By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON — This first morning in June is shaping up to be a busy day.
Jane Bartsch, 56, vice-president and general manager of 99.5 WJBR-FM, will soon experience her usual round of meetings with managers and salespeople as part of overseeing one of the top radio stations in Delaware.
But not before a few things are taken care of.
Like every morning, when she arrives at the office, she throws her keys on the floor to the right of her desk, next to a potted plant.
“Don’t pick those up,” she says to a visitor who comes in later, under the impression that the keys were inadvertently dropped.
“Ever since I wrecked the top of the desk at another radio station, I’ve stopped putting them on the desk,” she says. “Three years after I started doing that, there were nicks in the desk.”
Her long office’s bookshelves are cluttered with small, framed photos of herself with music stars, and from her walls hang huge framed posters of Yankee Stadium and Mile-Hi Stadium.
Hints of people she has met and places where she’s worked during her three decades in the radio business.
It was mainly while running a cluster of Long Island radio stations where she met and posed with celebrities.
There she is, her 6-foot-1-inch frame capped by straw-blond hair standing tall next to Clint Black, Bobby Rydell, Kenny Chesney, Randy Travis and Lou Christie. She’s even with Wayne Newton — “He wore a girdle,” she says, “you could tell how he bulged over the top” — and Jerry Vale.
And then there’s the picture she took of Bon Jovi from the front row at a concert. She wishes she was standing next to him.
But this morning marks the beginning of the end of an ordeal. This is the the last day the nurse changes her dressing.
Little more than a year after being diagnosed with colon cancer, and less than a month after a final surgery reattached an intestine that had had 10-12 inches cut out, Bartsch’s nurse will change the dressing on the nearly-closed wound, about four inches to the right of her navel.
As much as she may be considered a cancer survivor, Bartsch also may be considered much more than a radio survivor.
For 30 years, she has thrived in a business that has both narrowed in format and expanded in reach. She has revived or kept stable a succession of radio stations, from Long Island and Oklahoma City, to Fort Wayne, Ind., Denver and now Wilmington.
Running a radio station is like running a sports franchise, says Bartsch’s colleague Maire Mason, who runs one of the top adult contemporary radio stations in New York City.
“You need leadership and a desire to win, discipline, focus, concentration, and know how to build a good team,” she says.
The whole point, says Bartsch, is to serve the radio station’s target audience. And for Bartsch and WJBR-FM, the target is a nearly-middle-aged married woman with kids.
Unlike herself — “When people ask about me, I tell them I’m divorced, own three homes, two cars, one cat and no kids,” she says.
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One of the first things people notice about Jane Bartsch is her height.
“I was always taller than everyone,” Bartsch says, and her height made her feel out of place, if sometimes at the awkward center of attention.
In first grade, her fellow students once used her as a maypole when the school’s pole broke.
Born in the Bronx, but raised in Huntington, Long Island, Bartsch became a tomboy who excelled in basketball and volleyball.
When she finally got around to having boyfriends in college, they always were inches shorter, including her current one, who is 5-foot-9-inches tall.
Bartsch’s father, a film editor for ABC News, wanted her to be excited about college, and sent her two older brothers through: one became a stockbroker, the other a schoolteacher.
But she just wasn’t a very good student, she says.
After going to public schools in Long Island, Bartsch received an associate’s degree in business administration at nearby Grace Downs Business College, and got a job as secretary with a sales training firm in Manhattan making $85 a week.
But a woman who ran an employment agency told Bartsch she was too “young and vibrant” to continue working there, and suggested she go into advertising. She helped Bartsch get a job as a secretary in a big advertising firm.
“It was exciting,” she says, as she finally moved away from home and lived at the Manhattan YWCA. “I saw how commercials were created for magazines, TV and radio.”
By the late 1970s, she was a successful “media buyer,” purchasing radio and TV time for Radio City Music Hall and several Broadway shows.
Mason met Bartsch in 1980, when Mason worked as an account executive for WCBS-FM in New York City.
A year later, Bartsch joined her at CBS, in the radio sales department, but jumped to NBC radio only a year and a half later for a more lucrative salary. Within two years, she became the company’s general sales manager.
By then, she was getting noticed by radio station ownerswho had recently begun buying up stations across the country due to a change in the ownership law. They were looking for people to reinvigorate or radically change them their new properties.
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Radio people are not paid well, says Dwight DeWerth-Pallmeyer, director of communications studies at Widener. He had been a radio news director in the mid-1980s.
“It’s a nomadic existence, and the way you get ahead is going from one station to another,” he says. “The payoff comes from the music, being with celebrities and being on the air.”
For Bartsch, during the later 1980s and through the 1990s, the payoff was progressively more money and the ability to turn around and reformat a handful of stations, beginning in Oklahoma City in 1987.
Bartsch rode the crest of a wave of change in radio during that time, from the reinvigoration of AM, which became more talk-oriented, and changes in the law that allowed companies to own more stations across the country.
As more stations popped up on FM, the more rigidly they became formatted. With the aid of sophisticated research, stations aimed at more narrowly-targeted audiences.
In Oklahoma City, Bartsch ran two stations, one on AM, the other on FM.
The FM station was adult contemporary, but its position on the dial, 107.7, meant that the listener had to pass two other adult-contemporary stations to get to hers.
“We blew it up,” Bartsch says, which means she fired some people, including a morning anchor named “Johnnie Dark” — “Can you imagine,” Bartsch says, “a morning anchor named Johnnie Dark?” — and changed the formats of both stations.
The FM station converted to classic rock, while the AM station moved from big band music to oldies. “They took off,” she says of their success, which further propelled hers.
She quickly moved to a country station in Oklahoma City, then on to Fort Wayne, Ind. — where she briefly married and divorced — and back to Long Island, where for most of the 1990s she ran a “cluster” of suburban stations that included adult contemporary, oldies, rock, country and adult standards.
Although it was fun to run stations that mirrored her predilection for country music, her musical tastes cannot be less pertinent when efficiently running a radio station, including WJBR’s adult contemporary format.
“It’s nice and easier if you enjoy the music you’re playing,” says Michael Waite, who hosts WJBR’s morning show. “There are songs I play I can’t stand, but at the same time, I got to say the majority of the music we play I enjoy.”
Even so, watching a contemporary disc jockey — actually, a computer-database jockey whose songs are picked out for him or her days in advance — playing music has become a pre-determined lesson in market and demographic research.
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You’ll never hear “Picture,” that song by Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock, on 99.5 WJBR-FM.
“For some reason,” Bartsch says, “that song really trips my trigger. It’s my favorite song of all time.”
You won’t hear it despite the fact that the song seems to perfectly fit the station’s audience or “demographic bull’s eye,” a 39-year-old woman.
After all, it’s about lovers who seem unable to talk as they drift apart.
It’s not played because Kid Rock sings that he’s “Been fuelin’ up on cocaine and whiskey.”
And that’s something you just don’t play on a family-friendly radio station, program director Waite says.
“In targeting our music and information and entertainment to her,” says Bartsch of the imagined 39-year-old, “we’re hoping to get the spill on either end.”
That’s radio talk for getting women who range from 34 to 44 to listen to songs by Billy Joel, Michael Bolton, Journey, Fleetwood Mac and Celine Dion.
“Mama has the pocketbook,” says Mason, explaining the advertising strategy. Her station in New York City also is adult contemporary, although it’s flavored with more “urban” stars, such as Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor. “Eighty percent of our audience is married with kids.”
So, they can have their radio station tuned to WJBR-FM — or even more likely at times, according to the Arbitron ratings, to 97.3 WSTW-FM — and not worry about the lyrics.
Within the radio station itself, the concentrated research also has changed the way everything works.
Long gone are the radio days of disc jockeys spinning songs they love, introducing on a whim, say, a new group or a song they’re itching to get others excited about.
Although DeWerth-Pallmeyer says that the greatest change in radio in the past two decades has been the advent of digital radio — which Bartsch does not see as much of a threat to local radio in the near future — there’s no denying the research behind formatting has changed, he says.
Today, Bartsch says, “It’s so scientifically researched, the DJ can only play what the computer printout says.”
The station’s music director, Catey Hill, neither spins records nor flips CDs when she’s on the air from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays.
It’s all computerized and rigidly timed on a large screen in front of her. During songs, she even may record her patter as one song blends into another, if she doesn’t want to go live.
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After nearly a decade at Long Island, Bartsch took a job with Tribune Broadcasting in Denver in 2000, and ran three radio stations, including an adult standards AM station and FM classic rock and adult contemporary stations.
She says it was the best job of her career and the highest salary she ever made. She improved the ratings of all three stations, and got to love the city.
But after 9/11, Tribune’s advertising revenue fell, and they sold their Denver radio stations. She returned to the Hudson Valley in Westchester County, N.Y., where she ran a cluster of five stations for a short time, before getting the offer to come to Wilmington in December 2003.
She decided to come here because of the location of the city, between Washington and Philadelphia and New York. She also liked the broadcasters who run Next Media, which owns WJBR.
With two homes in New York, one in Manhattan, the other a lakefront home in Westchester County, she recently bought a town home near Hockessin.
“This is my last stop,” she says. “I like it here.”
Even her diagnosis of colon cancer last year while feeling “healthy as a horse” has not dissuaded her from remaining.
Which brings us back to the nurse.
“I couldn’t look at it,” Bartsch says of the wound, explaining why the nurse has been coming to her office each day to unpack and repack the hole since she returned to work more than a week after the May 4 surgery.
Her surgeon, Dr. John Marks of Lankenau Hospital in Wynnewood, Pa., decided to pack the wound instead of sewing it closed to make an infection less likely. Although some patients unpack and repack it on their own, Bartsch didn’t.
“It started off as big as a half-dollar,” she says of the wound now the size of a dime, “and I didn’t want to see the Cheerios I had for breakfast.”
Last month, the intestine was reattached and the ostomy — when a surgeon pulls out a section of the intestine through an opening made in the abdominal wall — performed when the tumor was removed was reversed.
For seven months, Bartsch lived with a bag attached to that hole to allow her to go to the bathroom while the intestine healed.
After the nurse leaves, she can’t stop smiling.
“I’m human again,” she says.