Missed it by thaaat much!

Get a REAL Job- Working for The Akron Schools
Phil Hoffman

On my first day at the Akron Public Schools, I was notified that since it was the week of Thanksgiving, 1992, I would only work til Wednesday. The schools were closed Thursday and Friday, so I wasn't to come in either day.

WHAAAAT?

After nearly 10 years straight of working on every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day, I was about to find out how normal people lived. And apparently, normal people don't work on holidays. This was an auspicious beginning to a job in which I would discover that the "glamor" of working on TV wasn't so glamorous. Although, truthfully, there is always a sort of cheerful playfulness in the newsroom on a holiday...everybody resigned to spending another holiday away from family, but united in a weird way with their work family. And usually we didn't work a full day, so it really wasn't that bad. To us. To our spouses and kids, it was hard to explain this situation. To us, it made sense. It's just what we did.

So the second day on the job I get a letter in the mail from Bill Spratt, an Akron administrator who turned out to be a huge influence on me. Here's the thing, Bill wrote: "you MUST take a vacation day between now (Thanksgiving) and December 31st, or you'll lose that day."

WHAAAAAT?

I'm on the job less than 9 hours, and I need a vacation?

I won't even go on to belabor great benefits, much better pay than in TV or radio, or a myriad of other things I discovered in my new job.

And I would start working for Karen Ingraham. Karen has been in charge of communications at APS since the early 1990s. She is great at her job, but what few people know is that she is a brilliant leader of creative teams. I would learn more in the years I worked for Karen than in all my radio and TV years combined. In fact, much of what is now my approach to management is actually her approach. Or my imitation of her approach.

In the end, I would spend from 1992 through the summer of 2000 working for APS. I would be in charge of 91.3 FM, WAPS and the APS TV channel on Time Warner position 15. That's another story entirely.

But....shortly after I started at APS, I got a phone call from Mark Williamson. WAKC was sold. A new company, ValueVision was taking over and they were going to make a big investment in news. Would I consider coming back? Mark set up a meeting with the new GM, a guy named Mike Jones. I had barely left WAKC, and already they wanted me back.

But that meeting would be a very odd one indeed. More on that in the next installment.

The Writing Is On The Wall

I knew something was up. I saw strange people coming and going, writing down serial numbers from our equipment. It was late 1992, and I just had a feeling that something bad was in the making. I had already been through the process of getting new ownership when I worked at WSLR/WKDD, WAKR/WONE,and WCUE.

It almost always started with strange people taking inventory, somebody figuring out what the property was worth. Then it would get eerily quite for a year, 18 months. Then would come the announcement: "We're sold." I knew what this meant: changes that would probably result in people losing their jobs. Then there would be a period of doubt, as the change went through the FCC. Maybe it won't happen. Maybe things will be better under the new owners. They'll all realize how underpaid we are, we'll get big raises and new equipment. Things will be better.

But by now, I had been around enough to know that wasn't going to happen.In fact, I had already developed what I tell my students to this day, I call them "Phil's Rules of Media."

Rule number one? "Sale always bad. Get out."

I went home that night and told my wife "I have to leave." We had just had our first daughter two months prior, so now I couldn't afford to risk losing my job. It might take two, three years for it to happen. But when it did, it would be ugly. I had time, I figured, to find a new gig. But I needed to get going.

As luck would have it, (and I know you're gonna think I'm making this up, but I swear it's true) the very next day our News Director, Mark Williamson dropped job postings on my desk.

"Did anybody here know the Akron Public Schools were looking for somebody to run their radio station?" Williamson asked. As per usual in any newsroom, he was greeted with grunts and guffaws. Who could possibly want to leave the glamour of TV for a school system?

I admit it. I casually slid the postings into my desk. I snuck them home that night, careful not to let anyone see them. I was destined for this job. By Thanksgiving of 1992, I would leave WAKC-TV 23 to become General Manger of WAPS-FM and APS-TV at the Akron Public Schools. I would escape the painful day that would come just over three years later, when allot of my friends would lose their jobs.

And I would start working for the person who would radically change my life.

Tune in next week...you won't believe what came next.