In Massachusetts: Giving Music

By RICHARD CONNIFF

At 3 p.m. on a gorgeous Sunday in June, Simon Geller slouches in an easy chair in his darkened apartment, with the windows closed and a chuck steak in the oven, listening to himself on the radio. At the moment, he is broadcasting the ballet Sylvia, by Leo Delibes, on the station he periodically identifies as "WVCA, 104.9 megahertz, in Gloucester, Massachusetts."

Apart from this announcement and the briefest possible description of the music, Geller says little, which is just as well. His listeners happily acknowledge that he has the least polished delivery in broadcasting. The accent is distinctly north-of-Boston, which suits them fine: the first syllable of the word Gloucester comes out long and glottal, as if the bottom has temporarily dropped out of Geller's voice. The letter r plays hooky.

But that voice, "the Voice of Cape Ann," is flat and without timbre. His admirers describe it as a deadly monotone or compare it with Elmer Fudd talking with a mouthful of marbles. His patter is often punctuated by dead air and occasionally interrupted by some terse remark like "The peas are burning."

Geller probably says less than any other broadcaster in America and has more time to say it. On this particular Sunday, as on almost every other day of the week for the past 18 years, he will sit in front of an 8-ft.-high stack of broadcasting gear from 6 a.m., when the station signs on, until 10 p.m., when it signs off. WVCA's studio is atop the Whale-of-a-Wash laundromat. The scrap of paper next to the apartment buzzer says simply WVCA-GELLER. When Geller plans to go to the movies or on an errand, he tells his listeners so: "And now I am closing. I have to go to the doctor. The kidneys or something, I forget." Then WVCA shuts down till he gets back.

Geller, a 66-year-old bachelor, doesn't have what you might think of as a radio personality. He isn't just taciturn but a misanthrope and the dead opposite of a local booster. He calls Gloucester "the end of the world" and says he would rather have caught on in New York City. In Gloucester, he says, there is nothing to do but work or have sex. "I don't have a sex partner," he adds gloomily, "so I work."

Still, his local following is intensely loyal, sponsoring raffles and fashion shows to benefit WVCA and sending in a steady trickle of contributions, which are not tax deductible. One listener shrugs off the work- sex slur, saying "Some people do both." Another says Geller has given so much to Gloucester he's entitled to knock it.

What he has given is good music. More than 95% of his airtime is devoted to the classics. He does not waste precious minutes on "garbage," a category in which he includes news, weather, and the time, among many other things. At WVCA, Geller leads off a typical morning lineup with Camille Saint-Saens and Sergei Rachmaninoff back to back, followed by Richard Wagner. He has no knack for pedantry; it is enough to play the music. When a visitor asks the name of a piece, he replies, "That's a piano concerto by Bronsart, who you probably never heard of. I don't know anything about him. A lot of the unknown composers wrote good music. That's why I have the listeners." Actually, Geller has given more than music to Gloucester. He is not Magic 106.7, or Johnny Dark on Quality Rock 103, but the voice of home.

Lobstermen sometimes tune in to hear Geller's unslick rendering of a commercial for Nichols Candies, a local retailer. Despite all appearances to the contrary, WVCA is a commercial operation or, rather, a listener-supported commercial operation. "I average three to six minutes of advertising a day," says Geller. "The rate is from $32 down." Most of his operating costs are covered by $10 and $20 contributions, which he acknowledges individually on the air ("My thanks today to Beverly, to Topsfield, to Rockport . . . And now let's get back to the music"). Fishermen flipping the dial pause to marvel at a plea for contributions by a local voice, so familiar and yet so strange; they often stay on to sample Mozart or Bach. Guy Wonson, a stonemason, started listening in 1968. He got a kick out of the commercials at first, but the music gradually insinuated itself. Now he sometimes listens while building walls.

"And if you listen, there are these gems," says Kasimir Stachiewicz, a woodcarver on Main Street. Stachiewicz once called Geller to request a Bach partita. Then, not knowing whether Geller would play the request, or when, he decided to pay a visit. He climbed the stairs to the studio. Then he heard music: his request. Afraid to knock, he waited outside, hearing it faintly through the door.

But this is not the sort of gem Stachiewicz is talking about. "When they were doing work near his old place on Duncan Street," Stachiewicz says, "he would turn on the mike so you could hear the hammering and he'd say, 'This morning Mac Bell has been hammering over at his shop, and I asked him to stop and he wouldn't, and it's driving me crazy.' Everything else is being homogenized, sanitized, deodorized. Simon is none of the above, and it's beautiful."

Mac Bell concurs, more or less. "Befriending Simon Geller," he says, "is like befriending an extremely tough, seemingly tired, apparently less than healthy watchdog. Some days he'd let you pet him, and some days he'd bite. And he is so very tenacious."

For about ten years now, a corporation calling itself Grandbanke has been making a display of Geller's tenacity, to its considerable cost. Grandbanke, a partnership among several out-of-towners, wants to take away Geller's license and run the station the way everyone knows a station ought to be run. Gloucester would no longer have to rely on the 40-odd other stations in range to hear the weather, world and local news, what the Dow Jones is up to. It would be blessed with 60-second spots on "Wonderful Cape Ann" and a daily report "For Fishermen Only." And, of course, pleasant voices and a mix of tasteful music. Grandbanke has outlined Geller's deficiencies in a succession of legal forums. (You cannot even find out how the Sox are doing from WVCA, and Geller will probably never utter the name Larry Bird unless Bird takes up the violin.) The corporation has made it clear that it wants to take away Geller's license for the good of Gloucester -- pro bono publico, as it were -- and not, as Geller has shamefully implied, because an FM station within range of the Boston market is nowadays worth at least $800,000.

Perversely, Gloucester has spurned this offer, rallying behind Geller. And WVCA has managed to endure. The newspapers have described the case as an "epic David-and-Goliath struggle." And the mayor of Gloucester has pointed out, in case anyone forgets, that in the original, it was David who won. (Bell notes an irony in this: Geller's cause has been represented in Washington by a public interest law group paid for by foundations and corporations considerably more powerful than Grandbanke.) The next round is scheduled for argument in federal court this fall. In the end, Geller believes, the station will be "O.K."

Otherwise, Geller is relentlessly, almost comically negative. That Sunday, Israel Horovitz, a playwright, is talking his way around Geller's peculiar character, which fascinates him. "We have one radio station," he says. "It could be anything -- it could be an ongoing bingo game. And what it is is music in its highest form. Geller is a dispenser of the sound of angels singing, the voice of Bach, Beethoven, Pachelbel. Whatever set of circumstances in his childhood made him come to sit in a darkened room and be such a misanthrope, there is a side to his soul that dances with the angels."

Informed of this opinion, Geller raises his eyebrows. He continues to sit in the dark, an attending slave to the station or the music, it isn't clear which. His arms are folded across his chest, his shock of gray hair stands up off his scalp, his lower lip is rolled out. "So?" he asks finally. Another long pause. "Does it mean he wants me to drop dead?"

Horovitz has in fact incorporated a character based on Geller into one of his plays. The character eventually dies during a broadcast, a plot twist that evidently troubles Geller. What follows is dead air.

In real life, Geller's eventual demise need not produce such a dire result. The truth is that, by now, much of his daily broadcast is canned. He has recorded more than 400 hours of programming, and he broadcasts these tapes in a cycle that is repeated every few months. The deadpan patter is there, and so is the music, the voice of angels, Geller's own secret voice. It is a thought that must give the people over at Grandbanke the willies: WVCA-Geller could go on like this -- forever.