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that day. As it turned out, she was one of two secretary/receptionists that the station employed. One worked solely for the general manager, Varner Paulsen, and our new best friend worked for program director Muni, answered the phones, and greeted visitors. In addition to being exceptionally attractive, she had an effervescent personality and spent the next hour chatting with us, interrupted only by the occasional phone call. She was younger than we were, and she gave us lots of unsolicited tidbits about the staff, to our shock and delight.
    We hadn’t planned on this briefing, but we didn’t mind listening to her stories, thinking they might come in useful during our interview with Muni. She told us of her boyfriend, with whom she was having trouble at the time. He was a musician and traveled a lot. He lived in Los Angeles and only could see her once a year when his band came to town, but they talked on the phone. And oh yes, he was married—didn’t love his wife but they had a child and he didn’t want to leave her.
The oldest line in the book.
I wondered why this gorgeous, intelligent woman would waste her time on a married man three thousand miles away who was obviously using her whenever his band came to New York. It seemed pretty clear to us that he probably had someone like her in several other cities, but that was something she needed to realize for herself. She swore her love for him and pledged to remain faithful. What a waste! And what a cad he was if my suspicions were true. After hearing her story, I never could listen to a Beach Boys song with Mike Love on vocals the same way.
    By the time Muni arrived, we’d swapped enough stories with her to feel like old friends, and I’m sure she lobbied for us to be granted an audience with her boss. He came in wearing a brown corduroy jacket over a short-sleeve madras shirt with the requisite faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. A saddlebag briefcase stuffed with albums and unopened mail was slung casually over his shoulder. “Scottso,” as he was known in his AM radio days, was a ruggedly handsome man, an ex-Marine with military swagger and confidence. His hero and role model was John Wayne, not exactly a popular choice given the antiwar sentiment of 1971. Muni’s bearing was similar to Wayne’s, even if his five-foot-ten stature did not quite reach that of the film legend. His hair was short and black, with long sideburns just beginning to gray—his only concession to hipness.
    “Come in, dudes,” he beckoned, after a whispered exchange with his secretary. We spent the next two hours in his office enduring the strangest job interview ever conducted. It felt as if we were interviewing him: He regaled us with tales as if we’d known him for years. We had told him that we’d caught Rosko’s last show and that we had heard some college kid from New Jersey on the overnight show, filling in. That was the plan, he told us. Jonathan Schwartz, a talented writer and raconteur, was starting as Rosko’s permanent replacement that evening, and Alison Steele, a sexy former television performer, would temporarily be doing Schwartz’s old 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift. There were no openings until they decided on whether the Nightbird (as Steele called herself) would fly during the day.
    We were intimidated by Muni’s reputation, but he was very kind and spoke gently with us. His disjointed phrasing was interrupted by long pauses, as if he were taking a private journey in his mind before returning to Earth. At one point, he seemed distracted while intently scanning his mail. Then he yelled excitedly for the secretary to come in.
    “I’ve found a goodie. Check this out.” He pointed to an envelope and she smiled knowingly.
    “I think you’re right, Scott. Let me get you some boiling water. I think we can save that one.”
    Harrison and I were dumbfounded when we realized that Muni was perusing the mail for uncancelled stamps, steaming them off for reuse. To us, that was