For those that didn’t know, for most of the 1990s I was on the radio as a journalist, show host, announcer, and DJ in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.  I even hosted a cable TV show for about 13 weeks somewhere in the middle of that decade.  Here are some samples of some of that work:

http://soundcloud.com/rodmilam/sets/broadcast-news-journalism

Doing that kind of job was NOT what I thought I wanted to do with my life when I was a little kid.  I spent that time seriously wanting to be an astronaut.  (Seriously enough that I went to Space Camp twice when it first opened up in Huntsville, Alabama [where I won 2 awards]  and studied Aerospace Engineering for a while.)  But in 2000, after nearly a decade of getting paid to be on the radio, I looked back at so much of the activity that I did when I was a kid, and I saw that I was a broadcaster of some sort for all of my life.

I have old cassettes from when I was about 5 in the 1970s of me just rambling on the mic about what was going on around me, what my aunt was trying (and failing) to sing along with on the radio, and trying to interview my little sister (who was 2 years old and slightly less than fully fluent in English at the time…naturally).  Even moving up through middle and high school in the early 1980s I have recordings of a friend and I pretending to be DJs and radio hosts “Run” and “DMC” and making fake commercials about the Atari cartridges that no one should have bought.  (I’m pretty sure that 3D Tic Tac Toe was on the top of that list.)

Then, even when I was away at school as an engineering student in the late 1980s, I somehow found my way behind a microphone and eventually on the air for the first time as host at my college, student run radio station KMNR.  After that on air fun and a desperate need to change from engineering to some, scratch that, any other kind of career path, I took it upon myself to see what it might be like to do the broadcast thing for a living.

And now after doing that in the 90s and eventually having technology and outlets for expression evolve rapid along with me, I’ve moved through radio, to voiceover work, to documentary film making, and now online writing and scene setting. I want to find things in the world that I think that everyone should know about, package it up, and then cast it as broadly as possible via the Internet tubes over social media and blog outlets.  I guess that I’m truly just a broadcaster, in the most broad sense of the word, at heart. (See what I did there?)

I’m starting to put out all of these posts and ideas that I’ve been able to gather on these virtual pages, I guess, because I guess that i just can’t help myself.  It must be inbred.  So I hope that you won’t mind the wide variety of stories, subjects, and people that I bring to your attention using this site as host because I think it’s going to happen whether I want it to or not.

I can’t and won’t promise that everything will be to all of your individual tastes, but I will promise that I will try to keep it interesting and insightful.  That has always been the way that I’ve rolled when talking with the masses.  I look forward to this new journey, and I hope that you’ll feel free to take what you like and spread it far and wide, while taking what you don’t like and ignoring it.  This should be fun.  I look forward to it.

And coming up next…who knows? I’m running the board now and I left my playlist at home.  Enjoy!