From: wnbc@wam.umd.edu (Joseph Samuel Kaufman)
Subject: "Howard Stern Just Won't Shut Up" -- Pt. 2 of 7
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 23:21:13 GMT

	In the summer of 1982, WNBC was hurting.  Don Imus's morning talk 
show was wildly successful, but the afternoon music show was in eleventh 
place in the local market.  So Bob Sherman, then the executive vice-president 
of NBC stations, and Dom Fioravanti, WNBC's general manager, went shopping 
for an afternoon man who could, as Sherman put it, "apply the coup de grace 
to the New York market."
	They found him flapping his gums weekday mornings in Washington, 
D.C., provoking tempers, grabbing headlines, and quadrupling his audience.  
When Howard Stern came to DC-101, an album-oriented AM-FM rock station, it 
was struggling to get out of the ratings basement.  DC-101 also hired Robin 
Quivers to do the news, and let Stern bring in his old friend Fred Norris to 
write and produce comedy bits.  Keeping the music to a minimum, Stern began 
to develop the outrageous show that he would perfect in New York.  Fourteen 
months after he landed in Washington, his was the third most highly rated 
morning show in the city, and Washingtonian magazine called him the year's 
best disc jockey.
	Sherman, now president of the advertising agency Della Femina, 
Travisano, Sherman & Olken, says that WNBC knew what it was getting into when 
it went after Stern.  In fact, management brainstormed to devise a strategy 
to handle its newest high-strung thoroughbred.  It was Sherman who suggested 
that WNBC not bring Robin Quivers and Fred Norris to New York along with 
Howard.
	"We wanted Howard without his aides-de-camp, so he'd be as naked and 
vulnerable as possible to good management," he says.
	When Stern arrived in New York, his new bosses sat him down and spoke 
such words as "guidelines," "restraints," and "restriction."  He was informed 
that he was at WNBC, and told to lay off sex and religion, to speak at 
intervals no longer than two and a half minutes, three times an hour, and to 
be respectful to newscasters and the traffic reports.
	In his first month on the air, Stern (who had prsuaded the brass to 
let Fred Norris join him) did a bit called "Virgin Mary Kong." about God's 
new video game, in which a bunch of guys kept chasing the Holy Mother around 
a singles bar.  Fioravanti immediately suspended him for a few days.
	"This is going to be different than I thought," Kevin Metheny recalls 
musing at the time.  Bob Sherman had already left radio for the advertising 
business, and the burden of Stern had fallen largely to Metheny and Fioravanti.
	"Howard and I began to sense that we had disparate visions, and we 
were each resolved that we were correct," says Meheny, who has lost track of 
the number of times he rushed into the studio, screaming at Stern, "Never do 
that again!"
	Stern began campaigning to get Robin Quivers on his team, but NBC 
balked.  "I was crying, ready to kill myself," says Stern.  "I thought I'd 
gotten myself in with the biggest bunch of idiots!  How could they break up 
my act?  I kept wondering why they hired me in the first place."  The battle 
between Howard Stern and WNBC was joined.

-- 
*****************************************************************************
 In-Real-life: Joe Kaufman, University of Maryland College Park, MD, U.S.A.
------- "Howard Stern is number one, Magic Johnson will soon be done." ------
	wnbc@eng.umd.edu 	 phone: 1 301 699-9455        :----)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.howard-stern