Dave FM this week held its annual three-day Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta radio-thon a little earlier this year. Why? The rock station is disappearing from the airwaves, soon to be replaced by sports talk.
So I stopped by Children’s Healthcare at Scottish Rite Friday to say goodbye in effect to the radio station. It’s a little sad for me since I was demographically very much the typical listener.
This year's radio-thon was different in many ways. They held it last year at the Voice studio at Children's Healthcare at Egleston. This year, they moved it to the cafeteria at Children's Healthcare at Scottish Rite because it's more accessible to the families and provides that "noisy background" that indicates action and excitement during a radio-thon. Another difference: the program director Scott Jameson was let go a few months ago so he's no longer hovering like a mother hen.
I was there while Yvonne Monet and Mara Davis were helming the final weekday mid-day shift. Monet, who had been doing mornings with Jimmy Baron until last year, had been working part-time on weekends for Dave FM. She's sad about the end of Dave but it wasn't her livelihood anymore.
Davis, on the other hand, is actively fishing for another radio job. Given her 18-year history in this town, she has a solid shot at getting a decent gig somewhere else, likely at either at 97.1/The River or Rock 100.5.
All the jocks are doing a final shift Saturday, including Steve Craig, Margot Smith (who has been programming the station in recent months) and Rich Sullivan, since it's 9/29 (as in 92.9).
[Update: The final song spun by a live jock at 12:24 a.m. late Saturday was courtesy of Margot: "Atlanta" by Butch Walker.]
I posted a bunch of photos in the original blog entry but as I clumsily transfer old pages from the other wordpress platform using web.archive.org, some of it has been disappeared into the ether.
