All I ever wanted to be was a Radio DJ. It wasn’t a negotiable thing for me. When friends of mine urged me to come to the police academy or become a teacher, or train to be a real estate agent, they were wasting their breath… I was in awe of the golden-voiced stars of the airwaves, and if my dreams really did come true that’s what I would be someday, a DJ.
I remember listening to the local AM radio station (in the early 70’s there was only AM) WARM “The Mighty 590” and it’s superstar Harry West.  Repeating back in my best “announcer voice” the break or song intro or station identifier that he had spoken, it was magical! I remember well the day that he came to little Lackawanna Trail High School in PA and spoke to OUR class. For me it was like Elvis was in the building! When he asked for questions I raised my hand and after being passed over five or six times he called on me and I froze. I stammered and stumbled and eventually blurted out the only thing I could think of:  “Does your job have a lot of paperwork involved in it?” (My dad had recommended that I stay away from jobs like that, the same way that he had, it was his only career advice) Mr. West paused, looked at me a bit confused, and said only one word: “No.”
As humiliated as I was I had spoken to my idol and I was surely convinced that I had seen an adult version of me, a DJ, and I liked it.
As  a shy kid you do some amazing things to stay firmly in your comfort zone, and I clung to mine as long as I could. In spite of going to college for communications (with a concentration in radio & TV broadcasting) I did everything (but radio) in my post college years. The excuses were many: I didn’t want to wake up at 3am, I didn’t want to start at the bottom, I thought that maybe TV would be a better medium for me… all bullshit, I was just scared.I had been in a band and had written several songs, one in particular, that had gotten some radio airplay and some record label attention, so I chased that as far as I could, but as with most musical dreams it went flat and I found myself defeated and working at yet another “survival job”.
One day I was challenged by a marketing guru that the boss had hired to teach us how to sell gym memberships (survival job #36) to admit to myself and to the rest of the people in the meeting what I would do if I could do my dream job. The following week we had to spill the beans and I sheepishly admitted my dream… I would love to be a DJ.
After that confession it seemed like momentum took over. I took out a home equity loan on my home picked up some hours bartending at the local watering hole (Survival job #33) and quit my day job the following week. I was going to change my shitty life once and for all.
One afternoon, several months later, I was looking through a weekend entertainment magazine and in the classifieds was an ad looking for a “news professional” for the AM news radio channel… I bit. I knew the woman who ran the station (we’d gone to high school and college together) and sent in my completely unqualified resume with an apology letter and waited for a response.
Days later she called me laughing at my shy approach and asked me why I didn’t “just call”, I told her I felt compelled to follow protocol, whatever. She informed me that the post had been filled but that the local Top 40 station was looking and that she’d introduce me to the man doing the hiring… he would be the one who would finally put me behind the microphone.