Jay Pearce keeps moving north.
After 15 years in Champaign-Urbana, he leaves for Rock Island at the end of the week. Unfortunately, his warm, musical baritone voice is going with him.
Thirty-two years removed from its first professional gig in Terrell, Texas with an entirely separate 15 years lost in Little Egypt*, the voice takes its mission of calming, soothing and forecasting meteorology to the Quad Cities. Due to physical realities not yet reconciled by modern medicine, the rest of Jay must accompany the voice.
Hear (sic) it is, reading an extremely well-scripted sports story:
Whether it realizes it or not, Champaign-Urbana is about to get marginally grumpier.
Formally the Director of Created Content at Illinois Public Media, Jay is informally WILL’s director of bonhomie.
That’s not the only reason he’ll be missed. WILL is running out of familiar faces.
Station managers Carl Caldwell, Dan Simeone and Kate Dobrovolny retired. Longtime Director of Development Debbie Day retired. Her replacement George Hauenstein, and his wife Lee Ann Donner (who voiced Sunday mornings on WILL-AM), moved to Vermont this year. Weathermen Ed Kieser, Scott Oltoff and Mike Sola were budgeted out, and in some cases beaten up. TV’s Tim Hartin and Alison Davis Wood left for the Big Ten Network three years ago. TV producers Henry Szujewski, John Paul and Steve Drake are gone. Program director Jake Schumacher: gone. News Director Tom Rogers headed back to school to become a speech pathologist. Henry Frayne took early retirement so he could spend more time playing ambient guitar in Greece.
Jay Pearce & Ed Kieser at Urbana’s Market at the Square
Jay Pearce first came to town to run WEBX 93.5 “The Web.”
Magnitude of Tuscola, LLC. purchased the station and switched the call letters to WEBX in 1995. “The Web,” as the station was called, became an adult alternative format. “The Web” was the first terrestrial radio station to stream on the internet.
Waaaay before its time, The Web sought a world-wide audience when nobody was online. 28k dial-up modems had not yet become fashionable. Thus, the experiment lasted only a few years. It was weird to have a staffed, commercial radio station in town, playing album-oriented material.
A picture from The Web era, with musician Webb Wilder and Cody Sokolski, owner of Champaign.
With Adam Schmitt at a Frayne party, early naughties
Always quick on his feet, Pearce was able to duck out before Seth Fein could ask him to do something for free.
In addition to northward progression, Jay Pearce is a fan of beer. Thus it would seem appropriate, I suggested, to make a ceremonial crossing of the Wisconsin border when he retires.
“Wisconsin’s too cold for retirement,” he countered. “I’m thinking Fiji.”
*This is not unusual. Most travelers get lost there. The locals tend toward the Dazed & Confused.