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Zenga McCurdy called me back in May of 2018 and asked for some feedback on his morning radio show. Since then I have made a point of listening to the show every once and a while to hear the progress. I meant to grab a beer with him in Toronto last year but we only had enough time for a "Hi, How are you?" and then we were off to whatever we were off to. I am very pleased that I got to have this conversation with him about his Kitchener/Waterloo upbringing where he confesses he wasn't always on the right side of an issue. He explains why he chose radio and how in his first job in rural B.C., he faced down racist slurs and marched onward with the support of his parents who have always been there for him.
Today, Zenga is the morning host on Kiss 100.5 along with Casey. Sault St. Marie may be one of those Great Lakes towns where the hockey players will always be a little more famous than the media personalities. I totally blanked that Wayne Gretzky played his junior hockey there for one season before he went to the Indianapolis Racers and then the Oilers.
Today, Zenga is the morning host on Kiss 100.5 along with Casey. Sault St. Marie may be one of those Great Lakes towns where the hockey players will always be a little more famous than the media personalities. I totally blanked that Wayne Gretzky played his junior hockey there for one season before he went to the Indianapolis Racers and then the Oilers.
One of the joys of this podcast is the honest stories that get told. I thank Zenga for sharing his. I can't imagine the difficulty of having racist words hurled at you when you are trying to make your dreams come true miles from home. In that moment there must be feelings of isolation, loneliness and defeat that must fill the mind. Every year I go to radio conferences and there are questions about why there aren't more women or visible minorities in positions in programming departments. There are many reasons but I do believe that a big one is because we tell new grads that moving across the country to remote places is a pre-requisite to getting key experience. If you're a white heterosexual male, this is often going to come without all the added pressures that a female or person of colour has to endure miles from home. Yes a lot of this bullshit exists in medium and large markets as well, but there's strength in numbers and when Zenga tells me that only 4 members of his graduating class took offers to leave to work in radio, the industry isn't doing itself any favours by letting their grads take local jobs where they won't have to deal with that nonsense 2 time zones away.