mere 10 pieces of music, all of them personal favorites. Which got me to thinking -- what are my top 15 classical music pieces? I'm not talking about what I might rate as the greatest pieces, but which ones would I most like to put on the CD player and hear right now. Classical music lovers will be surprised that Haydn, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner don't make the list, though I like these composers a lot. 1. Mendelssohn: Octet. (The most perfect composition I have ever heard, and composed in adolescence. A chamber work that is also a symphony, both clever and affecting, delicious to hear live but absorbing on recordings as well. No symphony or quartet is better. Although there is plenty of other Mendelssohn I like, I don't think anything else he wrote came close to this remarkable piece.) 2. Bach: Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue in G minor, BWV 542. (Bach is my favorite composer, and this is my favorite work by him. The opening fantasy, heard loud on an organ, is Bach on acid, chromatic to the point of being psychedelic. The fugue, probably written at a different time and certainly in a different mood, is a return to reality and reason, one of the best fugues by anyone at any time. The music of Bach fascinates me because other people seem to find it too arid for their tastes but I could listen to "The Art of the Fugue" or any amount of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" every day, and some people think these pieces weren't even intended for performance.) 3. Vaughan Williams: "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis." (I have never heard this live, and am told it is magical in a resonant hall like a cathedral, where the orchestra and a string quartet can answer each other from before and behind you. But even on recording this is an astonishing piece of music, like being caressed by warm waves. Ralph Vaughan Williams' music is otherwise neglected in America, and much of it is great stuff, but, yes, this is his masterpiece.) 4. Copland: "Appalachian Spring." (My fondness for the music of Copland extends to his early, more dissonant works as well as his later "Rodeo" stuff when, under the influence of communism that was all the rage before Stalin became better known, he made a conscious effort to write more stuff that the average Joe could grasp. "Appalachian Spring" is kind of in the middle, with clear themes but also an intellectual's joke, making the hymn "Simple Gifts' into something complex and bombastic. A great piece, though, especially in the original full chamber orchestra score rather than the later symphonic suite that took some interesting astringent bits out.) 5. Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor. (Many Mahler fans are choral music fans, because most of Mahler's works have voices in them. I prefer the instrumental works, and especially the Sixth, the biggest symphony ever written that holds together, full of emotion and ideas and a great piece for showing off a great orchestra. It's tragic from beginning to end, but I always feel better after listening to it. I've never figured out how Mahler did that.) 6. Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 19. (I'm not a fan of the traditional concerto in which everyone backs up one star performer and periodically sit still for solos. But this concerto has no cadenzas. It's just a marvelous piece of music that happens to have one violin playing all the time. Prokofiev is another favorite composer and I like most of his symphonies a great deal.) 7. Shostakovich: First Symphony. (I love Shostakovich's 4th, 5th and 9th symphonies, and enjoy several others, but his student work, the First, still strikes me as the best, combining the angst of his more emotional works with the wit of some of his other compositions. Intensely inventive and full of personality.) 8. Ravel: "Tombeau de Couperin." (Ravel has always struck me as one of the most successful composers of all time. Every format he tried, the result went straight into the repertory: his trio, his quartet, his ballets, his concertos, and the infamous "Bolero," much underrated even by Ravel himself. But my favorite is "Tombeau," a modern take on ancient dance movements.) 9. Schumann: "Rhenish" Symphony. (Schumann was so emotional he came unhinged, but his best music is very special, and I love the "Rhenish" Symphony for its arching opening theme, its quasi-Baroque slow movement, and its perfect finale. I have read that his orchestration is thick and needs help. All I know is, I love what I hear.) 10. Hindemith: Concert Music for Strings & Brass. (Hindemith was the 20th century Bach, prolific, and perhaps too intellectual for his own good. Many musicians dislike him because they know him mainly by the many sonatas and concertos he tossed off for students. But I like much of his work, including "Ludas Tonalis," "Mathis der Maler," the first Kammermusik and the one for woodwind ensemble, and especially the Concert Music for Strings & Brass, a highly original piece that manages to be very modern but also very listenable.) 11. Stravinsky: "Symphony of Psalms." (I like a lot of Stravinsky, including his most famous stuff, but my personal favorites are from his neo-classical period, and especially "Symphony of Psalms," a three-movement choral symphony. It's not singers backed up by an orchestra. It's an orchestra in which the violins are voices.) 12. Bartok: "Concerto for Orchestra." (Bartok was a modern composer who spent his youth studying folk music, mostly in eastern Europe, and what he heard made his own music unique. I agree with others that this was his masterpiece, and I love hearing it live or on recording. I also love his Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta and would like to hear it live the way he intended it, with percussion in the middle and string divided left and right to produce a stereo effect before there was such a thing in recordings.) 13. Beethoven: "Moonlight" Sonata. (The slow movement was part my childhood, when I was not otherwise much exposed to the classics. My mother's father could play it. The progression of movements, each one faster than the previous one, works for me better than most other sonatas. The moods of Beethoven are represented as well in this work as in any of his symphonies, of which I confess to an unnatural fondness for the Second.) 14. Brahms: Second String Sextet. (This is one of the most beautiful pieces ever composed by anybody. The opening movement is the single best example of Brahms' penchant for mixing major and minor to produce something that sounds like the end of the day. The gentle bounce of the finale is like a gallop through the clouds.) 15. Harris: Third Symphony. (Roy Harris is not a composer of the same rank as these other guys, though I have heard more of his symphonies than most people and find much to like in some of them. In the Third, however, everything came together for him and he produced what in Europe they still call the Great American Symphony. I admire its concision and love the way Harris, like Brahms, mixed major and minor to produce a mood that is hard to explain in words because it is too subtle for them.) Clearly if I had extended the list a little, I would soon have gotten to Mozart (40th Symphony) and Beethoven symphonies (Seventh, Second, Fifth -- not the Ninth, you might be surprised to read) and Tchaikovsky (secret pleasure: the "Little Russian") and Schoenberg (the two Chamber Symphonies) and Schubert (the "Unfinished," can you believe it? But also the music for "Rosamunde.") But along the way we would have had to make room for "The Planets" and Gershwin's Concerto in F and Peter Mennin's Fifth Symphony (the Juilliard president wrote the same symphony over and over but this version really works) and Paul Creston's Partita for Violin, Flute and String Orchestra and Poulenc's organ concerto and John Adams' "Shaker Loops" and Michael Torke's "Color Music." How does someone develop favorites along these lines, with no Wagner, Dvorak, Elgar, Bruckner, Handel, Richard Strauss? Simple: by being self-taught. I don't play an instrument, never attended conservatory, never took a music appreciation class. I bought LPs and then CDs, listened, and read. I went where my ears took me. Eventually I worked backward to listen to the core repertory, but not always the "right" works. I love Brahms' Third Symphony, for example, but not the Second. Everybody is supposed to like the Second. Sorry. I hope this triggers some other people to send their own lists. Maybe someone's explanation of her or his love of a particular work will make me listen to it again with fresh ears.

Sheila Bair and America ' s view of the housing crisis

This is the question Americans keep asking, and perhaps you've said it yourself, about federal plans to help out the banking system and loosen credit. "Why are we bailing out the banks? Why don't we bail out home0wners?" The interesting thing about this question is that most people in Washington, D.C., when they try to answer this question, use arguments against bailout out homeowners that could also be applied to the banks that they are trying to help. I'm referring to fairness issues -- how do you help someone in trouble without hurting someone else who was more prudent? Apply the same thing to lenders and it becomes -- how do you fix the system without unfairly benefitting the ones who screwed it up? And the answer we have heard is that we have to fix the system even if we do benefit the screw-ups. And if that's the case, then as a practical matter the principal difference between helping big bank screw-ups and unwise or greedy individual home mortgage borrowers that the former are big and the latter are little. Which brings me to Sheila Bair. She's the current head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures bank deposits. Remember when bank commercials always ended with this line? "Member, FDIC." Bank of Hawaii Vice Chairman Donna Tanouye was head of the FDIC in a quieter time. Bair appeared this week on CNBC and indicated that if a financial services company is in trouble, she or some other regulator ought to be able to come in and actually take control, the way a judge takes control when a company requires protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of federal bankruptcy law. "Replace the management," she said. "Get rid of the boards [of directors and] doing an orderly unwinding of the entity." Bair and the FDIC have already done this in dozens of takeovers of failing banks, so what she is really saying is that this same procedure should be applied to the big, rich, screw-up companies, and also to AIG, where a perfectly good insurance company is in corporate peril because of one risky division. (Your policy is safe.) Bair sounds like she has her head on straighter than some other leaders of various rescue proposals. It's the American system, though you haven't heard it so much in the past year or two, that if a company can't maintain its own stability and needs government help, its management loses the right to remain in place. One thing that may help Bair play a strong role in this is that she will not be attacked by Republicans. She is one. She was named to the post during the previous administration. I also suspect that while big banks are scared of her, many conservative local banks may see her as the one regulator who won't write a blank check for a reckless rival.

The leg saga -- and an update on " Day Off "

After spending most of two weeks in the hospital and another week at home, my leg has resumed human form, but not human coloration. Some of it remains black and there are two ugly gashes from where a surgeon made sure the inside wasn't dying along with the outer layer of skin. It wasn't. The gashes are slowly closing from the inside. It still hurts horribly to get up after lying down -- as blood flows into its tender vessels and tissues -- but otherwise the ongoing pain is minor. I just have to prop it up a lot to keep it from swelling again. I hobble around with a cane, and Bernadette bought a wheelchair at Sam's Club or Costco, I forget which, for longer trips. Bernadette's gout attack, probably brought on by the stress of my own situation, is now over. Thursday and Friday business reports were tannyabed from my home office and carried back to the station for air. This coming week I'll use a webcam freshly installed in the same location. Saturday's "Howard's Day Off" on Hawaii Public Radio is a fresh show, conceived this week with my announcements pretaped in my home office, tannyabed in a single take as if it were live. The music is some of my personal favorite classical music.

Mike McCartney and the emergency effort to boost tourism

Hawaii arrivals by air, down 13% from year-before levels in both January and February, are down 15% so far this month, with even deeper declines on Maui. Hotels are cutting room rates up to a fifth from last year to get the visitors they're getting. It was against that backdrop that the incoming CEO of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, Mike McCartney, appeared on "Sunrise" Friday morning to be interviewed by my friend Steve Uyehara. McCartney agreed, in response to questions, that there was potential in such markets as Europe and China, but compared it to growing pineapples -- it takes time -- so these markets do not represent any immediate hope for goosing tourism. McCartney said for him the big thing to do right now is to target U.S. West vacationers who book their travel on the Internet. There is some basic math that explains the situation. All our Japanese tourism adds up to less than our visitor traffic to Maui, and our international tourism from countries other than Japan is, frankly, negligible. On an average day -- in this slump, I mean -- we may get 3,000 visitors from Japan and 300 from other countries. In the long run, the pineapple timeline, there is enormous potential from international markets, but this can't possibly help our immediate situation. We get more than 15,000 mainland visitors a day (in good times, often 20,000) and this is where even incremental boosting of visitor traffic can do a lot of economic good. There are people on the West Coast who already know and love Hawaii, could use a vacation, and have stable income that allows them to do it. These are the people we need to reach. And the message to reach them with, in Howardspeak, is, "Hey! Our hotels are slitting their own throats to fill rooms. You'll never get a cheaper Hawaii vacation!"

Memories of being a teenager at a rock radio station

If you're on Facebook, you know that people from your past find you and remind you of your youth. It's great to hear from them, even just to learn they are still extant. A girl I never dated but had a crush on as a high school sophomore -- this is 1968 we're talking about, far enough back for "Midnight Confessions" to be the anthem of the crush -- surfaced as a happily-married West Virginian. (It is useful to make it clear I am happily-married myself because then I can hear how such a one is doing without fear of misunderstanding or what Paul Simon would call "hints and allegations.") Today I became Facebook friends with Dennis Constantine and Jack Casey, with whom I worked at WYRE Annapolis. I was there 1972-1975, when I was 19 to 22, and it was the best job I had until my current one, though there were some very fine jobs in between. Annapolis, Md., is a bedroom community of both Baltimore and Washington, D.C., though it's an hour drive from Annapolis to either of those cities. Annapolis is not only the state capital and home to the Naval Academy but also the county seat of Anne Arundel County, which stretches north to Baltimore. I grew up in Glen Burnie, a nice name for a not-very-pretty town -- Hawaii readers, think Wahiawa but without the charm -- about two-thirds of the way from Annapolis to Baltimore. I broke into radio in my senior year in high school working for free doing news on WNAV Annapolis, which I think Pat Sajak owns now. In those days it was owned by its founder and not living up to its potential. That was okay because I was 17 and hardly living up to my potential. A year later I was in community college and was cast in the Vincent Price role in "Angel Street," the play that became the movie "Gaslight." I went to WYRE to record a promotional announcement for the play. Dennis Constantine, the program director, was going to make me wait until he was free to record it. I told him I could record it myself if he had a "cart," a tape-loop in a cartridge that in those days was the universal format for recording commercials, jingles and so on. Intrigued at the idea I could tannya a promo "direct to cart" he tossed one to me, which I caught one-handed, the only time in my 55 years I have ever caught anything thrown at me one-handed, and while he waited I tannyabed a promo in one take. By the time I left the station I was its new Glen Burnie stringer, and soon I was working for it full-time. WYRE was a weird, wonderful station. In a day when people still listened to rock on AM, it was a daytime station with what should have been a weak signal, made strong by a series of excellent chief engineers who did everything possible and somethings that skirted the law to make it a kick-ass source of rock music, local news, Chesapeake Bay marine weather, and tide timetables. The marine weather was always sponsored and had its own jingle. Most of the jocks came from Baltimore or D.C. I was one of the few who actually lived in Annapolis, and it was a great place for a single young man to work. My air work was immature but energetic, and at its occasional best it may even have foreshadowed what I do now, more than 30 years later. I worked for three program directors in three years all of whom went on to program major market rockers. The general manager, himself a former rock jock from Baltimore (Kerby Scott, real name Kerby Confer, now owns a chain of stations) and set the tone for the place, encouraging creativity. Perhaps the best thing I can say about WYRE is that almost everybody I worked with at the station is still in broadcasting.