Local radio host celebrates 20 years in Baker By Brad Mosher
bmosher@countrymedia.net
Vaughn Zenko found his “perfect” job two decades ago. And he has no plans to leave it. “It will be 20 years on Jan. 4,” he said Tuesday. The road to Baker came via an advertisement he saw while watching the Super Bowl as a college freshman. He posted a job wanted ad on an online service he saw during the Super Bowl game. It took five years, but he got a response from a radio station in Baker. The Great Falls High graduate packed up his gold-colored mini-van and headed to eastern Montana at the age of 22, ready to start work not far from his hometown and his parents. “I was working in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, at the time. The first time I was ever in Baker was when I moved here Jan. 2,” he recalled. “I started on the air the day after that.” He had been working in radio while in Joliet, IL beforehand. “But I didn’t like the corporate radio stuff so I quit and started doing a sales job in Milwaukee.” He said he was advising businesses on how to get the most out of their advertising when the post on the Monster. com website drew a response – five years later – from a radio station in Baker. “I got an email. I said that sounds like fun so I packed up my stuff and moved out here,” he added with a chuckle. He still has the minivan that brought him to Baker. “Its name is Buffy. It doesn’t run anymore but I am committed to that
minivan. We have been through a lot of adventures together. It still is sitting in my backyard waiting for me to fix it. It is enjoying its retirement for right now,” he added, with a laugh. “Originally, that was my parents’ minivan back when I was in high school. I just sort of co-opted it and took it for myself.” “I loved that minivan. We’d take it to concerts and stuff. We’d sleep in the back. It was like the perfect vehicle for a 20-year old kid,” he recalled. One of the biggest road trips was the one which brought him to Baker. “I had quit radio, but my parents lived out here (in Great Falls), so it was a little bit closer. They (the station) wanted me to come out and do sports announcing here. I decided, yeah, lets go.” “I dropped everything in Milwaukee. I wasn’t having a super fun time there and moved out here to give it a shot.” “It turns out that I could do more than sports announcing, so it has worked out well,” Zenko said. Big move He graduated in 1999 from North Central College, a small liberal arts college in Naperville, IL. “It is a western suburb that’s next to Aurora … everybody knows (Aurora) from Wayne’s World.” For Zenko, getting into radio wasn’t quite what he expected at first. “You watch all the movies and stuff and you think it is this lone DJ playing his own music and saying all this important stuff.” “When you actually get into radio, in Chicago anyway, it was like some billionaire in Texas telling you what to say all the time. I hated it.”
“My dream job for retirement was someday to find a nice small radio station where I can go and they are going to let me do anything I want. That was going to be my retirement. I’d just hang out and do my show.” “What do you do when you get your dream job for retirement when you are 22 years old? “I wasn’t about to leave this (Baker). This is perfect. This is everything I ever wanted in radio,” he said. He did sports announce for Baker and Plevna schools and even in Ekalaka or Wibaux, depending on what was going on, Zenko explained. Just a few months later, his role at the station expanded. “They started the rock station in July of 2001. I had hosted a morning show for a little while in Chicago. I kept lobbying … to let me be the morning guy. Eventually, when the rock station went on in July, they let me be the morning show host, he said, explaining how he got the 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. slot in the morning during the week.” “There is not exactly a ‘drive-time’ here. If there is, it is only about two to two and a half minutes. When I first moved here I thought about moving to Plevna because I missed the commute. I missed having like that hour drive to work where I could sip coffee and listen to the radio and stuff. Instead, it is now like five minutes to get here to the old radio station. In Chicago, I lived 26 miles from work and never made it in less than an hour and a half,” he recalled. “Drive time here is a lot different. Here, I might get the pipeliners on their way to work because they have to drive a little bit further,” Zenko said.
KFLN (AM 960) originally hired him, but he also spends a lot of time with the rock station KJJM (105.5 FM – The Rock), both operated by Newell Broadcasting. “I still fill in on the AM station when they need me, but mostly I am on the rock station, which is KJJM,” he explained. “We were technically the first rock and roll station in eastern Montana.” Sometimes, he can even be on both at the same time. He recalled one time when the announcer for one of the stations had car trouble and couldn’t get to work. That left
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Memorable Spartan sports broadcast recreated By Brad Mosher
bmosher@countrymedia.net
Commissioner Roy Rost swore in Kevin Braun, Commissioner; Jeraldine A. Newell, Clerk of the District Court; and Keli R. Bertsch, Deputy Clerk on Dec. 28, at the courthouse.
It was like a detective story, in a radio format. Something was missing or lost which had a big impact in Fallon County decades ago. It took a lot of prep work, but local radio broadcaster Vaughn Zenko said he was proud of a recent historical broadcast from 2000 when the local Baker high school basketball team was in an overtime state playoff contest. With the basketball season put on hold by Montana state officials until January, the station has been broadcasting recordings of games from the past. “The deal was that we were going to play classic games that we had from back in the day,” he said. “(Recently), it was the most famous game in the history of Baker – the semifinal game from the year 2000 where Baker went on to win the state championship. The semifinal game (with Wolf Point) that went into double overtime and was like the most exciting game in history.” “We did not have a radio copy of that game. I felt we needed to have some kind of archive of that game because it was so impactful to so many people. It was like that big of a game for Baker’s basketball,” he said. So Zenko tracked down a video cassette of that game from the then-coach, Dave Breitbach. Now, he is the principal at Baker. “He found the team’s old video of that game. We got that. We found a VCR. I asked for newspaper clippings or any information people had about the game.”
“Then I put the tape in the VCR and rebroadcast the game off of this videotape from 20 years ago. I broadcast the game as if I was actually there. There was crowd noise. I tried to make it like I was actually there on that day in March at that basketball game.” “We played it Friday night and the response was overwhelming. People who I had never heard of found my number and were texting me that night saying thank you so much for doing this game,” he said. “There were people telling me that they were listening to the game and were crying. Some of the old coaches were telling me they were listening.” “It was a big moment. It was a big community event where like
everybody somehow had a connection back to this basketball game and they were so appreciative,” he said. “It took me about 14 hours to put this game together with all the production that needed to be done to make it sound right.” “It brought people who weren’t in Baker anymore back to Baker for those memories and that basketball game,” he explained. “It was like a super cool moment of how cool radio could be and how big a deal it could be for a community like this one.” “Breitbach said there were a lot of people listening,” Zenko said, noting that the former coach heard from a lot of former players when the game was being broadcast. “It was a fun thing for t
he community.” According to Zenko, it was like a cool Christmas present to the community after a terrible year. “It was a really neat moment last Friday night. Everybody was listening to this basketball game and reliving all these memories.” “It was something fun that radio could do for the community,” he added. “It was super fun.” Zenko said that he doesn’t think any other game had the impact on the community the semifinal playoff contest against the Wolves had. But, he is hopeful the upcoming season will be able to be played and the station can broadcast the current season games. “Still, we might do this one again next year,” he added.