Hudson Reporter Archive

Radio Jersey City Resident to start talk show

Pat O’Melia will be talking about Jersey City, and he wants you to join him. On the air.

Beginning Nov. 13 at 9 p.m. and continuing every Monday, the lifelong Jersey City resident will, as he puts it, be discussing “everything from potholes to politics” on his WNSW-AM 1430 radio show, “Jersey City is Talking.” “Not everyone can go down to the City Council or see the mayor or visit the Department of Public Works,” said O’Melia, who intends to get councilmen and other city officials to appear on his program. His first interview will be Mayor Bret Schundler.

A man who makes his living from buying, selling and repairing tractor trailers, O’Melia, a P.S. 23 graduate and former Dickinson High School student, said he had the idea for the show mulling for a year and shopped it around to a number of stations. He bought the hour time slot for the program on WNSW, which is based in New York, and is working on getting advertisers.

The Don Imus and “Rambling with Gambling” fan said his love of the radio and of his town is what drove him to do the show.

O’Melia is a tall man with large tinted glasses and day-old salt and pepper facial hair growth.

“My real job is a pain in the ass,” said O’Melia, as he smoked a cigarette and drank coffee at the Coach House Diner on Kennedy Boulevard. But when things are going poorly on the job, he said, “you can swing over to radio and brighten up your day a little bit.”

O’Melia is no novice to radio. He hosted a wrestling radio show on Elizabeth-based station WJDN several years back that, he admitted, had a tough time attracting advertisers, since the show’s core audience was young teens.

Not a Schundler voter

Jersey City is going through a renaissance, O’Melia said, pointing to the improvements in Journal Square and Martin Luther King Drive, and he thinks the current mayor deserves a lot of the credit. But that doesn’t mean he voted for Bret Schundler. In the 1997 election, the registered Republican cast his vote for Judge Jerramiah Healy. He says he did so out of fear.

“[Healy’s] mother was a saint,” said O’Melia. “If I didn’t vote for him, his mother would come down from heaven and kick me in the ass.”

O’Melia said he will try to maintain a non-partisan approach to the show and stay away from personal attacks. He also said the show will be caller-driven. He’ll look at the week’s news and see what people are talking about and use that as a springboard, he said.

A sample of some of the topics: affordable housing for young families, illegally parked cars, the quality of popcorn at local theaters.

“The movie can suck,” O’Melia said, “but the popcorn’s gotta be good.” His current favorite theater for popcorn is the recently-opened Columbia Park Theater in North Bergen.

Cars and where to put them is usually the number one topic for many of the city’s residents, he said. Some residents have found creative ways to keep their parking secure. A person will take the curb in front of their house, cut it to look like a driveway, and paint stripes and erect a sign that says ‘no parking,’ when, in fact, there is no driveway in which to put the car. That way, a ‘tourist,’ or non-Jersey City resident, will drive right past it, he said.

O’Melia lives in the “the dog patch,” an area including St. Paul’s Avenue, west of Kennedy Boulevard. He considers it a forgotten part of the city.

As far as trying to use the show as a springboard for a political future, O’Melia dismissed it.

“You lose your privacy,” he said. “I respect anyone who runs for office because they lose that.”

Jersey City is Talking begins Nov. 13 at 9 p.m., and can be heard every Monday on AM 1430, WNSW.

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