{"id":28283,"date":"2012-06-01T17:22:50","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T22:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=28283"},"modified":"2012-06-01T17:22:50","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T22:22:50","slug":"the-do-it-yourselfer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=28283","title":{"rendered":"The Do-It-Yourselfer"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a bit of a whack upside the head to see that George Chapple – better known as “Dark Star” – has passed away<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Chapple grew up in Ohio and Long Island, NY. He was a Vietnam veteran, and originally came to the Twin Cities with his parents in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

After dabbling in the auto business, Chapple became known to radio listeners in the 1980s via Steve Cannon\u2019s WCCO Radio show where he handicapped horse races at the newly-opened Canterbury Downs (later renamed Canterbury Park).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before that, though, he was a regular caller on sportstalk shows all over the Twin Cities, including KSTP when I was there in the mid-eighties.<\/p>\n

The brief Strib <\/em>obit skips past what was a convoluted and almost comical path to sports-radio celebrity. \u00a0When I first met Dark, he was hosting a cable-access handicapping show at Canterbury Downs, in the next press booth over from the KSTP Sportstalk show I was producing. \u00a0I ran into him again in…er, 1988? \u00a0He and, of all people, Mike Gelfand were hosting an evening sportstalk show on the old AM1470 in Anoka, doing a remote broadcast from an old Chi-Chi’s in Brooklyn Center. \u00a0In both cases, he bellowed out “Mitch!” – to me, one of the lowliest peons on Twin Cities radio – like I was Steve Cannon himself.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t long after that that he got his job at ‘CCO.<\/p>\n

And I spent years thinking of that example – going from regular caller to night-time host, one of America’s dream jobs. \u00a0And the lesson of that example – make your own opportunities, and be both creative and persistent about it – was in the front of my mind in 2003 and early 2004 when I first broached the idea of an all-blogger talk show to AM1280.<\/p>\n

So anyway – RIP Dark Star.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a bit of a whack upside the head to see that George Chapple – better known as “Dark Star” – has passed away: Chapple grew up in Ohio and Long Island, NY. He was a Vietnam veteran, and originally came to the Twin Cities with his parents in the 1970s. After dabbling in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,71,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoriam","category-talk-radio","category-the-rare-sports-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28283"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28285,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28283\/revisions\/28285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}