My first memory was when I was less than three and I was sitting on the couch staring across the room at the radio, and I distinctly remember there was country music on the radio. That's the first thing I remember in life! Then ever since I was 7, I was hooked on radio. I was listening to shortwave radio--the BBC, Radio Moscow, Radio Bucharest. When I was 12 I started studying to take a test to get my amateur radio license, and I got my license when I was 13 or 14.

At school I was a good student, and the only time I really goofed off was when I was a senior in high school. That's when I joined the Marines. There were about five of us from school and we thought we'd enlist before we got drafted. We all went through boot camp at Parris Island. That was a struggle. Keeping up was the main thing, because if you didn't keep up with the platoon, they'd set you back. I think that if nothing else, the Marines instilled in me responsibility and discipline and a certain level of organization.

In their infinite wisdom, they thought I would be a good radio operator, so after boot camp they sent me to Norfolk, Virginia to go to radio school to learn what I already knew. Back then, the buzz was Cuba. Going through boot camp the drill instructor's telling us we're going to be down in Cuba fighting Castro. Nobody was talking about Vietnam in 1964. Who knew? Then, in 1965, I went over to the Far East. Okinawa. Back then, if a guy wanted to call home you'd use commercial shortwave and transcontinental cables, and it was a very horrible and expensive process. For a guy to call home it was like 23 bucks. So what the Marine Corps did was take guys like me, amateur radio operators, and have us utilize shortwave radio frequencies to run phone patches home. Soldiers would come in and fill out a card, and we had a waiting room they'd sit in while we'd place their calls. We were like glorified phone operators, but it was a heck of a morale thing. We'd hear guys getting off the phone after learning that their wives had just had a baby. The battalion commander would come through and make a call, and once a three-star general came through and wanted to call his wife. We were making friends--they loved us.

Of course we had to monitor the conversations, and if they started talking about where they were going, we'd have to stop them. Then there'd be calls and some guy's calling his wife when it's 10 at night in California and she doesn't answer. The sad part was hearing guys whose wives were screwing around on them or they were going through divorces and they were trapped over there getting ready to go down to Vietnam stuck in a 13-month tour.

I was in for four years and when I got out at 21--compared to where I was when I was 17 it was a quantum leap. I went back to my folk's house where the objective was to get any kind of job, and through a friend I got a job at a local TV station as a projectionist. I was making two bucks an hour and my take home was $63. I was happy.

The station had two projectors, like slide projectors, and there were two or three islands where I had to load up every 30-second commercial. For the evening news, one guy would shoot film and I'd have to process it, and then I ran film clips and edited them and spliced them together while also running commercials and putting tapes in the VCR.

I had always wanted to do some announcing and I started recording commercials, and eventually I started doing booth announcing which led to me doing the weekend news. On TV. Every Sunday they had a 15-minute news block and I was doing everything--news and sports and weather--and I had to write the stories myself. I'd go out and shoot stories in the morning and steal news from wires and newspapers--but nobody ever told me how to do weather! Honest to God, I had no idea what I was doing. We had a map and I'd draw in the cold fronts and I didn't really know what that was. I'd draw a line here and a line there and sometimes I'd put an "H" there and sometimes I'd just steal the forecast right out of the paper and read the summary. Nobody ever took me aside and told me how to do it. I guess they assumed nobody was watching.

I was there for two years when an AM news station, WGAL 1490 over in Lancaster, offered me a midday slot. They were going to pay me 10 bucks more a week, and besides that, I preferred radio. I did that for two years and then I started to look around and I saw a couple of ads in a broadcasting magazine, so I sent out tapes to Fort Wayne, to Savannah, and to WDBO. I liked WDBO because I had been down to Florida a few months earlier and even though I didn't even know Orlando from Ocala, I knew it would be neat to go to Florida. They flew me down and hired me and that was it. I've had the same job ever since.

I consider myself a success. I'm happy. I'm happily married to Emilie and I'm proud that I was smart enough to marry her. I have a nice house and I have no debts and I'm in a position where I could retire if I wanted to. Job-wise, I'm good at what I do. To become successful, I think that takes a certain amount of natural ability in whatever you want to do, whether it's being a radio announcer or a chef or an interviewer. No matter how much book smarts someone has, they're never going to be successful without that natural ability. And sometimes it's just luck, isn't it? I'm not a real outgoing guy, and if I had stayed in my hometown I would have ended up being an engineer at the radio station.

If you're in a creative business, you're always kind of negative on yourself unless someone gives you a pat on the head and says you're doing a good job. If you get recognition along the way, a new contract or more money, that builds confidence. But there comes a point in your life where you become more comfortable with yourself and think "this is what I do and I'm good at it." I haven't gotten to a point where I feel I am deteriorating. In my business you can do that--you can overstay your welcome. And that's one thing you have to learn in this business: it's to know when to go.

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Jim Turner (with Officer Jim) celebrating his 30th Anniversary with WDBO in 2002.