Cape Fear

Part 3

by Dan Kennedy

They say there's a mural on the elevator walls of Boch's Vineyard home. It's an undersea scene that gets darker as you move farther down. At the bottom, there's a drawing of a shark. In its teeth is a sign that reads COME ON DOWN!

According to Peter Kenney, who was fired from WXTK in 1995, the mural has it exactly right. "He's a shark, and sharks eat things," he says of his former employer.

Certainly Boch's success story is as bare-knuckled as it is colorful. His Norwood auto dealerships -- the heart of the "Auto Mile" -- grew thanks to his pioneering TV commercials. Boch was one of the first of the televised supersalesmen, jumping out of car trunks and smashing windshields. In recent years his pitch has been less action-oriented but no less weird, as he introduces viewers to Chico, one of his pet llamas.

Things can get pretty wild on the premises, too. A few years ago, the town of Norwood took Boch to court to prevent him from dropping a grand piano from a 100-foot crane, a stunt that town officials contended would create a dangerous traffic jam. The defense offered by Boch's son Ernest Jr. was logical, at least by Boch standards: in the past, he argued, the dealership had dropped a van from a crane and pumpkins from a helicopter. What was the big deal?

The record shows that Boch's business practices have been just as outrageous as his promotions. As far back as 1970, his company paid a $100 fine after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of odometer-spinning. He's also been fined by the state attorney general's office for withholding required information from some of his advertisements.

Boch's foray into the world of broadcasting began in 1991, when he bought the Cape's oldest radio station, WOCB-FM, and a weak-sister AM station at a bankruptcy sale for $875,000. The recession had hit the Cape Cod market hard: the previous owner had paid $4.5 million just six years earlier. Long-time Cape Codders say that, prior to Boch's arrival, the station broadcast an unimpressive mix of music and talk. Shortly after the sale, a storm knocked WOCB off the air. When it returned several months later, it had new call letters -- WXTK -- and a nasty new format.

In the early days, the station thumbed its nose at political propriety by making then-state representative Ed Teague, a conservative Republican, its morning cohost. Steve Grossman, at that time the chairman of the Democratic State Committee, protested the huge campaign advantage Teague had been handed, but to no avail. Teague stuck around until he became House minority leader and no longer had time for moonlighting. Teague's partner, Peter Kenney, a cerebral presence with an acidic tongue, soldiered on until 1995, when Cary Pahigian fired him for reasons that have never been entirely clear, and which Pahigian declines to elaborate on now. Kenney says he was told that other employees found him difficult to work with, an explanation he doesn't believe.

Kenney's show was replaced with Lambert and McKeag, and though the Mariah Thatcher episode may have been its most notorious moment, it was hardly the only one.

Just ask Tom Dolby, chairman of the Barnstable School Committee. The school system's finances were a mess, and Dolby, understandably, had come under fire. But Dolby charges that the show's hosts went way too far by claiming, falsely, that he had lined up a job as a music teacher for his wife, Marjorie Dolby -- a part-time job at full-time pay, no less. Under the state's education-reform law, Dolby notes, principals, not school committees, do the hiring, and in any case she was given a full-time position.

"It was a constant beating-beating-beating, every day," he says. "I'm a `moron.' I'm an `idiot.' I'm a public official, so tough shit, I have to take it. But my wife's a very sensitive person. Students would say to her, `I heard you're going to get fired.' " Dolby is stepping down from the committee later this year. "I had already decided not to run again," he says, "but if I had even been considering it, that would have made me not do it."

Even as WXTK's local hosts were stirring up controversy, Pahigian was paying increasing attention to nationally syndicated programming. Lambert and Giles is the only remaining local show. From noon to 7 p.m., the station is a complete washout: it broadcasts Rush Limbaugh and Howie Carr, even though those shows are already on WRKO. Pahigian protests that 'RKO can't be heard in many parts of the Cape, but the accuracy of that assessment is debatable. In fact, 'RKO comes in loud and clear right up to the parking lot of WXTK's studios, which makes 'XTK's simulcast seem like nothing but a waste of broadcast bandwidth.

With the exception of Ollie North's brief sojourn on the Cape Cod airwaves, the most notorious of 'XTK's syndicated talkers has been G. Gordon Liddy, the Nixon-gang ex-con famous for having once held his hand over a flame to show how tough he was. Liddy commands the weekday 10 a.m.-to-noon slot, and though Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine, says the aging Gordo isn't as vile as he used to be, 'XTK makes the most of what Liddy gives it to work with.

"I'd shoot the son-of-a-bitch! Screw the gun laws!" Liddy recently shouted in an exchange with a caller.

But that was mild compared with Liddy's take on an effort in Provincetown to teach tolerance to schoolchildren. A wide-ranging initiative to confront racism, homophobia, and various other prejudices, the program was distorted beyond recognition by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times beneath the headline PROVINCETOWN PRE-SCHOOLERS TO LEARN ABC'S OF BEING GAY. Liddy took that a step -- well, quite a few steps -- further a few weeks ago when he blurted out, "Now they're going to be teaching little kiddies about the poop chute. That is disgusting!"

Of course, a local station has only limited control over what happens on a nationally syndicated show. No one would blame WXTK if it had apologized to its listeners and vowed to cancel Liddy if he failed to clean up his act.

But that's not what 'XTK did. Instead, the station made a promo out of it and played Liddy's hateful remark over and over. "Virile, vigorous, and potent," a voice-over announcer sternly intoned.

Certainly no one has to listen to Liddy's rants. The problem with hate speech, though, isn't that it offends its targets; the problem is that it validates the prejudices of its intended audience.

Says human rights activist John Perry Ryan, who's working on the Provincetown initiative: "These kinds of hateful tirades often lead to violence and harassment of the targeted groups, and for that Ernie Boch bears responsibility."

Back to part 2 - On to part 4

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.