TheBisch

Mango’s started his own live Internet webcast and after listening to it the other night, it reminded me of my days as a college DJ.

Yes, another college story.

I joined the college radio station, WEGL, I took an early morning shift, as the newest announcers couldn’t get the premier shifts that the upperclassmen wanted. I took on the personality of “Will Thrasher”, which was on my on-air name. I gathered a following of a small handful of listeners and by the next quarter, I had my own “specialty show”, which meant I could broadcast just about whatever the hell I wanted, with the station managers approval, and I could ignore the standard station rotation of songs. I opted for the morning show, since I was used to getting up early anyway. I then had to scramble to audtion others for my show, I mean, what good was a morning show without other players?

Utimately, the “Good Morning Breakfast Bunch” was born. We were on from 6 am - 9 am… and we had a host of characters during my tenure at the station. Of course, I was there as Will, and we had “Pizzaman”, another new announcer who needed a place to land. He had a wild style and wasn’t afraid of poking fun at anyone… Unfortunately, he didn’t last long, as management pressured me to fire him shortly after the show started… that brought in “Jennifer J” from Chicago was played “the news girl” and Lucas the “Polish Boy”. The last quarter I was there, I remember replacing Jennfier with “Celeste” as the news girl… Celeste was a red-head and total hottie… wonder what happened to her? Or heck, any of the old crew… I know Pizzaman was from the Atlanta area…

We managed to find a new way to get in trouble and be a thorn in the side of the programming director on a weekly basis. I remember having an “on-air wedding”, “marrying” (not really) Jennifer to a guy from the overnight requests show (Tommy, I think we called him). I remember the time rumor had it a student won the Corvette in the Monopoly game that McDonalds used to play…. we called our local McDonalds to confirm it… the live on-air interview was going great until the manager asked “Is this on the air?” That was bad, as it was station policy to get permission before putting someone on the air. The best time (and the time that got Pizzaman fired) was when we impersonated the University President’s wife and discussed their sex life on-air.

There were good times too… We got to interview Widespread Panic, Terry Bowden, and had some fun out on Haley Center Concourse with some live remotes. I think I still have the tapes somewhere in my closet. I’ll have to see about converting them to CD someday.

Yes, I miss those days…. Radio was fun, wish I could have done it longer… but glad I don’t do it for a living.

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