Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Do you see the glass as half empty or half full? Even the most ‘pie-in-the-sky, the sun is always shining somewhere’ people (think REM’s Shiny Happy People or Katrina and The Waves I’m Walking On Sunshine) certainly have days when things don’t look so rosy. I won’t […]
My source for what “National This or That Day” it is, the Jan Tucker Show, planted the idea for this FTV when Jan mentioned that one of the things designated for April 4 is ‘National School Library Day’. With only so many days in a calendar year, there are usually multiple ‘National This or […]
Robert Weston Smith. Does the name ring any bells? No? How about Big Smith and the Records? Daddy Jules? I will give you a couple of hints: If you have seen the movie American Graffiti or reruns of the TV show The Midnight Special or heard Bob Smith’s, “Have Mercy!” catch phrase, then you might […]
In the summer of 1974, Professor Pat Farrell was both my instructor and boss at Northern Michigan University’s Field Station just south of Melstrand, Michigan. All Geography majors were required to take a class called Field Studies to give us boots on the ground experience using tools of the mapping trade. My undergraduate advisor, […]
S4SD 2021 Campaign So what exactly is S4SD? The full name of the program is Strive 4 a Safer Drive. Six years ago, the Ontonagon Area School owned FM radio station, WOAS-FM 88.5, was looking for a way to engage student DJs in some form of community service. With sponsorship by the Ford Motor Company […]
Warning: I like Styx. I have always liked Styx. What happened to make them fragment, reassemble, and separate again into two distinct ‘camps’ the way they did was never quite clear to me. The memory of where and when I first heard Lady on the radio, however, pops into my head everytime I hear […]
We start this month with the planets visible in the morning sky. Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn can be seen low in the ESE forty minutes before sunrise. Mercury will drop lower each day and be lost in the Sun’s glare by mid-month. The two Gas Giants will climb higher each day. Since their historic close […]
We left Part 1 of The Smothers Brothers just as they had their first album in the can. They landed in New York during the brutal winter of 1961 for their first club dates on the East Coast. It must have been quite a shock to their systems having spent the majority of their […]
In the world of entertainment, the list of stories about siblings working together is a long one. In the music end of the business, these tales often focus on the dysfunctional pairings like the Robinson brothers (The Black Crowes), The Everly Brothers (Phil and Don), and the Gallagher brothers (Oasis). Some concentrate on groups […]
Former WOAS-FM General Manager Mike ‘Zenith’ Bennett was much too young when he passed away a few years back. Mike was my radio mentor and he made it a point to stay in touch years after he had moved from Ontonagon to Bessemer and eventually to Marquette. When I was first getting involved in […]