I recently took a tour of radio station KCSN located on the campus of California State University Northridge (CSUN) where my wife graduated and I came close. My mother was a cancer patient and as is common in cancer patients she contracted a terribly painful case of Shingles from which I caught Chicken Pox. Chicken Pox at ten years old is usually no big deal but at twenty-one it was awful. I starting getting sick on the day of registration for the spring semester. Had it been for the fall semester I simply would have returned to school in the spring. Had it been during the summer there would have been no big problem returning in the fall but as it was I had to wait all spring and all summer to return in the fall and my parents insisted I was not on vacation but had to work if I wasn’t going to school. I went back to work at Hanna-Barbera Studios where I had worked during the summer immediately out of high school and after a couple of months I made the move to Ralph Bakshi Studios to work on a movie.
After months of employment which paid the kind of pay rate that my father, a grammar school teacher, claimed took him years to get, I was faced with the decision to either continue working or return to school. Since returning to school essentially meant continuing to remain living at home, I decided to continue working and get my own apartment.
The campus of CSUN was virtually unrecognizable to me when I visited the radio station which is located in a huge new media building. Shiny, new and of glass and steel the new building is quite impressive and hopefully earthquake resistant. The radio station was surprisingly roomy and clean as most radio stations I’ve seen are tiny, cramped and well lived-in.
Surprisingly, KCSN, while promoting itself as being on the campus of CSUN is not a student radio station. Its target audience is not the students but the older rock and roll fan demographic of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys. Their program director, Sky Daniels, and new DJ, Judd the Fish, are both long time Classic Rock radio people and Terri Nunn of the band Berlin has a weekend show. The only student participation comes from the news reports which are compiled by journalism students. I was a journalism student myself when I was at Northridge, although I was on the staff of the school newspaper as a political cartoonist, not as a reporter. Years after what should have been my graduation from CSUN I returned to see about advertising my illustrated lyrics magazine, PaperCuts, in the school paper and visited the newspaper office. I was happy to see one of my old cartoons set up on a file cabinet, still there after all those years.
After months of employment which paid the kind of pay rate that my father, a grammar school teacher, claimed took him years to get, I was faced with the decision to either continue working or return to school. Since returning to school essentially meant continuing to remain living at home, I decided to continue working and get my own apartment.
The campus of CSUN was virtually unrecognizable to me when I visited the radio station which is located in a huge new media building. Shiny, new and of glass and steel the new building is quite impressive and hopefully earthquake resistant. The radio station was surprisingly roomy and clean as most radio stations I’ve seen are tiny, cramped and well lived-in.
Surprisingly, KCSN, while promoting itself as being on the campus of CSUN is not a student radio station. Its target audience is not the students but the older rock and roll fan demographic of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys. Their program director, Sky Daniels, and new DJ, Judd the Fish, are both long time Classic Rock radio people and Terri Nunn of the band Berlin has a weekend show. The only student participation comes from the news reports which are compiled by journalism students. I was a journalism student myself when I was at Northridge, although I was on the staff of the school newspaper as a political cartoonist, not as a reporter. Years after what should have been my graduation from CSUN I returned to see about advertising my illustrated lyrics magazine, PaperCuts, in the school paper and visited the newspaper office. I was happy to see one of my old cartoons set up on a file cabinet, still there after all those years.
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