An Unconventional Journey To put it mildly, Dom Giordano’s career path was unconventional. He has gone from being a creative high school teacher—he once rewarded a student’s reading accomplishments by giving him enough shrimp to feed an entire classroom—to becoming one of Philadelphia’s most popular talk-radio hosts. Teaching groups of easily distracted teenagers, he said, helped him make the transition to the world of radio, where he has interviewed such people as Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. Hey, if you can find a way to captivate a bunch of 15- and 16-year-olds, what’s so difficult about interviewing a political big shot? “Teaching was a great experience,” said Giordano, who now hosts a show on 1210 WPHT. “It prepared me to entertain and to get people informed. It taught me how important energy is.” Giordano has local roots, enabling him to understand the psyche of his listeners. He attended Bishop Neumann High and earned his degree in education at LaSalle. He received his masters at Antioch University, where he met his wife, Rosemary, and attended Rutgers Law School. “But I never took the bar because I got into this,” he said. “This” is the radio business—and he probably wouldn’t be behind a microphone if it wasn’t for his creative teaching methods, which, in a roundabout way, led to him getting a taste of the media. Giordano taught English in Camden (Davis Middle School), Darby Township High in Delaware County, and Triton High in Runnemede, NJ. While teaching at Triton, Giordano rewarded his students for correct answers. “It was like a behavior-modification system,” he said. “If you got something right, I’d threw you gum or candy and the wrapper counted toward points—and you needed X number of points to get an A or a B.” Giordano’s main goal was to make students want to read. That seemed like a long shot at first, but the reward system proved beneficial. “It helped tremendously dealing with people who were, let’s say, reluctant learners,” he said. The more points you accumulated, the higher your grade. And the students who excelled were given prizes donated by folks in the community. “One kid read 10 books in one quarter, so I got him 30 pounds of shrimp, because that’s what he wanted,” Giordano said with a smile. “Another kid read a lot of books and I got him a half-priced transmission job.” His unique system became known as Giordano-ism. Giordano’s unorthodox teaching methods became publicized locally and made him a popular radio guest. It even enabled him to attract well-known guests—such as Tug McGraw, the former Phillies relief ace—to his classroom. “There were those who could read, but they chose not to read,” Giordano said. “I started to write about it, started to have the kids write to famous people...and it got picked up on the news and that’s how I got started doing talk radio. They had me on as a guest because of all these teaching things I had written about and were in the news.” As a radio guest, Giordano felt so comfortable he decided he would “like to try this while I was still teaching. So I got into paid talk radio.” He bought air time at a Jenkintown station. “Before me, was Rev. Billy Bob Ray, saying the world was ending, and then I was on after him,” he said, giving the radio host a fictitious name. Giordano sold advertising to pay for his costs, then went to a bigger station and was on the air after a “glutton who was doing a six-course meal” as he spoke, “and then I would come on and do a self-improvement show, followed by Mark Segal and the only gay hour in America. They would open the closet door and say they were coming out of the closet. “That,” said Giordano, a Germantown resident, “was quite the programming block on a Saturday afternoon.” For a while, Giordano continued to teach full-time while doing radio work on the weekends. In 1987, he went to WWDB and left teaching. Thirteen years later, he was hired at WCAU (now WPHT) and has been there ever since. No word on whether he has been rewarding his producers with bushels of shrimp. 52
They don’t like him at this point, and he has to win enough of them to counter this.” Giordano believes Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) is in the “top two or three states” whose outcome will decide the overall election. The polls have been close, but Trump is fighting huge odds because Democrats hold a 919,000-voter registration edge over Republicans. In New Jersey, which has 14 electoral votes, Giordano sees Clinton winning in a landslide. A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Pennsylvania and New Jersey since 1988, when the states helped George H.W. Bush take the election.
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S FAR AS PICKING this year’s overall winner, “the fundamentals are there for Hillary Clinton,” Giordano said before adding, “I would give Trump a puncher’s chance. The electoral map adds up for Hillary Clinton. The Democrats have a lock on California, New York, but....” There is something about Trump that makes Giordano believe an upset is possible. “I wouldn’t call it an ‘outside’ chance for Trump, but I’d call it a ‘reasonable’ chance,” he said. In some polls, “Ronald Reagan was behind Jimmy Carter until the Sunday before the big election in 1980—and then it broke right for him.” It will be a “relatively close” race, Giordano predicted. “It’s Hillary’s race to lose, but she’s on her way to losing it.” He said if Trump can be relatively gaffe-free down the stretch—and continues his campaign’s new strategy by displaying more substance than bluster—he could shock the world. No matter who wins, Giordano will be happy behind a WPHT microphone. He said the station has become a bigger player because of resources provided by David Yadgaroff, the CBS Philadelphia market manager, and Jared Hart, 1210’s program director. “What’s thrilling about this job is you never know what’s going to come up,” Giordano said, noting he once did a politicalbased interview with Cher. “Here’s the essence of my job: In one week, I got to judge a seven-hour Miss Kensington contest, and the very same week I got to interview Dick Cheney after he had the heart problem during the recount of 2000.” There was another time he got to interview Kissinger and Phillies manager Charlie Manuel on consecutive segments. “Where else, but on talk radio, do you have Henry Kissinger followed by Charlie Manuel?” Giordano cracked. “When you can handle those two back-to-back, you know you’ve arrived in talk radio.” n