SOMEWHERE IN THE AIR BETWEEN CHICAGO & DALLAS (US) –- I had the chance earlier today to hook up with Steve Downes, my old UD roommate. We shared a lot of memories and caught up on a few decades of life, since we last saw each other. Steve is currently the morning drive personality on WDRV “The Drive” in Chicago, the Windy City’s Classic Rock station.
Downes and I first met when we lived across the hall from each other at University Hall on UD’s West Campus our freshman year. Sophomore year we lived in different places, but shared a place for the first summer school session over the Moonlight Bar and the Laundromat on Brown Street. Junior year we again lived separately, but made plans for Steve to replace a guy in our house for senior year. That is, until unbeknownst to me, a couple of my knucklehead roomies managed to get us tossed out of the house over the summer. I showed up in August and there were a bunch of girls living there. Steve and I scrambled and secured a place at the Fourman Court apartments up off of Stewart Street.
Steve was in our wedding the year after we graduated. When we reminisced about it, he recalled the following morning as being the worst hangover he has ever encountered in his life. Downes woke up, still in his tux, with his arms folded on his chest and immediately thought to himself “Holy sh*t, I’m dead!” He wasn’t, but he sure felt like it.
I worked in radio sales in Dayton for 5 years after we graduated, while Steve toiled on the airwaves in Athens, OH and then moved to WYDD in Da Burgh. Soon after, YDD became UD-East, as at one time there were a total of 6 UD grads working there: Steve, Louie Chelekis, Jim Augustine, Sean McDowell, Kevin Carroll and later me. I got a call from Carroll saying that YDD was looking for a sales guy and that I ought to come and check the place out next time I was in town visiting my in-laws. The studios were out in New Kensington, about 15 miles up the Allegheny River from the city. They were kinda dumpy, up a long flight of stairs over some stores in not-so-beautiful downtown New Ken. None of that dissuaded me, as the chance to move to my wife’s hometown and be close to her family, plus work with my friends was too powerful. We rented a place in Plum Boro, which was almost an hour away from her folks in the South Hills, so consequently, many weekends we ended up just staying on that side of town. The station wasn’t much of a factor in the ratings and so sales were underwhelming. Everybody there took the station softball team more seriously than we did our day jobs. The Steelers won two Super Bowls and the Pirates one World Series in the 3 years we lived in Pittsburgh, so it wasn’t all bad
The whole UD-East thing kinda fell apart pretty fast, as we all scattered in different directions. Downes headed to the West Coast, while I ended up getting transferred to Detroit after hooking up with Group W Radio at KDKA’s FM station. Steve worked at ABC’s legendary rocker KLOS-FM for 10 years; moved up the coast to Santa Barbara; then to Florida; back to LA and finally to Chicago, where he just signed an extension to stay with Bonneville Broadcasting at “The Drive.”
It was interesting how Steve and I got back in touch with each other. I had written an item in “From the Swamp” about OSU wearing LeBron James basketball jerseys and got an email response from Steve’s brother Jack, who is a fellow UD alum, semi-avid follower of UD hoops and a reader of UD Pride and “FTS.” He gave me Steve’s email address and we chatted online. With my new gig taking me to Chi-town every other week we made plans to get together and did so today.
The one take away from our visit that really struck me as intriguing was how a single Communication Arts class that both of us took at UD ended up having a tremendous impact on what each of us ended up doing for the rest of our lives –- in totally different directions. It was Fundamentals of Radio 101, taught by Steve Dougherty. As part of the class, each student had to put together their own “demo tape” with music, news, commercials, etc. Dougherty pulled Steve aside after listening to his and said that based on the demo tape he might have a future in the radio business. That was all Downes needed to hear. With Dougherty’s help, he ended up getting a gig at ‘VUD and the rest, as they say, is history. Steve recently found the demo tape in a box of old stuff and had to find an engineer with an ancient ¼ track reel-to-reel machine in order to listen to it. He said it was just awful, totally amateurish, but Dougherty obviously must have heard something.
As for me, I totally screwed up my demo tape. Part of it had to be done live and I included some humorous news stories, which cracked up my classmates but made me go over the allotted time limit. With a thick Boston accent, I kinda knew there was NFW that I was ever going to work on the air in radio.
However, one day Dougherty invited two sales guys he knew from WHIO -- Ken Moorman and Dennis Collins -- to speak to our class. Denny said something that I will never forget:
“Disc jockeys get all of the women; salespeople make all of the money.”
I was already engaged to the future Mrs. Swampy, so I had no use for more women –- I needed a freakin’ job! I harassed Comm Arts Chairman/WVUD GM George Biersack until he hired me as the first full-time sales slug at WVUD, for the princely sum of $50 a week –- draw –- and here I am 30-something years later.
I told Steve that I went back to UD several years ago and spoke to students in the Comm Arts department during Career Day. They don’t have ‘VUD to provide the springboard to their careers that Downes and I and tons of others got and they weren’t too happy about it. As one of them told me, in the current digital age “we’re still learning how to cut reel-to-reel tape” like Steve and I did back in the day. That can’t be a good thing.
Coupla interesting tidbits about Downes:
-- When we were still at UD, Downes mentioned to me that his mom was a distant relative of Boris Karloff, the actor who played Frankenstein. I immediately said to him “So your mother’s family name is Pratt?” Steve was dumbfounded and asked “how the hell did you know that?” As a horror flick freak, I was well aware that Boris’ real name was William Henry Pratt.
-- I’m not a video gamer but if you know one, ask them if they play “Halo.” The principal character of the game is called Master Chief and it is voiced by none other than my old UD roommate. Here’s a video interview from YouTube in 2 parts of Steve, trying to explain the cult following of “Halo”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEtGv...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSQHq...eature=related
Steve said that Peter Jackson of “Lord of the Rings” fame owned the rights to make a movie version of “Halo” and it looked like it was going to get the green light until everybody involved got a little too greedy and it fizzled. Steve mentioned that they talked about him reprising the role, since Master Chief wears a helmet and is never actually seen. Downes only gets paid a flat rate for his voice work and said he would love to have a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1% of the deal. But he doesn’t.
That’s it “From the Swamp.”
You can email me at:
swampy@udpride.com