...Until early December of 1979 when the phone rang and it was Bart. Vince Miller was leaving WROV for a job at the new K92-FM and they needed a weekender. My dream of someday making it to the station I'd grown up listening to had finally come true. Working weekends, I could still attend college and get all my work done. This was indeed a no-brainer and I accepted the job immediately and became the last WROV DJ hired in the 1970s. This was kind of cool because the last one hired in the 1960s had been Dan Alexander. A "decade" kind of thing.

My girlfriend was a big Allman Brothers fan and I had LONG blonde hair and looked like the younger brother of Duane and Greg (and I think she really LIKED this) but upon getting the job at WROV I went out and had my hair cut cut exactly like Bart's. And that's when I grew my very first moustache so I'd look like him. So the 1980s began with America getting Ronald Reagan, Roanoke getting K92 and WROV getting yours truly.

Working at WROV was more fun than anything I'd ever done, and I really improved as an air personality while there. Things changed a bit during the summer of 1980 when we learned that K92 had become Roanoke's new #1 station. Steve, who had recently gotten married, left for a job at WRQK-FM in Greensboro. Dave Shropshire also left and was replaced by John King. WROV began transitioning to a more adult-oriented format. Still, Bart, Larry Bly, Barry Michaels and Rob O'Brady were still there. By 1981, I was alternating on the all-night show with Matt Eakle and continuing my education at VWCC.

That spring, WROV featured an "All Star Weekend" and its highlight was the return of Fred Frelantz and Jack Fisher. Neither had done radio for years and it was decided that somebody should be at the station during their show to keep the logs, find records and ensure all commercials were run while they focused on their show and the hundreds of listeners who would be calling them. I walked into the station while this was being discussed, volunteered to do this job and as a result, got to work with my two all-time radio idols. Again, I'd shown up at the right place at the right time. Fred and Jack continued doing monthly shows and for the next year I worked with them. The highlight of my entire career!

During the summer of 1981, Barry left WROV for a job in South Carolina. Bart left for a job at K92. WROV had become a much more adult station and I was having trouble fitting into the new format. Also, I had worked there for almost two years and at one point had done the all-night show 37 consecutive nights, yet, with each new fulltime opening I was passed over for someone else. I decided to leave WROV for a part-time job at K92 in early 1982.

In retrospect, this was a mistake. If I'd have remained at WROV and done what I was asked to do I think I'd have gotten a fulltime job. Instead I worked at K92 six months and was fired over a misunderstanding I had with their PD.

Everything in my life seemed to come to an end or go to hell in a handbasket in the fall of 1982. I graduated from VWCC, broke up with Susan and lost my job at K-92. My cat—the one I got in the summer of 1967 when Jack, Fred and Sammy were playing the Monkees "Pleasant Valley Sunday" on the radio—died of old age. One of my grandmothers bought the farm. The bank closed my account because there'd been no money in it for two months. So it goes!

I couldn't find a radio job because I'd burned all my bridges. That December I took a temporary job working as the parking attendant for Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley. I was the guy who sat in the little booth and took your money as you left. I remember that this is where I was sitting when I heard that Karen Carpenter had died. I got to do a lot of thinking while sitting there alone all day and and decided it was time for a change. Or at least time for a long vacation so I could comtemplate what to do next.

So I decided to go live at my parents' trailer in North Myrtle Beach, SC. A former WROV friend, K.C. Jones, was working in Wilmington, NC at WGNI and would be about a 50 minute drive away. So I packed all of my clothes, my stereo, and all of my albums into my brown Datsun B-210+ and headed off to live at the beach for a few weeks. At the time, I figured I'd be back in a few months, would reconcile things with Susan and find another job in the Star City. I left without telling anyone goodbye and ended up never returning home. I should note that the night before I left, CBS aired the very last episode of the TV series M*A*S*H and the title was "Goodbye, Farewell, Amen."

Myrtle Beach was empty in February 1983. I read books, took long walks everyday and on weekends visited K.C. One Saturday night in early March I went with him to WGNI to see the station. It was snowing that night—a rarity in Wilmington. The PD, Bruce, was there and received a call from the overnight guy who lived on Wrightsville Island, saying that he couldn't make it to work because he didn't want to try driving over the draw bridge in the snow. Bruce needed someone to cover the shift but nobody was available. I told him "Hire me and I'll do it" and an hour later I was on WGNI. Again, I'd been in the right place at the right time.

A few months later I was promoted to doing the 7:00 - Midnight show. The midday man Chuck McCartney offered to rent me his extra bedroom so I became his roommate. He was also a Beatles fanatic and had also just been through a break-up, so we got along quite well as friends. Finally, I was working for a living and was truly out on my own.

For the first time in my life I was able to get cable TV and soon was spending my spare time watching old 50s and 60s sitcom reruns and every National Hockey League game that I could find. This was Spring, '84 and Wayne Gretzky's Edmonton Oilers were knocking off Billy Smith's New York Islanders in the 1984 Cup finals.

WGNI was an adult station but sounded fresh and contemporary until Bruce left in early 1984. His replacement was an old bastard named Wally who ruined the station's slick sound and caused them to lose half of their audience in the course of six months. Wally insisted on everyone working six days a week and doing the same shift which, for me, meant doing 7:00 - Midnight every night but Sunday. This meant that I had NO social life.

When Gerry Flannigan left I thought I'd get the afternoon shift but this was not to be. I'd again had enough of radio, had decided to live in my parents' trailer and go to school at UNC-W. As a last shot, using an old aircheck from K92, I applied for job at the new WKSF, "KISS-FM" in Asheville, NC. They hired me!

The timing was perfect. During an humiliating meeting that lasted about an hour, I plead my case to our owner and Wally and begged them to let me work afternoons. They rather curtly told me "no!" I was about ready to kill myself. I bought a six-pack of beer and headed to Carolina Beach, found a secluded place, and thought "what the HELL am I going to do now?"

I went home to prepare for work that night and saw that I'd gotten a phone call from Asheville. I'd gotten the job at Kiss-FM! So I was able to walk into the office the VERY NEXT DAY, find Hannah and Wally and tell them "OK, if I can't have what I want, I'm out of here and here's my letter of resignation!" I left Wilmington in early September, '84 and the VERY NEXT DAY Hurricane Diana slammed the city. Another case of perfect timing.

KISS had been WLOS-FM, an "elevator music" station and early one morning we abruptly started playing blaring rock and roll—kind of like the first episode of WKRP in Cincinnati. This really pissed off all of the older Asheville "Muzak" crowd. When we first went on we were running commercials showing people smashing their radios with John Cameron Swayze saying "KISS-FM...takes a knockin' and keeps on rockin'."

KISS prompted one local preacher to devote several sermons to describing how the presence of our radio station was a clear indicator that the world was on its way to the depths of hell. According to him, WKSF stood for "We Kindle Satan's Fire," KISS stood for "Knights in Satan's Service", and the station's FM frequency of 99.9 was "666" turned upside down. We pointed out that it was actually only 6.66 upside down so we were really only 1/100th as bad as he thought we were.

The original KISS-FM staff featured my friend K. C. Jones, Dawn, John Stevens, and Brother Bill. Soon we added "G.T." to the line up and for the next four years we ruled the airwaves of Western NC, SC, and parts of Tennesee and Georgia. Over the years the lineup included Chuck Finley, John Oliver, Kenny B. (Kenn Buckner), Vic Thomas (Tommy Clevinger), Ric Hampton (Ric Rowe), and Paul Turner, who is now a nationally-known voice talent heard on Court TV, Monday Night Football, and CNN. Paul has one of those deep voices that makes you think he has five testicles and takes hormone shots. He makes me sound like Mickey Mouse.

When I moved to Asheville I lived in an apartment owned by a man named Willard (but no, we didn't have rats, thank God). My roommate, was K. C., who was into betting on football games, so we spent every weekend with three TVs on, each tuned to a different game, with K. C. alternately whooping for joy or cursing and beating on the floor with every play from scrimmage.

The apartment complex consisted of three buildings and twelve apartments—but only one laundry room with two washers. One day, I became angry when I needed to wash my clothes but couldn't because a girl who lived in the next building kept leaving hers in the machines. Her name is Mary. She was the SECOND and FINAL girl in my life who generally thinks the exact same thing that I do. Four years later she became my wife. This was the ULTIMATE case of "right place, right time!"

Asheville was known for being a breeding ground for rednecks. In fact, we used to say that we grew them there, then shipped them off to other parts of the country where they were in short supply. Still, I loved the place. My friends included David Creasman, Tony Rogers, John Hitch, Jerry Baumann, and Chris Lockhart. Tony and I used to have fun going out at night and shooting golf balls off the side of Beaucatcher Mountain and rolling bowling balls down the middle of Patton Avenue.

Local businesses included the "Sip & Dip", a beer store run by a man named Al, which was the only place in all of North Carolina where you could buy Lone Star Beer, which I later found out he stocked just for me. Lone Star Beer served as bait which attracted Cliff to my area for visits on a regular basis.

One night, John Oliver, Mary and I went to Greenville, SC to do a remote at the comedy club, The Punch Line. Upon arriving we learned that the special guest comedian that night was Pat Paulsen. Pat had been famous during the 1960s as a regular on The Smothers Brothers Variety Hour where he encouraged people to vote for him for President in 1968. Pat was FUNNY. After the show, the three of us and Pat went out bar hopping.

For a while, KISS was a good station and I enjoyed working there until it was sold in 1987 to a man named Bud who used to be a captain in Air Force. Bud was a nice guy in his own right, but his "military" way of doing things did not meld well with our generally laid-back, relaxed culture. Bud made us get rid of the four cats that lived at the radio station, he told us we could no longer wear blue jeans in the building, and he implemented many other rules that didn't go over well with most of the staff. Suddenly, it just wasn't fun anymore.

Things got even worse for me that fall when Mary graduated from UNC-A and moved to Raleigh to live with her brother and work for a company in Wilson, NC. We spent a ton of money on long distance calls and visited on most weekends but clearly, this was not going to work for the long haul. In December, 1987 on my 30th birthday, we went to Wrightsville Beach, NC and I asked her to marry me and remarkably, she said "yes!"

By early in 1988 I had had enough of the radio station. I had been the assistant PD for three years but when the PD job came open, Bud filled it with a guy who had worked for him in Alabama. Enough was enough. I had decided that I was going to start moving all my stuff to Raleigh, relinquish my apartment, live on Paul Turner's couch and devote my time and effort toward getting fired in such a way that I'd be able to receive unemployment. Then I was going to move to Raleigh.

It didn't work out this way. On an early January visit to see Mary, a gear in the transmission of my car chipped a tooth. I made it, but knew I couldn't make it back. Also while driving up there it started snowing and by the time it finished we had about 12 inches in Raleigh and about 18 in Asheville. I called the station and resigned. Another case of leaving a town and not finding out until later that I'd never be going back.

We were married on May 21, 1988, in Charlotte, NC, by a preacher who looked exactly like game show host Wink Martindale (in fact, as Wink wasn't anywhere on the tube at the time, I have often wondered if it was really him, using an assumed name). My best man was David Creasman, and my groomsmen were Sam Lacy and Mary's brother Paul.

After the wedding, I started looking for something to do for a living. My first job in Raleigh paid me $20 for impersonating the alien TV character Alf on an answering machine message. I also spent about 8 months working as a salesman in a store that sold compact disks, and also worked briefly at WZZU-FM, 94Z. At one point I thought I would join another Wilmington friend, Steve Jones, on the staff of Hot-104 in Greenville, NC but this didn't work out, either.

So after giving it some thought I again decided that it was time to return to school in pursuit of a four-year college degree. And since I was in Raleigh, I chose a school I had always liked for its sports teams, N.C. State University.

At the time, I'd decided that the logical business for me to enter would be advertising and I had read about 20 books on the subject by Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins, Rosser Reeves and others. But N.C. State didn't offer a major in advertising so I chose Mass Communication with a focus on TV production.

I'd just finished working in broadcasting for 15 years and now was in a classroom with people who were all about 10 years younger than me, with little or no experience, who hoped to do it for a career. The first class I took was a news writing class. After completing the first assignment each person had to read theirs in class and when I read mine everybody's ears perked up and the teacher looked like she was going to fall out of her chair. They were just starting to realize that I'd done this before!

I very quickly became very good friends with two guys named Alan and Rhodney. Rhodney was about the coolest guy under pressure that I'd ever met and was a great guy to have on your crew in the TV studio. Alan was not only cool, but as a technical director, he seemed to have the ability to know what shot I was going to want next and punch the button before I'd even finished calling it out. Both of those guys are among the most creative people I've ever met and the three of us became very good friends. From that point on we took all of our classes together and worked on each others' projects. We came up with some crazy stuff and managed to actually pull some of it off. Those eighteen months were among the most fun I've ever had.

While at N.C. State, Mary and I moved into our own apartment in Cary and I got a part-time job working at WPTF-AM radio. WPTF was the news/talk station in Raleigh but had been there for about 50 years and had a LOT of listeners. They were part of a combo that included WQDR-FM and WPTF-TV 28. I worked with area personality Maury O'Dell (who was like the Raleigh equivalent of Ted Rogers). My boss was a nice older man named Charles, who had a bad toupee reminiscent of "The Hair Club for Men."

This job and my education led to a job at the TV station and for about a year and a half I was on the production crew of the 6:00 and 11:00 news programs. That was a fun job. I was still actively involved in broadcasting but no longer was the star of the show. I worked hard and eventually was hired fulltime when my friend Cindy left to have a baby. My other good friends there included David Dixon, an old radio guy who did audio; and Greg Short. Greg became my first really good Raleigh friend.

I graduated at the end of 1990, then we bought our first home in Garner, NC. I worked nights at the TV station and this allowed me to spend all day painting the new house then go to work at 4:00. We moved in in May, 1991.

And not a moment too soon, because while living in our Cary apartment we had adopted a cat. Chinese people say "You no pick cat, cat pick you!" and this was the case when I was on the back porch cooking out one night and a black cat showed up. We heard that the big maintenance goon at the complex was going around looking for him so he could take him off to be put to sleep at the animal shelter, so we decided to hide him out (animals were NOT allowed!) until we got a house. We moved right as they were about to figure it all out. We named him Tyler but called him "Kitty Boy."

Broadcasting screwed me for the very last time in the fall of 1991. The company that owned the radio and TV stations sold them. The TV station went to a group that decided to save money by firing the news staff, dropping production of a local news show, and cutting all of the production people back to being 35-hour-per-week part-timers (so the cheap bastards wouldn't have to pay us benefits). The call letters were changed to WRDC.

To make matters worse, the guy who became our manager was a guy named Dave who was a COMPLETE TOTAL ASS. He insisted that we all learn to do Master Control so we did. But while we were trying to learn, he would stand over you, criticize and belittle you, even though he couldn't do it worth a damn himself. I soon decided that I could not stand this bastard anymore. The new owners of the radio station weren't much better.

But I needed a job. And, again, I was in the right place at the right time. I had recently taken up the hobby of making my own beer. At the time, it was difficult to find "alternative" types of beer. Bars didn't really have them yet. The grocery stores only stocked the usual commercially brewed American horse piss. So I decided to take up this hobby myself.

I bought supplies at American Brewmaster, a homebrew store in Raleigh and became good friends with Mike, the owner. He taught me much about the art and eventually gave me a job in the store. I began making about two cases of beer every week and soon had about 20 cases of different kinds of beer in the closet, which I consumed with the help of my friend Greg. I liked working there but knew that I would have to find a more permanent career.

Mary convinced me that I had the kind of brain it took to be a computer programmer and encouraged me to return to NCSU to seek a THIRD college degree in Computer Science. By then, people were saying that I would become the first student ever to be awarded tenure. I started in May, 1992 right after Mary and I returned from a great vacation in New York City.

The very first day of my very first class in Computer Science, we found out that we were pregnant. Eight months later in January, 1993, The Girl (her nickname) was born. I had always wanted to have a daughter, and when they carried her around the screen to show her to me, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She had more hair than I have ever seen on a newborn baby. She was also wet, cold, green and boy, was she pissed!

We brought her home a few days later and spent the rest of the winter getting used to having a baby living in the house. Back then, her favorite foods were grapefruit sections dipped in yogurt, and raisins dipped in mustard (YUK!!). I really enjoyed taking her out to the grocery store because every single adult (especially OLD LADIES) came up to me to tell me "that's the prettiest baby I've ever seen." Some people who had THEIR OWN BABIES came over and told me this. Once, a black lady came over and told me "That's the prettiest WHITE baby I've ever seen."

I continued working myself to death at school and did very well. My wife's parents came to stay with us during the week to help take care of The Girl while Mary worked and I spent about 16 hours a day in class and doing homework.

I did my very last radio shift in the Summer of 1993. School and having a baby in the house were taking up all my time and it got to the point where the $6.50 per hour the cheap bastards were paying me no longer justified having the job screw up my weekends anymore. That same weekend two others reached the same decision. WPTF lost 63 years of broadcasting experience in one day.

Early in 1995 I began working as a cooperative education student at SynQuest Technologies as a programmer and designer of multimedia computer-based training. At the time, SynQuest was a small company that worked in a small office in Garner, across the hall from an animal hospital (all day long all you could hear were howling dawgs) and down the hall from an ambulance service (all day long all you could smell was cigarrette smoke and greasy fast-food fumes). Work was great. It was like doing Computer Science homework all day—and suddenly getting paid lots of money for it.

SynQuest did multimedia computer-based training and we were working on a project for the cement mixer division of the Mack Truck company. When their regular voice-over person in Pennsylvania wasn't available for a demo we were working on, they remembered that I'd done radio and asked me to do it. The Mack Truck people liked my voice better than the other guys, and I ended up being the "training voice" of all their products.

We later did training for hospitals, including Wake Medical Center. Once, I had to take The Girl there for some tests. From the moment we arrived until we left, every employee there that heard me talk perked up their ears like Nipper the Dog on the RCA Victor record labels. They knew the voice but had never seen my face before and you could tell this was messing with their heads in a major way.

While working at SynQuest we discovered that we were pregnant again, and in November 1995, our son, The B-Man (also his nickhame) was born. He had a lot of hair, too (but not as much as The Girl). He was a very happy little guy and he looked a lot like me when I was a baby. He was also the youngest baby that I have ever heard laugh, which he always did loudly whenever I bounced him up and down on my lap.

One night he was crying, so I got him out of his crib and tried every trick I knew to get him to calm down, but nothing worked. So I got him and brought him into the back bedroom that I used for an office/study, where I was watching a hockey game on TV. He suddenly calmed down and was fascinated.

From that point on, he became my "hockey buddy." We watched the entire final round of the Colorado-Florida Stanley Cup Finals of 1996 together. Little did we know that one year later we would have an NHL team, and ten years later we'd be standing together watching as they won The Cup.

In Summer, 1996, I graduated. That very week I was also laid off from SynQuest. The official reason was that they had lost out on a contract they thought they'd get, but I really think it was because I had gotten three raises in the last year and now made more money than they wanted to pay me. I wasn't worried because I'd just earned a Summa Cum Laude degree in Computer Science from a major university.

But this meant it was once again time to pound the pavement and with two babies in the house I knew I didn't have a lot of time to waste. I put the time off to good use and fixed everything that was wrong with the house (from four years of it being ignored while I went to NCSU) and enjoyed having a break.

That September we had an unwanted guest: Hurricane Fran. My wife and the kids had gone to visit her relatives in Arkansas and I was alone at the house in Garner. The hurricane came in on a direct path from the ocean, through Wilmington and straight on to here and upon arriving was still pretty nasty. The power went off around 10.

Luckily, as part of fixing up the house, I had prepared an area in our crawl space for this sort of occasion and put a bean bag chair (sealed up to keep the bugs out), a flashlight and a small, battery powered TV under there. So down I went. While there I found a box full of half full liquor bottles that my father had left on previous visits. I spent all night drinking bourbon and watching the weather radar. The house got through Fran OK but I was smashed.

About five weeks after the hurricane I finally got another job. Nortel, previously known as Northern Telecom, was a big company with facilities in Research Triangle Park. They made phone equipment and working there was exactly like living in a Dilbert comic strip--meetings, cubicles and all. I worked in the documentation tools development and support group.

My boss was a nice guy who by day looked like a cross between Dagwood and Pinky Lee. At night he morphed into a rock and roll musician who wore purple leotards with a big replica of an insect head over his own. The coolest thing about working at Nortel was that I made friends with lots of people in Canada who shared my love of hockey and beer. And I made enough money to start collecting hockey jerseys and wore one nearly everyday to work.

Since I finally had a good income, Mary and I decided that it was time to move our family from our small house in Garner to a larger one in the Cary area. Garner was a good place to own one's first home but ours happened to be right down the street from South Garner Park and the traffic up and down the street was terrible. One of the speeding high school 'necks ran over Kitty Boy and we had to have him put to sleep. Another one took out our neighbor's little dog. Obviously this was no place to let small children play unsupervised in the front yard.

We picked Cary because they were known to have good public schools, it was close to work, and because we had really enjoyed the area before when we lived in the apartment there. Remarkably, right about the time we moved to Cary, the NHL Hartford Whalers moved to our area and became the Carolina Hurricanes. Though they played their first two seasons in Greensboro, NC, they eventually moved into a new arena about 5 miles from our home, which made it easy for me and The B-Man to go to games.

Around the summer of 1998, Nortel's CEO stepped down and his replacement began laying off and outsourcing employees. I began realizing that the upper management of Nortel could not be trusted and generally didn't give a damn about the welfare of the people who worked there. Over the next year, their actions caused irreparable damage to my attitude and and I lost all interest in continuing my career with them.

I heard from my group's former director, Kathleen Atwater, that our support group was going to be outsourced. This, though our current director continued to lie and tell us that there were no truth to these rumors. I have always had an impeccable sense of timing and knowing when it was time to move on, much like the subject of Bob Segar's song "Still The Same" and I knew it was time to go.

So in early 2000, well before the proverbial shit hit the fan, I started looking for another job and in June, was fortunate enough to be hired by SAS Institute, Inc. where I was hired as a tester in the C-compiler division. In 2003 I moved to a new department and now test the macro facility for the Base SAS Core Testing department. SAS is a good place to work and is only a few miles from where we live, which makes commuting easy.

Shortly after moving to SAS, my former director Kathleen was found dead in her home, at the bottom of the stairs. Her husband, a writer for the Durham newspaper and former candidate for mayor, was arrested for doing it and was later found guilty of the crime in a BIG trial that drew much national media coverage. It was wierd watching this sort of thing, knowing many of the people who were involved.

In recent years things have slowly been calming down. The kids have gotten bigger and don't require as much maintenance as they used to. I've been fortunate enough to find and get caught up with many of my old friends, many of whom you read about, above, and work on several projects that were put on hold while the kids were babies.

Most notably, I've been in touch with all the WROV gang. A few of us kept in touch for years with letters, then email. As the number grew, we set up a Yahoo listserv. There are now about 30 of us that regularly mail each other. And starting in 2004, we began having yearly reunion parties in Roanoke. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Roanoke I wished that one day I'd be friends with all the WROV personalities and today, I am!

Then came the idea for the WROV History website. I'd put several WROV pictures on my personal website and was surprised by all the email I was getting from people who had grown up in the Star City and were now searching the web for nostalgia. My friend Twig Gravely had recently done a very popular Lendy's site. Other radio station tribute sites were popping up on the web. We decided there should be one for WROV.

I knew much about web development from my new line of work. And since I'd been a photographer at the station in the 70s and 80s I had lots of photos. I began working on this in the summer of 2004. Inspired by the demolition of the old studios on Cleveland Avenue and specifically by Bucky Stover, the first incarnation of the site debuted on November 9, 2004.

Research and development of the history site has led to my renewing old relationships with many old friends and meeting several legendary folks I'd always known and looked up to but did not know personally, including Ron Sunshine, Lee Garrett, Sammy Russell, Ken Tanner and Tommy Holcomb. I now visit Roanoke several times a year to do research at the library and see old friends. It's almost like living there again!

During the Summer of 2006, two very good things and one very sad thing happened. The Carolina Hurricanes hockey team won the Stanley Cup. The B-Man and I went to all the playoff games and were there when it was awarded. I think we've now seen almost everything that can happen at a hockey game. This was SWEET!!!

Then just a few weeks later in July, we went to see our favorite band, Chicago, at the Alltel Pavillion in Raleigh. We already had very good seats, gotten through our membership in their fan club. But a ticket mix-up resulted in us sitting on the FRONT ROW. The B-Man ran to the stage and shook hands with Robert Lamm and after the show we both shook hands with Lee Loughnane and Jason Scheff. THAT TOO, WAS SWEET!!!

But in August, I lost a very good friend. Bucky Stover, one of my two "Siamese radio twins" died from a heart attack while he was driving the Channel 7 news truck on I-81. I'd just seen him a month earlier and we had plans to get our families together for swimming and a cookout the Sunday after we lost him. I intend to honor his memory by continuing work on the WROV History Site. Sleep well, old pal.

And there you have it. The life story of Patrick W. Garrett, thus far. Hopefully it will continue on for years and I'll be adding more and more as time goes on. So far, it has been interesting. I've gotten to do lots of things that many folks just dream about, and have been lucky enough to become very good friends with some very good people.

How many people do you know who grew up, met, and in some cases became very good friends with their childhood idols? Well, I did and everyday I'm thankful for it. Some of it was because I was too naive to know that this sort of thing just wasn't supposed to happen so I made it happen anyway. And much of it is due to my being in the right place at the right time. But I wouldn't trade a bit of it! I love my family, my job, our house, and our friends and am very fortunate to have them all.