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Flying airplanes as a teenager was exciting and unique enough. Another seminal time of my youth was experience working as a disk jockey at several radio stations.
One night when I was fifteen - which would have made it the year of 1974 - a friend of mine named Jason Blalock decided to sneak my dad's car out and drive from Orange to nearby Beaumont. Once there we were driving down Fannett Road and saw a radio tower with a lone car parked at its base in front of a smallish building. Must be a radio station. On a lark we decided to stop and knock on the door. By now it was about 1:30 in the morning.
So we parked in front next to the other car and knocked. We saw from the signage that it was KAYC, an AM top-forty station that we regularly listened to (but as of this writing in 2020 no longer exists). No one answered right away so we knocked several more times. Finally the DJ, a guy named Mark Evans, answered the door. It was a cold winter night, but he was wearing shorts, one of those colorful Hawaiian shirts, and a lei around his neck. I knew right away that this was a business I wanted to be a part of.
He invited us in and the three of us crammed into the broadcast studio. We watched him work, and he gave us pointers about what it was like and how to get into the business. I was hooked, and Jason was too. After an hour or so we drove back home in time for the missing car not to be noticed.
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