It's the 1970s. Riots springing from social and political turmoil plague the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated. Richard Nixon resigns after the Watergate break-in and coverup. Planes are hijacked and forced to fly to Cuba. Terrorists' demands are printed in the newspaper. It is long before social media. Before cell phones. Before personal computers. Before CDs, even. If you love music, you have to listen to the radio or buy records, 8-tracks, or cassette tapes at the mall. DJs are locally well-known.
Rick Morgan gained fame in Pittsburgh and is an up-and-coming name in Chicago area radio. He and his wife Linda have suffered their share of bumps in the road: her father's unexpected death, her diagnosis of secondary infertility, her gunshot wound in the teacher's parking lot at her school, and Rick's own job upheaval woes that have buffeted them and tested the ties that bind. But it all blows up on a Labor Day weekend marathon broadcast in 1976.
Terrorists-the Freedom Now! splinter group-decide to spread their message more efficiently. They seize WPYM, the secluded station where Rick works, and they hold his wife and daughter hostage at their home. They plan to raid the Joliet Arsenal for weapons and explosives. Then, using a fortified WPYM as their base, they will rain terror down on the Chicago area and broadcast their terrorist manifesto around the clock to the Chicago area.
Rick is forced to stay on the air "as usual" while they make their preparations. He hatches a desperate plan to stop them. It's crazy, but it's his only chance. Rick counts on program director Walker Wright's knowledge that WPYM is a Priority A station. And Rick is relying on Walker's obsession to meticulously list all the songs Rick plays that are not on "The List," the station's approved playlist, that all the DJs-except Rick-abide by during their shifts. If his plan fails, hundreds will die. It MUST succeed.
With an AK-47 and a Colt 1911 handgun in his face, events of Rick's life pass before him as he tries to focus on what he must do to keep his family safe. Priority A uses multiple time lines that weave from the present (1976) to Rick and Linda's sometimes rocky, sometimes joyous, history and back again, threading it all into the critical drama that now holds hundreds of lives in the balance.
Les Holliday has a B.A in literature and an M.S. in Communication Studies. He taught Radio-TV and English courses while working as an on-air DJ in the Chicago area for six years. In the Pittsburgh area, he taught English courses and operated a mobile entertainment company for 30 years.
