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ONC: Where did you grow up, and how did you grow to have a love for radio?
CB: (Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” plays in the background.) Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, I have no idea how I ended up in radio. I just loved listening to it. I couldn’t sing or play anything. I used to call in and win morning quiz prizes on the local radio station. When I was 13, for my bar mitzvah, I got one of those big tape recorders, and I worked part-time at a record store in downtown Norfolk. In my junior year, I got asked to be on a radio show called “Teen Time” on the big Top 40 radio station. Since I had worked at the record shop, I was able to get tickets to the shows for the front row and knew the guy running it, so I would take my tape recorder and interview all of these people backstage, and then I would play the interviews back on the radio. I still have those tapes. I have been in North Carolina since 1959, when I came to Chapel Hill for college. I managed to get out of school in Chapel Hill somehow with my degree in economics. I worked part-time at a radio station, and then my first job was at a R&B radio station in Charlotte. The radio station I grew up listening to in Norfolk was a R&B station, 850 AM, so 850 was already on the dial when we came into North Carolina, and, ironically, it was WKIX. Unfortunately, it was a directional station, so I couldn’t pick up the signal at night, but I could in the daytime. 54
OutreachNC.com | AUGUST 2017