Thursday, December 18, 2014

Part 2 for Tod and Daz

In the last two posts, I detailed my experiences with one of my college friends and a woman I tried to hook up with. They hooked up with each other. This is the colliding conclusion.

After Tod and Daz moved to Roswell, NM, I made frequent attempts to stop by and see them. I knew their address, but every single time I came by on my way to and from Artesia. They were never home. Once, I stopped by and the apartment appeared to be empty. They had moved up to Albuquerque, NM. He had gotten a job at KIVA-FM and worked the overnight shift. Before he went on the air, he was told by the Program Director that he would be going by the on-air handle of "Truckin' Tod."

After awhile, Tod started hanging around after his shift and contributing to the station's morning show. This allowed him to graduate into the morning slot after the host left. He worked that for awhile and then moved to Findlay, OH. I was living in Denver at the time. He encouraged me to try to get a job there, although he admitted that Toledo was the closest large city and there really wasn't a lot going on. I sent in a resume and an air check, but no one responded.

I lost track of them for awhile and moved to San Diego. Then, I reconnected with a friend from college who lived in Santa Fe. When I tried to call that friend, I got a recording that the line had been disconnected and it gave a different number to call. I called that number. The woman who answered was not the person I was looking for. I identified myself and went into this long spiel about trying to find my friend from Santa Fe. The woman identified herself as Daz. She told me that another mutual friend had listed her number as someone to contact and that's how I wound up getting her number.

She was living in Cincinnati and working radio there. She told me she and Tod had gotten divorced some time ago and that he had remarried. She gave me his phone number. I called him and reconnected. At one point, he stopped doing radio and started driving a truck, so he did indeed become "Truckin' Tod." He told me that one of the hard things about being divorced from Daz was that she did voiceovers for Sears commercials in Ohio, so he would frequently have to hear her voice while he was watching TV.

I got both their addresses and sent them my music releases. (More on that phase of my life MUCH later.) For a couple of years, Daz sent me Christmas cards, but she always sent them after I had done all my cards for the year, so I kept forgetting to reciprocate. I never heard from her again. I also lost contact with Tod.

A few years later, I moved to San Jose and got a job with a newsradio station. The station's sister FM is a country station and has a morning host named Gard. Gard and I were in the break room together one morning and he asked me about my past radio experience. I told him I had worked in New Mexico and Denver. He told me he used to work in Albuquerque at KIVA. I asked him when he was there. He said it was the late 1980s. I asked him if he knew a DJ who went by the name of "Truckin' Tod." His eyes widened. "THAT WAS OUR OVERNIGHT GUY!" Yes, he remembered Tod. He added, "Yeah, his wife was a real psycho. I mean, I never met her, but just the stuff he told me about her."

I caught back up with Tod on Facebook and we became "friends." He currently lives in Bowling Green, OH and works as a nurse. He remarried again and recently had another child. Daz still lives in Cincinnati. Judging by the parts of her profile that I can see on Facebook, she may have remarried and had a couple of kids. She's worked at several radio stations over the years there, but doesn't now. She works as a Director of Development with a disabled services organization.

I probably won't hear from her again, unless Tod tells her about these posts. I'll let you know if I get a response about that.

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