I can remember wanting to be in radio even when I was a little kid. Thanks to the Air Force, I learned during my 18 months in Turkey that I could actually do radio. And I learned that the role I wanted to play in radio was that of a journalist. KTUS, where I adopted the name, 'Nick Newberry,' got me started. And then an admin guy who knew my voice KTUS and who preceded me from Karamursel to Vanderburg AFB, gave me the chance to try my hand at radio at a real commercial station.

What a stroke of luck that was! I didn't even know the guy (nor do I to this day), but he called me in the orderly room of the brand new Minuteman missile squadron where I had been assigned and told me that a local radio station had called the base asking whether they knew of an experienced radio guy who might want to do weekend radio shifts. He recommeded me. I did an audition and the next thing I knew, I was a weekend disk jockey.

By the time I got my early out, in June of 1962, I was already enrolled in the Journalism school at Marquette University in my home town of Milwaukee. And Marquette gave me almost a full year's credit for the nine months I spent in language school (Bulgarian) at Syracuse.

Well, I'm not going to write a book-length feature here. So, let me just briefly trace my steps after that. About a year after I started college, I lucked into a job in the newsroom of the local NBC radio/TV station. Later (long story) I switched to the staff of the morning newspaper owned by the same company. It's now called the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

After graduation, the paper gave me my own news bureau in Central Wisconsin.  That was a pretty exciting career opportunity, but one-man-bureau life was pretty boring and I only lasted about a year and a half before I was lured away by more money into public relations -- first, for a year in Chicago and then under the bright lights of The Big Apple.

In New York, I got married, had two terrific kids who are now all grownup -- a son in Denver and a daughter, with three kids of her own, in Tucson. The marriage didn't last, however, and I spent from 1977-1999 as a single guy again.

The P.R. agency assigned me to a dream job, promoting the Johnson Wax company's sponsorship of the Canadian-American Challenge Cup (Can-Am) road racing series. That led to quite a few years in the auto racing field, mostly in sports car and Indy Car racing. I finally got out when I had the chance to start a business providing the public relations industry with satellite services. And that got me right back into broadcast journalism, producing and distributing corporate video "news releases" for TV newsrooms around the country. I "worked" the national political conventions in 1984 and 1988. I sold my company, Newslink, and got another shot at seeing the conventions first-hand in 1996, as the producer of a nationally-syndicated daily radio talk show.

That radio job took me from New York to Washington, DC.  One of the more interesting decisions I made there was to go back to school and, taking one class at a time, I finished my Masters in Telecommunications in the Spring of 1999. I invited an old (girl)friend to attend my graduation. Sharon teaches journalism and mass communications here at Bradley University in Peoria and has two grownup kids of her own.

The old friend has become my wife. And, since my career was deemed more "portable" than hers,  I moved to Peoria late last summer. Thus, I find myself back in the Midwest after a 35 year absence.

I work for an Internet service provider, making some use of the stuff I learned in graduate school, and I teach public relations courses from time to time. I also spend a lot of time on a bicycle, a hobby I re-discovered about a dozen years ago.

If you care (after all this!) to know anything more about me, check out my web page at: http://www.ssi.net/~brad