RICHMOND — With breakfast from McDonald’s in his left hand and his softsided briefcase rolling behind him, John Fredericks strolled into his radio studio, housed in a small, isolated building on the south side of this city.
He has engaged in some version of this ritual in the pitch dark for the past eight years as host of a morning show on a local AM radio station — an unlikely career path for the lifelong stutterer.
Fredericks, who declared bankruptcy in 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis and lost his family’s home, vowed to make the radio job work. And he turned his hosting gig at a single station into a regionally syndicated radio network run out of Richmond. Continue reading.