John Ferguson: Steve Franz, LSU Sports Information.
John Ferguson: I was going to tell you about Tiger Stadium and had the background sound during our broadcast. We worked very hard, very hard, in creating, in transmitting the sounds of Tiger Stadium to the people who listened on the radio. Tiger Stadium is a place with a lot of presence, partially because it’s a bowl and just the way . . . just the way the sound rolls around in that . . . that big edifice. We made sure, we had parabolic microphones and . . . We just didn’t hang a microphone for crowd noise out of the front window and so forth. We didn’t do that. And we had a parabola especially for the band. We had the best band pick up of any broadcast network in the country. And we used the band a lot. They don’t do that anymore, and I think that’s sad. The band is a big part of all of this, of the spectacle. But when we let you hear the band, I mean, it was like the microphone was right in the middle of the 300-piece outfit.
Melisse Campbell: Right.
Ferguson: So . . . But we did work at that. And the reason was, wasn’t that we thought it would just be nice to do that. It was for a reason, for a purpose. We wanted you . . . If you were in the Midwest and you were in your car driving along the highway and you just . . . you just were thumbing along looking for something on the radio, and you would hear this. Even if nobody was saying a thing, you would recognize the crowd noise and the sound of Tiger Stadium. We worked on that. And as a result, we attracted a lot of people throughout the country on that, in that way. We did have a wide audience, by the way, just getting off into another subject. We . . . using all those things, we had a very wide audience. We used to get correspondence from all over the country and overseas and so forth. A lot of our games were picked up by American Forces Network.
-- John Ferguson, interviewed by Melisse Campbell, 1994