{"id":86730,"date":"2023-12-28T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-28T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=86730"},"modified":"2023-12-28T17:06:30","modified_gmt":"2023-12-28T23:06:30","slug":"do-it-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=86730","title":{"rendered":"Do It Yourself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in high school, there were two radio stations in Jamestown. Up above White Drug was KEYJ, my station, a little 1,000 watt AM station whose boss, Bob Richardson<\/a>, always made a point of hiring local kids and showing them how to do radio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across First Avenue, above the jewelry store, was KSJB and KSJM. KSJB was a 5,000 watt station at 600 kilocycles – which meant it covered six states and two Canadian provinces, and broadcast couintry music and lots and lots of farm market reports. It was a big station, and – at least when I was a kid – hired pretty serious air talent for the region. High school kids? Never.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KSJM, at 93.7 FM, was a little FM pop station. It was “automated”, which is the norm in radio stations today (most music radio uses computers to splice together commercials, music and “voice-tracked” dropins from “disk jockeys” who’ve never jockeyed a disk), but was not common back then, done with reel to reel tapes and carousels of cartridge machines and clunky analog computers. I rarely listened to KSJM when I was a kid – there were much better rock stations available, even in that part of North Dakota. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also back in high school in Jamestown, everyone knew the Ebertz family. They’d gone to high school with my dad, who had in turn taught a generation of two of Ebertz kids and cousins. One of them ran a cafe that was an institution in Jamestown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, sometime about my senior year of high school or freshman year of college, I heard that Pat Ebertz had finagled his way into doing some disk-jockeying on KSJM. It wasn’t much – a few hours on weekends – but it was a fun little burst of local radio. And as someone who’s done a lot of “do it yourself radio” over the years and today, the idea grabbed me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I moved to the Twin Cities, and inadvertently slipped back into radio<\/a>. And it was a few years later – probably 1991 – when I was at KDWB when the jock I was producing, “Michael Knight”, was on the phone with his old buddy, Pat Ebertz, from his old station, KNOX in Grand Forks. We talked for a bit – he’d stayed in the biz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was just about to leave it, actually – within a few weeks, I’d bail on KDWB, and not set foot in a radio station for another 11 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Pat made the move to the Cities a few months later, latching on at KDWB, where he spent years as a producer and sidekick for Dave Ryan. Being music radio, fashions change and jobs come and go fast – but Pat had a long run at the 101.3. I heard he’d moved to Saint Cloud and was at the Top40 station there, and then recently that he’d latched on with Tom Barnard. We hadn’t talked in decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone sent me this yesterday:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My condolences to the whole Ebertz clan. From another radio do-it-yourselfer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in high school, there were two radio stations in Jamestown. Up above White Drug was KEYJ, my station, a little 1,000 watt AM station whose boss, Bob Richardson, always made a point of hiring local kids and showing them how to do radio. Across First Avenue, above the jewelry store, was KSJB and KSJM. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,4,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-five-ate-for-oh-won","category-media","category-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86732,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86730\/revisions\/86732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}