When I grow up I want to be…..

Ask most any kid what they want to do for work as an adult and you typically hear firefighter, doctor and so on. If you asked Ernie or Tim, you would have heard DJ. Yes, really.

Early signs of their leaning toward the profession are quite evident.

Ernie set up a small recording studio under the stairs of his parent's basement. He had been collecting records for sometime and was recording tapes there. Later, he moved out from under the stairs and built a nice size room with plenty of shelving for the collection and counter space for his turntables and a mixer. Before the start of Radio Record Hop, he and Tim recorded a few tapes there for a youth group they were both involved in.

At age 10 Tim turned an electronics set he was given into a bit of a PA system and hooked up his father's tape recorder into it. One end was in the family rec room where Tim stood at a shelf changing tapes and a speaker was in the shop where his father was working on a project. Later, with a different electronics set from Radio Shack, he built a 10 watt AM transmitter and hooked it up to a large antenna that was in his parent's attic. This was quite effective and well, a problem for the neighbors when they discovered that his audio was also coming across on TV channel 4. Needless to say, he was taken off the air shortly after that.

Time marches forward. Ernie goes to Marquette and works hard to get a degree in Communications and after a relentless pursuit lands a job on-air, working for WGLB–AM. A bit later he moves to WBCS, a country music station working overnights. Per the way these things go in radio, he later takes a job working for WEMP and survives a format change.

In the mean time, Tim finds that the career he had chosen of print communications was not working for him and he was called back to his original goal in life. So he takes lessons at Broadcast Services, a school of broadcasting. There he learns the finer points of being on the air. A few times he worked as producer for Ernie at WEMP during the “Friday Night at the Oldies Show”. A bit later WEMP changes format again and Ernie finds himself unemployed from the radio industry. Tim looked at this and decided that he didn’t want to try to get into a competitive industry where you can do little to affect your standing. It really is as one on-air DJ said, “Read the cards and shut up.”

While Ernie was working at WEMP, a listener contacted him and asked if he played music for Weddings. He figured he could, so he said yes. They hired him and he played the first Radio Record Hop event solo, while sitting behind a table. A few bookings later, he had a stand made with turntables mounted on it and a good sound system. He hired Tim to work with him, basically pulling music and handling requests. By the second dance, Tim was more comfortable with the equipment and acted like a full fledge DJ. Since then, they have shared the microphone time during every dance.

Now, along with other daytime jobs, we are both doing the job we started out in life wanting to do, Disc Jockey. We’ve been working together for over 21 years, playing a variety of music for the finest people in the world, our customers and their friends.

You can visit is on-line at www.radiorecordhop.com