In last Thursday’s Stark Country, programmers shared hilarious stories about the troublesome air personalities they’ve worked with in their careers. That story generated quite a lot of e-mails from readers relating their own experiences, some of which are published below. If you missed Thursday’s story, you can read it right here.

• “I’m sure many others have said ‘too many to count,’ but [here are] a couple of my favorites. Circa 1983, I took a new programming gig and adopted a morning guy who dominated the ratings, and was by far the most talented jock on the station and in the market. I soon learned that he lived in a ‘camper’ on his pick-up in the station parking lot. An extension cord provided power. And showers? Well, um, when he felt like it, a good rinse in the station bathroom. In my first meeting with him he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I like it here, but don’t piss me off or this show is moving down the road.’

“We [also] had a jock with a great voice, but just wouldn’t come out of his shell. After much coaching, he still made Ted Baxter sound like the most animated personality on the planet. One day a few of us, including the PD, stood quietly outside the studio and waited for him to open the mic and begin his next break. We then burst in the studio and threw a lit pack of firecrackers on the floor. The tape is still around here somewhere, and for a few precious moments he came out of his shell!

“As I have said for many years, and most people in radio would agree, the memories are much better than the airchecks!” — Ken Moultrie, partner, Broadcast Partners

• “I must add a moment from my radio programming days regarding this topic. I was PD at WSAI in Cincinnati. It was ’80 or ’81 and we moved our current air staff from the AM over to the FM, so we had to staff up the AM with a more classic country approach.

“[Country artist] Jack Reno had been doing the all night trucker show on [crosstown] WLW but was diagnosed with cancer and needed to leave [to] get treatment. Thank God his cancer went into remission, but nobody in the market would hire him except good ole brother Dale Turner. We hired him on to do middays and to oversee the music (which included playing all of his songs on his show). Seems like a conflict, but the GM overruled me.

“That wasn’t so bad except that one day in my office while monitoring his show, a song faded and there was a loooong period of dead air. I buzzed the studio, nobody picked up, so I ran into the control room and there sat Jack on the phone betting the horses at Latonia Racetrack across the river in Kentucky, completely unaware of the fact that his own song had ended. The station was basically second fiddle to his gambling priorities!” — Dale Turner, former Lyric Street Records VP, radio marketing

• “Great column. Hard to narrow it down to just one ‘colorful character,’ but one amazing overnight talent I had in Tallahassee in the early ’90s is probably it. He was too good for the graveyard shift, but he lacked the necessary ‘people skills’ to be around the office during the daytime. (The GM would have fired him for sure.) I knew he was having marital difficulties, but didn’t know how bad until I got up at 4 a.m. to host one morning, only to hear dead air. I raced into the office and it was empty. My only clues were a blinking CD machine and the smell of alcohol.

“Just as I’m about to go on, I noticed a tape left in the aircheck skimmer but was too scared to listen. A caller asked me if that guy was okay last night—or was it all a joke? Uh-oh. When I finally got the guts to listen to the tape, I heard him slowly slipping into intoxication as each break progressively talked about his wife leaving him earlier that night. Even in his drunken state, he was on time, hitting the post and executing each break perfectly.

“Never saw him again, and the GM confiscated the tape. (Too bad, I’ve heard from several Tallahassee radio veterans looking for a copy.)” — Bob Walker, PD WCTK Providence, R.I.

• “I used to do mornings with a guy many years ago who liked to experiment with a lot of different drugs. You could never predict who he would be on any given day. Sometimes you’d walk into the studio and he would be lying on the floor with his eyes closed, and other days he would be so wired he couldn’t sit on his chair. It was a rock station, and I was doing news and co-hosting the show with him.

“One morning I came in as usual and my partner wasn’t there. No phone call. He wouldn’t answer our calls. (The program director was trying to find him too.) So I did the show by myself, and after the shift was over the PD and I went to his house. We stood out front banging on his door for about 25 minutes and were just about to call the cops when he came out. Said he had been hanging out with some nurses the night before and they gave him all kinds of pills. He was totally passed out.

“[At a] different station [I] had a boss who was in denial about the guy they had paired me up with for the morning show. He was an old friend of our PDs, and when I say ‘old’ I mean I was 31 at the time and he was twice my age. We had absolutely nothing in common. Everything we talked about on the air fell flat. We just had negative chemistry. Every Friday I would walk into the GMs office and ask, ‘How long is this misery going to go on?’ He would say, ‘I’m hearing moments [in the show].’

“One morning after a particularly frustrating show I walked into his office and just screamed, ‘Name one, just one [moment.]’ Of course he really couldn’t. He did finally come to realize it wasn’t working, but I always thought those Friday morning meetings could be written into a script for a movie about radio.” — Laurie DeYoung, mornings WPOC Baltimore

•“At WCTO Allentown, Pa., we hired ‘Kenny,’ a good sounding weekend talent. [It was] the second weekend the station was on the air with talent [and] Kenny called. He said he wasn’t feeling good and could we replace him on the air. I said we didn’t have anyone else, [so] he said he would do it.

“Next call comes several hours later and woke us up. It’s the GM telling me an ambulance is on the way to the station and Kenny. I get dressed and head down with my daughter, who was a weekend board-op then. Kenny is leaning out of the gurney, changing CDs and firing the next song. He goes in the ambulance and my daughter takes over. Several hours later, he comes back from the hospital, gets his car and leaves.”

Kenny’s “real” story, as it turned out, was that his girlfriend was seeing another guy and he wanted to get off the air, presumably to confront her.

That wasn’t the end of Kenny. Chuck Geiger reports, “Several years later, I get a call from a client thanking me for having one of the jocks at a local bar doing a remote and giving out CDs. We didn’t have a remote. I asked the client what he looked like. It was Kenny, making phony remote calls [and] giving away CDs. Last we heard Kenny was doing some hard time in Harrisburg for serious crimes.” — radio veteran Chuck Geiger, now inside new business development representative at The Fresno Bee

• “In my first programming position, I had a part timer/weekender that thought he was it. He had no idea of how below average he was. One Saturday night at about 11:55 (his shift started at 12:00), my home phone rang. It was him. He said he was in Nashville (about three hours away) and would not be able to make it for his shift because, ‘I have a flat tire, and oh by the way you can fire me if you want to.’ No problem there.” —Joel Dearing, VP affiliate relations, Virtual News Center

•“When I sold radio in the ’80s—this was probably 1984ish in Charleston, W.Va., at WVSR (Super 102)—we had a girl who worked weekends named Jamie. One Saturday she called Chris Bailey—the PD at the time—late on a Saturday afternoon and was trying to tell him she could not make it on the air that night for her 7 to midnight shift. He could hardly understand her talking between her teeth. Seems she could not get a tube of Super Glue open at home and did the ‘smart’ thing, and held it between her teeth to open the Super Glue. Jamie had to go to the local hospital to get the Super Glue separated from her teeth so she could talk again!” —Doak Turner, songwriter and owner/publisher of NashvilleMuse.com and MusicStartsHere.org

This topic continues on Radio-Info.com’s discussion board, with one reader’s descriptions of the four types of on-air talent, including “Amateur Andy,” “Liner Card Larry,” “Verbose Vern” and “Personality Pete.” Another reader has his own take on the four kinds of air personalities, which he defines as “voice tracked,” “part time,” “on unemployment benefits” and “shift manager at Burger King.” Read the whole discussion here.