Bryan Ramona:  

Hard to believe that it's been four decades since I left the halls of Archbishop Mitty; memories of those days are scarce after all this time. To be honest, not a lot of my memories were great ones to begin with, as I felt most of the time like an outsider, someone who never quite fit in. Leaving the South Bay and heading up to Berkeley in the fall of 1976 was the best thing that could have happened to me. It was at Cal that I started to break out of the shell I'd grown into in high school. Not every memory was bad; there are some classics if I work really hard to remember! Once I got to Cal, I was surrounded by kids who were at varying levels of self-awareness, but many away from home for the first time like me. Most of us were coming without the prejudging that often leaves the scars many obtain from the high school cliquishness and inability to find their place. I started to meet and socialize with other young people who also achieved academically to get there; we found exposure to a wide world of possibilities. One of the first that came up for me was working at the college radio station, KALX-FM. I was encouraged by one of my resident assistants to check it out. I did, and ended up talking to the sports director and really being curious. I signed up to help out that weekend handing out lineup cards before the football game. I had no idea then, but soon it was impossible to ignore, that broadcast journalism was a perfect fit for who I was and wanted to be. With the encouragement of the talented seniors on staff, which included Lisa Stark, an esteemed ABC News national reporter, and Bill Van Amburg, son of legendary Channel 7 news anchor Van Amburg, I found quickly I was a natural on the air doing sports and news, as well as the occasional DJ shift. I was shocked (in a good way) by these mentors, who kept telling me just how good I was for having so little experience. My confidence and self-esteem grew rapidly, and within two years was assisting the newest sports director, Larry Baer, now the president & CEO of the San Francisco Giants! Called a few live games with Larry as we dreamed of our ultimate job; being the next Lon Simmons or Russ Hodges. When he graduated and our mutual friend Mike Bogad took over, I was made Assistant Director in the Sports Department. We traveled all over, doing football, basketball and baseball games, including the Garden State Bowl in The Meadowlands stadium outside of New York in 1979. While I had decided on majoring in Statistics (momentary lapse of sanity, I admit!), I knew that TV/radio was my goal. Even while joining a fraternity, all I could think about was being one of the anchors on this new thing called ESPN. And I got a few more supporters like Stanford legend Bob Murphy, who brought me on to do several sporting events of all shapes and sizes as his broadcast partner for the old Gill Cable TV. Confident I was ready, I left school hoping to get right into KGO and being Joe Starkey's #2. Well, that didn't happen right away, so I had to get a job in the insurance industry, using my math skills. But then I was given the opportunity to be the main producer for Starkey, Lee Grosscup & Murphy for the KGO broadcasts of this new-fangled spring football league, the USFL. I worked for the Oakland Invaders on weekends while still working at the insurance agency. I got to see lots of the country I never thought I would get to see. At the same time I was working with the AMI Ski Network as one of the ski report providers for about 27 stations in the Northeast. That continued into the spring of 1984, when I left insurance for good and went to the Invaders full time as a PR assistant. And kept up with the ski gig too. It was through that I was given a chance to be a news and sports director at a small station in Massachusetts that I had provided ski reports for. Seeking advice from many sources, including Hank Greenwald at KNBR who I interned for, I was counseled that it would be a good idea to go to a small town and work my way up. I consulted my parents and took the job and embarked on a new adventure, figuring I'd have to do about one to two years on the East Coast to earn my way back home. I envisioned at that time I would be totally ready to take the Bay Area back by storm. Little did I know, that the cross-country drive in late April 1984 would be the last I would see of California for a long time. When I arrived at this first "real" radio station, I found it was in a depressed factory town of about 2,000 people after the yarn mill that was the center of the economy went belly up. One thing I learned fast was that New Englanders are not really keen on outsiders; I got an eyeful of people wondering if I was some drug dealing hippie from Berkeley! That was a LONG six months... during which I told myself that if I was going to live THIS far from home, I wanted to be near the ocean. (Dudley / Webster was in the middle of the state - way before the Internet would have helped me know that!). So I badgered the PD at a station on Cape Cod for weeks on end, and he finally relented and hired me to be the Sports Director at a small AM/FM combo. Here I was, doing morning and afternoon "rush-hour" news and sports on the Cape and doing play-by-play of high school football, hockey, basketball and Cape Cod League collegiate amateur summer baseball! I was in heaven, since that was EXACTLY what I wanted to do. To my surprise, my first birthday out there in 1985 brought me two feet of snow...made me think twice on more than one occasion if I should just pick up and go home! After the first year, despite the sudden death of my grandpa and fighting the homesickness for the Bay, I knew in my heart that this was the perfect training ground to make me better. That is, until the entire staff was let go so they could turn the place into an automated country music station! Indeed, that threw me for a loop, but I landed on my feet not long after doing fill-in work for a friend at another radio station as a disk jockey, while convincing another new friend to let me work for him for free (while on unemployment) at the local TV station, where I had filled in once or twice as the weather guy! I had taken some classes in TV production while at Cal and while working in insurance close to the office at Laney College. While I remembered some key things, it was clear I had a lot to learn. John insisted he pay me $50 a week, and I dove in and learned everything that there was to learn about TV news and reporting. I ran cameras, went out as a remote cameraman with reporters, wrote and edited copy and video tape, learned the jobs in the control room... and loved it. When John left the station to move up to a bigger one in Missouri, he recommended me to take over as Sports Director!...Expand for more