Daria (Eckhardt) O’Neill ’94 didn’t follow the well-worn
trail of small-town radio shows and dismal late-night time slots that eventually
leads to the promised land: morning-show rock jock in a top-25 market. O’Neill,
who graduated in theatre, jumped completely over the path and onto the air
in one unlikely leap.
O’Neill was working with deaf and developmentally disabled children
at Portland’s Wilson High School—loving the kids, hating her
bosses—when in 1997 she heard rock station KNRK make an open call
for audition tapes. The morning DJ was leaving, and the station was making
the finding of his replacement a promotional event. As you can guess, this
is not how it is usually done.
“I was home, sick with a cold, probably delusional on cold medicine,
and on a whim I decided to make a tape,” O’Neill recalls. “I
told a long, rambling joke. I read an excerpt from Burt Ward’s Robin
Hood: My Life in Tights. I did all sorts of strange things—it
was all very low pressure for me, because being on the radio had never been
my dream. Until, of course, they told me I was a finalist—then it
suddenly became what I had desperately wanted my whole life!”
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Daria (Eckhardt) O’Neill
’94 |
On O’Neill’s 26th birthday she got the
call telling her that she had been chosen, over hundreds of others, to get
the gig. She proved to be a natural.
“Radio,” O’Neill says, “is exactly like doing improvisational
theater for an invisible audience. My real fear was ‘What do I know
about choosing music for the format?’ Turned out the program director
does all that.”
There were a few other things she didn’t know. Like don’t
badmouth the songs. And for God’s sake don’t badmouth the
sponsors.
“You’d think
those things would be obvious,” O’Neill laughs. “But
I still remember my first week—I said something and before the words
were out of my mouth the window of the studio looked like people stuffing
a phonebooth: a crowd of panicked salespeople all pulling their fingers
across their throats.”
The now 31-year-old O’Neill weathered the initial mistakes and is
now part of a very popular morning team. She also acts in Portland theater,
to reviews that often read something like “Local radio personality
surprises, shines in stage play.” She has, however, been acting
on stage since grade school.
“I was never bashful about expressing my opinions,” O’Neill
says, “but Reed intensely honed my ability to think on my feet and
took away the hesitancy that will kill you on the radio. On the air you
have to be fearless about just forging ahead. The really good times are
when it feels like you are just having a wonder-ful conversation with
friends. This is a great job— I’m in the place I want to be.”
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