General Jim

Founder, President and CEO

Biography

Jim was born in San Antonio, Texas but grew up on the border of Virginia and West Virginia in the city of Bluefield.  He began his broadcasting career at the age of 3 on his grandmother’s TV show, Kiddie Kapers which aired on WHIS-TV channel 6.

Jim took an early interest in electricity and electronics, building a complete radio station, including a 50 watt transmitter, for a ninth grade science fair and winning first place in the school.  The radio station was installed in a downtown office building across the street from the cable company where the station became the background “music” for the public access channel.  Jim and his buddies would show up in the afternoon after school and played anything and everything that was brought to the studio — rock, pop, soul, underground and early contemporary Christian music of Larry Norman, Love Song, The Children of the Day, Mustard Seed Faith and other pioneers.

Not long after, with a little help from grandma, Jim started working part-time at WHIS AM-FM-TV in high school.  Within a year, Jim was a popular on-air announcer for the stations.

Jim earned degrees in electrical engineering technology from Bluefield State College and business administration from Marshall University in Huntington, WV.  At Marshall, he was named the student manager of WMUL, the student station on campus.  He instituted 11 hours of Christian music on the weekends.  One program, which is called “The Rock”, still survives to this day.  Jim organized a live concert that featured a fellow student who was leaving the university to take a job as Amy Grant’s piano player, that student — Michael W. Smith.

After graduation, Jim worked primarily in secular radio.  In 1981, he hooked up with a young engineer, Glen Clark and his roommate Matt Bahr, who was the field goal kicker for the Pittsburgh Steelers at the time.  The two had developed an audio processor for major market radio virtually on their kitchen table.  Jim quickly discovered that the product, the Audio Prism, was the ultimate weapon at the time to make a radio station sonically standout above its competitors.

The company that was formed from that association was called Texar and was based out of Pittsburgh, PA.  Jim traveled around the country and the world doing tradeshows, presentations and installations.  The processor was mandated for most of the major groups of the time in virtually every major radio station in the country starting with the famed Z100 in New York.

In 1986, Jim sold his interest in Texar and moved to Florida.  While working for a radio station near Orlando, he got inspired to bring contemporary Christian music to the region and was able to find a non-commercial allocation for that purpose.  Not sure how he was going to fund his “hobby”, he formed a non-profit corporation in 1988 and placed an application on file with the FCC.  After 7 long years of litigation with 6 other competing applicants, Z88.3 was born on August 14, 1995.

In 2001, Jim took over the chairmanship of the Emergency Alert System for the eight county Central Florida area, volunteering his stations as the local entry point for emergency information for all television, cable and radio station in the region.

Presently, Jim is the founder, president and CEO of Z88.3 in Orlando which is broadcast on four full power FM facilities and six translators.  Jim says that his education, life experiences in secular radio and broadcast equipment manufacturing have prepared him providentially for “such a time as this.”

Jim has been married for 18 years to the former Eunice Medina of Cali Colombia, and has two children, Viviana and Gabriella.