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Verna Green's old habit of listening to two radios at once used to bother some of her friends. They thought her a bit unsociable.
"I was not a fun person," she said of her early days as vice president and general manager of WJLB-FM. Back then, Green made a practice of keeping one ear tuned to WJLB and the other to the competition.
Green, 42, had a lot of catching up to do. Before she was hired in 1982 by Booth American Co., the Detroit broadcasting company that owns WJLB, Green had never worked a day in the radio business, but she wasn't afraid of the risk.
And the risk paid off.
When Green arrived, WJLB was just one of a group of black-oriented FM stations, rated 12th overall in the FM market. But, within a short time after Green's arrival, WJLB pulled away from the pack, and it has never looked back. It's now the top-rated FM station in Detroit, second only to perennial leader WJR.
Green began her management career as an organizational specialist at General Motors Corp. and moved from there to personnel posts at Detroit Receiving Hospital and the Visiting Nurse Association of Metropolitan Detroit.
Radio industry professionals scoffed when Ralph and John Booth hired someone with no previous experience to handle such a demanding job in such a tricky business. The Booth brothers still in their 30s, had just assumed control of the family communications business from their father, John.
"When she was named general manager, everybody thought it was the dumbest thing they'd ever heard, said Richard Kernen, vice president of the Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts in Southfield. "I assumed it was because of the youth and inexperience of the tow sons.
"Is turns out they were a lot smarter than we were. She's done an absolutely phenomenal job."
John Booth knew that Green had some well-developed ideas about managing people, ideas she and Booth had discussed occasionally in the year before she was hired, though they never discussed any job possibilities. They had met through John Booth's wife, Rebecca, who worked with Green.
John Booth subscribes to the Philosophy that a good manager can manage anything. Major-market radio stations need staffs full of specialist programming,...