I started out building crystal sets. I was generally fascinated with making radios work and listening to them. Radio was very, very young at the time, about 1935. I was not yet in my teens. This foto of me on the porch of 6532 Monroe Street, Hammond, Indiana. It was in the basement where I began my hobby of fooling around with radios.

I had a neighbor, Mr. Searfoss, who fixed radios in his shop at home. He let me watch. As I listened to him I began to learn some basics of radio in my early teens.

I went to work in the radio repair shop in a sporting goods store, where, thanks to the patience of the boss, I learned more.

I passed the test and got my first FCC operator's license in 1942 and went to work for my 100 watt hometown radio station (on the top floor of that sporting goods store.
I was 17. I was delighted to earn $35 a week playing 78 rpm records and 16-inch transcriptions.

The following year, I went to work for WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana “Indiana’s most powerful radio staton. (10 KW) WOWO served as a good training ground for a young “engineer”. I learned how to change the big water-cooled tubes in the transmitter that took up two complete floors of a very large building. Fun!

After a stint in the US Army Signal Corps during World War II, I returned to Fort Wayne where I “ran the board” and worked on the air, sold time and fixed equipment at WANE.

At WANE I became a combo operator of sorts before it was common. Times were tight and stations couldn't afford an engineer and an announcer. I became the engineer sitting between two turntables and with a microphone in front of me.  The owner, Glenn Thayer, an early mentor of mine, let me innovate. We covered news events, unusual for a small radio station at that time. I did this by finding a telephone line I could appropriate anywhere near a news scene.

While at WANE, I had the pleasure of broadcasting the games of the Fort Wayne Daisies, a girls’ baseball team.  If you remember the Madonna movie A League of Their Own, the Fort Wayne Daisies were in that league. Great fun!

After WANE was sold, I moved south to Norfolk, Va., to be chief engineer and assistant manager of WNOR.  While there, the Battleship Missouri ran aground. I located a surplus army tank transmitter and put an announcer on the bridge of the Battleship Missouri. We covered the floating of the Battleship live.

I set out for California, arriving in Los Angeles January 2,1951 (without the pot or the window, as I have said). Finally, I lucked out and landed a job with NBC Hollywood, then home to some of the biggest radio shows off the day, as a summer vacation relief engineer. These were the last of the golden years of radio.  Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were among the shows I enjoyed working. Great fun!

While at NBC, I worked on some great who-dunnits. Dragnet with Jack Webb, and Night Beat. On December 17, 1952, after the dress rehearsal of Night Beat, I dashed to the hospital where son, Rob, was born. Conveniently timed, I was able to return to NBC to mix the live show feed to the network. I guess it’s no wonder that Rob has followed me into the broadcast industry, now with CBS-TV in New York.

It was while at NBC that I became aware of a new FCC ruling allowing for radio stations that were nondirectional and 10 KW or less to operate transmitters unattended by remote control. With the help of fellow NBC engineer Bill Amidon, we designed the first Schafer Remote Control system for transmitters.

The Schafer remote control system marked the birth of Schafer Electronics in 1953. After working out the bugs, the first remote control unit was installed at KROW in Oakland, the station that became KABL, a “San Francisco” radio station belonging to Gordon McLendon.

In 1957 that the FCC amended the rules to allow for the remote control of all broadcast transmitters, thanks in part to NAB field tests filed in 1955 using Schafer remote control systems. This was organized by a gentleman who became a mentor or mine and a very good friend. A. Prose Walker, a legend in the industry, then with the NAB.

I had installed a remote control system at radio station KGEE Bakersfield, California. Later, the owner, Dexter Haymond invited me up to Bakersfield and asked  me if I could envision a system which would automatically assemble a radio program so he could leave his radio station on the air all night with no one in attendance. I said I thought I could. He asked me how much it would cost. I guessed about $7,000. He pulled out a check, made it out to me for $7,000 and handed it to me. I asked him what about if I didn’t want to build it. He said, “Then just don’t cash the check”. After carrying the check around for a week, the idea sounded better and better.

The first Schafer Automation System, installed at KGEE(AM) in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1956 was dubbed the "blue-wire job" because all of the wiring in it was blue. Dexter wanted to program his station all night long without a person being there. I used a couple of Seeburg record player changers to play 45 RPM records and several Ampex reel to reel decks for commercials That was the first Schafer Automation system.

Originally, commercials had to be dubbed sequentially to play back in the right order. Before long, with the help of Chief Engineer Jim Harford, we designed a better system. The "spotter" used Ampex reel-to-reel tape decks that could fast forward and rewind to count windows cut from the tape in order to locate specific commercials. "We removed about an inch of the oxide from the tape every minute. The 'windows' were then counted by the automation system as they passed between a lamp and a photocell to find the right commercial to play," Schafer said.

The Schafer Automation System used a series of relays and stepping switches and a clock that allowed programmers to back-time music to join network newscasts without having to fade the music. The automation system consisted of two or more racks: one held the "brain," others contained reel-to-reel decks. The Seeburg record player changers held 100 records each.

Programming the system was limited at the beginning. The front control panel consisted of a series of pins to allow programmers to change a sequence or repeat it. "They could set up a pattern by screwing pins into any of the many holes in the clock. Typically this would be each 15 or 30 minutes to play station breaks.

In the original Schafer Automation System, the switching from one event to the next was triggered by silence. "Whenever silence was sensed the system would step to the next event. There would be the occasional record with a pause that would give us fits, of course, To remedy that problem, we introduced a system using a 25 Hz tone at or near the end of an event on reel-to-reel tape. The tones, which were inaudible to listeners, allowed for overlapping of events and made the system sound better, he said. "The system used stepping switches, like the ones telephone companies used at the time. After the tone or silence, the next element was triggered, which was determined by the setting of switches on the front panel.

Eventually, Schafer's automation system used Viking cartridge decks and then Sono Mag Corp. carousels for commercial playback. It was Gordon McLendon who first dubbed music onto reels, which improved the reliability of the automation system and meant we no longer needed to depend on the 45 RPM records. For about the first five years after we introduced automation to the radio industry, we were the only ones producing anything of the kind. We sold direct and through Gates, Collins, RCA and IGM," Schafer said. It was how I became known as the Farther of Automation.

To help spread the word of his innovation, we had three motor homes traveling the country demonstrating Schafer Automation Systems to radio broadcasters. The idea was so new, it was the only way to get the idea of automation across. In early 1959, I purchased a radio station to help demonstrate how efficiently a station could be run with automation. The station, KDOT in Reno, Nev., operated with a staff of three. "The manager did the selling, the engineer was also the announcer and one office manager ran things in fine fashion.

Schafer Electronics sold more than 1,000 automation systems all over the world. The Model 800 was so reliable, some are still in operation.

After selling Schafer Electronics in 1968, I formed Schafer International, which I still run from my home office in Bonita, California (San Diego). We sell to radio and TV stations, principally in Mexico. And I buy used giant screens from US stadiums and sell them to stadiums in Mexico.

For four months each winter I move my office to Mazatlan where my customers/friends can visit me From December through March. For many years I traveled and parked my motor home on the beach at Mazatlan. Now that I have moved from my motor home phase which I enjoyed for more than 40 years, my office is in my suite at the Pueblo Bonito resort where telephone calls to my office are automatically forwarded to my suite in Mazatlan.

My website is managed nicely by my webmaster, my son, Christopher Schafer.