They Call Me Baba Booey (16 page)

That’s what I planned on doing with my life. Frank’s father ran a camera store and photo processing shop in Rockefeller Center and he would lend me cameras. When I graduated from high school my dad bought me a used Nikon FM from the Associated Press sports photographer for Long Island, who was a friend of his. I still have it in my closet.

During my senior year in high school, Anthony and his wife moved to Austin. They decided to settle there after passing through on a road trip to Central America. I applied to the University of Texas because it had a great photography program and I got in. I bought a plane ticket to visit that Easter and even had a check ready to hand over for a deposit. If I liked it, I was going.

But the weekend I was supposed to visit, Anthony’s father-in-law got sick and died suddenly. Anthony and his wife came home and decided they had to stay in New York for a while; they couldn’t leave her mother alone. I panicked. My plan was to go to Austin, move in with my brother, and by my sophomore
year, get in-state tuition. Now that I didn’t know when he’d be back, I canceled that trip and changed my plans.

It was April of my senior year and I had nowhere to go. I was scrambling big-time. My dad had seen Anthony blow off college and Steven simply decide it wasn’t for him. He wasn’t going to let me do the same thing. So he said to me, “Just go someplace locally for a semester or two and figure out your next move.”

Growing up on Long Island, there were three universities and one junior college, Nassau Community College. Everyone called it the University of Uniondale or the thirteenth grade. No way I was going to go there. It was literally walking distance from my house. It was a longer walk for me to go to high school than to go to Nassau CC. Then there was Hofstra University, across the street from Nassau Community College, and a great school. My buddy Gary Bennett’s father was the dean of admissions and I knew I could get in there no problem. But still, I couldn’t go to college where I went to high school; I had to move a little bit. C.W. Post was another local option. But I just didn’t like it. And then there was Adelphi, which was about twenty minutes away.

My father and I went to an open house at Adelphi. And we got so taken to the cleaners. I wanted to study photography. Adelphi had photography classes, but no photography major. We walked around the displays set up for potential students and I met the guy who eventually became the chairman of the communications department. We started talking and he told me, “Communications is just like photography. They have cameras, they have lights. It’s the same thing.” Umm, okay. That’s how I became a communications major at Adelphi. I was going to live at home, take a few photography classes, and then figure out my next move. That plan changed before I even started school.

During orientation I went on a tour of the communications
department and took a walk by the radio station. It was like seeing wrestling for the first time in junior high. There was a guy sitting at a radio console and the
ON AIR
sign was lit. He looked so cool, so fucking cool, and I just lost it. I thought to myself,
I am getting in there
.

My feelings were confirmed that first day of school. I took an elementary radio class and the professor brought in a boom box—this was 1979. It was the teacher’s first year, too. She was a gay woman who lived in the Village. She was young and cutting-edge and carrying a boom box, and I was into it. Then she said, “We are going to do an exercise. I am going to turn on different stations and based on what you hear, tell me what you are listening to.”

Are you kidding me? This was a college class?! I was nailing every station, every kind of music. I had a natural aptitude for this.

That first week I signed up to work with the radio station. There wasn’t a lot of competition and it wasn’t long before I was doing a newscast on the school’s channel, which was broadcast by something called a carrier current. That meant only people on the Adelphi campus could hear it. So basically, no one. I didn’t give a shit. A girl and I were co-anchors. We had to be in the studio by 4:30 in the afternoon to get ready for a 6
P.M
. broadcast. We’d read through newswires, rip up stories, decide who was going to say what, and then flip the switch. God, it was awful, I mean really horrible. I don’t know if a single person was listening. But I was on the radio, hanging with other people who liked doing exactly what I liked to do.

The next semester I got a gig working for 90.3 FM, which was still a school station, but at least it was one you could find on the local radio dial. One afternoon Vinny heard me reading the news and called to ask me, “How come you sound like Ronald McDonald?” I made my voice rise and fall while I did the broadcast because I thought it sounded professional. No
one was teaching us to be ourselves. The point was to be in front of a microphone and get comfortable. Which I did, eventually.

I could tell my parents dug hearing me on the air. One Sunday night all my relatives were over for one of our weekly dinners. Even for occasions as casual as those, my mom spent the entire day cooking. We also broke out the appetizer table. I left to do a show when the Cotroneo ladies were in full-throated debate about life and sauce. I figured things would have quieted down by the time I got home. Instead, as I walked through the door, I heard an unfamiliar sound: clapping. My dad had made everyone stay and listen to me on the radio. He was psyched, just totally loved it. And he loved that I loved it.

Halfway through my first semester I was looking to sell my photo equipment. That was it for me. I was having a good time in radio and I knew I could be good at it. I was making plans in my head. I thought I was going to get into radio and be the next muckraking superstar.

ONCE YOU GRADUATED FROM POP MUSIC
—and high school—the coolest New York radio station to listen to was WLIR-FM. It was progressive, playing the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead, but also new acts like Steve Forbert. It was the laid-back, hippie spot on the dial. The whole vibe seemed to say, “We don’t care about making money, we just care about the people.” All the best concerts for music snobs were sponsored by WLIR.

LIR also had a left-leaning, aggressive news department. On air, the reporters didn’t act like talking heads reading copy: They projected opinions, liberal ones, into every story they broadcast. They also had this great segment called News Blimps, where they mashed up a real news sound bite with bits of music and comedy. Today that stuff is commonplace, but back then it was cutting-edge.

The studio was located in the shittiest part of Hempstead. It was crap, really. But because it was WLIR, every kid studying radio on Long Island wanted an internship there, including me. I knew that when I was a junior and eligible for the program, I’d try to get it.

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait that long.

Just before freshman year ended, my radio teacher—the woman who brought the boom box to class that first day of school—asked me to dub a TV program for her. It was a fifteen-hour special series about the history of rock and roll that she wanted to use in a class the following year. To her the job seemed like a pain in the ass. There’s no way to speed up dubbing. You need to let the tape roll and keep an eye on it so you stop when one episode ends and you don’t run out of tape in the middle of the next one. It was definitely tedious stuff. But I saw it as being asked to watch a TV show about the history of music. That was right up my alley. I didn’t mind doing it at all. And when it was over she was so grateful she asked, “What can I do for you?”

“Well,” I answered, “I’d love to have an internship at WLIR.”

At the beginning of my sophomore year, in 1980, I showed up at the WLIR office for an interview. The fact that it was in the slum of Hempstead didn’t deter me. I couldn’t believe I was inside a professional radio studio, seeing it all firsthand. The guy I listened to every morning, Steve North, was just finishing a news report. He was only about six or seven years older than me, but he might as well have been Edward R. Murrow. We were in the same studio but the difference between us was immense. He was on air and getting paid; I was an amateur. He was comfortable; I was quivering behind a mustache. He had on a suit and a tie; I wore the nicest outfit I had: a loud, blue and red striped button-down shirt that I bought at Just Shirts
in the Roosevelt Field mall, a skinny tie that looked like something I stole from the band the Knack, a pair of beige slacks I picked out at Sid’s Pants (which was right next to Just Shirts), and a snazzy pair of Capezios.

The first question he asked me was “Do you smoke?” Did he smell my breath? This was a newsroom with young journalists. I thought everyone smoked. I did, so I told him. “Well, that will not be accepted.”

I made a mental note. Right after that we started talking about news and its value and other high-minded philosophies of journalism. The conversation turned to Geraldo Rivera and his late-night news show,
Good Night America
. Steve had been a producer on the show. I told him my favorite segment was when Geraldo had had on Jack Ruby’s sister and Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow and they got into a knock-down, drag-out fight on the air. I couldn’t get over that. Seeing people fighting like that on TV was crazy to me. Turned out, Steve produced that piece.

I was hired that day.

I had to be in the office twice a week by 6
A.M
. Three weeks after starting, my car radio was jacked from the LIR lot. But that didn’t slow me down. I’d get there before the sun came up. Initially my principal job was called “sledding.” This was long before everyone had a computer, but slightly after stone tablets. Reporters couldn’t Google to find information. They needed interns. That was me. The station subscribed to all the major local papers. Every day I had to go through the papers and clip the most important features. Along the wall were packets of the biggest stories happening at the time and each day we added the new articles. That way, if someone was working on a piece about, say, Agent Orange, they could go to the packet, flip through all the stories, and be up to speed.

Steve was very methodical and precise. When he told you how to do something he wanted you to do it his way from then on. I did the sledding job well. I also learned a valuable lesson:
If you do shitty tasks well and without attitude, someone will give you better stuff to do.

I hung around Steve as much as I could, watching as he did interviews on the phone, pulled articles from the sledding files, edited his pieces, and read newscasts out loud to himself before going on the air. The politics of the place made me chuckle sometimes: All the stories my brother Anthony warned me about when he was rebelling against my father were being played out and reported on every day.

About a month into the gig, Steve sent me out on an assignment. Nassau Community College was holding a “handi-capable” day to raise awareness for handicapped people. It wasn’t political intrigue, but it got me out of the office. He threw me a tape recorder and said, “Go.”

“Umm, what do I do?” I asked.

“Talk to people, ask them why they are there, what they hope to achieve,” he said.

So I went down there and walked around all the different booths and interviewed people. I would start off asking everyone, “Are you having a good time?” Then I’d launch into an interview. I thought I got some good stuff. People were really excited about “handi-capable” day. I got back to the studio and gave Steve the tape. He popped it into a deck, started listening, and, ten seconds in, paused it.

“First tip,” he said to me. “Never ask a yes-or-no question.”

He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to give me the assignment, listen to the tape with me, or give me any criticism at all. He didn’t really have to acknowledge I existed for any reason other than cutting out newspaper articles and making his job easier. But he did all of that. And when we were done going through the interviews he cut ten seconds of tape, put it into his broadcast for the day, and introduced it this way: “WLIR’s Gary Dell’Abate was there and asked people what they thought of the event.”

Holy shit! That broadcast ran six times throughout the day.
I went to work at the kennel the next day and people said to me, “Hey, I heard your name on the radio!” That was it: my first taste of countywide fame. I was a month into my internship and my name was already broadcast on the station all my friends listened to.

After that, Steve kept throwing me the recorder. He knew I was a huge sports fan—he couldn’t have cared less—and not too long after my “handi-capable” success he asked me if I wanted to interview Rick Cerone, the Yankees catcher, who was doing an autograph session at a mall in Hicksville. It couldn’t have been more perfect for me. While my fandom had expanded to the Jets and the Islanders, the Mets and baseball were still my true loves. They were everything the Yankees were not: upstarts, scrappy, abused, laughed at. Clearly, I could identify with this team. Plus, my dad loved the Mets and I idolized my dad. Every year he’d take my brothers and me to a game for a Dell’Abate boys day out. At night he and I would watch the Mets together. He used to joke that on his third try, he got it right and had a boy who was a sports fan. It was something only he and I could share.