North Star Writers Group

Awakening the DJ Inside Me

When it comes to the radio in my car, I’m a card-carrying button-pusher. It probably has something to do with my attention span, which is about as long as a gnat’s eyelash. It also might have something to do with my incredibly eclectic musical tastes.

When I’m tooling to work in the morning and returning home in the afternoon, I drive with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the radio dial.

American radio — bless its soul — plays right into my roaming hand because there are, according to the latest edition of Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook, nearly 9,000 FM stations and more than 4,800 AM stations bouncing around out there.

Country music, I discovered, is the most popular radio format. The adult contemporary format is second followed by Christian music, Top 40 hits, classical, jazz, blues and so on. Less-common formats include agriculture, bluegrass music and Arabic, French, Greek and Chinese formats.

As far as I’m concerned it’s format schmormat. I like ’em all.

Needless to say, my frenzied button-pushing habit when I’m in the car has a tendency to drive my passengers insane as we tool down the interstate at 65 miles per hour.

“For gosh sakes leave the radio on one station,” pleads my wife Sally, slapping my hand as I reach over to change the station for the umpteenth time. But, with all my practice, I beat her to the punch just about every time.

Speed is definitely an asset for the devout radio button-pusher because the faster you are, the more songs you can cram into a short trip to the grocery, or a cross-country vacation drive.

Twirling the radio dial as I do also helps me avoid all those dorky commercial spots featuring screaming used-car dealers.

Another reason I’m so adept at dial-twirling may have something to do with the fact that when I was in high school in the 1950s, I dreamed of being a radio broadcaster.

Back then, rock ‘n’ roll was taking America by storm and it seemed like everybody was listening to the radio. My high school — Central High in Flint, Michigan — had its own radio station where students studied broadcasting.

The station had the call letters WCHS and the station piped its programs into the school. The low-watt station was a fun, exciting place. As student broadcasters, we served as on-air hosts and produced and directed our own shows, created public service announcements hyping upcoming school events and wrote and acted in radio dramas.

In short, the WCHS staffers were really cool guys and gals, and most of us harbored dreams of going into broadcasting after graduation.

Though several of my friends and fellow school radio jocks, including Dave `Arms’ Thompson and Mike “Mike at the Mike” Gaylord, went on to make radio broadcasting their careers, I tried, too, but failed. At age 18, I accepted a $25-a-week position as a copy boy at The Flint Journal, which led to my first newspaper reporting job.

Now that I’m older and wiser and dedicated to twirling the dial whenever I’m listening to my car radio, I’ve noticed it has produced some rather interesting results. Like the time I tuned in a rural Indiana station with a morning show host who frequently sang along — and, I might add, badly too — with the record that was playing.

Then there was the Wednesday morning recently when I was able to spin the dial from a Brahms lullaby to the vintage rock song “Roll Over Beethoven” in a split second.

Now that’s talent.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column # BB36. Request permission to publish here.