
It was a very routine morning, I woke up, left my house in City Terrace (near East Los Angeles) around 3:30am to arrive at work in Culver City around 4am. We had a very typical show planned for the day, we had a scheduled phone call with Family Feud host Louie Anderson in the 7am hour and the rest of the show was already laid out. Our morning show office had a system of VCR’s that we set to record various TV programs that we can pull audio from. We changed out the tapes from the night before, and loaded the new ones for the morning news programs. My assistant producer Tim arrived at work and later Jim and Joni arrived at the station about 4:30 and we were ready to go at 5! The way the studios were laid out at K-Earth was simple. We had 4 main studios…. A-B-C and D. Studio A was the main broadcast studio, Studio B was a mirrored layout of A and used as a backup / commercial production studio, Studio C was an interview only studio… it only had microphones. Studio D was dedicated to production only. We ran our morning show out of Studio B and C because our PD wanted Jim and Joni in the room together. Tim ran the board out of Studio B and I was in Studio D doing production throughout the morning. All of these studios were side-by-side with windows looking into each one. At about 5:35am we did a segment called “The Joke Of The Day”. It ran as planned, and the rest of that day would change forever.


I don’t know how much time went by but here’s what I can remember about what happened next.

I casually asked our engineer Lynn why everyone was still in there and he asked me out of the room and in to the hallway. He told me that I was not to tell anyone, but there was a bomb threat across the street at the Department Of Water and Power Sub-Station. He wanted the staff in that studio because it was furthest from the street and built like a bomb shelter. He told us to stay in the studios until they can figure out what to do. By then Mike our PD had arrived. Before I knew it we were being asked to evacuate the building. We put KNX up on the air and walked out of the rear exit of the building. We were taken to the grassy field out back where the KHJ-AM towers and transmitter building were located. Was this safe??? Confused co-workers were arriving to the station and were parking in the grassy field.

I remember wandering around the hall, I wanted to get out of there and get home. By then all air traffic was grounded and the Los Angeles skies were very quiet. I think it was about 2pm that I finally realized that I had nothing else to contribute, so I decided to go home. My trip home was eerie. The freeway was wide open and you couldn’t help but look up at the skyscrapers in downtown L.A. I was gripping my steering wheel the whole way home.
I learned a lot that day, I matured as a producer and matured as a human.