All-around great guy and Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy goes old school and reveals he's actually a card-carrying member of the School of Rock. As station manager of the University of Kansas' alternative rock radio station KJHK, Doocy stayed cool while putting out fires:
In its second year of operation, the station somehow managed to retain its license after mistakenly reporting that a nuclear meltdown had killed thousands of people in Waterloo, Iowa (a journalism student mistakenly put the fake story on-air).
"People were calling the Associated Press saying, 'I just heard this story on the news and I think my family's dead,'" recalls Steve Doocy, the station's manager at the time. "That night, the last story on the 'CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite' was about how this radio station at the University of Kansas had 'blowed up' Waterloo, Iowa."
Like most of KJHK's alumni, Doocy went on to live a perfectly productive life. He now co-hosts the nationally syndicated FOX morning show "Fox and Friends," and he's pretty sure he's no longer accountable for those couple occasions where he "definitely didn't" (wink, wink) drink beer on the station's roof.
Doocy also holds a unique place in KJHK history: he was the DJ on-air when the station switched from a campus-only carrier current to a big 9.9-watt broadcast on Oct. 15, 1975.
"I was terrified," Doocy recalls. "We were broadcasting in front of Flint Hall and there were lots of passersby, so it was weird to be doing that in front of people like a disco DJ."
All KJHK DJs were required to obtain a broadcasting license. "You'd be the operator and the engineer simultaneously," Doocy recalls. "You had to know about plate voltage. What the hell is plate voltage? I was lost. I was just there to have fun."
Doocy's flagship program was "Gripe Line," a talk show where students would call in to complain about whatever irked them. His rock shows featured his favorite artists of the day - Boz Scaggs, Harry Nilsson, Moody Blues, Jethro Tull and Elton John - and often featured uninterrupted broadcasts of entire LPs.
"That's what it was all about," Doocy recalls. "You didn't want to sound like KLWN; you didn't want to be Top 40."
Would you not love to have this man be the guest celebrity DJ at your 70's-themed Halloween party? Steve! I am a huge fan and this question comes from a place of total adoration--did you have long hair? Because if you did I bet you looked really, really cute!
1 comments:
As a fellow KJHK-er, I knew Steve well. The Waterloo Iowa debacle was at once appalling and hilarious. We both knew the amazing and much-missed Steven Greenwood, without whom alternative rock might never have happened at all. Steve D and I also hung out while we both worked in Wichita a couple of years later; his "PM Magazine" show was doing a feature on Wichita's Favorite DJs and I was one of 'em, way back at the start of my radio career and his television career. He's a great guy, lots 'o fun. Hiya Doocy - L Traxler
Post a Comment