I knew what I wanted to do when I was eight years old. You know the story. I hated school; it was prison. I could see out the windows where I would rather be. I was locked in, forced to learn how to paste or whatever you learn in first grade. 

Every morning as I was getting ready to go to this prison, my mother had the radio on. She was listening to a local jock, and this guy sounded like he was having fun, playing records, doing commentary and the weather forecast. I said, “I want my day to be like that!”

That was how I decided I wanted to be in radio. I loved music and wanted to be the guy on the radio playing music for people. Till then, I had quit pretty much everything else I had tried. I was a tenderfoot Boy Scout for a year. That’s unheard of. The first campout I got the Gold Brick Award, which went to the least useful person on the trip. I had quit everything but my affinity for radio.

So when I was nine or ten, my parents gave me the Caravelle AM radio transmitter and receiver by Remco. It was the most amazing thing. It was plastic, about three feet long and two feet high. You set it to transmit on any open AM frequency and you could broadcast over a radio inside your house. I would take it upstairs and play deejay with it, put it next to the turntable so it could pick up the music, and my mother would actually sit down and listen to me on the radio pretend to be a disc jockey. This is actually how I was first on the air.

The quality wasn’t great. But it worked, and it allowed me to get started on living out my dreams. And even though the family didn’t understand it, the fact that I wouldn’t quit it was enough for them to encourage me to stay in it — and it’s been so rewarding, so meaningful to me. Many people have made it possible. Among them, all of you.

We’re at the top of the heap, the most listened-to radio talk show in the country. You made it so. I have eternal, never-ending gratitude. You have been integral in my dreams coming true, my wildest dreams when I was pretending to be a deejay on the radio when I was a young kid. Those dreams took me from a plastic toy stamped “microphone” to the Golden eib Mic. Doing what I was born to do. And so are you: I was born to host, and you were born to listen.