Looking back, there were a lot of great teachers in my life who got me interested in a variety of things, many of which I am still interested in today.  By far, one who added the greatest value to my education was my first band/music teacher, Joe Patterson. When we took our ‘band test’ in […]

      One of my favorite pastimes is reading books and articles about drummers.  Of particular interest to me are three basics bits of information: 1) How old were they when they became obsessed with drumming, 2) When and how did they acquire their first proper drum kit, and 3) What path did they follow before […]

      WOAS-FM 88.5 will begin the new year with a Schwans Cares fundraising campaign to help replace some of our studio equipment.  The WOAS EQUIPMENT REPLACEMENT campaign will begin on January 1, 2019 and anyone who orders products from Schwans can donate to WOAS simply by including the campaign’s number 44259 .  Schwans will donate […]

     We left off Part 1 around 1997 with the newly remodeled WOAS-FM studio approaching the cusp of the new millennium with a new studio layout and all new electronic hardware.  There were still things to be done but operating a radio station isn’t much different that owning a car or home: there is […]

      If you are of a certain age, you probably remember when they used to predict what life would be like in the year 2000.  The list of ‘gee whiz’ things would invariably include flying cars, personal jetpacks, or both. Nobody was predicting wristwatch communication devices (that was a little too Dick Tracey for most […]

    The band that could be the next Beatles.  This was never a good way for the press to introduce a band to the world.  It has happened many times over, but it has never quite worked out that way.  The pop band The Cyrcle were introduced on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand as “the band that […]

      In Part 1, we used Robert Kurson’s book ROCKET MEN (Random House 2018) as a reference to examine how NASA stepped away from their normally cautious process of training crews for space missions over an 18 month period.  The idea was to keep ahead of the Russians in the Space Race when intelligence reports […]

      “Are you out of your mind?” he yelled into the phone.  “You’re putting the agency and the whole program at risk!”  The ‘he’ above would be NASA Administrator James E. Webb. On the receiving end of his tirade were his deputy at NASA, Thomas Paine, and the director of the Apollo Manned Lunar Landing […]

  Pearl Harbor was attacked by the United States Armed Forces in 1928, 1932, 1933, and 1937.  Of course, these were only training exercises, but just the same, the Navy’s assaults on Pearl had caught the defending forces with their pants down each and every time.  The 1932 attack even saw the ‘enemy’ planes swoop in […]

      Near the end of my time with the band Knockdown, Lee the bass player loaned me a copy of an album called Medusa by an English band called Trapeze.  He mentioned something about wanting to learn some of their songs, but a few months later, we played our last gigs before Ray the guitar […]