Word: geller
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...