Today's guest will be inducted into our Hall of Fame at this year's Banquet. His classmates know him has "Happy" Dave Dwyer, but now his listeners on SiriusXM's Busted Halo show know him as Father Dave Dwyer.
Before he got either nickname, he arrived in Syracuse and joined WJPZ, just using his given name on the air. And it wasn't until he started using his nickname from Lawrinson, "Happy Dave," that he really got his footing. This was just before WJPZ launched on the FM dial. Soon, he had the Friday afternoon shift, which became the Happy Dave Happy Hour. But station management knew he could do even more. They tapped him to be the anchor of the "Cra-Z Morning Crew," complete with a rotating cast of characters.
While radio was one of Happy Dave's passions, he also loved television, particularly directing. He was a mainstay at UUTV, and following graduation, he went back to the place he'd interned as student - MTV. He worked on their long-form programming, including Rockumentaries and the Unplugged series. He then got involved with the launch of Comedy Central, quickly getting to know the likes of Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Ray Romano, and more. In fact, many comedians would invite him to shows because of Dave's unique, contagious laugh. He tells a story of being virtually the only one in the room laughing when Adam Sandler debuted "Opera Man" on Saturday Night Live.
In 1993, Dave was between gigs. He'd always been close with his Catholic faith, and he some folks from his church group went to World Youth Day in Denver, a huge event that would include Pope John Paul II. At that event, Dave felt a calling to the ministry. He joined the Paulist Fathers Mission and started the process of becoming an ordained priest. He tells his side of the story of him calling Dr. Rick Wright to share this news.
The Paulist Fathers have always been very involved with media - having done radio, and television. So Father Dave started a podcast. Around this time, satellite radio was expanding their programming, and he offered to fill the overnight slot with his pod. But when they heard the CD, they offered him a prime time evening spot, where he's been for 16 years.
We spend some time talking about the power of radio, particularly talk radio, and the deep connection it can create with listeners. Father Dave talks about some of the more memorable feedback he's received. And now his producer is also a fellow JPZ'er, Krista LePard from the Class of 2012.
You can listen to Father Dave and Krista on the Busted Halo Show on SiriusXM, Channel 129, Monday-Thursday nights, from 6-8pm Eastern.
Podcast Solutions by Dan Klass: https://www.amazon.com/Podcast-Solutions-Complete-Guide-Podcasting/dp/1590595548
Join Us in Syracuse for Banquet on March 4th: https://bit.ly/WJPZ50BanquetTickets
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast is produced by Jon Gay '02 and JAG in Detroit Podcasts
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am John Jag Gay. Very excited for today's guest. He is going into our Hall of Fame in March, so we're gonna touch on that in a little bit. If you went to school with him, you probably know him as Happy Dave, but if you met him in recent years, you'll know him as a Father Dave.
That'll be Mr. Dave Dwyer. Welcome to the podcast.
Dave: You threw in the Mister too, just for a variety.
JAG: It just popped into my head.
Dave: Jon, JAG if you will. Thank you for having me on. It's been a while since I've done some sort of radio or podcast with a fellow JPZer.
JAG: Yes, but not not long since you've done radios with the Sirius XM mic flag right in front of you there. We're gonna come to that in a little bit as well.
Dave: And actually, I have to correct a mistake that I just made. My producer now on my show that's on every night on Sirius XM, she's a former JPZ'er, so it's only been a few hours actually.
JAG: Alright, shout her out.
Dave: Shout her out. Krista she was Krista D'Amore. Krista D'Amore when she was at Syracuse and she married another fellow, Newhouse grad and JPZ' er, Clay LePard. He's a broadcast news reporter and they live in Cleveland.
They have a little child, Carmen. So Krista LePard, my producer on the Busted Halo show.
JAG: Excellent. Let's start at the beginning and how, I dunno for sure, I should call you Mr. Father. Happy?
Dave: No, it's not Mr. It's anything but Mr. No. Father Dave. Happy Dave. Whatever you like.
JAG: Father Dave, how did you get to Syracuse and end up at the radio station?
Dave: Boy. Yeah. Going way back into the days of high school, when I was participating in a TV and radio that we had at our public high school and really feel like I got the bug. I was playing with one of those mini cassette tape recorders, that had the two buttons where you press play and record as of when I was six or seven years old and we were pretending to be radio hosts instead of, I don't know, team sports or something that, that was my sort of after school.
So I think the bug was in me all from the very beginning. And then I picked communication schools when I was going to college. Almost went to Ithaca but decided on Syracuse. Really. One of the things that pushed me towards Syracuse was the things that were available to us, such as, at the time it was called UUTV, which I know now is Citrus.
And then of course the few radio stations that were there in my time, WAER, WJPZ, and there was another one I think even as well. But it was those sort of things that really attracted me to Syracuse. And quite honestly, I learned. I would say a lot more about the broadcast industry and things that have stayed with me all these years from UUTV and WJPZ than I did in a lot of the classes.
Classes were great. Glad I was there, but it was the practical on the ground experience that we got working as students at these kind of places that was so invaluable that I still draw on.
JAG: So you mentioned being the class of 86 getting to WJPZ. The station was on AM and you were there for the move to FM, right?
Dave: It was on AM for many years since the seventies until I got there. So I believe the story is, if I'm getting this right, the summer before my freshman year, the AM transmitter tower was on the top of, is it maybe well Mount Olympus, I think way up on, so maybe Flint Hall or one of those. And over the summer the maintenance folks had discovered leaks or something and they took down the tower.
So when I started as a freshman at WJPZ, we were not on FM. We were not even on AM. We were only on the campus cable system. Yeah, I think it was channel seven, if I recall.
JAG: Lucky seven.
Dave: They had a pulsating graphic that would go to the waveform of our voices or the music. That's where I started my broadcasting career was people that were up, cuz of course my first shift on WJPZ was a one to four in the morning, I think.
When we were still in a little white old house with creaky stairs to get upstairs to the second floor and playing off of turntables ,45 RPMs off of turntables at, one in the morning when clearly nobody was listening. But that's when it all started.
JAG: I'm told there was,Felicia was the one listener. Chris Godsick told me that.
Dave: Felicia would call every night and she would ask for Rick Springfield. Felicia was our most, perhaps our only, but our most devout listener. She would call every night, and she honestly didn't really, and we really, God bless her, we didn't think she was actually calling to request a song, nor did we grab a Rick Springfield record every time she called.
That was just, like her intro, like on a sitcom when somebody bursts through the door and that's their opening line. That was just her salvo. And what she really wanted was the DJ to talk to her when he wasn't on the air for, all night long to keep her company.
JAG: Companionship.
Dave: Of course. And then I went into a career where I essentially.
JAG: Stained glass window right behind you. I'm looking at and everything. When the station goes to FM, tell me what a difference that was for you and for your classmates.
Dave: It was great. It was halfway through my junior year, so I guess it would've been January of 85.
What am I doing the math right? Yes. Yes. My junior year. So all of freshman and sophomore year we were working hard towards this goal and a lot of dedicated people if I start naming them, I'll forget all the key ones, but certainly many dedicated people of my peers. That were working hard, getting the licenses from the FCC and permissions from the University or whatever it took.
It was a lot of work to get us on. And then it was at that time that we had always had the call letters WJPZ, but they decided to go with Z89 as our kind of on-air personality or the on-air sound, if you will. And they picked the format for the music. But it was at the time that was very popular.
I grew up in New York and it was at the time that Z100 and many of the others around the nation were using like the Xs and the Zs and we, and it was perfect cause we already had the Z and the call letters. So I guess when they got 89.1, they're like, boom, let's do it. Z 89. So that was a very exciting time.
I was there standing in the station offices and studios when we flipped the switch, and it's a moment in my life. I will never forget it. It was a great culmination. I've been a part of other startup things in media since then. I was at the launch of Comedy Central, so remember the flipping the Switch and that, and so some other things.
But it was certainly. It was monumentous and the difference being, of course, you're not talking about multimillion dollar media corporations that were able to start up some sort of new channel. This was a bunch of college kids and we did it.
JAG: Yeah. Do you remember who was in the room at that exact moment?
Dave: I remember Chris Mossman was on the air. Larry Barron was there. Dave Levin, I think was the, I'm trying, who's to my left and to my right. Mary Mancini, these are the folks that were in that original cadre and I'm pretty sure we're all there as we're flipping the switch. So prior to when we went on FM, when we were still on the cable station, I had, and this was part of how got the old Happy Dave moniker and personality, my freshman year I lived on a dorm room floor in Lawrinson.
So I was an 11th floor of Lawrence and my roommate was the nickname giver and there were five guys on my floor. It was an all guys floor. So maybe, what is there, 25 guys? If you got two guys in a room or something. So of those five of us were named David. He was the one that chose nicknames. And long before I was ever on the air or had a personality or anything, I had a personality before, I had a non-air radio personality.
He had nicknamed me Happy Dave. So everybody at the dorm called me Happy Dave. And when I went to audition for JPZ, Steve Simpson was the program director. And Steve Shimshon. And he was at what was it, Y94? So Steve Simpson. He went by Tommy St. John on the air, Tommy St. John and Y94. So he was the program director and I remember coming up as a squeaky little wet behind the ears, freshman, handing him whatever my little form that I filled out or something. And he looks down at the paper, he goes, Dave Dwyer, that's a great radio name.
Don't ever change it. And so at the beginning when I was playing for Felicia at one in the morning, I hadn't developed all the skills yet, so it's here we go, putting on the Rick Springfield for you. It's Dave Dwyer on WJPZ. And then at some moment, one of those nights late at night, it came to me that back of the dorm, everybody's calling me Happy Dave.
And so at some point it just clicked and I started using that on air and it was like the sort of metamorphosis of the personality came through and all the skills came rushing in. And suddenly I was a CHR DJ as Happy Dave! So I was doing the prior to one we won on FM. Steve Simpson again, I'm pretty sure the way he used to assign the various time slots.
Is that we would all sit in a big room and he would go through the schedule starting with the least desirable. So starting like with the one in the morning ones. and people would raise their hand and he would look around the room and go, okay, you, I'm gonna give it to you. And I was holding out and I was still, I guess was the end of my freshman year. Yeah, it was the end of my freshman year cuz I'd only done one semester. I did the spring semester at the one to four of the morning, obviously the starter slot. And I didn't deserve to be, what I was holding out for. So he got to just cuz in my head cuz I was already Happy Dave.
I was holding out for four to seven on Friday, which of course is happy hour. Ah, so when he gets to four to seven on Friday, there's other people in the room that have way more experience, that have been around for longer and are more professional. And he says 4-7 Friday. And I raised my hand and he just looked over. He goes, I'm gonna give it to him.
JAG: No kidding.
Dave: And it was Happy Dave on the happy hour. And that was, so that would've been all of sophomore year and then the first half of junior year. So I for three semesters, I did the Happy Dave Happy Hour. And then when we went on FM, Dave Levin was the program, right?
He was the chief announcer, I think, and he wanted to put together a morning show that would break the convention of what we had always done, which was everybody only gets three hours a week. Yeah. We want to have as many people involved as possible. It's the radio classroom, training for the best, in the best on the earth, and we wanted as many people as possible.
But Dave kind of went out on the limb and said, radio stations particularly CHR. They've got like a morning show, right? And we should have a morning show that's the same every day. So we put together a cast of characters, again along the lines of the zoos or the Z Morning shows or those sort of things that were popular in the eighties.
And we had a little cast of characters, but I was the one sort of anchor. So we had different people on each day of the week, but Happy Dave was the one on the, and we called it the Cra-Z Morning Crew, we came up with that name. I think they probably still call it. and we came up with that name when we went on the air.
And so I was, I think it was my second semester senior year, maybe my first semester of senior year, I actually registered for a class Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It was com, I shouldn't say this, it was Comm Law. It was communications law required for all Newhouse students and your senior year, you gotta take Comm Law.
And it was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at eight or eight 30, and I was on the air from seven to 10. So I actually booked a class in conflict with the radio show. Occasionally would show up and I did okay, I think, in Com law, I'm using more, actually probably using more of that these days in my current career
JAG: The way the industry's gone. Yeah. I would think.
Dave: Some of the other skills so we went on with the morning show the crazy morning crew, and there was people there was a lot of Dans, there was Dan Klass, Danno Wolkoff. Captain Chris, Mary Mancini. Tom Giarosso, Scott Sookman. These were a lot of the morning gang with the slide whistles and the whole traditional morning show sound. Contests. We would have things to give away, like two tickets to the whatever cinema, and we'd do all these crazy contests and people would call in and we'd act like we were, but we'd act like a real radio station where we're giving away. We weren't giving away trips to Florida.
Actually to their credit. Later on in my time and certainly after my time, the ad salespeople did get some pretty significant prizes. It wasn't just cupcakes anymore.
JAG: Cash and cars and everything. Yeah. A lot of people I've talked to from the mid-eighties, Dave, talked about you and your role anchoring that morning show. Any particular bits come to mind that you remember doing or being a part of during those?
Dave: What I do remember is that when people would call in, and I remember we used this clip for a while in some sort of on-air promo, but people calling in, I remember one particular caller saying, "Happy Dave. I like him. He's funny." And I always thought to myself, I'm not the funny one. I'm a little bit of the ring master, but primarily I'm the guy who laughs.
And so all these other people would be around me doing goofy stuff and funny stuff, and I'd be laughing. And then once there'd be a big laugh, I'd hit the song and hit the post and we're out . To me was having fun, while everybody else around me were really the funny folks or the insightful Mary Mancini and I did the show.
Merry Mary. Something of a branch off of Happy Dave, I think, but Merry Mary. I remember the fact that I lived in Watson Dorm. Which is where the studios are still, I think to this day. But I chose that my last two years, junior and senior year because of my heavy involvement in JPZ and partially also because I'd be doing the morning show and so all I'd have to do is literally wake up, roll outta bed and did not have to go outside in the Syracuse winter.
JAG: Agreed.
Dave: Through feet of snow, whereas Mary was coming from, what was that, up campus? Near Drumlins.
JAG: Oh, south campus? Where the apartments and stuff are.
Dave: Yep. South campus. So she lived there and we'd have three feet of snow and she'd be trekking in and, a few minutes late and I'm like tapping my watch and I'm still in my pajamas practically in a hat on my head cuz I haven't taken a shower.
And it wasn't even it was five in the morning, it was seven. For college student that's a little early.
JAG: It is. So you graduate and then take me through some of your career arc since graduation and where you started and to basically to where you are now.
Dave: Graduating Syracuse. I had been working, talking obviously mostly about radio now, but I'd also been very involved in television, UUTV and directing.
And my major was TRF production. , I did my senior thesis with Danny Zucker, who went on to become an executive producer of Modern Family. Yep. And essentially he was just as funny and creative back then, so it was really a Danny Zucker show. He had interned, I think the summer before at something like Entertainment Tonight or one of those shows.
Where he was able to get, as they're like micing up a celebrity. He was able to get sound bites for them as if it was a retrospect about his career. So that's what we did. The show that we did for our senior thesis was as if he was a sort of a failing or a disappeared big celebrity star and all these people like, Martin Sheen and Roseanne Arquette were like saying, oh yes, Danny's wearing mask. So we built a whole show around that. That was my senior thesis. So I loved directing television, directing live multi-camera, but also putting things together. So that's, this was my major. A lot of people like counseled me. The people that worked at UUTV and JPZ said, we get all that experience here.
You should major in something else. So a lot of people that worked at UUTV were broadcast management or even a completely different major, something else, for the backup career or whatever. I think the eighties was right on the cusp of when people started having to need, three and four different majors in backup careers,
It was still the more traditional four years. Here's my major. I get a jump. People would say that to me and I'm like, no, I lo this is what I love to do. I don't wanna run a TV station as a manager and do the budgets. I wanna be behind the camera and say action and all that. Take camera one.
So when I graduated I was really split because I loved my time at JPZ and obviously that senior year doing the morning show. There was even a tad bit, I had a little bit of my 15 minutes of fame with advertisements in the newspaper if I was spinning at either Faegan's or or wherever.
So I graduated, honest to God, with two resumes. Not that it matters these days, people probably change it every day, but when you had to go to a Kinkos and have them printed up and do 500 of them, I had two different resumes. One for radio on air and other broadcast journalism type stuff if I wanted to do whatever sort of news anchoring or something. But then a separate resume for TV production. I had worked at MTV as an intern in their production department over the summers and so I really was split when I graduated as to what career path I would take and through not a lot of great discernment or pro and con weighing, I just went with production and not on air and went to, and I went back to MTV cause I'd interned there.
Had a little job right outta college where I was literally the tape librarian writing numbers on the sides of, like George Michael interview tape one. And I'd have to put it on the shelf and somebody would come in and go, where is that dang George Michael interview? Why don't we use that clip again?
I'm like, that's right here. I happen to have it. I'm the tape librarian. So that was my first job outta college, but eventually, MTV still in the mid-eighties was such a young and fast-growing company and place to work that, I started as a nothing and within, I'm gonna say eight or nine months, I was literally producing TV shows in the long form department.
JAG: What kind of shows?
Dave: So at the time it was still mostly VJ segments. Okay. So I worked in the department that they called long form. Out of that came things like the Unplugged series. And almost the behind the music that was VH1, but it was those documentaries. Rockumentaries. I think we coined the term when I was there. Rockumentaries, like a half an hour. I do remember that George Michael won when he came out with his Faith album because they shot it on film and they wanted to look, real cool and, go over the top and all that. And then I started working on a lot of comedy stuff.
So I worked with a great guy named Bill Aiken, who died very young in his 30's. But he was really, he took me under his wing. We worked with a lot of comedy stuff. We did a show called The Half Hour Comedy Hour that I was directing and helping produce. At the time people used to call comedy the rock and roll of the eighties cuz it was such a standup comedy boom in the mid to late eighties.
Back in the day before that you'd have to be on Johnny Carson in order to get any kind of TV exposure. With the advent of cable tv. There was a lot more of these shows, so we did one on MTV called The Half Hour Comedy Hour. Ha ha. Comedians Doing Standup Comedy, but interspersed with little comedy of skits and bits and things like that.
But the likes of Honest to God, David Spade, Ray Romano, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler. All these guys were, some of them doing their first tv. They were just coming up at that time, just coming up and I was like editing all of their bits and I could recount every one of their routines when I would see them and people like, like I got to be friends with Adam Sandler and somebody like me again, back to the morning show at JPZ, somebody like me who has a good laugh.
Comedians tend to like to have around. So Sandler would honestly call me up every time he was on Letterman, go, Dwyer. I need you there. gotta have you there. I gotta have you there. Letterman. Just because he knew that I would be in the audience. One time when I was working at Comedy Channel on Monday morning, somebody came up to me in my office.
I was directing a comedy show, and somebody came up to me in my office. Were you at SNL this weekend? I'm like, yeah, how'd you know? They're like, we definitely heard your laugh. And there it is. I was right under the microphone. And in fact, I remember it was the first time that Sandler did Opera Man.
JAG: Oh wow.
Dave: And if you go back and watch it, nobody else thought it was funny. And I did. And so you could clearly hear me laughing. I was right under a mic and I was just, he was cracking me up, as he often did.
JAG: Of course. Absolutely. So what's next after MTV and getting into some of all this comedy?
Dave: All along, even way back to my freshman year at Syracuse, I was also, in addition to all this, always very involved in my Catholic faith. And never really thought, honestly, never had an inkling or a calling that I would be in ministry. It was just seemed to be something that, and a lot of people do this, there's only a few priests and nuns and everybody else that kind of is involved is a layperson who has a job and a family and all that.
It just seemed like this is what I would do as my advocation. At Syracuse, I'd be leading retreats and bible study groups and all this kind of stuff. And after graduating, still very involved as a young. In my twenties, my late twenties, I went on a trip with my church group to Denver, Colorado. when Pope John Paul the Second came for what's called World Youth Day, and they do it all different places around the world and it's for they call it youth day, but usually we think of like teenagers when we say that.
Typically in the broader international community that's more like 20, it's kinda like young adults. So sometimes they get three, 4 million people. And this was a gathering in Denver, Colorado. I'd never been to. I'd been outta work for a while cuz the show at Comedy Central had ended. And between gigs, right?
That's, as a freelancer it's, that's the best time on the beach. So decided to go to Denver and again into my Catholic faith. But it was kinda like one of those, John Paul II’s getting a little old, I've never seen him. Let's go see him person. Sure. So some of my friends and we went, it was a group about 20 of us from my church group.
And I, during those four days, had a very profound life-changing experience that I can only describe as a call. Wow. It was not like a voice or a vision, but it was definitely a feeling down deep inside. Even very specifically to priesthood. Okay. That again, had never thought of before. And when I got home, that was August of 1993.
When I got home, I started, inquiring and knocking on people's doors and doing the recruiting of all the various different Catholic religious groups. And that was August of 93. And by May of 94, I had entered the Paulist Fathers mission. And since then, I've been part of their community.
JAG: We've often heard at a banquet where Dr. Rick Wright gets up there and talks about many of our illustrious alumni, present company included. He talks about getting a call from you saying that you're going to enter the priesthood and him being a bit surprised by this phone call. I'm wondering if you can give us your side of that phone call.
Dave: Well, first of all, I remember him leaving a voicemail. You know what it was. Jon, I called him for a reference.
JAG: Oh, there you go.
Dave: When I was applying, because you know you have some academic references and other kind of references, I called 'em for a reference. And so the voicemail went something like this.
Happy Dave. Happy Dave. Entering the ministry. Happy Dave. I, myself, I'm part of the AME Zion Church. Happy Dave. And he was, he just went on, he just kept saying, Happy Dave on the voicemail and when I called him back and he was thrilled. I obviously remember his influence. I remember very clearly one of my, one of my writing teachers, At Newhouse, Dr. Sharon Hollenback. And I remember her saying on graduation day when I saw her, oh hey, thanks. I've got the little cap and gown on. And she's if you don't do something in your career using your voice, I'll be very disappointed.
JAG: Wow.
Dave: And that stayed with me. And that was even long after I decided not to do on air and do behind the scenes production and directing and comedy and all.
That kinda came back to haunt me when I went into the ministry. But then years after going into the ministry, then all of a sudden somebody invented podcasting. And here's another shout out to one of my crazy morning crew fellow JPZ alums, Dan Klass. Danny the K he went by. He wrote one of the first and very prolific and successful books on how to produce a podcast.
Podcasting for Beginners. I think it was called. I can picture of the book was like lime green. And so I was doing the ministry and they gave me this sort of website that we were branching out into other media and I'm like, I don't know anything about websites. I'm not a good writer, but of course they're talking.
I'd been doing the talking. So we decided to start doing a podcast. So I looked up, I bought Danny the K's book, and I even called him and I said, hey, we're doing a podcast. What do we do? You need this. He got up little the files and got a microphone and all that. And of course, remembering back when we were at JPZ, remembering all the stuff.
So I bought compressors. Mics and everything. You gotta have the egg crate foam on the wall like you got there. And all that. And we started doing podcasting and it was soon after that Sirius XM approached the Archdiocese of New York and wanted to start an original to them, only available on the subscription service channel of Catholic programming.
Their business model is that they pay for programming if they can get a unique niche audience. So right before the Catholic Channel went on the air in 2006. they had just added like a NASCAR channel. So they essentially, they look at 80 million or a hundred million NASCAR fans in the States, where can they only get the audio from the guy who's driving the car?
If we have a station that's the only place they can get that they're gonna pay 14 bucks a month for, at the time it was Sirius or XM. That's their business model. And honestly, most of the people, when they do surveys, most of the people that pay their monthly fee. It's for one channel, really. Even though there's 300 channels, they're not paying for the variety.
They're paying for that one thing they can only get there. So that's why, and they saw 80 million Catholics in the US and more in Canada. And they're like let's do a channel of original programming and we can program it here in the Archdiocese in New York. So essentially they approached the Archbishop of New York and said, if we gave you money and equipment and satellites, would you like to provide the programming?
And of course he said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So I heard that they were doing that and having been part of startup things, I sent 'em over a CD of our podcast and I said, Just put this on at two in the morning. I know it's hard to fill 24 hours when you're first starting up. So put this on at two in the morning. They heard that, and I got a call from one of the execs at Sirius XM, and they said, again, that was Sirius Radio at the time before the merger. And they said yeah, thanks for the CD. We'd like you to do a full-time, five day a week live call show. I'm like, oh, what?
JAG: And you're in great JPZ company at Sirius XM. From Dion Summers to Dave Gorab.
Dave: Took over the whole place.
JAG: Yeah. Rich Davis, you name it. Like we, we've infiltrated all of Sirius XM at this point.
Dave: Dion and Rich, I think are two of our finest. Obviously, in many ways people come out of JPZ and gone onto many great careers, but terms of on-air.
Chris Bungo in my day, Mike Tierney, who went by T-Bone on the Air. Yep. Rich Davis and Dion I think are really, from my memory, I mean there's maybe people that are, they're good that I haven't heard, but they're just really some of the best that are still, I dunno if they're all still, but Rich Davis and Dion still in on air and national on air.
Rich Davis is just hard to beat. So good. So tight.
JAG: He was a classmate of mine. Yeah.
Dave: Was he really? Okay. Yeah, he can do, he can do talk and he can also do music and hitting the post and, being concise. And JPZ a great, of course, media classroom as we always say. But yeah, Sirius XM.
There's plenty. Dave Gorab is my boss, He was the one just now, just a couple days ago. I know when you're gonna put this up, but a couple days ago I was in Rome broadcasting live from Pope Benedict the 16th's funeral. Dave Gorab is one of the higher ups that sort of, gets to decide on that thumbs up and the old budget deal.
Let's fly him over there and do all that. And he gave some very nice kudos to how we did the word picture. It was interesting getting into talk radio after, and you probably find this doing a podcast. Even having done the morning show. On music that's only so long. Now I fill 52 minutes an hour, twice that.
So over a hundred minutes a day. Just me talking, a couple other people on air, maybe some guests and some callers, but it's not let's talk and have a laugh and hit the post and hit the song and play three songs. It's a lot more talking than it is doing music radio. So that took some getting used to.
JAG: When I got into podcasting, I realized I wasn't talking over 15 second Katy Perry intros anymore. I understand.
Dave: Exactly. Exactly. You gotta keep. At first it's the, cuz it was a three hour show at first. And we did 11 years of three hours, three hours from seven to 10 at night, five days a week. I remember it was almost exactly six months that we are on the air, that there's this tremendous panic or nerves or whatever.
It's like, how are we ever possibly gonna have enough to say. And at six months it just clicked and it's we're never not gonna have something to say. There's never, no, it may not be Pulitzer Prize winning every single second. It's talk radio. We're always gonna be able to talk. We have conversational people like our personalities and are gonna tune in even when we're just talking about our day or whatever.
So it was almost exactly six months that they just clicked a little switch in the back of your head that it's not okay, let's prepare for the show, but we don't have to have that panic that there's no way anybody could possibly ever fill three hours.
JAG: With that in mind, Father Dave, give me the elevator pitch. What do you cover in the show? What's talked about in the show on an average night, realizing of course, no two nights are alike?
Dave: It's called the Busted Halo Show. The name Busted Halo was around even before I took over the ministry. It was the Paul's Fathers, my religious community that I joined after World Youth Day and was ordained a priest with them.
It's kinda like in the Catholic Church, there's different subgroups, like the Franciscans are the ones that wear the brown robes. And the Jesuits they teach at Universities. The Paulists, my group is American. It's fairly young. It's only about 160 years old, and we have always done a lot with media. I'm standing right now in what was one of the first AM radio studios in the country in the United States.
It was WLWL, the Paul's fathers. My group, it was AM radio station. You could hear it. Of course, he used to bounce off the ionosphere and you could hear it in Chicago. All those old stories about. When they built this building that I live in, which was built in 1931, almost the entire basement floor has these double thick walls, that soundproofing tiles that are probably made of asbestos, Jon, I'm looking at them right now. I dunno.
These are old. But anyway, so they built this and it was, and we had been doing radio since the early days. Did television in the 1960s based outta Hollywood, a show that would air on Sundays on secular TV stations. So a lot of people knew my group, the Paul's Fathers, from the show called Insight. Our founder in the late 19th century, started the first Catholic book publishing company.
So we'd always really been involved in a lot of media. And so they had created this ministry to young people called Busted Halo. That initially was a website primarily. And then my predecessor moved on to a different ministry. They asked me to take over and I'm like, I don't know about editing articles.
So they hired somebody else to be the editor of the website and me to take it in a new direction. So we did a lot of this media stuff. So the show that we do every night on Sirius XM on Channel 129. Is primarily what we subtitle it as is answering your questions of faith. I found that in ministry, not only with young people, but people of all ages, Catholicism, and maybe even just religion broadly in general, is something where people know some stuff, but they wonder about a lot of stuff.
Like where do we gets that? Or why, how do we think that? Or why do people believe that? Or why don't other people believe what we believe? All that kind of stuff. So even when we would do in-person retreats, when we decided, when we started podcasting with Dan Klass's book as a guide. We didn't know what we were gonna do.
We knew we should podcast, but we didn't know what we were gonna do. Should we like pray, should we like read sections of the Bible or something? And on our retreats, in person with young people, their favorite part of the whole weekend was when we sat in a circle and people could write down anonymous questions on a piece of paper and we'd pull 'em out of a hat and answer questions.
JAG: Oh wow. Okay.
Dave: So we started doing that as the podcast. And then when we went on the air, it's just, it's answering people's questions of faith, which is a good chunk of it. Obviously, we'll have guests, we'll take calls. We do on Monday night. We actually do ask for people's prayer requests about what's going on in their lives.
What should we pray for? But it would also tend to be, I think, like any good talk radio. My co-host has been with me for 16 years. And he's a young person. He's now 40. He was pretty young when we started, but he's now 40. He was a standup comedian. He really loves the medium of radio and loves giving me a little what for, and a little guff. And people I think love hearing the sort of real human side of a priest.
We've had callers over the years say, just, I didn't know priests were allowed to laugh or have fun or talk about what they eat or, so a lot. of it, Jon, is just, it's just our lives. When we sign on, the first 20 minutes we're now, we now do a two hour show. Cuz after 11 years I went with the whole Johnny Carson negotiating thing.
I'm like, okay, no more Fridays. Let's do two hours instead of three. So we do a little bit less than we did for the first 11 years, but really the first 20 minutes or so of every show is just kinda what's going on? We're checking in with our lives. My producer, who I mentioned, who's a JPZ alum. She's a new mom of a one and a half year old.
You don't need to script a lot. And just flip on the mics and go, so what did she do today? And what I didn't realize particularly about talk radio. I would say music radio too, but particularly talk radio. It's such an intimate medium. That people really feel like, not only that they know us.
But they're part of the family. When we will occasionally do something live and in person, I'm gonna be at a big Catholic convention that happens every year in Anaheim, California with about 20,000 people or so, and we do the convention floor and we set up our little table and we broadcast from there on location and people come up and say things like, I feel like you're a part of my family when people eventually do.
I mentioned to my cohost has been with me for 16 years. But not everybody that's been part of our on-air team, people have come and gone. And when people leave the show, we have a couple of days of goodbyes with people calling in and tearing up and saying, I feel like I'm losing a family member.
I've had people say to me that I've never met in person. Here where I am in, Oregon. Father so- and-so is my pastor, but Father Dave, you're my priest.
JAG: Oh, wow.
Dave: It is that intimate, a medium. It's amazing to me that I didn't even remember from the days that we worked in music radio. I know people would connect and they go, oh, there's some fame or whatnot, but the way in which we can touch people's lives. You think about it today, just with headphones or Airpods or whatever. You're literally inside somebody's head.
JAG: That's actually something that I tell potential podcast clients. When I'm pitching them on, working with me on a podcast is I tell them, what is your favorite morning show that you were up listening to if you were here in the Detroit area?
You know what I mean? The top morning shows here or whatever. It's, you feel like you knew them because they were on the bus with you on the way to school or in the car, on your way to work. And that is the intimacy of audio, and that is what you are describing right now to a T.
Dave: That really did surprise me. And yet I don't take it for granted now. Absolutely. It's a very powerful medium. We have a great responsibility that what we're saying. I definitely have a personal stance that while it may work in a lot of either cable news or talk radio, to be very polemic. I don't think that's good on either side.
Wherever, wherever pole you want to grab and be dividing or polarizing. Yeah, it's gonna get a lot of people to click or to tune in, but I really feel strongly that's tearing us apart as a society. And also even internally as a church. So try to be fairly as St. Paul said in his letters being all things to all people and trying to not take sides on whatever. We don't do a lot of necessarily political stuff, but it's easy to get a lot of people tuning in or, liking you on social media if you just find the most volatile thing you can say whether it's left or right.
And it's tougher and I don't wanna be patting myself on the back, but it's tougher to try to not do that and to still maintain an audience and people that feel it can come back every day and people that will tune in. It's probably not a lot of the big spikes of huge numbers on any given topic or whatever, but it feels more like a long-term relationship rather than just a quick flash in the pan.
JAG: You alluded to this a couple minutes ago. I wanted to ask you this. What do you feel is the biggest misconception about priests and the priesthood that you wish you could put to bed? I'm sure you could go for an hour on this, but give me just your top one or two where, no, that's actually not what this is, or that's not what my life is.
Dave: For Catholic Priests, probably one of the big things is what is this weird anomaly that you all embrace called celibacy? And I've heard a lot of parishioners at parishes, people that have around church for a long time who kind of joke with you and say, Father, I've been married to her for 40 years, but I don't get any more sex than you do, Father.
JAG: Oh geez.
Dave: It's something of a false, I don't know. A false image that one of those things that, that is constituent of Catholic priesthood, that is not in, in every kind of ministry. Not certainly not even every kind of Christian ministry that is, that we choose not to get married, not to have one person as our lifelong love, and yet I have very intimate relationships. Sometimes we use that as a euphemism for sex. But as we were just talking about radio, intimate in a lot of important ways where the nurturing of long-term relationships with parishioners or even people that I don't know and I haven't met, I definitely feel that kind of generativity that a parent would feel that, they're passing on something to another generation. So I think one of the big misconceptions is that, if people choose celibacy, it must mean that they're no good at relationships or they can't get a date, or they're ugly right or whatever it is.
And any of the best choices in life, I would argue are choices between two goods. So the church doesn't say that being married and having children is a bad thing, and you should choose this over that. It's that all of these are good for society, for church, and for people's individual lives to be living out.
But this is one good that is different than the good that we see. And quite frankly, of course we can definitely point to stories about the priesthood, where it's spiraled and gone wrong of course. And that's been something that's very much harmed the people of God over the last several decades of awareness and more than that, that it's been happening.
You also don't have to look far to see that the other thing in life that's held up as the more normal thing doesn't always work out perfectly either. So it's interesting that people just look at something that's markedly different than a lot of what the societal norms are, ie choosing celibacy and just say like, how could anybody ever do that? That's unique or special or weird, or there's something wrong with you, and it's I see a lot of people that have chosen the kind of normal. That I seem to be a lot more content in my life, and nurtured by my relationships than that.
Not to say that I necessarily have to justify this choice by saying other things go wrong, but it's just that when you ask about the misconception, I think oftentimes it's quite the opposite of what people think.
JAG: I think that says something about you getting something out of those interpersonal relationships with parishioners, with listeners. When I first reached out to you to come onto the podcast, you were one of the only guests that their first response tell me about you, Jon. What do you do? That, that was your first response. You asked about me, saying, yeah, let me come on and talk about myself. But I think that says a lot about you as a person.
Let me bring it back around to WJPZ before we wrap up. Father Dave. You are being inducted into our Hall of Fame. Joining a select group here this March. Tell me what that moment or what that means to you to get that kind of recognition?
Dave: It's wonderful. It's not something that I would've, even as I saw some of my peers. , I think of one of the early banquets I might have given one of the keynote addresses or something, but it's not necessarily something like I felt I deserved or should have. Or just cuz I was Happy Dave, or I was there when we flipped on FM. So therefore, when it comes it's a very humbling and honoring choice and recognition.
I don't know how much fame I've brought to WJPZ. We've been talking about it a lot lately on the show, now that my producer is also there and we're both planning to come in March for the Hall of Fame ceremony. But it's of the many awards and things that, that I've had in the years of my career.
For me it's all a way of possibly reaching more people. So if there's more recognition, if there's more on the resume. Or just recently, I was persuaded to write a book, which I really didn't wanna do. But those are other ways in which not for me and not so that the name Happy Dave or Father Dave can be higher up there or that certainly not about making money cuz none of my money goes to me.
But it's really just about the mission. That's what we talk about in my line of work, that this is really about reaching people. When we first started, I think this is probably the best answer to that. When we first started the Catholic Channel at Sirius XM, the other priests in my religious community said this might be a good opportunity, but if it turns into really just like the same old folks who are diehards and go to church all the time, we'd really rather be reaching people that are not in the pews, right? And that have questions about church or faith or don't feel like they're welcome and really within the first couple of weeks or months, and still until this day, 16 years later, people all the time say, I haven't been to church in a long time, and I got this subscription with free with my car, and I was flipping around and found you guys and I've completely reconnected with my faith. That's why I do what I do. That's why I would accept any award or recognition, is to hopefully do that some more and reach some more people for the Kingdom of God.
JAG: I think that is a wonderful place to leave it. Congratulations on your upcoming induction into the WJPZ Hall of Fame.
Thank you. Happy Dave. Father Dave. I won't say Mr. Again, I promise. Happy Dave. Father Dave. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, sharing some of your experience with us and look forward to seeing you in March.
Dave: Thanks for having me. It's Sirius XM 129 6:00 to 8:00 PM Eastern Time every night.