Mark Czerniec
News Monkey

I was born in Chicago but while I was still a toddler, my father was advised in a dream to whisk me north to the land of milk and bratwurst.

As a young man I worked on a cabbage farm, sold vacuum cleaners and TV sets, and programmed computers at an electronics factory. Clearly this career path was leading directly toward radio, so I set my sights on working with the most interesting broadcaster I had ever heard — Steve Dahl. When Buzz Kilman was abruptly prohibited from providing Steve with his daily All My Children Update, I recognized my chance and immediately began interrogating my mom and sisters about the soap.

Working with Steve every day for 3 and a half years was magical, but I eventually tired of All My Children, so we parted ways. Having become close friends with Steve's former producer Dan Falato, I joined Dan's Saturday overnight show on WLS. I spent a summer managing a tiny WGN-affiliated radio station in a gazebo at Great America. I worked for years at Kenosha's public station, WGTD, reading news, hosting classical and big band music and organizing pledge drives. I worked at Kenosha's AM station, WLIP, hosting an evening talk show that had no listeners except my wife Amy, but I repeated the phone number anyway.

When the World Wide Web showed up on my desk one day, I saw it as a handy way of combining my interests in mass media, computers, and working from home, so I developed a Web site all about Kenosha and eventually began communicating with people all over the world — former Kenoshans living in Tokyo and Addis Ababa, and former Italian soldiers looking for old comrades here. Eventually, companies began asking me to make Web sites for them, so I did.

After we all spent the morning of September 11, 2001 dumbstruck by what was unfolding on TV, Dan — who had recently returned as Steve's producer — asked me to spend the afternoon monitoring events for the show. Now I do that every afternoon. From my home, I watch TV, listen to a couple of radios and surf the Web searching for anything new that might be of interest to Steve and his listeners. These items are posted to a Web page for use by Steve and the gang throughout the afternoon.