Radio Days (Part I): The Broadcast Center

It seems like ages ago, and perhaps, it was. During my early adult years, I pretty much ate, breathed and lived radio broadcasting. The following is the first of a series of essays about the time I spent having fun behind a microphone. It recalls how I decided to get into radio. Time Frame: 1981-1982

My life had become confusing, unclear, and somewhat melancholy. I was 23 years old and back at home living with my parents. This situation had arisen because my academic adviser at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, where I had been attending, had politely suggested that I take some time off or pursue a different major. It seems that the J-school had learned about my grades falling below the minimal GPA requirement of 2.0. (It was the “D” I received from taking an introductory news-writing course called ‘News 105’. This course was a bear of a class the school used to weed out students. Several years later, by the way, I retook the course and ‘aced’ it.)

Living up their loving and nurturing roles, my parents, particularly my mother, expressed concerns about my uncertain future. Periodically, they offered ideas on schools and career paths they thought suited me. My father fancied the idea of me attending a school that offered a degree in hotel and restaurant management. Being the child of privilege, I took their offerings for granted. In retrospect, I realize how lucky I was to have all these opportunities.

Perhaps it was due to their advertising saturation of the St. Louis television market or perhaps it was because they offered something that, at least on the surface, tied in with my journalism education. Whatever it was, my mother, unexpectedly, suggested I ought to look into what the Broadcast Center had to offer. The Broadcast Center was and is, mostly, a local trade school that trained people how to be radio disc jockeys. I paid them a visit and they sold me. They appeared to have a proven record of accomplishment as they boasted having graduates working all over the country. Additionally, they had some well-known St. Louis deejays working as instructors, such as ‘Radio’ Rich Dalton of KSHE 95. Moreover, the Broadcast Center had some well-known speakers come to the school to present seminars on various broadcasting topics. (I met Bob Costas, who is a St. Louis area resident, when he conducted a seminar on sports announcing.)

The school won over my parents with their implicit promise of finding graduates an actual job in the broadcasting industry with their free placement service. Thus, I started attending the Broadcast Center. For ‘class’, I recorded myself reading aloud samples of both news and advertising copy. After doing this repeatedly, an instructor would come into my booth and review my annunciation. Before attending the Broadcast Center, I used to say ‘hunerd’, doubie-yuh and ‘couny’ instead of ‘hundred’, ‘double-you’ and ‘county’. The school also had a studio that could almost pass for a real-life deejay booth. I learned how to operate and record cartridges, cue up records (this was still the early 80s, folks!) and talk into a mike. After doing this for about a year, I earned a ‘Certificate of Proficiency’.

I was ready to start working.


Coming...Radio Days (Part II): Florida and My First Gig