The man whose voice has graced the WOMT airwaves for nearly five decades is hanging up his headphones.
Damon Ryan’s final day at the WOMT News Desk will be November 7th, which is also the day he was hired 46 years ago.
We reminisced with Damon about his near half-century in radio, which began after two years at Illinois Valley Community College.
“And then I thought, ‘Nothing seems to click,’ so, I went to a broadcast school in Chicago, the Institute of Broadcast Arts,” he explained. “I started at one of my hometown radio stations, which is no longer there. Not the hometown, but the radio station. It was an FM.”
Damon spent about a year at that station doing, as he put it, “a little bit of everything at an extremely low salary.”
Despite growing up in Illinois, Damon says he was always a Green Bay Packer and Milwaukee Braves fan, which is part of the reason he took a job at a WNAM in Neenah before moving to WMKC in Oshkosh.
“I worked there through the football season, and then I got a call from Don Seehafer that he had an opening here in Manitowoc,” Damon revealed. “I started on my birthday, November 7th, 1977.”
Manitowoc gave Damon a rousing welcome, as he had a very busy first day.
“Not only observing a birthday, I was 26 years old back then, (but) I covered a City Council meeting, I also covered a murder announcement through the DA’s Office,” he recalled. “It wasn’t a real great birthday looking back on it, but it was memorable in a lot of ways.”
As for why he got the call from the late Don Seehafer, Damon explained that the two had met in Madison for the state basketball tournament, which led to the broadcast teams for both stations going out for dinner.
Damon has always been a proponent of sports at all levels and has been the voice of Manitowoc Lincoln Ships basketball and football his entire career here.
We asked Damon to pick out his top three favorite local sports memories.
“I would say the football [team] going down to state, the 48 game winning streak,” was the first thing that popped into his head.
But he did note that it’s not just the winning teams that stuck in his head.
He also recalled the Ships boys basketball team falling to Neenah in the sectional finals.
“After the game, Tim Scalmaski, who was quite a player, and Brad Jergenson who was just a sophomore and an up-and-coming player, as they were walking off the court…I still remember Tim had his arm around Brad as if to console him,” he recalled.
Damon also reminisced about being in Green Bay covering the draft when Lincoln legend Don Davey was drafted.
Davey of course was drafted by the Green Bay Packers after playing his high school ball just half an hour south of Lambeau Field.
Damon tells us he could go on for hours about all of his memories of local sports and all the friendships that have formed from his time in radio.
He said that he feels blessed to have had the career he has enjoyed and will cherish those relationships forever.
