Emily McLongstreet

Once upon a time, a little girl named Emily daringly leapt from a tattered olive armchair to the back of a sagging couch and scampered along its spine, careful not to wake the sleeping, overnight DJ. She was contemplating her next move, how to get down the hall without touching foot to the dingy shag carpet (that, legend has it, once consumed an entire burrito), when instead she was scooped up by her father, carried to a stool in front of a microphone, and crowned with giant headphones.

Emily’s father was Scott the Radio Flyer and for the next 16 years she was raised in this Neverland of freeform radio, where lost boys and girls avoided growing up by becoming DJs.

Years later, Emily moved up the California coast to study art, religion and politics, and drop out of college many times. She realized that anything requiring that sort of determination and attention span was not in her cards. Instead, she needed a path that was colorful and constantly changing; somewhere her tendency to be distracted by shiny objects would be rewarded, not frowned upon. She briefly considered running away with the circus, but given her lack of balance and distrust of clowns, opted for the second best – a return to radio. Lo and behold, there was KHUM, a bastion of creamy freeform goodness, like a nougatty center in the chocolate shell of Humboldt County’s redwood curtain.

So that pretty much brings you up to speed. Emily McLongstreet now does the Saturday night show and Meet Me In The Morning on Sunday on KHUM, playing a little of this and more of that than you could shake a stick at. In her spare time she remains a leisure sport enthusiast, a master of brunch, and a child at heart.