An Interview with Scott Medwid, WOBC's Nuclear Powerhouse
A deep dive into the mind of everyone's favorite community DJ (and licensed massage therapist).
By Edie Carey
If you’re a WOBC DJ, no matter what ungodly hour your show is at, chances are you’ve gotten a call from Scott. Maybe he gave you a song recommendation, scolded you for playing an obscenity, or talked you through a technical difficulty. I’ve spoken to Scott several times; he once called in to share his disagreement with an opinion I had expressed about the movie Top Gun. Well, I was lucky enough to sit down with Scott after his show—Energy News and Space Report, Mondays at 11 AM EST—and talk with him about everything from the history of the station to nuclear energy to beekeeping.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How long have you been a DJ For WOBC, and how did you first get involved?
Well, I've been a listener for 27 years. My family and I moved to Oberlin back in 1995 and shortly after that, I started listening to the station. I had a friend that had a show and he would invite me to come in and read album covers and comments, and it was just a lot of fun. I have always had an interest in space issues and energy issues, and then I thought this might be a good thing for me to give a try and, you know, actually advocate and broadcast at the same time. About six or seven years ago now, I signed up for a show, and I got it. My first time in the hot seat was just a disaster. Nothing worked, I was freaking out, and I didn’t sleep well the night before because I was all stressed about it. But now it’s like, things can go wrong for me, stuff doesn’t work, and it just doesn’t faze me. I know I can just talk and talk and I don’t have to worry about dead air, so it’s a good thing.
I’ve talked to a few people who have said you’ve called into their show when they’re having a technical difficulty.
Oh yeah, especially that first week when we have new DJs, the station’s basically always on; if I'm awake, I’m listening to it. If there’s dead air, or the sound levels are bad, I’ll call in and help guide them through because it’s nice to have that help and not be sitting in here freaking out. Last term, I tuned in and I heard the end of the last show and then I was doing something else and got back to listening, it was a few minutes later, and it was dead air. I was listening and thinking, “Okay, it’s just taking them a little bit,” but I didn’t hear anything. So I called in and this poor DJ is just crying, and they’re like, “My computer, I don’t know what—” trying to explain, I’m like, “Okay, take a deep breath, it’s not a problem. The station’s off the air, so you’re gonna have to turn it on again, and there’s a procedure but I’ll talk you through it, and look to the left on the wall, this is what you’re gonna say, and then start your show.” I just talked them through it and they got through it.
You tried to call in to every show, right?
I did. I got to like two-thirds of the shows last term, and I keep a call log [he looks through his notebook on the table] and I’m paging through, this is all the different folks I talk to, and I had a good old time doing it. I know some of the community DJs, but a lot of the other DJs, other than calling in on the phone, I probably wouldn’t see 'em around, especially now that I live outside of town.
I was wondering how you've seen the evolution of radio since you've been a listener and since you’ve been listening to WOBC.
Well, WOBC is always a cornucopia of different genres and different experience levels, because we've got people that are kind of semi-professional, or have been and were retired from the radio industry, and then a lot of people that have done recording and blogs and whatnot in their young lives and have incredible technology and experience. And so you get a big wide mix of things. And then plus, you know, just the different music and everything that you hear. And the different show formats, like right now they're talking about baseball [The Dugout, Mondays at 12 PM EST]. Which is cool, I don’t really pay attention to sports, but I’ll get it from WOBC.
Growing up, did you listen to the radio?
Oh heck yeah. We had record stores and then we had radio. I grew up in the Cleveland area and we had great radio back then. The new rock would be coming from CKLW in Canada. And then there was WIXY 1260 which was another rock’n’roll station, and WMMS which was a progressive modern music station, and you would hear a lot of stuff for the first time on WMMS; this was in the 70s and 80s. I went away to college and then ended up coming back to Northeast Ohio and I got a job with a civil engineering firm. I would be out on jobs and as I’m driving around, I would listen to talk radio. And this was back in the day when stations used to have DJs producing their own shows and people calling in. So I used to call in all the time but this was back in the days when if I’m driving around, I’d have to pull up to a pay phone, drop a quarter in, and then wait on line to get in. Sometimes I could do that, a lot of times I couldn’t. But the times I did get on line and be able to talk to DJs and guests it was fascinating, and I did that for years and talked to all kinds of different people. Usually, they’d go with a pro or con [segment], and I’d always try to come in with a third way, and I really liked calling in and trying to lever the conversation in a completely different way and everything. That was always a fun game for me. And then I actually got some in-studio interviews over the years because some of my activism—I’m an activist in several different areas, and I’ve actually been able to be in studios as a guest on these different talk shows and conversations. So I got no problem getting in front of a microphone!
Could you talk more about your activism?
Oh, gosh. So I've always been an environmentalist. I've been a member of the Sierra Club, and I used to do a small bit of advocacy and a little bit of contract work for Greenpeace back in the very early 90s. At the time my wife and I were working with a group that was trying to defeat a toxic waste incinerator proposal for south of here in Sullivan, Ohio, Nova, Ohio, which I have actually come to regret doing. Because, what do you do with toxic waste from industry, if you can't eliminate the source, high-temperature incineration and treatment is a viable way to deal with this material. And we were successful in defeating this proposal. But the cost of it was a lot of industry; this would have been a way to keep industry in the United States. But I did learn how to advocate and talk to politicians; I've done multiple trips down to Columbus, different EPA regions, and been on the media, on television, and radio and press. I've been a press officer for a couple of organizations, and a volunteer press officer; then one of the other areas was hemp, I was a hemp advocate. I don't have any problem with people smoking marijuana and everything. But I was really interested in the hemp aspect of it. Which is the same crop, but it has industrial uses for fiber, food, oils, energy, and all kinds of different stuff. We went from it being completely illegal in the United States, to partially legal, and then in the state of Ohio, being big-time illegal, and fairly legal now. And then also agriculturally, there's people that are planting hemp crops right now in Ohio. That was a ten-year-plus battle. Then I moved into clean energy. I was first looking at wind and solar, and I would go to lectures at the Lewis Center here, but the more I studied the issue, the more I started realizing that maybe we should take another look at nuclear power. Then I did a deep dive on that, starting in the 1990s. I was doing a research project for Greenpeace and they wanted to kill the industry back then. So I got tasked to go and look at old information and go into the libraries because there was no internet, so you had to go to research libraries and go into the stacks and pull up stuff and go through microfiche and whatnot, and read some of these old things that had been stored on photographic material and getting prints of that. The more I learned, the more I started questioning my opposition, which led me to question my questioning. So I did more research. There was 10 more years of research, hitting up libraries, and then finally, around 2000, I started to warm up to nuclear power. Around 2010, I stumbled on these Google tech talks. They were talking about advanced reactors, really advanced stuff, and I just went down that deep rabbit hole of thorium molten salt reactors and high-temperature gas reactors. I got very involved with that, I stumbled into the Thorium Energy Alliance and started going to conferences there, then helping with some video efforts there. Which has been really cool, and that advocacy has been really cool. Just to see that change has been amazing, because as a loose group of people, we’ve been able to change policy in this country and other countries and we’re getting people to take another look at this energy system. Had it not been linked to nuclear warfare at the end of World War II and then like the Cold War and whatnot; if nuclear power were coming out as a new technology now, we would be all over it for what a miracle this technology is.
Since Oberlin is known for such a history of activism, have you ever done activism with students or faculty?
Oh gosh yeah. I mean, I think there’s been a change since COVID and maybe since social media’s really kicked on. I think this goes across the whole population, not just at Oberlin, but liking something on a social media string, you know, it's not really activism. It used to be that you could put up some flyers around Oberlin on a thing, and you'd have several dozen people showing up for your event. I think there's a little bit of a difference and also kind of hesitancy. For instance, in my experience, I would hang out in the quad here in front of Mudd and I would wait for the International Space Station to go over. I would have some binoculars, and back when I was first doing this, it was like 10 years ago, people would stop and say, “Hey, what are you doing? What are you waiting for?” And I would tell them and then they would hang out and they’d be excited about it and then there’d be a whole group. And then during COVID, people weren’t interested at all.
Do you have plans for the eclipse?
Oh heck yeah. I was just talking about it on my show. My half-sister and her husband and a couple of people are going to be dropping by my place in Grafton. If you’re going to be here, don’t plan on driving around, because there’s going to be 700,000 people coming to our county, according to an estimate from the County Fire Chief’s Association. They’re calling it the apoca-eclipse because it’s going to be kind of like the apocalypse, there’s going to be so many people here coming to see it. And that’s because of the low angle of the sun. We’re going to have a longer viewing time for totality, so get your shopping done a couple days before, don’t plan on going out and driving around because the roads are going to be completely packed. I was in Missouri seven years ago for the last eclipse and that was bedlam, it was nuts. It was like hair on the back of my neck excitement. The sun went out, stars came out, birds were flying around like crazy, and the night bugs started making noise.
How did you first get interested in space?
I came through it because of early exposure through my father, who worked for NASA. My dad was a World War II vet who was able to use the GI Bill to finish up his training in aeronautical engineering. Then he got a job with the government at the old NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] here. That transitioned at the end of the Eisenhower administration into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I didn’t realize the importance of this until my later life, but he was working on power systems for satellites, space stations, and interplanetary vessels that used nuclear power. They were building these very small reactors using military-grade materials; they called them trashcan reactors because they were so small, but they put out a lot of heat. And that heat would vaporize mercury, so liquid mercury would turn into vapor, and then that would spin turbo alternators and then make a bunch of electricity from a really small package.
I’ll tell you this story. In 1969, he grabbed me—I was the oldest kid—he said, “Don’t tell your brothers and sisters, but we’re gonna go see a movie.” We went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in theaters. Frankly, we almost left, as several people did, in the beginning of the movie, because it’s just a bunch of monkeys on the plains of Africa. I could tell he was getting fidgety and wanted to leave because he thought it was a space movie and we walked into some weird documentary. But then all of a sudden they’re in space and it was really cool. And then there was the acid trip at the end, which is like, “What’s going on?!”
But as we were driving home, my dad said, "There's every chance that you're going to be able to do all this by the year 2000, because we're going to have all this stuff going, you know, moon bases, big space stations, interplanetary vessels. And he says there's even a chance I'll be able to come up to a space station and visit you.” And shortly after that, the Nixon administration came in, and they pretty much torpedoed the Apollo program and whatnot, which was kind of an emergency program that the Kennedy administration put in, because they were looking at a cheaper, faster way to get us into space to beat the Russians. So it's long and complex and everything. But I've always been a space bug. I've always read everything I could about it. And I’ve been a student of the American program, the European program, what the Russians were doing, other agencies. So it’s always been a big interest of mine. And now SpaceX is doing amazing stuff. That madman Elon Musk; he’s a big billionaire and everything but sometimes he’s sleeping in the office, on the factory floor, and he doesn’t have a yacht, he doesn’t do all this other stuff, he plows everything back into developing this technology for the future. I’m a critic, but I’m also a great admirer of what he and his company are doing. Thank god he’s got Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX. She really keeps him in line and everything on track, so God bless her.
I don't know much about space technology, but it worries me to think about colonization on Earth and what some empires would do with access to the moon.
Yeah, well, here’s the thing. I'm all for saving areas of the Moon and Mars, in their natural state. Just for people in the future to be able to go and look at it in pristine conditions and everything, but there's quite a bit of it that we can use and mine and use to develop humanity. Because part of being human is being able to venture into new areas and explore and spread life. Plus getting off the planet and establishing on the moon or outer planets or artificial worlds is going to give a chance for the future Earth to actually be restored to natural conditions. And from the stuff I’ve read, there’s nothing to stop us from going out and expanding humanity throughout the solar system and getting the population on Earth down and actually having the energy and resources to clean up 400 years of industrialization and get control of global climate change. Before we can even talk about Star Trek stuff and going to other star systems, we really need to clean up home first. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to utilize the space industry.
I hope you don’t mind that I googled your name…
Go ahead!
And I saw that you’re a masseuse!
I’m a retired massage therapist. Masseuse is the French word for a female operator of massage therapy, and a masseur if you are a male in the same business, but I’m a state-licensed massage therapist. I had to pass a medical board test and then establish my practice. I worked in Oberlin for over 20 years. I used to be in the old Oberlin Inn, I had an office in the business wing that they used to have back then, and then I moved across the street in 2009 to above Ben Franklin’s up until COVID. When COVID hit we got shut down by the state because nobody knew anything about this new disease and it looked scary and it was in fact very scary. I worked on 4,150 people over 20 years; I’ve seen and worked through a lot of different stuff.
Did you find my bee movie?
No…?
I used to be a beekeeper. At one point, I had three or four hives out of the Jones farm and we filmed a video that’s still up on YouTube. I'm on there for like six minutes talking about the bees, and I actually go into the colony and pull it out. I'm showing the camera the bees and the honey and whatnot. And in fact, the cameraman got stung by a bee and the bee went right past the microphone. So you hear this buzz and then the camera just shakes just a little bit and I’m looking at the camera and ask, “Did you just get stung?” He says, “Yeah, I did.” And what was really weird about that and the power of the internet was I got an email a few months after that and it was from a beekeeper association in Kazakhstan, who said that they played that video at their national meeting of the Kazakhstanian Beekeeping Association. I got an email from somebody else after that, they said “Yeah man, just wanted to let you know that I got a link from somebody because they saw your video on a Japanese comedy show.”
Do you have any other thoughts about anything related to WOBC?
I think a lot of people don't realize the power and how many people listen to WOBC from all over the place. I can hear the station in Grafton, and you can get it pretty much up to Lorain and down to Sullivan. And we’re worldwide with wobcfm.org so alumni can keep up with the station – and they do! I think what the station can do is get more assistance from our alumni to fund cooler stuff. Like we’re going to be in a place on the fourth floor here but we really should have our own space someplace like a lot of other radio stations on college campuses have. I’ve talked to other boards in the past, where we said, “Can we get a bit of land on campus and build like a shipping container studio?” Just dream big, you know, try to work on some performance spaces, and integrate the film department and journalism into actually doing a regular news program. I think there's no place to go but up. Plus, we've been at it for 75 years. And I’d like to see there be a station 100 years from now. Wouldn’t it be great to have a satellite station for WOBC? You know, connected to the college, on the moon or Mars? Why not? It’s possible. I’m very enthusiastic about the possibilities for the station.
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