Happy Anniversary DFW Radio!

Monday morning , August 20, 2001 at 5:00am… was a quiet, rainy, not-very-illustrious start to a Summer day. Back then, I had a day job, working in the IT Department for Allegheny County, in Pittsburgh.  9/11 was a few short weeks away… and I had 2 hours to get myself ready to go to work, via the daycare to drop off my daughter, and a bus stop (because nobody in their right mind actually drove downtown to work a job!).  We didn’t know it, but it was a poor time to launch an Internet radio station.  But, uneventfully… that’s exactly what I did before I walked out the door.  I clicked on the old Winamp/Shoutcast setup… flipped a switch… and grabbed an umbrella. Simple as that.  All day long I listened to the automated stream at my desk while I fielded tech support calls in my office.  Not shabby for a webcast (the term “netcast” was still several years away from being the commonplace term) that was streaming at 64kbps.  And that was it.  No fanfare… about 2 listeners that whole day…no sponsors… just music.  I did a show called “Simply 80’s” with a co-deejay partnering with me since 1997. By the end of 2001, the partner was gone… and it was just me…so I moved the show over to DFW and kept going.  It would be years before we added The Morning Show, RetroOasis, Beatlefest Sunday, HitMix, The RetroDiner, or Sharon’s Country Harvest… but I do recall the night I premiered “80’s After Dark” in January of 2002, because it was the first time Sharon did the DJ Drops and went on the air. 

Next came  Charme, and, with her… a host of announcers, techs and freelance voiceover artists.  We were growing… and somewhere along the line… we were becoming an extended family. When I relocated to Honey Brook, PA, almost 8 years ago… we went off the air for a few weeks.  It was Sharon who said “you should be doing what you love…what is it that you want most of all?”.  I immediately blurted out “DFW”.  And so the rest is history. DFW has always been a labor of love. To remain commercial–free and still be able to produce the quality of shows we have… we’ve learned how to become extremely creative…both with production value and financial shuffling.  But we’re still here… and we’re proud to have outlasted many other (some more popular) Internet Stations in the process.

People have asked me time and again over the years: “what does ‘DFW’ stand for?”.  The call letters were cleverly (or predictably) dreamed up back in 2000… and they stand for [D]avid’s [F]amily [W]ebcast.   Ha.  The More You Know, right?

We’re proud as we can be to still be here… and still tagging along with you as you go about your day. 

So… Happy Anniversary to DFW, and thanks for “tuning in” and joining us.  We are hopeful for many, many more years to come.

David, Sharon & Charme