She laid her head on her arm, which was resting on her desk, and reopened the book she had been reading during her breaks.
For Kathy Hart, half of the famous “Eric & Kathy Mornings” that has worked for 18 years in 101.9 FM’s morning slot, “breaks” happen when she played a song. Commercials lasted only 30 seconds and had to be managed closely, but songs were three-and-a-half minutes — time enough to get through a few paragraphs before needing to cue something else up.
Hart was working her first on-air job in radio, the midnight-to-6 a.m. slot at a station in Rockford; being young and single, she had been out the night before, and came to work tired. She hit play on a song from the Cars; this was the early 1980s, and she had played the hit song a lot, and knew off the top of her head that it was three minutes and 37 seconds.
When she hit play, a timer started, showing her how many minutes and seconds had passed since she cued the last song or commercial.
It was just after 4 a.m. The weary Hart hit play, the timer started, she laid her upper body horizontally on her desk and went back to her book. In a minute or two, she would check the timer to see where she was at in the cycle.
Her eyes closed.
When they reopened, she glanced at the timer. But it had climbed to 48 minutes.
A skilled storyteller, Hart brought several humorous and a few tense moments from her life so far to a presentation at Stevenson High School on Feb. 8, drawing an audience of adult listeners. A resident of Lincolnshire, the radio personality is also the parent of a Patriot freshman, and Hart joked about the drama of a boy whose mother is coming to his campus as a featured speaker.
“I got the look like ‘What are you doing, coming to my school?'” she said. “I actually thought this would be for students, and he was like ‘God, that would be worse.'”
Hart told a range of stories and answered several questions. No, she and Eric are not super-close buddies off the air; they rarely speak outside of work and barely greet each other before going on the air, strictly to ensure that their conversations in front of listeners are fresh and unrehearsed. She wakes up at 3:30 a.m.
“We walk in at 5:30, and nobody says hello,” she said. “It’s the weirdest thing. When we have visitors, we kind of have to explain why we don’t talk to each other.”
More stories: working in sports reporting for a station in Phoenix, she and Green Bay Packers legend Reggie White once made a whole city of competing sports reporters mad at the two of them. Still in Phoenix, she gave Charles Barkley a birthday card, and he kept it in the Suns’ locker room long after his birthday passed. If you are one of the few but persistent people who constantly call in, trying to win every single prize her station offers…chill out.
Her maiden name was Achenbach, an unfortunate moniker for a radio personality. She managed to keep it for her first job, in Rockford, but when she moved to Milwaukee, the general manager instructed her to pick out something easier for listeners to pronounce.
“I just picked ‘Hart,’ I don’t know why,” she said.
She worked in Columbus, Ohio — first on the air, then downgraded to doughnut delivery. The demotion came after an on-air conversation during which another radio personality, who Hart struggled to get along with, really angered her. Hart tossed the “f-word” into a live microphone. Most stations broadcast on a seven-second delay, which gives the guys at the controls enough time to hit the “bleep” button in this situation; that station’s control-panel guys were so shocked, though, that they nearly missed the delay window.
So, as she told her audience, Hart learned a lot about being authentic in her early years. And, as she continued the story from the Rockford overnight shift, the early years were nearly the only years she had.
Clearing her head while staring at the timer, Hart realized that she had fallen asleep. The Cars finished their song 45 minutes ago; since then, her station had been broadcasting silence.
She knew that the general manager woke up around 4 a.m., and arrived at the studio around 5 a.m. She knew that, while she had been asleep at the microphone, he had been behind the wheel. These were the days long before mobile phones, though, so Hart could only dread what he would do when he got there.
After Eric Ferguson became her partner at the Mix and the ratings climbed, dread and stress became small parts of Hart’s life. She began having adrenal gland problems, which led to panic attacks — the first of which occurred at an invitation-only film premier attended by several leading critics.
“I thought ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die in front of Roger Ebert, are you kidding me?'” she recalled. “‘He’s going to be pissed because they’re going to have to stop the movie.'”
She had another case while interviewing the Goo Goo Dolls.
“They just come from out of nowhere,” she said. “Not the Goo Goo Dolls, panic attacks.”
Taking supplements helped, but the key, she said, was making her relationship with stress less adversarial and more tolerant.
“I can meditate, I can get a massage, I can drink a lot of wine, but if you just embrace it and go along with it, it helps a lot,” she said.
She started a web site, HealthyWithHart.com and is in the process of opening her own restaurant in Highwood this summer. After career sidetracks that took her through the insurance and cheese industries, then back to her parents’ home at age 30, Hart is living with stress, succeeding with coworkers who she called “the most dysfunctional family” and embarrassing her teenage son by coming to his school.
Maybe none of which might have been possible if the manager in Rockford had been listening to his own station that one morning in the ’80s. Hart’s asleep-at-the-mic story ends with a happy boss greeting the young upstart as he walked in.
“Clearly, he wasn’t even listening,” she said. “I was a little bit offended.”
She said she would have hated being fired from that job.
“I was loving every minute of it, working minimum wage.”
