On January 24, the Ticket celebrates its 24th birthday as a 24-hour sports talk radio station.

As the day goes on I'll be updating this with the handful of on-air personalities who since Day 1 have been at what is now corporately known as Sports Radio 1310 AM and 96.7 FM. We also hope to have a few surprise guests.

First up has to be Mike Rhyner, the senior member of the afternoon-drive Hardline, who was a mover and shaker in getting the station up and running back in 1994.

I've asked Rhyner, a radio lifer who was temporarily out of the business when he began planning for Dallas-Fort Worth's first all-sports radio station, as well as the others, the same simple questions:

1) "Remind us where were you working immediately before you joined the Ticket?"

and 2) "How long did you think your gig at the Ticket would last as you were settling in for your first day?

Here's Rhyner on his old job:

"I didn't realize it at the time, but prior to the advent of the Ticket, I was caught up in what would become known as the tech bubble. I was the sports arm of 'GTE On Call.' That was primarily nighttime work, so once the Ticket hit the drawing board, I did that in the daytime and GTE On Call at night. Looking back on it, I see now that the two dovetailed nicely - just one of the many things that broke a certain favorable way for me as this thing was coming to life."

And on the future:

"Honestly, I didn't give a whole lot of thought to the down-the-road of the Ticket. I was knee-deep in alligators just trying to get the thing on the air and make sure we had somebody to do all that needed doing. People told me that guys were going to come out of the woodwork trying to get on at the Ticket and I anticipated the same. That turned out to be pretty far from what happened.

"I didn't know who was going to do the 9-11 show until days before we went on, and I mean single-digit days. It turned out to be Curt Menefee but we had to clear a few hurdles before landing him. It worked out well. Curt was the one we wanted, but I barely knew him at the time.

"We had staffing issues throughout the day. We had engineers that were not terribly well-qualified to do what they were attempting to do. We had a signal that had not been maintained for years. Already there was infighting between the partners; already Skip Bayless (the original morning-drive host) was showing that he was not willing to play the game. The production equipment we had was maybe a tick above World War II surplus; and to top everything off, we didn't have our own studios.

"We'd purchased the signal of KAAM from Bonneville. Their FM sister was KZPS. They shared space, so now you had two different radio stations owned by two different entities sharing that same space. That first day, it was a matter of just getting through that day, and maybe by some miracle, we might be on the air tomorrow. I couldn't even see the end of the first week, let alone a day when we would be headed into our 25th year."

Stay tuned for more Ticket stories throughout the day.