Ginny Prior: Living a Dream by Marjorie Smith California broadcast journalist Ginny Prior, '75 FTV, ran into a fan recently in Anchorage, Alaska. "I knew you sounded familiar," the man told her. "I listen to you up near the North Pole where I work." The encounter came as no surprise to Prior. She knew her life would work out just fine when, as an MSU freshman, she got her dorm assignment. "I lived in Pryor Hall," she says. "It never bothered me that the building's name is spelled a little differently than mine." Prior is a woman who has known what she wanted to do since her Minnesota childhood. "It was always my dream to live in California and be in the public eye," she says. She moved to California a year after her MSU graduation and has made her living in radio, television and as a widely published writer. Prior started out majoring in economics but quickly discovered that film and television was a better fit. "I was blessed--that's the only word--with a brilliant advisor who became my mentor and the biggest influence in my life--the late Fred Gerber," she says. Prior discovered radio as a freshman, doing a program for the campus station KATS, predecessor to KGLT. After more than three decades working in print journalism, radio and television, she says, "I just couldn't get enough of all the media, but I really love radio the best--the spontaneity of it." Her first jobs in California were at small radio stations in small towns. Then she landed a job with the CBS affiliate in San Diego, but "they had a huge news staff but not much going on--I ended up covering things like jellyfish stings." She moved to KSFO in San Francisco where she spent more than 10 years doing the morning news. In search of greater stability--"whenever radio stations are sold, the new owners like to put in new people"-- she went into newspapering. She writes a weekly column for the Montclarion, her local paper in Oakland, and does free-lance travel writing, but it is clear that her heart still belongs to radio. She does 15-minute adventure segments for "Out and About" on the Sirius Satellite Radio system. The program goes out to all Sirius subscribers and is also broadcast by the Armed Forces radio network and some conventional stations. Prior specializes in "activities a 51-year-old mother of two can do, like snowboarding, kayaking, bull riding." Bull riding? "Yes, and I rode out the clock," she says proudly, meaning she stayed aboard the huge animal for the required eight seconds, all the while talking about the experience and recording ambient sounds. "My life today is a compilation of all the things that I love," she says. "God has truly blessed me."