A blooper -- or a Taco Bell menu item

At Cal Poly I was a broadcast journalism major. I had this idea that I could be a great broadcaster. But at Cal Poly, they had a "learn by doing" motto that did a pretty good job of preparing you for anything. So in addition to broadcasting, I did some newspaper writing too. Good thing, as it turned out.

I was on the news staff at KCPR-FM, Cal Poly's radio station, in the mid-'70s. The main purpose of the news staff was not so much to go out and report news as much as it was to get comfortable with reading news copy on the air. The news-gathering operation consisted primarily of the news director going over to KSBY-TV and gathering as much wire copy as KSBY could spare and bring it back to the station for people to read.

Every weeknight at 6 we would go on the air with the news. One person would read the world news, another the national news, still another the state news, sports, weather, and so on. We filled a half-hour with this stuff, along with a few local stories. People would shuffle in and out of the studio during the breaks.

One night I had the world news, which I was delivering in my best Walter Cronkite manner. One story was about the Glomar Explorer, a ship built by a Howard Hughes company, which was being used to recover a sunken Soviet submarine.

This had been an ongoing story and the gist of it this night was what the ship had recovered. The line I was supposed to read said the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped torpedoes."

What I said was the ship had "recovered two nuclear-tipped tortitos."

Now, I have no idea what a "tortito" is, but saying it caused me to crack up. I guess I had this picture of a gigantic, spicy Mexican dish at the bottom of the ocean in my head and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The two other people in the studio started laughing too and pretty soon it was a full-on disaster. The engineer cut the mikes and finally went to a break.

It was really funny at the moment, but not so much afterward where I understandably got some criticism for the whole thing. One thing is clear: I certainly will never forget the Glomar Explorer.

Of course, that wasn't the only funny thing that happened at KCPR. One night one news reader set fire to the copy the other news reader was reading, causing the second news reader to start reading much faster before his "hot" story burned up.

During one summer, I was actually the news director. There was a girl at the station who had perhaps the worst broadcasting voice I've ever heard. It was extremely high-pitched, almost shrill. Not only that, but she had an awful habit of reading everything on the wire copy: the dateline, the "AP" designation, all the stuff that was in parentheses that you weren't supposed to read. I don't want to say she was ditzy or anything, but I guess I just did. I also won't tell you her name, primarily because I can't remember it.

I tried to coach her before one newscast to try to have better transitions between her stories. I told her to say things like "Turning to California news..." before she started the state news so people could tell she was going from the national news to the state. I could envision that taking her "under my wing" would help her tremendously.

So she started reading her national news in her shrill, monotone "style" and when she got to the end of it she said, "Turning to California..." and she literally turned her body in her chair a few degrees before reading the next story.

Many of the people at that station went on to brilliant careers. "Weird Al" Yankovic was one of the disc jockeys at KCPR. Others probably went on to careers where they were more likely to serve nuclear-tipped tortitos.