Goin’ to work … 3 jobs

Long before “Deee-troit Basketball” went from a spur-of-the-moment protest to a refrain familiar on the other side of the globe, John Mason dreamed of a job in a cozy tollbooth along the Ohio Turnpike.

“I don’t know why I wanted it,” he says through the familiar booming laugh that turned a struggling young father from Cleveland into an enormously popular Detroit morning radio host now known worldwide as the arena announcer for Detroit Pistons games at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

“They had those nice uniforms. It looked easy. They had a booth. The radio was going. I figured that would be a cool job.”

Not as cool as the one he has today, though. It started five years ago when his station manager asked him if he’d be interested in working a Pistons preseason scrimmage at Wayne State and he figured, hey, why not – it might get him a deal on those season tickets he hoped to buy.

But before Mason – and, just like Magic or Madonna, that’s all you need to say: Mason – became uniquely associated in the public consciousness with the Pistons, he had to pay his dues the same way the Pistons would pay theirs in an ascent that began about the time their new arena announcer assumed his duties in 2001.

By goin’ to work.

As a young graduate of Kent State University and a newly married father, Mason’s driving motivation in the late ’70s was feeding and housing his family. When he found a sweet deal at an apartment complex for young families in Euclid, Ohio, he jumped on it.

By car, it wasn’t a bad drive to Cleveland, where he landed a job at University Hospitals of Cleveland – to go with his part-time gig doing the graveyard shift at WJMO-AM radio around the corner and another job at a Burger King around another corner, all near the campus of Case Western Reserve. But when the car quit on him, Mason got intimately familiar with the joy of buses.

“I’d ride the bus from Euclid to downtown Cleveland, then from downtown up another street called Euclid. Between waiting for the two buses and riding the two buses, it took three hours every night. At 9:30 I’d catch the bus and I’d be at the radio station one hour before my shift, work until 6 in the morning. My mom lived around the corner, so I’d go to her house, sit in a big white chair and crash for an hour and a half, then either bike or walk to the hospital.”

Mason was a nurse’s technical assistant in surgery, charged with scrubbing patients or putting them in casts. Once he had to encase a 15-year-old in an entire body cast. It was back-breaking work – or arm-breaking, at least – and one night it was leg-breaking. He was so thoroughly weary that a woman who was scheduled for hip surgery slipped from his grasp and broke her leg in the fall.

“They had to scrub the surgery,” Mason said, wincing at the memory. “I don’t know what they told her, but they told me ‘Goodbye.’ ”

‘What did I know?’

His radio career suddenly took on additional urgency. In 1979, they moved him to the morning shift, and a year later, when an opportunity to move to FM arose, he left for St. Louis.

“The world was going FM and I was AM,” he said. “So I guess I was OK for that and what they were paying. What did I know? It was my first gig and I was just trying as hard as I could. But I was out of my league. I just could not relax and put together a radio show.”

Homesick for Cleveland, disillusioned at his progress and feeling unloved by his listeners, Mason sought alternatives. An opening at Detroit’s highly rated urban-formatted WJLB appealed to him for one reason, even though they told him he didn’t have the five years of experience they required to go on the air.

“They needed a production director – just do commercials, nothing on the air,” Mason said. “I figured, ‘I can do that. Go back and forth to Cleveland, get the Sunday paper, find a job.’

“Cleveland was home. I had had my job in radio and didn’t think I could cut it.”

But a funny thing happened while Mason was combing the Sunday classifieds in the Plain Dealer, still hoping for that exciting career in toll booths to crystallize.

“(WLJB) let the morning guy go on vacation for a week and while he’s gone, he calls into my office in production and says, ‘Hey, Mason, tell them I’m not coming back. It’s too much pressure.’

“I said, ‘You’re kidding. With what they’re paying you? You’ve got to be kidding. Too much pressure?’ But he wasn’t kidding. So I go tell the program director, ‘Your morning man just called and said he’s not coming back.’

“So he says, ‘What am I supposed to do? It’s Friday. I’ll tell you what. On Monday, you go in until I can find somebody else.’ So I went on for about two weeks and after that they had a meeting and said they wanted to turn it over to me full-time.”

Still a little bruised from his St. Louis treatment, and still driven by the same motivations he had while riding the bus three hours to get to work in Cleveland, Mason demanded one condition. If he flopped on the air, he’d still be production director.

“I did both jobs for six months,” a piece of cake after the three-jobs-and-a-bus-days, “and finally I let the production job go.”

He decided the karma might be right when he learned that the man who hired him, James Alexander, not only shared the same birthday, but also that both of their wives at the time were speech pathologists.

Entrenched as WJLB’s morning man, Mason took seriously the need to hone his craft. He taped Dick Purtan, a titan of Detroit radio for decades, and studied his timing, his delivery, the structure of his show. When his first vacation window opened, he flew to Los Angeles for a week to listen to the popular morning host, Rick Dees. For his next vacation, he flew to New York to study Scott Shannon, whose “Morning Zoo” program on Z-100 was the hottest in the country at the time.

“Those three morning shows – other than that, I was self-taught,” Mason said. “Morning structure, everything. I had not a clue. But we took off from there.”

King of the hill

Over his 17-year tour de force at WJLB, Mason counted 42 other morning teams in Detroit that came and went. He was No. 1 in the market on two occasions at a time when the legendary J.P. McCarthy held the fort at WJR and Purtan was at the peak of his popularity. Then he “wanted to try something new, the adult format” and recently completed another highly successful five-year run doing that.

His most recent venture is as bold as leaving the cocoon of Cleveland for an FM job in St. Louis for which he felt completely unprepared – Mason has gone independent, starting at WOWE-FM in Flint in late October on the 6-10 a.m. shift with the intention of putting together a radio syndicate. The terms of his last contract allow Mason to return to Detroit’s airwaves on Feb. 1.

“The trend in urban radio, the people who are getting it done now are syndicated,” he said. “What’s unique about my situation is going without a radio conglomerate. A lot of risk in that.”

More time on the road, too. Mason gets up at 3:30 in the morning these days and by 4:15 he’s making the rounds to pick up five employees for the trek up Interstate 75 to Flint. Anybody who dares complain might get an earful.

“They feel sorry for me. Sorry for me? Going up and down 75 in a 2007 Escalade? They have no idea what it was like going up and down the freeway on the bus, the Iron Pimp.”

Like the team whose motto he lived long before he would dream of their mutually beneficial association, John Mason’s success has been built on Goin’ to Work.

PART II: Come back to pistons.com on Sunday for the story of how “Deee-troit Basketball” came to be.