[BC] What brought me into radio

[Steve Ordinetz]

I guess my first interest in radio was piqued when, as a small child I wondered how they were able to cold-segue 2 songs together without any gap between the songs.  My only exposure to playing records at the time was a record changer, one of my first "duh" moments was when someone explained that they had 2 turntables.
Some time in the mid-50s (I would have been in the first or second grade I presume) our local station had some sort of open house and my father took me there.  Couldn't really see much, but he lifted me up so I could see thru the window into the studio.  Had no idea what the dj was doing, but I thought it was incredibly cool.  About 10 years later I got my first radio job as a weekender at that station, at first just running the board for the Sunday morning stuff no one listened to, later getting to play the hits!!  My father took a day off work to drive me to Boston to take the test for my 3rd...no way was I going to disappoint him by not passing!  For the next 20-odd years I was a weekender at various stations in addition to my "day job", not getting into radio fulltime until the late 80s/early 90s.
While in junior high I built an AM transmitter from plans in some electronic magazine and broadcast to the neighborhood (such as it was...there weren't many houses nearby) until I got my first "real" gig.

We had a neighbor who was a ham when I was a teenager.  Would visit him from time to time, but after a while that whole scene seemed kind of boring and I lost interest in it.  My idea of being "on the air" wasn't chatting to some stranger about what equipment we had.

Several friends and I had shortwave radios in high school, still have a bunch of QSLs from most of the major players.  Got a Knight Kit Star Roamer for Christmas one year.  Had to have been about the deafest SW radio out there!  
Speaking of shortwave stations whose purpose was mysterious...I remember hearing stations that would play a short instrumental passage over and over.  There was one that was a maybe :10 flute passage...my friends and I referred to that one as "Arabian time" for lack of a better name.  It did not seem to be an interval signal, never did find out what it was.
It would drive my mother nuts when I'd tune to CHU, then go off and do something else while their "all time all the time" format would play on...