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Rock & Roll Attorney |
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Herald & Review - (Decatur, IL) March 27, 1994
[Note: This article was later syndicated by the Associated Press of Illinois].
Scott Ealy isn’t looking to be a star in Top 40 radio, but the Effingham man finds dealing with kids via the airwaves to be an ideal way to “blow off steam” after office hours.
H&R Effingham Staff Writer
He says it’s his way to blow off steam.
“Sometimes I get worked up, and I can really work myself up into a frenzy,” he said at the end of the day in his law office. “But then I get to the radio station and my job is to deal primarily with young people.”
The 33-year-old Ealy first signed on to radio at age 15 as a part-timer at Effingham station WCRA. He worked at stations in Peoria, Springfield and Charleston for the next eight years. And, while earning his bachelor of arts degree in communication from Sangamon State University in Springfield, became press assistant to then-Secretary of State Jim Edgar from 1985-87.
After leaving Edgar, he went to work for Illinois Information Service, which provides audio and video reports to the state’s radio and TV stations.
“I found out that the people I most respected in life were the ones who knew how things worked, who knew what the rules were and played by those rules,” Ealy said. “The more I learned, the more I began to realize my own ignorance.”
He first applied to law school at Southern Illinois University but said there was an overabundance of applicants caused by what he called the “L.A. Law Effect.”
He entered the Mississippi College School of Law in the fall of 1990. It was there he was drawn to civil rights issues. Blacks, he said, comprised 36 percent of Mississippi’s population, the highest percentage of any state in the nation. The city of Jackson, where he attended college, was 53 percent black.
Yet his law school enrollment was only 5 percent black, and fewer than 4 percent of Mississippi’s lawyers were black, he said.
“The first couple of people I met were very nasty, racially divisive, very terrible people, saying bad things about African-American people,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘These are the thinkers of the world?’ I saw a message of inferiority being passed from one race to another.”
His wife, Joy, attended predominately black Jackson State University, and Ealy said the couple was somewhat “ostracized” for sending their children to non-segregated public schools rather than private “academies” where many white families sent their children.
He worked for the rights of blacks while in law school and in the city of Jackson. His work was recognized this year when he was named grand marshal for Jackson’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.
To help make ends meet, Ealy worked part-time jobs with newspapers and radio stations and was even offered a morning slot at one station, only to have the offer nixed later by a management change.
About a year ago, Ealy moved his family back to the Effingham area. It was a chance for the new attorney to join his father, Ron, in a joint law practice covering family law, child custody and workers compensation suits.
But the father-son collaboration was cut tragically short by Ron Ealy’s suicide in September.
Ealy described his father as a manic-depressive who had slipped back into a long battle with alcoholism after 20 years of sobriety.
“We knew things weren’t right with him,” he said. “But I was as shocked as anybody (by the suicide).”
A month after his father’s funeral, Scott found out that he had passed the Illinois Bar Exam on his first try.
“It was a mixed emotional moment,” he said.
Soon after, Ealy bumped into WXEF general manager Greg Sapp. The two began discussing radio, and Ealy offered to work part-time at the station. That grew into the nightly spot.
Ealy is careful to go home for an hour - ”to play a little basketball, do something to talk with my guys” - before heading off to the radio station.
“My dad didn’t spend as much time with me as he should have when I was a kid, and all my life—I think even doing this law thing began as trying to please him,” Ealy said. “He did the best he could, I suppose, but he didn’t really spend a lot of time with me. There were times I didn’t think that he was in my corner.”
Ealy’s sons, Robert, 8, and Michael, who will be 6 on Friday, sometimes call in and request songs. (He and Joy also have a daughter, Brigette, 1). His sons’ calls are among a deluge - mostly from teen and preteen listeners - that Ealy juggles, along with the computer operation that controls 18 compact disc players.
He uses his legal research skills in combing through newspapers and magazines to find out information about artists.
“It means a lot for me to be able to play a song and be able to say something about its significance,” he said. “The people I admire in radio are the people who give you something more than just the time and temperature.”
Ealy said he realizes that being on the radio isn’t going to make him a star. And the $5 an hour isn’t going to make him rich.
“But every little bit helps,” he said.
He also uses some artists to show the results and the success of hard work and clear thinking, unclouded by drugs and alcohol.
“For the most part, to do good things through music you have to be a thinker, you have to have some talent but you also have to work at it,” said Ealy, a non-smoker and non-drinker. “If you’re chemically involved, you’re not going to be yourself, and the best thing you can do for yourself and others is to be yourself.”
Ealy said he isn’t sure how much longer he’ll be able to keep doing both the law and radio.
“It really wears me down sometimes, but I enjoy it,” he said. “For now, I guess I’ll just play it by ear.” Which is a good thing to do when you’re in radio.
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