Today, good-looking Jon-Erik is an actor, and you probably know him best from his role as “Bogg” on TV’s The Voyagers!, but at one time he made his living as a disc-jockey.
We all have fond memories of jobs we’ve held and people we’ve worked with, and Jon-Erik is no different. One of his first jobs out of high school was a radio disc-jockey, and it’s a time he remembers with a grin across his handsome face. He begins to laugh when he talks about his days “on the air.”
“It wasn’t a job I would have wanted to do forever; it would have driven me up the wall,” he says. “ All we were supposed to do was say the weather and the time and do commercials here and there and try to make up something funny that wouldn’t offend the program directors...which was hard to do because they got offended all the time!”
When Jon-Erik was in the booth he admits he did get out of hand every so often; but his mischief was harmless...usually. “We would call people up and I’d tape things that they’d say to use on the air. We’d also make funny phone calls to people on the air.”
One prank Jon-Erik used to play was calling people and giving them the day off from work, “without checking first with their bosses. That didn’t go over very well with their bosses, or mine! It was all very funny at the time, but I did get fired from one station.”
Looking back on those days is lots of fun for Jon-Erik particularly because his friends used to get such a kick out of hearing their buddy as the local DJ. Although Jon-Erik admits, “Usually my shift was from midnight to six in the morning...not many listeners then.”
The first station he worked at was fairly small and he could get away with him friends dropping in while he worked. “Later I moved to better and bigger stations where they were a little more strict about things like that,” he says. “The last station I worked at was a big rock and roll station, and on weekends I’d get to be on at 9:00 p.m. That was fun because my friends could listen in.”
Jon-Erik, who was living in New York then, had some friends “over the bridge” in New Jersey who weren’t able to pick up his station that late in the evening, so Jon-Erik did something that was actually illegal. “I didn’t turn the power down because these friends of mine wanted to listen to me on the radio.”
“It’s like the signal goes forever...it comes down through the stratosphere without the sun going through the ozone or something. You’re supposed to turn the power down on AM at night but I didn’t. I got fired for that one and I should have gotten fined for it too, but for some reason they didn’t fine me.”
Jon-Erik wouldn’t do anything like that today, because being older he realizes the responsibility of holding down a job. Looking over scripts to select the next acting job he’ll accept is keeping him busy these days, but not so busy that ever now and then his mind doesn’t wander. And he remembers the old days when he was the craziest disc-jockey ever to hail from Englewood, NJ!
Tiger Beat