(Pictured: British newspapers headline the death of Princess Diana on August 31, 1997.)

I have written previously about being on the air the afternoon Michael Jackson died, and about reading the bulletins on the morning of the Challenger explosion. Twenty years ago tonight, I was on the air at the classic-rock station when Princess Diana died. (It was early in the morning of August 31, 1997, in Europe, but the evening of August 30 in the States, and the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend.)

We did not do breaking news on that station, of course. Our conventionally wacky morning show had newscasts, but it was the barest of headline services. A hard news item that could break through at any other time of the day had to be very, very big.

I was doing the all-request show that night. If our studios were connected to the Internet, it was an extremely new development, and I can’t say for sure whether I got the first bulletin that way. Although the company still had a news department, I wasn’t in the habit of looking at the wires. I suppose somebody from one of the other stations in the building could have come in and told me. Maybe a listener called up and told me. By some method, I tracked down a bulletin, although I didn’t read the first one, which was about the princess and a car accident. But later in the evening, when it became clear that it was a serious accident, I decided to go on with it. An hour later, the bulletins I was seeing made it clear that Diana had died in the accident, so sometime after 11:00 I delivered the news.

There was no consultation with the program director before I did it. I made the decision entirely on my own hook, as a veteran jock smart enough to recognize that this was the kind of news story even we shouldn’t ignore. That’s not intended to make me sound like a hero. It’s more an illustration of the fact that if you smack a mule in the head with a two-by-four, you can get his attention.

That show was one of the last ones I did at that station, as we were getting ready to move from the Quad Cities to Iowa City. It may have been the next-to-last week, which would mean my final show was September 6, 1997. Somewhere, I still have a tape of that last show (and I think I saved the tape of the Diana show, too). I talked about it being my last show, and I am sure I played some songs because I wanted to hear them. My ego was/is such that I undoubtedly played every phone call I got from people saying the show wouldn’t be the same without me.

Long before that night, I had chosen the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” as my last record. The last request I played was for “End of the Line” by the Traveling Wilburys, which seemed cosmically appropriate. I gave a little speech at my last break, thanking the audience and thanking the program director for putting up with me. Then it was into the Beatles and I was done, except for a back-of-the-studio, off-mike response to the overnight guy during his first break, when he told the audience how much the station would miss me.

I didn’t think of my exit from the Quad Cities as the end of my radio career, although I had no plans to return to radio anytime soon. And I didn’t. Over the next several years, I would do a few sports broadcasts, but I wouldn’t do a music show again for nearly nine years.