On the Air

Recent alumni aim to make Q106 radioa household name in the Upper Valley

Jeff Shapiro '83 has an inventive sense of humor that runs from wry to wacky, and he is blessed with unusually keen entrepreneurial instincts. In his first business venture, a Nantucket kite store called "Sky's the Limit" that he launched with his brother (Mike Shapiro '81) eight summers ago, Jeff honed those instincts. Throughout his short business career, he has usually found ways of combining his creative flair and his desire to achieve a profit.

The exception came after his graduation from the College. It was the first time in years he had spent a summer away from Massachusetts' island paradise and the small business he had managed successfully; at 21, Shapiro found himself living in a small Manhattan apartment and riding a crowded subway car to Wall Street each day. A New Jersey native, Shapiro said he didn't mind living in the city; he just couldn't stand being a tiny cog in the gears of high finance. "It was a great learning experience," Shapiro said of his time in the world of banking. "One thing I learned was I never want to work for a big corporation again unless we own it."

Rather than remold himself in the corporate image, Shapiro seized control of his career last year and struck out in a new direction. Now, Shapiro lives in a ski house in Quechee, Vt., and commutes each day to the city of Claremont, N.H. (pop. 15,000), where he is working to transform a small, underdeveloped radio station into a regional power in the Twin-State Valley.

Unlike Shapiro, Mark Belmonte '82 loved his job in New York. As a research analyst tracking trends for NBC, the Revere, Mass., native was learning everything he had always wanted to know about the inner workings of radio networks and their affiliates.

Belmonte was doing extremely well for a 24-year-old who had started out in college radio as a freshman planning a career as a broadcast meteorologist. Shapiro's immediate predecessor as general manager of WDCR and WFRD-FM at Dartmouth, Belmonte worked at WBOS in Boston until the station changed hands, then found a job with unlimited potential in one of the nation's top broadcast organizations.

"The guy who hired me [at NBC] just was thrilled with me and very sorry to see me leave," said Belmonte, who said he was due for a promotion at the time. "I had no doubt about my future there." But Belmonte, who has a passion for radio and its numbers games from top 40 countdowns to market share surveys had three problems in the spring of 1984: an address in Greater New York, a city whose "sheer size" he found oppressive; an unfulfilled desire to program his own station; and a housemate who stoked this desire with constant talk about an AM-FM complex in New Hampshire they both knew was available.

Not many college graduates these days go straight to a top business school without time off. to relax, gain work experience, and save money. But Bill Goddard '8l, Belmonte's housemate in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, had always been intensely driven. He graduated from Tuck in 1983 and took a job as a business analyst at Morgan Guaranty Trust Cos. in New York, where Shapiro started work the same summer.

Goddard still lives in Brooklyn, and still works at Morgan in one of those 50-hour-a-week jobs that young careerists find so appealing. But almost from the beginning, he and Shapiro had something to talk about at work besides that day's "Heard on the Street" column.

Over lunches at the Morgan cafeteria, they talked, schemed, and dreamed about WTSV and WECM-FM in Claremont, the AM-FM complex Shapiro had learned was for sale. On some days, they had serious business talks about financing a takeover of the station; on others, when it appeared all deals were off, they kept the faith by fantasizing about catchy call letters and promotions that would make running the station fun.

Goddard was known among college friends for his willingness to drive his run-down Chevy Citation almost anywhere at almost any time to the Tally House for dinner, to Princeton for a football game, or home to Arizona for vacation. On one late winter 1984 trip from New York to Claremont to look at the station, Goddard and Shapiro spent over an hour pushing the car in a vain effort to jump-start it, spent a restless night in the Citation, and rented a car the next day to resume the trip to Claremont. "That just shows how desperate we were to get this thing done," Shapiro said. "There were a lot of headaches, a lot of sleepless nights, but.it was really a blast."

The Citation survived into the summer of '84, long enough to carry Goddard, Shapiro, and Belmonte to Hamden, Conn., where they signed a purchase agreement with Chris Dante, the owner of WTSV and WECM-FM. Now, Goddard takes frequent weekend excursions in his new Mercury Topaz from Brooklyn to Claremont, where he handles much of the station's accounting. The lunch time talks at Morgan were not in vain; the three recent alumni are breathing new life into a station that had been floundering. And true to form, Shapiro came up with a catchy new handle for the FM station, WHDQ: Q106, "Northern New England's Music Headquarters.

On the surface, Shapiro, Belmonte, and Goddard have shared several experiences and affiliations - the College, WDCR, and Tri-Kap fraternity among them. But it was after leaving school that a more subtle similarity emerged. As young alumni, each found he needed to have some direct control over his life and career. And each found the confidence and strength to make sacrifices to gain that control.

For Shapiro, who like Goddard served a term as business manager of the college station, running a small station affords a sense of control that working in a huge corporation could never provide. It boils down to a feeling that what he does each day, in some way, matters. His decisions have an almost immediate effect on the station's performance; his creative promotional ideas and his overall efficiency are not graded by a professor or rated by a supervisor, but they must guide the station's staff, entice the region's advertisers, and please the listening public. The job of general manager carries a good deal of responsibility, including supervising and paying a staff of 20 full-time and 10 part-time employees - many of whom are considerably older than the 23-year-old Shapiro. But like Belmonte's post as Q106 program director, Shapiro's job is a constant creative challenge. And although both Belmonte and Shapiro gave up secure and reasonably lucrative jobs for this venture, neither is looking back. "We were young and we didn't have any responsibility - if we completely screwed up, we could start all over again," Shapiro' said.

So far, there is not the slightest hint Shapiro and company will foul up. With improved technical equipment, a tight new blend of current hits and oldies, a new news format, and a major push in sales and marketing, QlO6 has begun to impress listeners and attract advertisers in Claremont and the surrounding Upper Valley.

Results of a survey released in May showed Q106 at the top of the mountain, not only in its home county (Sullivan) but in Grafton County as well. "We did very, very, very well," said Goddard.

He and Shapiro admit WECM was fairly successful in the rating game even before their takeover.

"But we've never blown away Sullivan County before," and the station never before gained ascendancy over WTSL, a Hanover AM station, in Grafton County and the Upper Valley.

A glance at the station's sales figures for recent months and the comparable period a year earlier makes WHDQ's success appear easy and almost inevitable. But those who made it happen stress the outcome was far from certain. Turning the station around tapping the potential of the staff, location, and facilities took a lot of hard work and more than a fair share of late nights at the station. But perhaps the most difficult part of all, and the best learning experience for the three novice businessmen, was the tortuous road from Hanover to New York to Hamden to Claremont - the process of acquiring the station.

Q106 and WTSV broadcast from a faded, white, one-story building on a narrow piece of land next to Washington Street - Claremont's main drag, a strip of shopping centers, hardware stores, and fast-food joints. Behind the building, at the bottom of a steep pitch, runs the Sugar River. Inside, down the hall from the broadcasting studios, Shapiro and Goddard sit at desks cluttered with programming paperwork and computer equipment, and explain just how unlikely a venture this was.

In the spring of 1983, when Shapiro was still at Dartmouth, he learned that WECM (known to recent generations of students and area residents as "the mountain") was for sale.

Goddard recalled meeting at the Yale Club in New York two years ago with a lawyer who had a good laugh over the financing he and Shapiro were proposing. "The lawyer thought we were a couple of dreamers. He didn't even charge us for the session at the Yale Club because he thought it was such a riot."

At first, the dreamers had no funding beyond their own savings. They had no guarantee the station's owner would even deal with them; and for all their education, they admit they had only a dim understanding of how small-business financing works.

What they did have going for them was resourcefulness, faith in the project, and enthusiasm for radio in general and this property in particular.

"We all sort of thought this was the sleeping giant of the area," Goddard said. "It hadn't been very well developed."

They managed to get some financial data from the station, which carried a pricetag of about $1.2 million at the time. But the raw numbers didn't help too much, and Shapiro and Goddard certainly didn't have a million dollars to throw around. What they had, Shapiro recalled, was "blatant enthusiasm with no direction." They graduated, moved to New York to work, and "basically, what happened was, it died," Shapiro said.

But the idea lingered, as Goddard and Shapiro spent their lunches talking about how "we really wanted to get back into radio and how it was still a great opportunity," Shapiro said.

That autumn, Shapiro called Chris Dante (whom he had never met), asked him some questions about the station, and offered him about $300,000.

"We figured if it was losing money, the only thing it was worth was the real estate," Shapiro said.

But a broadcasting license, of course, has an inherent value, and Dante told Shapiro his offer was "ridiculous." Undaunted, they started looking at another station in nearby Newport, N.H., one with reasonable business potential and a "beautiful facility."

That prospect became a wild-goose chase; the owner refused to consider an offer Shapiro and Goddard made, and the quest for a business of their own ended - temporarily, it turned out - in April 1984. In the process of negotiating for the station, the wouldbe buyers gained a much better understanding of how the radio business works.

By early 1984, Belmonte had moved to Brooklyn and Goddard and Shapiro had resumed talks with Dante. Another offer was rejected, but negotiations continued.

"It was really a big roller coaster, and at that point we began to take more people on the roller coaster ride," Shapiro said. Skeptical bankers and confident parents agreed to invest in the buy-out. Belmonte was recruited as prospective program director. Ken Elias '82, a former FM programming director at WFRD, was pushing them to pursue the deal and agreed to invest. And Will Stanley, in his fifth year as sales manager of WDCR, agreed to invest and switch jobs if Shapiro and Goddard could pull off the deal. Despite the new sources of financial and moral support, the ride became wilder than ever.

"There were single days when we had and lost the station two and three times," Goddard said.

Finally, things broke. Dante reached agreement to buy a Connecticut station, contingent on his selling WECM. In late August 1984, after almost half a year of negotiations, Dante agreed to sell the station for $600,000. After signing the paperwork in Hamden, Goddard, Shapiro, and their program director Belmonte hopped into the Citation and returned to the city, more frightened than jubilant.

"We had done it, but just barely," Shapiro said. Even after the deal was struck, there was no celebrating; what lay ahead were two months of planning and hard work while waiting for FCC approval and, starting at midnight November 1, 1984, the task of running the radio station.

In the difficult first days after the takeover, Goddard and Shapiro fired two employees and explained the station's new ground rules to the survivors. Last winter, before the call letters were changed to WHDQ, the"new WECM" frequently kept Shapiro and Belmonte busy until nearly midnight. Gradually, the staff began to share the outlook of the station's leadership. As the new owners geared up for a first summer of major promotions devised by Shapiro, the station seemed at times to boast the locker-room camaraderie of a winning team.

"We've got a huge amount of enthusiasm, and that's what makes radio stations successful," Shapiro said. "You listen to our disc jockeys and, boom, they're excited about what's happening. You listen to our sales people and they're excited about the product."

Shapiro, rooted as he is in the business side of radio, was looking forward to a summertime Q-cash contest as a follow-up to a Ticket-to-Paradise giveaway that sent a lucky listener to Hawaii last spring. He was also planning to expand the sales staff and to raise the transmitter even higher on the mountain to extend Q106 into new listening areas.

Belmonte, who spent weeks before the November takeover organizing a total overhaul of the air product, is thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

As he put it, the station he inherited was "all over the place musically," playing too few "oldies," too many bad ones, and interrupting the music too often with news. Now the news has been streamlined and Belmonte tightly controls the air product with a color-coded index-card system that guides the disc jockeys in selecting classics and current 455.

Besides his personal tastes, Belmonte follows broadcast trade publications to help find "hot" new releases for heavy airplay. And like Shapiro and Goddard, Belmonte is "tuned in" to the business side of the operation, saying it's exciting to "total up the billing for a month and say, 'Wow, that's twice what we did a year ago.' "

But his main interest remains the contemporary hit radio sound - music aimed at the 18- to 45-year-old listener. Belmonte's concerns are with the subtleties most listeners never think about -"the order in which songs are played, the songs themselves, the things the disc jockeys say and the way they say them."

"Programming is probably as much an art as it is a science. For me it becomes almost a form of personal expression," he said. "To create something, put it down on paper, and then hear it on the air is very gratifying."

But one radio station serving rural New England can only go so far. After recounting their unlikely acquisition of the station and their hard work injecting new vitality into it, Shapiro, Goddard, and Belmonte agreed they are ready to consider the future.

"The next one will be a lot easier, Shapiro said.

Three Big Greeners who are "making it happen" at Q106, ]eff Shapiro '83, Bill Goddard'Bl, and Mark BelmoBelmonte '82, pose in front of the Claremont, N.H., City Hall.

Q106 Program Director Mark Belmonte'82 does his daily on-the-air shift.

Michael Berg '83, who has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia, writesfor Foster's Daily Democrat, NewHampshire's third largest daily.