Maureen "Mo" Cooper from the Class of 1999 is the first voice you hear at the beginning of this podcast. An imaging guru, she and Ed LaComb ('85) have done the production for this show.
A Central Square native, Mo grew up listening to Z89, even if she had to work to get the station to come in that far north. She's always loved radio, and began working in the Syracuse market before she even got to SU. Once at WJPZ, she was there for the format flip to the Pulse, where she learned a lot about both on-air and imaging. And she was on several stations at once in the market - needing cue cards to keep track of all her different on-air names!
Maureen says WJPZ helped teach her what she was passionate about, but also what she didn't want to pursue professionally. As a local, she was happy to step up and help staff the station over school breaks, but that experience taught her management was not where she wanted to go professionally. In fact, she even tells the story of what we believe was the first automation in WJPZ's history, when she couldn't staff the Pulse over Christmas, 1995. It's a story she's never told before and shares for the first time with us.
Mo did have to leave the station when she got full time work in Syracuse, while still a student. But she stayed in contact with her classmates, including when they made the flip back to Z89. After graduation in 1999, we were really starting to see a sea change in radio ownership, as the Telecom Act of 1996 really started to take hold. Ownership swaps were happening everywhere, which led to opportunities. Mo had her pick of several markets, and she went to Orlando for a decade after school.
Maureen briefly left radio and moved to Houston. But sure enough, she was eventually pulled back in, where she worked on-air and imaging for several radio stations. She's currently at legendary CHR KRBE in H-town.
We close with Mo's feelings about the true family of WJPZ, and how these connections across the generations are still a huge part of her life.
Join Us in Syracuse for Banquet on March 4th: https://bit.ly/WJPZ50BanquetTickets
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast is produced by Jon Gay '02 and JAG in Detroit Podcasts
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. One of the first voices you hear on this podcast would be that of Maureen "Mo" Cooper from 1999. She helped do the imaging for the podcast. That is her voice at the beginning of the show, and you're about to hear a lot more of her voice. Welcome to the show, Mo.
Mo: Thank you, JAG. I'm so excited to be here.
JAG: So you are one of the folks who didn't have that far to go when it came to coming to Syracuse University because you're a local gal, right?
Mo: Yeah, I grew up in the metropolis of Central Square, which if you attended SUyou probably never made it up there, but we're about 20 minutes north of Syracuse.
So I grew up listening to Z 89. We definitely didn't have a great reception in Central Square. They have a better signal now since there have been so many upgrades. But back in the eighties, we had to do some antenna finagling to be able to listen. But definitely knew all about the radio station, before I went to SU.
And really, it was definitely a great learning experience for me in so many ways. Actually listening to this podcast, I thought I knew a lot about the history of WJPZ. I would never claim to know everything cuz 50 years is a long time and I wasn't around for all of that for sure. But I learned something right off the bat from your very first episode with Dr. Wright and it really blew me away. He was talking about Central Square and my high school, Paul V Moore.. We had a radio station back. I remember when I was very young, some point in elementary school, we went on a tour of the high school. And there was a radio station and I remember seeing it. Of course, I didn't know I wanted to be in radio or anything then.
But by the time I got to high school, that radio station was gone. And I remember by then, I did have an inkling. I like to talk a lot. I knew I wanted to go into broadcasting. And I remember thinking, oh, that would've been great. I wish they hadn't given up this radio station. But I learned through Dr. Wright's story that by Paul V. Moore giving up that license with the FCC, that was actually what enabled WJ PZ to get onto the FM dial. So it's a full circle thing for me because I was really thinking, man, if we had. A radio station in high school, I would've had, even more of a leg up on being able to learn and start my broadcasting career.
And then I look at it and go, yeah, but if my high school had never given that up and that license had not opened up and opened a door for WJ PZ to move to FM, WJPZ may never have made it to FM, might not have even, survived. This definitely affects my history too.
JAG: Do you remember maybe, leaning out your bedroom window in Central Square with a coat hanger and picking up any of the other alums when you were younger?
Mo: We listened, but I didn't really pay that close of attention. And like I said, we didn't get a great signal for Z89. It was hit or miss in the suburbs back then. So I don't remember the personalities, but I do remember listening, I remember the music and I remember. Just that vibe of, Z89 was cool because we all knew, that it was college students and that, maybe there was a, I don't know, just that little bit of an underground sort of thing to it.
JAG: So you knew, I would imagine pretty young, you wanted to go to SU and get involved with JPZ, or how did that play out?
Mo: I did. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew myself, I knew what I enjoyed and I really liked talking, and I'm a very creative person and I did the morning announcements at school every day.
I was a lector at church. I had a lot of the tendencies, but I didn't know. So I was a broadcast journalism major, and I actually started working in radio before Z89 before I ever got to SU when I was still in high school. I was getting ready to graduate and so it was like springtime and my mom was like, what are you gonna do this summer?
And I was like, I don't know. And she said you're going to be a broadcaster. That's what you wanna do. Why don't you write a letter? This was, yes, there was no email. This was sit down and type up a letter to every radio and TV station in Syracuse and see if you can get yourself a job or an internship or something for the summer.
And I was like, oh, okay, nobody's gonna wanna talk to me. I'm just some kid. So I wrote a letter to every radio and TV station in Syracuse with a little resume that had nothing on it really. And I got one phone call, , and that was Rich Lauber at WBBS, B104.7, which is still there. It's now owned by iHeart.
At the time it was owned by New City Communications, then became Cox Radio, then became. eventually iHeart. So I got this call from Rich Lauber. He did afternoon drive and he was the program director and I couldn't believe it when he called me, I knew the voice instantly. And he said if you're interested, I have a job for you.
And there's money, it's not a lot, but it's a paying job. And so I started board opping at B when I was 17, I board opped the weekend satellite shows. They had a show on Saturday nights called Boots Scootin' Partyin' Nights, came in on satellite from Nashville. There was no automation back then.
Everything was carts and CDs, and so somebody always had to be at the studio to run the board. That was the first radio station I ever worked at, and I got on the air doing overnights during the holidays and stuff like that there, and so I was working there when I started at SU, so I immediately also started at WJPZ, but I worked both places pretty much the whole time that I was in college.
JAG: Were you on the air at both?
Mo: Yeah. I was actually at one point on the air on four different radio stations in Syracuse at the same time, and I had different names on each. It was so confusing.
JAG: How do you keep that straight?
Mo: I had little cue cards I'd put up in front of me that said, my name is Raven Thorn on 89 1, the Pulse, and then I'd have another one said, my name is Maureen Collins on Y94 fm.
My name is. They made me use a different name and so I was on the air at B104.7, Y94FM, Hot 1079, and JPZ for a minute. Yeah.
JAG: All right. So a moment ago you referenced The Pulse. This is something I wanna ask you about because you're the class of 99. So you saw both iterations of JPZ. Tell me about The Pulse and were you there for the changeover to The Pulse or just back to JPZ?
Mo: I was there for the change to The Pulse, but I was not there when it changed back to Z89. So when I first started my freshman year, it was still Z89. And I was doing on-air stuff. Unlike most of the people that have been on your podcast I never held an executive staff position at JPZ. I was just too busy, I had another job and so I was, I definitely put in a whole lot of time there on air, and I put in a lot of summer break and winter break time, which I definitely wanna tell you a story about.
And I just really, honed my on-air skills and learned, the beauty of WJPZ is it is a safe place to make mistakes when you're a baby DJ.. And that was what it was for me. I just learned the ropes there and experimented and tried things and learned things without any risk of losing my job.
It was really learning responsibility. Just learning the ropes. But yeah, I was there. I wasn't a manager or anything, I was just a DJ and so I learned a lot from Dan Austin and Jeff Wade. I was there actually when they were working on the imaging to flip it to The Pulse and that was where I really first fell in love with imaging, where I learned about how they were getting a new voice guy and they were, putting together the sweepers for the new station and I really got to observe and learn that stuff as part of that.
JAG: What was it like being there when you're flipping, what was, the traditional pop format or, hotter pop format over to the alternative format? Take me inside the building. What was that like?
Mo: At the time that was, for lack of a better word, it was trendy. Alternative and Modern rock was such a big deal then.
And I really think that it was a great learning experience for those guys who led the charge. Like I said, what better place to learn how to do a format flip and make your mistakes and, learn what works and what doesn't, than in an environment like JPZ, where you can an experiment, you can try things and if it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world for anybody. It was a lot of fun. We really, we had fun with the music. It was a different vibe, but at that time, alternative rock was so mainstream that it was a mainstream format. And like I said, I didn't really know much. A lot of the political stuff that was going on behind the scenes.
I've heard on stories about the conservatorship and all the, financial struggles and all that. I really didn't know that much about that in the moment when I was there. For me, JPZ was just, it was just a lot of fun. It was just a place to go on the air and have fun and learn how to interact with callers and learn the equipment and learn the different aspects of the different departments.
It was great, and I'm a creative person and I learned really at JPZ that I didn't wanna do any of that. I didn't wanna manage people, and I didn't wanna worry about the money side or go out and try to sell it. It's just not me. But I really did fall in love with imaging production and being on the air.
JAG: That is great to hear. Okay, so you finish up in 1999. Tell me, or was it before that you started going pro, so to speak?
Mo: Yeah, I got a full-time job at Cox during my junior year. I was production director for Hot 1079 at the time, WWHT, and so I was still doing shifts at Z right up until when I was part-time.
And then when they gave me the full-time job and I was still a full-time student, something had to go. And for me, unfortunately, that was WJPZ. So it was during my junior, early in my junior year when I stopped working at the station. And then it was shortly after that when Harry and Dena and everybody flipped it back to Z89 and I was there. I remember listening and calling Harry and being like, hey, congratulations. This is great. And so I was around, but I was just working full-time over at Hot.
JAG: So I'm gonna be selfish for a second and tell you that you've given me a bit of a sigh of relief because I've been doing the math since I first met you at a Banquet.
And I'm like well, if she was 99, and I was 02, why don't I remember her from the station? Why is it that I don't remember meeting her prior to that? That explains it because I was a freshman when you were a senior, you weren't there anymore, so I feel better now. You actually weren't there, so I did actually meet you for the first time at a Banquet.
Mo: But I wanna tell you some of the history of WJPZ that a lot of the students maybe don't even know about is how we kept the radio station on the air all summer and during winter and spring breaks when everybody went home.
JAG: You referenced a story about that. Let's hear it.
Mo: Yeah, so during my freshman and sophomore year, I stepped up to help run the station during those breaks cuz I was local and it was quite an undertaking. There was no such thing as automation or computerized, there was no systems like we use now in radio.
Everything was carts and CDs and there was a live operator in the studio, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays, weekends, overnight, you name it. And it was a real struggle to do that over the summer. And what we used to do is in the spring we would do a big recruitment event with local high schools, and we would bring in local high school students and train them in the spring and early summer.
And then when the students went home, that's how we got through the summer. And then some of those students would still be around and they would help us out during the winter breaks too. We had a license. We couldn't just turn the radio station off if there was nobody available.
It was a struggle and I managed the on-air schedule and the programming side during some of those breaks. And that was really, like I said, where I learned what I don't wanna do as a career. Cuz I really to this day. I'm, I still work in imaging and production and on-air. But I have no desire to be a program director or general manager.
I really love being creative and it's hard to do that in a corporate environment when you're in a managerial position. It just, for me, it sucked the life outta me. I didn't like it, but it was a great time for me to learn that at 18 or 19 to experience radio management and then you know, the different sides and figure out, this is what I really like, it's what I'm gonna go for.
But yeah, we kept it going on those breaks and I trained a lot of local kids. I did enjoy that. I enjoyed the teaching part and the training, but there were some times in the holidays and the overnights when it was really tough to keep the station on the air. And I think it was probably my freshman year, there was a Christmas break where I was left in charge.
And I pulled everybody outta the woodwork that I could think of. And I got down to the wire in a couple of days before Christmas. And I had nobody Jag. I could not pull anybody that was willing to work overnight Christmas Eve to Christmas, and then Christmas Day. And so I, for the first time publicly, I'm gonna tell you the story.
I created the first ever automation system that was ever heard on WJPZ in 1995.
JAG: Let's hear it. Okay. How'd you do it?
Mo: And I had never talked about this. Mina thinks that she had the first automation, the first voice tracking, but no. My parents had one of those cassette players in their like living room Hi-fi system.
It was RCA plugs on the back and it would automatically flip from one side of the tape to the other and play continuously. So I didn't tell anybody, but I went in the production room just like I do today. I went in the production room and I produced up, like I think the longest cassette you could get at the time was 120 minutes.
JAG: Yes, sounds right.
Mo: Yeah. And I produced, 120 minutes of Rock leaning Christmas music with sweepers and some legal IDs sprinkled in there. And, I made myself a reel basically, and I put it on the cassette and I unplugged that cassette player and I went to the station. The last guy that I had scheduled was getting off at 6:00 PM Christmas Eve.
And, I walked in and I said, all right, I'll take it from here. Go home. Merry Christmas. And I plugged that thing in. And turned it on and left it through Christmas Day and I kept listening. I would check on it, every once in a while, to make sure the station was still on and that the cassette was still flipping back and forth.
And then I went back in at, 6:00 PM Christmas Day when I had somebody ready and I went in and unplugged it, and no one ever knew except me. And now everybody listening to this.
JAG: Oh, so you even hid it from the person who was on after, like you went, like you'd been on there before.
Mo: I hid it from everybody. I was like, I felt so bad that I couldn't find anybody to do the shift and that I, it was Christmas Eve and so I, that's just what I did. I don't think I told anybody.
JAG: So we are breaking news on this podcast today, Mo.
Mo: I, yeah. Yeah. From 1995. Yeah, we're breaking news.
JAG: Okay. So let me flash forward to five years or six years later because I have a very similar story.
If you'll indulge me for a second. The 2000, 2001 school year, we were in this decrepit house on Ostrom Avenue while they revamped the studio, and I was VP of Ops. We actually split up Christmas break between three of us. The first third of the break, Paul Chambers, our then GM, was in charge of the station.
I came back over the second part of the break, which included Christmas, and then Brett Bosse came in the third part of the break to finish it out till all the SU students got back. So those of us that were in charge of the high school kids. You know, whose parents somehow let them come into this creepy old off-campus house to run the board.
But I ran into the same problem. I had Christmas, I'm like, Hey, I'm the Jewish kid. I'll stay Christmas. It's fine. And so we were at a really small staff of high schoolers at that point. So I had probably the second, now that I know you're first, the second piece of automation that we know of in the station's history.
I had a five-disc CD changer, so before I came back to run it over Christmas, I burned five 60-minute CDs with songs and imaging on them and a legal ID to start each CD at the end of the hour here at least. I had a way to automate the overnights, and I only had to staff the station from six to. midnight
Mo: That's way more sophisticated than what I had.
JAG: Yeah. But I wasn't as careful as you because one of the big songs at the time was Stan by Eminem, and I did not realize that one of the CDs contained the album cut and not the radio edit. So the five CDs, once I learned that, had to become four cuz I couldn't play the dirty version of the Eminem song on the air.
And then at one point the CD player broke. I remember calling my mom in tears. I'm like, I'm up in this house by myself and I don't. Then one of the engineers from a AER came and God bless him, fixed the CD player so I could keep automating the overnights.
Mo: Oh, I remember. It was very stressful though, and I remember as a student, my parents were like, why are you so stressed out over this college radio station?
Who cares? I care, I'm responsible for the broadcast license of this radio station. You felt this, you felt the pressure of, of everything that you feel in a real job. You felt that responsibility on your shoulders, and I think that it made us who we are figuring out those kind of problems.
JAG: Absolutely. And then I think Christmas Day, one of the high schoolers locally, Jake Goldman was also Jewish, so he and I split Christmas. We each did 10 hours and then put the overnight automation on. But we were so short staffed. By the end of the break when Brett had the last third of the break, he had almost nobody left because we burned out these high schoolers, giving them so many hours over Christmas.
Mo: They were great in the spring. They were always raring to go. They were like fresh and new in the spring. Their first time being on the air. They were so excited. They grew up listening to Z89, but then when you came back to them by Christmas time, they were like, no, dude, I'm busy.
JAG: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, so back to you and your career path. You go to Hot 1079. You're doing the imaging. What's after that?
Mo: So yeah, I was full-time there my junior and senior year while I was doing, full-time classes and full-time. But it was great. And then right when I was getting ready to graduate, we were owned by Cox Radio at the time.
That was in 99, so you know what was happening in the radio landscape. Then the Telecommunications Act was really kicking in. It had been passed a couple years before, but the actual ownership changes were starting to take place in 99 and all over the country. There was all these ownership flip flops and swaps going on.
And it was really a golden time to be working in radio because there were so many job opportunities. Those couple years as all those stations were changing ownership and things were just, it was like a whole bunch of balls up in the air and there were just opportunities all over. And I knew I wanted to leave Syracuse and Cox was selling the stations in Syracuse to Clear Channel, but they were trading in other markets.
In some markets, Clear Channel was acquiring from Cox and in other markets, Cox was acquiring from Clear Channel. . And so Cox had, jobs for me, basically I had my choice. I had an offer in Orlando and I had one in Tampa and I had one in Long Island. And so I looked at all three and I decided to go to Orlando because the station was called Party. And that sounded like a lot of fun.
JAG: To a 22 year old. Why not?
Mo: Yeah. Honest to God, that's really why I made the decision. I was 20 years old, so I just, I went to a new sign on, it was called 953 Party. It was a dance hip hop, top 40 kind of station. It was rhythmic, CHR but it was different. It was really tailored to the Orlando market, and in a way that only local radio can be.
Back then it was a station that really identified with the Orlando, the Hispanic culture there, the dance culture there, everything about it. And so it was a lot of fun. I was with Cox in Orlando for 10 years. and then I left radio for a while and I ended up in Houston and then I started back up.
I had worked for Cox for so long, they had stations here. I started back up with them and I eventually worked my way back up again to be imaging director of country station here called 93 Q, but not the same 93Q as Syracuse. They had three stations here, Cox did. They still do, the classic Rock, The Eagle. 93 Q country and then a classic country.
And so I was on air and imaging director there for about 10 years and then, I transitioned away from that and I was freelancing on my own for about two years just doing imaging production, voiceover work whatever I could for my home studio. And then I landed this dream job that I have now, right where I'm sitting at KRBE here in Houston. It's a Cumulus radio station. Top 40.
JAG: Legendary call letters.
Mo: We are the top billing individual Cumulus station in the country.
JAG: That is major market and some major market coin. Yeah.
Mo: Yeah. Not for me. But no, the station does really well and it's just a really great environment to be in.
There's very few radio stations left in the country like this, where we are live and local all day, even nights, seven to midnight, we have live jock in the studios. We're out in the streets every day. We're like in the community and broadcasting live from everywhere all the time and just, it's a real blessing to be here, to have a full staff and have just the resources that we have in Houston.
So I like it. It's really great here.
JAG: Was there a culture shock for a girl from Central Square going to deep in the heart of Texas?
Mo: Yes, there still is. I've lived in Texas now for 15 years. It's home now. I've lived here a long time. I love the radio stations that I've worked for here and I love where I live, but I'll never really be a Texan, I still get the, where are you from? You don't sound like you're from here. I still have my accent. I never knew I did till moved here.
JAG: Do they call you a Yankee?
Mo: Yeah, all the time.
JAG: Which always, when I was in New Orleans, they'd call me a Yankee. I'd be like, please don't call me that. I'm a Red Sox fan. You could not give me a bigger insult than to call me a Yankee.
Mo: Yeah, I get called a Yankee here all the time. But, Houston's a big city and in a lot of ways it's every other big city, just New York or LA or whatever, there's people from all over the world, it's very much a modern city. Yes, there is a Cowboy boots and rodeo kind of element to Houston, but it's also, a very diverse modern city.
JAG: So you've kind of touched on this throughout, Mo, but are there certain things you learned specifically at JPZ that have served you well throughout this long radio career that you've had up until today?
Mo: Oh, absolutely. Like I said, I really, in some ways it was just as valuable to learn what I did not like, what I did not wanna do, and really find my passions at such a young age. At JPZ, it was the first place that I ever had to teach anyone anything. And I learned working with those high school students, and even at JPZ, the minute you learn something, you pretty much have to turn around and teach it to somebody. I mean because there's elections and the staff gets replaced on a constant basis.
So you know, the minute you learn something, you pretty much have to turn around and pretend to be an expert at it and teach it somebody else. And that is a really valuable thing as well to learn and, to learn that you enjoy that and what you don't enjoy for me was just really important. And, being on air there, like I mentioned, I was working at the country station in town.
It was a cluster, so they had the adult contemporary, which was Y94 fm. But I didn't work there and I didn't really know the bosses there. I was in my staying in my lane back then. I was 19 years old and one day I got a call from Jay Nachlis, who's another alum, and at that time Jay was the assistant program director at Y94 fm.
He had graduated, he was older than me and I got a call from him, which came by way of Jay Palladino, who's another alum. And he said, I wanna hire you to work at Y94 FM on the weekends. He said, I've heard you on the Pulse. And I was like that's great. I was like, I already work there so you could just put me on the schedule.
And he was like, what do you mean you already work here? So I already worked down the hall at B104 and I'm a board op there, but he heard me on the pulse, on WJPZ. And wanted me to come on the air at Y94 FM and yeah, I mean I got tremendous opportunities from, like I said, I never held an executive staff position, but I certainly, for many years I felt like I learned so much there and took it with me everywhere I went.
And like you mentioned, the friendships that we all have from different generations and different classes in the weird way that we tell even our friends and family. That's my friend from school. Scott was saying, It's a very unique thing. Nobody has what we have there. It's really special and I feel just really privileged to have, those connections.
JAG: Are there any other names you haven't mentioned yet that they've made lifelong connections with while we're talking about that?
Mo: It's hard. We all have working in radio. This happens. All of us, our friends are just all over the country and spread out and so I feel like whenever I'm in a city, I always know somebody because of JPZ. My family and I, we went to Washington DC for a spring break one time and just on a whim, I texted Scott MacFarlane, I know he's busy. I said, I know you're busy. I'm in town. And like the next day he was giving me a tour of the Capitol and walking me through all of the, with a press pass in Washington DC and I was like, this is amazing.
I feel like whenever I'm in New York City I always, Ryan Sampson's a good friend of mine at Sirius, and we always spend time together. I feel we just have these great connections all over the country and we all know that, if we need something, we're all we gotta do is pick up the phone or shoot a message and we're all there for each other.
JAG: And it really is such an amazing group, and that's why I've really enjoyed doing the podcast. Thank you for your help and your contributions to the podcast, Mo Cooper class of 99, and thanks for being on this episode.
Mo: Thank you for having me on. I really am so honored to be part of this. I really wanna thank you for putting this together and the tremendous amount of work that I know has gone into this.
You've really created just another living history of the radio station with this and it's awesome.
JAG: Appreciate that, Mo. Take care.
Mo: Thanks.