I HAVE BEEN CHASING MY DREAM SINCE I WAS 10

It’s been a more than a 50-year career, and it’s still going strong. I once got to introduce President Ronald Reagan at a campaign rally in San Diego in 1984, later gave him one of my ranger hats, and in 2013 received a star on the

known as “Shotgun Tom” Kelly, is a longtime radio and television personality in Southern California and can be heard on Siriusxm 60s Gold (Channel 73) from 4 to 9 p.m. He is working on a book titled “All I Wanna Do is Play the Hits” and lives in San Diego County.

Hollywood Walk of Fame.

I was born and raised in San Diego and have always been proud to say that San Diego is my hometown. As young as 10, my dream was to be on the air in the radio industry, and I was very fortunate to have my dream realized when I was just 16. I was attending Mount Miguel High School in Spring Valley, and I was the school’s announcer every morning on “The Morning Bulletin.”

Then, in 1966, I got my first on-air job at KPRI-FM playing standard music through a workstudy program. At the time, FM was not the radio giant it is now. AM radio dominated the airwaves with stations like KCBQ and KGB-AM playing the hits, and that’s where I wanted to be, behind the microphone of a Top 40 radio station, playing those hits.

When I started, I needed a Federal Communications Commission first-class radiotelephone operator license to work at the big AM stations. So as soon as I graduated high school, I enrolled in the William B. Ogden Radio Operational Engineering School in Huntington Beach. I graduated from Ogden after six months with my first-class license, and I was on my way.

My first AM radio job was in Merced at KYOS-AM, then I worked at KACY-AM in Oxnard, and later, I was hired in Bakersfield at KAFY-AM.

It was in Bakersfield that I got a chance to host my first television kids show. I was “Nemo, the clown” every Saturday morning on KERO-TV, channel 23. I was in heaven. I was playing the hits and slowly making my way back to my hometown. One day, I got the nerve up to send an audition tape to Charlie Van Dyke, the program director of KGB-AM. He hired me for the 9 p.m. to midnight show. A year later, in 1971, I was the afternoon DJ at KCBQ-AM, at the same time I was asked to host “Word’s A Poppin,” a syndicated children’s game show on KGTV, channel 10. Now, I was working in two media industries, radio and television.

In the late 1970s, I worked at various radio stations in San Diego, including B100-FM and K-BEST 95, and in 1983 I began hosting the KUSI-TV “Kids Club.”

In the 1980s, Rep. Duncan

MEG MCLAUGHLIN U-T Thomas Irwin — known as radio personality “Shotgun Tom” Kelly — poses for a portrait in his home studio. The San Diego native got his first on-air job in 1966.