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Insomniacs' Tranquilizer

"Nightline's" Mike Adams "you've got to be out of your tree."

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BALDING MIKE ADAMS is an enormous young man with hands like boulders and an employment record that reads like roll call at a spot labor hall.

The 6-foot, 1-inch, 240-pound Adams has been a ditch digger, highway construction batch-truck driver, chicken farmer, drugstore manager, pot and pan salesman, cement-block hauler, polka show entrepreneur, disc jockey and radio newscaster. Somewhere he found time for high school and college football and a 9 wins -3 losses amateur heavyweight

career.

He accumulated this polka-dotted work dossier in only 32 years and the record seems to have fitted him for his present career. He confesses however that nothing save perhaps the most spectacular knockout in Golden Gloves history really prepared him for his

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current job, host of "Nightline" on WERE-Radio.

The show opens at midnight five nights a week. Mike sits in a second-floor studio for the next 5%1⁄2 hours doodling Dick Tracy sketches with his right hand and punching the buttons on a four-line telephone with his left.

At the other ends of the telephone lines are the weird and sleepless Nightliners, some of whom proudly announce themselves with names such as MeeMaw, Loretta the bootlegger's daughter, Betty from Strongsville and French Horn Fran.

The conversations range from folksy to fey, devout to devilish, unblushingly candid to indignantly prudish and broadminded to bigoted. Engineer Dale Fox tapes the conversations and broadcasts them 10 seconds later so the swear words

By JAMES B. FLANAGAN

and revelations from the occasional hustler or homosexual can be expunged.

On the sixth night of the week, Adams rests and presents barbershop quartets-live and recorded instead of conversation from 8 Saturday to 3 Sunday morning.

Adams looks as nervous as Rodin's Thinker but two telephoned death threats did dent his cool. Once it took him until 10 in the morning to get to sleep and the other time 1 in the after-

noon.

Mike soothes his nerves with a variety of hobbies and by commuting to and from his Elyria home in a Cadillac equipped with a stereo that plays constant country music. His hobbies range from scuba diving to woodworking.

"Maybe I should look for a safer

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