Paul McLane is U.S. editor in chief.
Bob Schroeder, N2HX, will retire from his job as communications and warning officer for the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management at the end of the year.
Though he works in the alerting community, Schroeder is part of the radio family.
He was on the air doing top 40 radio in Columbia, S.C., in 1970, before he’d turned 21, and received a journalism award from the broadcasting society Alpha Epsilon Rho.
“Doing radio wasn’t a job, it was a dream,” he told me. “Growing up in Trenton put me between two awesome markets.”
I asked him for more info about he got into the biz.
“I’m older than dirt,” he emailed me. “I own a turntable. I’ve used a Gates Sta Level. I was friends with the great Art Silver and Paul Godley. I worshipped Dan Ingram.”
He worked as a studio engineer for New Jersey Public Television from 1979 to 1982. “Amusing anecdote: When NJPTV first went on the air, they built their studios in the old Sherbrook Lanes bowling alley where I used to bowl when I was a kid growing up in Ewing.”
In 1983 he was hired by the state Office of Emergency Management as a radio tech and in 1995 became the state communications and warning officer. “All that radio and TV background made it easy to interface with the EAS side of the profession because I was once ‘one of them.’”
Bob earned his FCC Second class ’phone around 1974 and then his First in 1978. “I say ‘earned’ because I had to take the tests in front of the indefatigable Joe Welch down at 5th and Arch.” He’s also active in SBE Chapter 18.
Though he’s leaving state service, he hopes to keep his hands in the business, “probably in EAS, cellular EAS, or some kind of emergency management-emergency communications capacity. I’m also writing an expository book on the history of emergency management and how to design an EOC.”He also wants to grow his professional photography business.
Best of luck to a good guy and a friend to RW.
Bob Schroeder, N2HX
