Here’s the beginning of my podcast journey.
Let’s go back to my first two years of college starting in 1967. My favorite activity was to sit in the K-Lair Grill and have conversations with people from around Kentucky and the country.
People and their cultures from outside my familiar area were fascinating. I enjoyed hearing accents, phrases, sayings and ideas that I’d never heard before.
I’d grown up in Louisville Kentucky and the only people I knew who weren’t from around here were relatives in Tennessee and Florida. Now I was having conversations with people from other areas of Kentucky, other States and other countries. This was so interesting to me.
After my first three years of college I ran out of money and took a job at a pipe, tobacco, and gift store in Fayette Mall. The shop was named A. David Ltd. We had an antique table with a chess set on it, a cigar humidor room, and antique balance scales to weight out the tobacco. The shop was filled with the aroma of pipe tobacco and cigars which also scented the air outside the shop.
Many times, I would be standing at the scales, weighing out tobacco for a customer, having a conversation that I thought was so interesting, I would think that it should be recorded and shared with at least some friends and family of the guy I was talking with. I remember wishing I had my own radio talk show.
In 2007 my wife and I were at a friend’s home and he was talking about this new Internet thing called podcasting. He said that radio was going to be dead…that podcasting was taking its place and anyone could have their own radio program produced in their home with their computer. I thought that sounded pretty cool but I had no idea what he was talking about.
A few months later my wife handed me the Herald-Leader newspaper which had an article featuring a student at UK who had her own podcast. Her name was Koch and her podcast was named A Single Serving of Koch. I don’t remember how it was spelled.
She was a graduate student and a dorm floor advisor. She would tape conversations with other students about campus life and put them out on the internet as a podcast. I was hooked.
Back then you would download the audio file to iTunes on your computer and then either listen from your computer or transfer the file to your iPod. I would transfer the file and then listen while I jogged or did other activities just like the iPod was a small transistor radio. This was so cool.
Next…I bought five books about podcasting and learned how to find podcasts using podcast aggregators and I began listening to The School of Podcasting by Dave Jackson.
Finally, forty years after college and the pipe shop, I could tape and share those conversations.
That was the beginning of my podcasting journey.
