Marty Dempsey today.

 

Marty did weekends at WPGC in the mid '70's. He later did afternoons at WWDC-AM and WAVA. Today he is on the Production Director at Red Zebra's stations in Washington.

 

 

Marty Dempsey writes:

It all started when I was 16. I drove up to a radio station in the suburbs of Washington D.C. to ask, how do you get into radio?

The receptionist wasn't at the desk so I strolled around and ended up in the studio area. I heard two legendary voices, I looked through the glass and it was the Great "Joy Boys" Willard Scott and Ed Walker, live on the air! After watching those two phenomenal talents...that did it for me!

The Program Director told me I had to get a Radio-Telephone license, so I studied, and got my First Class License, which enabled me to be on the air, or an engineer.

Of coarse were talking early 1970s, when we lived in a world of analog, tubes, records and tape.

I got a job as the Assistant Engineer at a small AM radio station. Then Christmas Eve 1973, the dj on the air said he needed to do some shopping, and that it was finally my turn to go on the air, I was petrified!

Nervously, I cued up the 45 RPM records, and when I opened up the microphone to talk, I sounded like a 13 year-old boy whose voice had just changed!

A year later, I was hired as an Engineer at NBC 4 TV in Washington, where Willard Scott was the weatherman before he went national.

The AM/FM Radio stations were on the bottom floor. Where I played the records and ran the control board for the announcers. A year later, the on air bug bit me again and I ended up full time at the same radio station I had drove up to as a 16 year old!

Now, some thirty years and forty radio stations later, I'm playing all those great timeless songs from the seventies on XM 7, which I played on record when they were new! And you know what? I love those songs today just as much as I did then. I hope that that feeling comes right through the speakers and into your car on the ride home!

My passion and hobby is restoring American Muscle Cars. Who would have thought some of those cars from the seventies would command the price they do today?

For me after starring at computers for hours, there is nothing like sandblasting, welding and painting an old "rust bucket" and turning into a thing of beauty!

 

Sound Files

Airchecks

Jingles

(Special thanks to Jonathon Wolfert from JAM for the above).

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