Notify the Hermiston Landmark Committee

Twenty years ago, College Graduate Scaia was looking for a new adventure. Loyal Scaiaholics will recall the saga of this burgeoning media empire started humbly in the SuperOregon town of Hermiston.

My first boss and I still keep touch. We hosted the morning show together on the iconic 1360 KOHU. He texted this week to let me know the couple who owned the station were shutting it down.

Selling advertising had become more difficult as agencies moved toward digital, and they couldn't find anyone who wanted to buy the station, so they are turning off the transmitter.

When I worked there, another fella owned the station, but I knew this pair well. When I was there, the husband was the salesman, and the wife was the general manager, though they worked much better together than the gang at WKRP.

They stood out among independent radio owners. They paid their employees on time, and they're the only station I've ever worked for that never went bankrupt. They even had me over to their house for Thanksgiving the year I lived there.

But radio has become an increasingly desolate landscape. I currently work for a CBS affiliate, and they even announced they're shutting down their radio operation later this month.

That first boss said he hired me because I seemed ambitious. He was actually looking for someone who wouldn't stick around. Apparently, a previous news guy had become burnt out and just started reading the newspaper on the air, crinkling the paper as he turned pages.

When I was there, the station won its first ever slate of Edward R. Murrow Awards. Winning awards might look good on a resume, but radio is about community involvement and helping people understand things that are going on around them... like providing live play-by-play of a watermelon seed-spitting contest as it develops.

I only spent a bit more than a year in Hermiston, but I'm sorry the economics of radio is shutting the station down. I'm glad to still know the folks I worked with there. They started me on a path that led to me becoming a network correspondent and twice named best radio reporter in Texas.

I've met presidents, attended Super Bowls and World Series, but I look back to Hermiston for one of my career highlights: having singers from a professional orchestra sing my name to the Hallelujah Chorus.

I had to cut several promos for that show and weekly football games. Many of them devolve into that same fight scene, and Angela and Cody narrate a lot of them. You can relive all the excitement here, including the time I convinced a government employee to deny they're controlling the weather.

But the KOHU gang is already looking forward. Angela and Cody had started another shop in town a few years ago, the current news guy will keep doing play-by-play for the high school and stream games on the station's old website.

And we've started a pool on what'll happen to the station. Cody thinks it'll be remodeled into a house. Jeff, my boss, suspects it'll be knocked down. I think this could be a prime location for Big Scai's Beer Frontier.

My career has outlived CBS radio and also lasted longer than the news network I previously worked for, so given how many operations I've worked for that no longer exist, I should probably just start walking around work with a scythe.