It was great to receive a letter from then-Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild congratulating me for receiving a station permit from the FCC. Ten and a half months later, the station was up and running.
I’d chosen a song chosen to be the first one played but engineer Owen Watson surprised me when he tol me we were on the air.
I didn’t know we were so close to going live. In fact, I thought we were still a few days away, so it shocked me when Owen told me. And it was on my birthday no less. After working on getting the station off the ground for nearly five years, it launched, completely coincidentally, on my birthday!
The song Owen picked–the first song ever played on Downtown Radio–was “Hell’s Bell’s” by AC/DC, an apt choice even if it wasn’t the one I had in mind.