My first podcast = "Screamin' Sean's" last broadcast

When I was in college, I first majored in computer science. I found out soon that my college's computer science department was for crap, so rather than do the smart thing and switch to a better college, I switched to an easier major: journalism, with a concentration on radio broadcasting. Why? Well...because I love music, and I've always been told I have a good voice for radio. God knows I have the perfect face for radio.

I took all the radio courses and was on the air at the college's radio station. In fact, during my last semester I hosted a specialty show dedicated to the most obscure Beach Boys music ever released, and that show won the "Specialty Show of the Year" award -- and I was against nineteen other shows.

Now, I knew going into it that a radio career -- or any journalism career, for that matter -- is extremely low paying unless you make it big in a major market. The year I graduated, I got a part-time gig at WYKT, a modern rock station located in the middle of nowhere in southwestern Will County...and I literally mean nowhere. There was a quadrangle of Wilmington, Coal City, Diamond, and Braidwood, and we were smack dab in the middle of the unincorporated area amongst all those dinky toilet towns. The mailing address that was on our stationary was Diamond. When we read our address over the air, it was Coal City. The phone number had a Braidwood exchange. And our legal ID said -- and even now as the station changed formats and even moved twice to two different towns, still DOES say -- Wilmington.

In fact....we kind of stretched it. When I started there, the legal ID sweeper actually said "WYKT, Wilmington, Joliet" -- the biggest city nearby is Joliet (one of the top ten largest in Illinois and still growing). After I was there a while they rerecorded the legal ID sweeper so that it says "Wilmington, Joliet, Chicago"! We thought the addition of Chicago was a stretch, but Tim Lamping, a jock (who's still there!) who lives in Chicago, told me he could pick up the broadcast ever-so-faintly by Midway Airport, so it was indeed true!

I was officially hired on October 4, 1996, literally the day after my 22nd birthday. At that time, it was called "The Kat 105.5," and the format was basically hard rock. Basically, if it rocked, we played it; if it was mellow, we didn't. I could go on for several volumes about my experiences there and the crazy management stories, but I'll save that for a book or something. I left there almost exactly two years later when I moved to New Jersey. When I got to Jersey, I didn't bother seeking to continue my radio career, as I now had a life (and soon a wife) and didn't really feel like being away from home making literally minimum wage and with zero job security.

As for my on-air name...well, when I first started, I just used my real name, which had absolutely no oomph to it over the air. Well...some time into my tenure, we hired a guy named Lenny Svoboda, who was already a known local jock at one of the Joliet stations. His shift was before mine every Saturday morning, and at the end of his first show there while I was waiting to take over, just off the top of his head, Lenny said, "...and coming up next is SCREAMIN' Sean" -- to which I responded with a major blood-curdling scream! I kinda liked that, so I let it stick -- especially because I don't scream at all! Our program director liked the irony, too.

Going back to that job security thing...I must have survived everything possible. I was suspended for breaking an unwritten rule that our program director at the time never told anybody; interestingly, he was run out of town on a rail after he did that. I dealt with drunk listeners. And I even survived a station takeover -- usually when the station is taken over, all the staff can kiss their jobs goodbye, but part of the deal when the station was sold was that everybody got to keep their jobs. The station lost a lot of its hard rock edge and transitioned into kind of a combination adult contemporary/modern rock. We lost some listeners, but we gained a ton more than we had before.

Shortly after I left for Jersey, the station moved to downtown Joliet -- within walking distance of where I lived before! The station was located in the same building as the historic Rialto Square Theater, and it was one of those you-can-watch-the-jock-through-the-windows deals. They still actually broadcasted via the broadcast antenna in Wilmington via a T1 line. After a year or two, however, in one of the dumbest moves ever, they left Joliet and moved to Kankakee, one of the worst places you could ever be, changed the format to oldies, and rechristened themselves "The Pickle." And I'm not kidding. Nobody -- even staff -- knows why the hell they changed the name to "The Pickle." And they still use the antenna in Wilmington via a T1 line.

Having moved back to the Chicago area, I drove down to the old stompin' grounds. Here's a picture I took during the trip:



Believe it or not, the building is much more dilapidated than it looks in the photo. Even more shocking is that the place didn't look much different when I worked there ten years ago! Seriously, it was rarely kept up. Yes, that's part of a broadcast tower -- that was our old tower from when I first started working there; probably a year after I started we built a taller one, and of course that's still standing but didn't get into the picture. It's 500 feet tall -- the maximum allowed by FCC law if the tower is located within two miles of a major highway. (Interstate 55 is right down the road.) Near the door we had a decomissioned toilet where we kept the keys to the building -- if someone had to come to work but nobody was there (i.e., if we were running automation), they simply removed the key from the dried-out tank. (You just can't make this stuff up!)

It was a crazy two years, but a great one nonetheless. I really had fun. Now, I give you my first podcast! This is my aircheck from what is so far the last time I ever was on the radio -- Saturday, September 26, 1998. Just to explain a couple of things...I left in a promo for "Basement of Blues," a really cool Sunday night blues show that was hosted by Mike Saracini, a.k.a. "Chicago Slim." He did a fantastic job, although he would never accept any compliments from anybody; he thought he was awful! I loved his show, as did many people, so I left the promo in as a memento. Also, before everybody starts replying and correcting me, I know that "Leaving Here" is not originally by The Who, but I didn't know it at the time!

Click on the date in the previous paragraph to hear the podcast. Enjoy!