“It’s me, it’s me! Donald G. at my J-O-B. Nearly famous, highly outrageous, and very contagious. I’m on the air, I’m off the wall, I’m feeling high, I’m getting small.”
So goes the signature opening catchphrase of shock-jock talk program The Don Geronimo Show, which debuts each episode with that Seussian greeting—if Dr. Seuss hosted a radio show where a few minutes later he interviewed a bisexual dominatrix who bestows sex advice.
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that’s how Geronimo begins each episode, considering he starts broadcasting each weekday at 5:30 a.m. If you don’t awake until sometime later, you might hear him on the way into work; he’s there until 10 a.m. And if you miss his show live on classic rock station BIG 100 (100.3 FM) entirely, it also releases as a free podcast on weekday afternoons.
“To me, morning is the best time of day to be on because you have the chance to make the first impression on someone. If there’s something out there, something important, I want to be the first person that people hear talking about it,” Geronimo, 63, says from his office down the hall from the studio where he broadcasts. “I thought that was a hindrance back when I was on in the afternoon because by then, everybody had already heard everything.”
One of the most popular radio hosts in the greater DC and Northern Virginia areas for decades, Geronimo returned last fall after a long hiatus with a new, revamped show—not just a new morning timeslot, but also solo instead of with his longtime on-air partner, and amid a modern audio media landscape awash with infinite podcasts.
As for that aforementioned bisexual dominatrix, the day he spoke with Northern Virginia magazine, one of his episode’s guests was Auntie Vice. At one point in the interview, she recommended a new type of sex toy with a feature allowing users to upload a preset musical playlist that will cause the toy to vibrate in time to the songs. Geronimo asked if classic rock would be a good fit. (The answer, fortunately for his listeners: yes.)
How It All Began
One day in the early ’70s, a 12-year-old boy still going by his real name, Michael Sorce, called into a DC-area radio station to request “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. When he went to school the next day, other kids recognized his voice from the previous day—and he was hooked.
“I was a contest pig. That’s what they’d call people who call in all the time to win prizes. When I was a kid, I would call WPGC [95.5 FM],” Geronimo says. (Now a DC-area hip-hop and R&B station, it was a top-40 station at the time.) “I figured out the disc jockeys were lazy—they did their contests at the same time every hour. So at about the 43- or 44-minute mark every hour, I would just start calling. I would win a bunch and pick up eight albums at once.”
While Geronimo was picking up some prizes one day, the station’s morning radio host Harv Moore recognized the boy’s voice from his increasingly frequent appearances at the building. “He brought me back to his office. In this day and age, you couldn’t do that because I’m a kid and he’s an adult,” Geronimo says, in reference to modern-day mores about allowing adults alone with children. “But he started talking to me.” Pretty soon, Moore was hiring him to help out on weekends.
“I was in there for four hours every Saturday, just soaking it up while this guy was doing his show. And I saw what theater of the mind was, how one guy can make it seem like there’s a million people working behind the scenes,” Geronimo marvels in regard to the old radio concept of creating an entire world through production values and larger-than-life personas.
Geronimo developed an early love for radio. He started appearing as an on-air DJ at 14 and still remembers the first song he ever spun: funk track “Once You Get Started” by Rufus and Chaka Khan. During a family dinner at 15, the house phone rang. It was for him. A radio station manager in Wichita, Kansas, was calling to offer him a job, in addition to the job he already had. “I said, ‘I can’t; I’m a sophomore in high school!’”
Accumulating enough credits to graduate from high school at 16, he left the house and got a job on the air in Wisconsin, moved to a larger market in Pittsburgh at 17, and advanced to the nation’s biggest market of all—New York City—at 18. By this point, he had acquired his new moniker.
“At the first station where I worked in high school…they’d had a disc jockey named Don Gerard and he had his own jingle, but they’d fired him a couple of years before. So they said, ‘That’ll be your name because we already have the jingle.’ So at my first job I was Don Gerard,” Geronimo says with a chuckle. “At my second job, the program director said to me, ‘That name sucks. How about Don Geronimo?’”
The DC Years
Geronimo came to prominence co-hosting DC’s off-color afternoon drive-time talk show Don & Mike with Mike O’Meara, which ran from 1985 to 2008. To give you a sense of what kind of program this was, in the recurring segment “Shock Trivia,” the hosts put on electric dog collars and got zapped whenever they missed a trivia question.
And that’s one of the segments that, crazy as it was, would at least still pass muster today; other segments from that era—such as color-commentating an orgy in Intercourse, Pennsylvania—definitely wouldn’t. “Now, it’s pretty much a given, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to be, for lack of a better word, politically correct. I wouldn’t touch half the stuff I did 20 years ago,” Geronimo admits.
In its home market of DC, Don & Mike aired for many years on sports/talk radio station 106.7 WJFK and was also syndicated on dozens of stations nationally.
Geronimo names comedian and actor Patton Oswalt as his all-time favorite guest. “Patton has probably been the most consistent interview. Anytime I have him on, he kills,” Geronimo says. “He grew up in Northern Virginia, listened to us on WAVA [105.1 FM] when he was a kid, and called into our show. The first time we had him on, I was blown away that he was like, ‘You’re Don and Mike! Oh, my God!’”
Over the decades, he’s interviewed countless major pop culture figures, claiming, “If you can name them, I’ve probably interviewed them.” OK: What about Meat Loaf, the legendary late rock singer? “Sure. Twice, actually. Great guest,” Geronimo says. “The second time I had him on, when I was on WJFK so it was just talk, we spent 45 minutes discussing ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light.’ Just one song.”
Other moments on the show proved far more serious or heartrending. Geronimo’s parents adopted both him and his brother but lied about it for years, and Geronimo didn’t actually find out the truth until he was 25. When he and his brother questioned their parents about it, their reaction was shockingly severe: They sent all of their children’s belongings back in a box with a message saying, “No one wanted you,” disowning them in their adulthood. Geronimo revealed all this on the air.
Though both his parents have since passed away, at that point, they were living in Florida, and the show was syndicated in Tampa Bay. “I got a letter one day from their lawyer, saying, ‘Stop talking about us or we will sue you.’ So I got my own lawyer and brought him on the air with me!” Geronimo laughs bitterly. “My lawyer said, ‘Anything they’re saying that’s not true, you can sue for … but everything they’re saying is true. So shut up.’”
It was acrimonious at the time, but Geronimo recalls the public feud today for the light it shined on an issue that a surprising number of listeners were secretly dealing with. “I’ve had so many people over the years, who were adopted and whose parents lied to them about it, call me on the air and say, ‘I get it,’” Geronimo says. “Looking at it now, as evolved as we are, why wouldn’t you just tell your child? You let them know, and you tell them that they’re special. But that’s just not the way it was always done back then.”
The Return
Geronimo was absent from DC airwaves for 14 years. Geronimo, who has two grown children from his first marriage, was married to his second wife, Freda Wright-Sorce, for 23 years, before she was killed in a car accident in 2005. He was back on the air three weeks later, but soon realized he had come back too quickly. He took an extended break in 2008, the year he turned 50, to pursue a dream of retirement down the shore that he and his wife once shared.
Until this past September, when BIG 100 brought him back for a solo morning show. “The challenge for me was: Could I get an audience without doing exactly what I did when they liked me before?” he says. “And the answer is yes.”
To be clear, he is still doing much of the very PG-13 comedy that his audience liked before. On the episode that aired the day Northern Virginia interviewed him, Geronimo somehow managed to insert a joke about male genitalia while delivering the weather forecast, of all things.
“I’m here to tell you that we’re going to have 2 inches of snow tomorrow. That’s right, I’m a 2-inch man,” Geronimo said.
Geronimo points to football when asked about the biggest drawbacks to his new, earlier timeslot. “The worst part about doing this show is I can’t stay up until midnight,” Geronimo laments. “Take the Chiefs vs. Bills playoff game the other night. I went to bed at halftime. [The game ended in a dramatic last-second Chiefs win.] But the next day, I got up at 3:25 and watched the last 10 minutes so I could know what people were talking about.”
That’s actually a habit with Geronimo—despite his love of music, he claims he’s also never attended a concert all the way through. “It started with Bruce Springsteen in 1977, when I saw him for the first time. It was just too much. I left. And that became my thing,” Geronimo says. “I get there, I have a good time, but I hear what I want to hear. I’ve seen KISS 15 times, and I love them every time I’ve seen them, but I’ve never seen the end.”
At least he stays through to the end of his own show at 10 a.m. Closing with the track “Wasted Youth,” an ironic choice considering he clearly didn’t idle away his own, Geronimo notes that there’s a small perpetual pleasure in the way his career has come full circle. After all, the new songs he was playing in his initial ’70s-era DJ stint are the same tracks he’s playing today, except now they’re categorized as classic rock.
“Radio is the best medium because it’s the most intimate,” Geronimo explains. “Usually, you’re listening one on one. You have a captive audience. It’s the ultimate because if they don’t like what you’re saying,” he mimes turning off a switch, “bye! But if you make a bond with somebody, they know you’re there every day, and they know what they get with you. It is truly the best way to communicate.”
This story originally appeared in the April issue of Northern Virginia magazine. Subscribe for more stories like this.