When I think back about my time in radio I m often reminded of the Joni Mitchell song, when she sang,
"Don t it always seem to go,
you don t know what you ve got till it s gone
they pave paradise and put up a parking lot."
For me it all started when I was 18 years old and working an all night shift at a gas station near the freeway by Beloit, Wisconsin in summer of 1967. In those days there wasn t much traffic on the roads at 3 AM other than the occasional traveling salesman who was either up early or driving all night to get to his next appointment, or someone getting gas on their way home from the bars.
Joni Mitchell Big Yellow Taxi
So I spent most of the time, sitting at the counter listening to the AM radio.
And at night you could hear radio stations from hundreds and even thousands of miles away due to a phenomenon they used to call a "skip", which meant on clear nights, the radio signals would bounce off the ionosphere come back to earth, and then skip back up into the sky and bounce back to earth, allowing the signal to travel far past it s regional home.
I was listening to radio stations in Pittsburg, Nashville, Memphis, and even as far away as Texas. It was intriguing how these voices journeyed all of that way to entertain and enlighten the audience with the music and events of the day.
I wanted to be part of that.
Later that summer I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I tried out for the school radio station, but was told that I wasn t good enough, and in retrospect, I probably wasn t.
Then one thing led to another and I eventually flunked a chemistry class and lost my 2-S status in the draft, and was about to be drafted unless I enrolled in another school, but it had to be a trade school, not a university.
One afternoon I was sitting with some friends pondering my plight in life and someone lit a cigarette. On the matchbook cover it said something like,
"You too can be a disc jockey.
"
I read the ad and there was a phone number to call, so I called it.
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