Radio Activity

As it turns out, I spent more years of my adult life speaking into a microphone than doing any other activity. Count days or hours and the results will differ. I did have other full-time jobs most of the time, but microphones were always hanging around in the background.

I wanted to be a DJ during high school, built a little “radio station” that had a broadcast reach of about 20 feet in my father’s shop and started hanging around Bellefontaine’s radio station (WOHP) where news director Bob Andre and DJs Don Beckman answered questions and shared stories. Later, I would work with Don Beckman (WLYV, Ft Wayne, and WOMP, Bellaire/Wheeling) and for Bob Andre, who was the general manager of WOMP.

“I Wish We Sounded Like WTVN”

During the brief time (the) Ohio State University put up with me, I was also a phone boy at WCOL. Then they actually paid me (not much) to be on the air Saturday overnight. Jack Keefe was in the newsroom on those overnight shifts. Then I moved across town to WTVN for a year and, when Ohio State University decided it had had quite enough of me, I moved to Ft Wayne to become a news reporter for WLYV (thanks to a recommendation from Don Beckman). There was a brief stint at WIFE in Indianapolis and then on to WOMP in Bellaire/Wheeling.

Dave D’Aquila (Dave James on the air) and I interviewed Ohio Governor John Gilligan for a lengthy series on strip mining. Later Dave accepted a job with the attorney general’s office and let me know about a public information officer position with the Travel and Tourism Bureau of the Ohio Department of Economic and Community Development. I took the job and Gilligan was defeated by James A Rhodes in the next election. Assuming my state job would be eliminated, I took a job with WNCI. That job was eliminated in less than two years.

So I tried my other primary interest, photography, and ran a photo studio for nearly a decade. The president of a company I had done some work for turned out to be looking for an advertising/graphics/pr person, so that was my next stop and I worked with a small group of people I met there for more than 20 years even though the company ownership kept changing. But I was also being dragged back into radio.

WTVN’s news director asked if I would be interested in doing one or two shifts per week. Although I thought I was done with radio and expected to truly be done with it in a year or two, that assignment lasted for 16 years, from Taft to Jacor to Great American to Citicasters to Clear Channel. Clear Channel now is IHeartMedia, but I decided that I’d had enough when I was assigned to create broadcasts for WSPD (Toledo) from WTVN (Columbus). I had been in Toledo twice and knew nothing about the city’s governance, geography, or politics. That was enough and I fired ClearChannel.

Even so, WTVN’s Joe Bradley and I continued with the Sunday morning Technology Corner that we’d started on Sunday mornings in the mid-1980s. That continued until 2006 when Technology Corner ended and TechByter Worldwide began as a podcast. At the end of 2024, I terminated TechByter Worldwide.

So if you counted hours worked, time spent behind a microphone isn’t much. But it was certainly my first love.