"Now Don't Cry"

With Congress bearing down and the F.T.C. getting ready to open hearings, the disk jockeys faced a lean future: no more cash off the record, no more palmy free vacations on the fly-now-payola-later plan, and for some, no more jobs.

In Manhattan, Superjock Alan Freed, already fired by WABC radio, lost his second job in two weeks, was sacked by WNEW-TV. Showing up for his final broadcast last week, Freed waded through crowds of sobbing teenagers, comforted them ("Now don't cry"), accepted a bound scroll from a group of record distributors in thanks for his services. What services? Had he ever taken payola? No, said Freed, but to supplement his regular income of $1,200 a week he had served as a "consultant" for "the major record companies." During his last hours on WNEW, Freed danced dolefully with two teen-aged girls at once, accepted a subpoena to face the New York County grand jury, declared: Payola "may stink, but it's here and I didn't start it." Once, he recalled nostalgically, "a man said to me, 'If somebody sent you a Cadillac, would you send it back?' I said, 'It depends on the color.' "

Apart from Freed's exit, the liveliest deejay purge occurred in Detroit, where President George B. Storer undertook a radical housecleaning of his Storer Broadcasting Co. (five TV and seven radio stations in nine cities). Three deejays at Detroit's WJBK bit the dust, as did one Joe Niagara in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, ABC's affiliate WXYZ chopped down still another in Detroit. Of the fallen, Detroit's Tom Clay was the first to tell his story in detail--and a fascinating, lurid story it was.

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