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I am unaware of any complications during my birth, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was wearing a set of headphones, and had some antenna wire or recording tape or a microphone in my hands when I was born. I don't know why, but I've been obsessed with radio - anything and everything about it - since well before I can remember. If someone were to hypnotize me, I'd probably be able to tell which radio station my mother was listening to on the way to St. Paul's hospital in Dallas to have me! A true radio guy, uhh, obsessed radio junkie is more like it.
From sending out a ham radio "CQ" in Morse code at age 13, to whiling away countless hours listening to what I call "far-away-radio-stations", with the voices of Allan Jackson and Edward R. Murrow and big-league baseball games filling crackling airwaves, to, myself, reading news bulletins about Sharon Tate or Charles Whitman, to later actually producing high profile sporting events to a global radio audience ... there's just something about radio, and its inherent magic, that throws a wonderfully intoxicating spell over me. Please consider two items...
In the past fortnight, 1) I've read about Marconi's daughter sending a celebratory message on the 100th anniversary of her father's original transmission (only his wasn't "celebratory" - it was earth changing), and 2) I've attended several social gatherings and individual lunches of current and former professionals in the radio business - a great many of which have achieved accomplishments
that rival and nudge right up to, in my opinion, the accomplishments of Mr. Marconi, himself.
Now, I think it's payback time...
Here's why. Several months ago, a young turk in what I call the "New Radio" business - that's the one operated from a computer screen - was asking me about how we used to do it ... say, edit commercials, or gather news. And I'm not that old! But, he'd never known the business from that angle, and he had a genuine thirst to learn how it was done. I was actually surprised to learn that many of the younger folks in the radio business today - the highly unregulated yet heavily 'cookie-cuttered' and formatted business that it's become - many of these folks truly believe they missed out on the glory days ... the fun days. It's someone's job to let them know the evolution. They truly want to know. And, they need to know.
I'm told there's a digital audio engineer in my town who has a glass display right behind his "super-duper mega-byte" digital audio work station, which contains ... an editing block, some splicing tape, and a razor blade. The sign on the display says, "In case of emergency, break glass". We need to break the glass. We owe that.
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