more on Tony Dean
Most just know of Tony as to where he ascended in the outdoors..but here’s part of the trail…
While a youngster, he set a goal to become a radio announcer. While attending Bismarck Junior College (now Bismarck State College), he started as a weekend announcer at North Dakota’s first rock & roll station, KQDI in Bismarck. But after only one full semester, his success as a radio announcer would propel him to a larger market, and he left the state to take a better job with a radio station in Cedar Rapids, IA in 1960
To supplement income from his radio job, he spent summer nights announcing stock car races on the dirt tracks of Iowa and Illinois. Later moving on to become a regular announcer for the Motor Racing Network covering NASCAR races on the super speedways across the south.
Outdoors remained his first love. Moving to Pierre, SD in 1968 to manage a radio station, he had returned to the fishing and hunding mecca of the Dakotas. Two years later, his employer wanted him to move back to Iowa. Instead, he resigned in order to remain in Pierre. Fortune struck that same day when the Governor of South Dakota called to offer him the position as the first Gubernatorial Press Secretary in state history.
But while in the Governor’s office, he presented an idea to the SD Game, Fish & Parks Department to develop a radio show. That show, South Dakota Outdoors, aired daily on every station in South Dakota for the nest 25 years. In 1990, he resigned to create a new show, “Dakota Backroads,” which airs 42 times daily on 29 North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and one Wyoming station. He was also hired by Fisherman magazine to produce a radion show that became the largest daily program in history.
He recounts that shortly after he began doing radio shows and writing a few magazine articles, his mother asked him how he made a living. He explained he hunted, fished, and wrote and talked about it. “And they paid you for that?” she asked. He assured her they did, and then she’d say, “No, c’mon, what do you really do?” It was years before she apparently accepted her oldest son was actually making a living doing something others got to do only on weekends.
