New PD joins CBS-LA

[socalguy]

And it shouldn't go unmentioned that Rick's GM at Ohana in Honolulu is none other than LONGTIME KROQ/CBS GM, Trip Reeb...yeah, he commutes every week from Pacific Palisades to Honolulu. That's the very same Trip Reeb that managed Kevin Weatherly for years...Makes one wonder if Trip hooked Rick up with Kevin for this gig.

 

[radio-darn]

And it shouldn't go unmentioned that Rick's GM at Ohana in Honolulu is none other than LONGTIME KROQ/CBS GM, Trip Reeb...yeah, he commutes every week from Pacific Palisades to Honolulu. That's the very same Trip Reeb that managed Kevin Weatherly for years...Makes one wonder if Trip hooked Rick up with Kevin for this gig.

When Rick was PD of San Diego's Jammin Z90, Kevin was PD of crosstown Q106, a station Jammin Z-90's owner really wanted to knock over.

 

[only1moore]

Rick Thomas basically created Jammin' Z-90 in San Diego (90.3 from Tijuana). Owner Victor Diaz brought him in from, I believe, Milwaukee. That was about 1990. The station had no promotion budget, but did have a copier that did tabloid size copies, so Rick got reams of colored paper and printed hundreds of copies of a simple Z90 sign and he and a couple helpers went out in the dark of night and stapled them to power poles throughout the San Diego area. As the company's VP for Communications and Public Affairs, it was my job to field all the angry calls from various city officials wanting to know why we were defacing their local power poles (and it wasn't like one sign per every couple of blocks: it was more like one sign on every pole!).

It was very effective for building a buzz and the start of Z-90's displacing the existing urban station of that time, 92.5.

By the way, in 1990 Rick brought in from Milwaukee Kristi Knight, who stayed in San Diego and has for a long time has been part of the duo Jagger and Kristi (on 92.5). Between her and Z90, Rick has a little bit of legacy here in San Diego (although his Linked In profile doesn't mention his first Z-90 gig).

He always impressed me as one of those radio people who had a permanent account with U-Haul so it will be interesting to see if he can stay around long enough to leave his mark in Los Angeles: certainly the lure of being a big time PD in LA is quite strong, but he's at the age when the lure of being retired or even semi-retired in Hawaii would tempt a lot of us.

Yes, Thomas did come to XHTZ from WLUM/Milwaukee in 1990. BTW when he was at HOT 102 he turned it into a more serious player in the Milwaukee Top 40 war with WKTI and it paid off big time ratings wise, resulting in WKTI shifting to Hot AC by the Summer of 1990.