One phone call steered Steve "Boomer" Sutton toward a career he'd never considered before.

Sutton, a part-time weekend deejay at Eagle 106.7 FM, was planning to be an architect before that fateful phone call in the early 1970s changed his course.

"I had spent 3½ years studying in (Cherokee) high school to become an architect," the 54-year-old Canton native said. "My plan was I was going to get my degree and become an architect."

During high school, he and his best friend, who did everything together, got involved in the Civil Air Patrol, which required them to get a license to use the two-way radios. While he was at it, he got a broadcast endorsement stamp on it as well.

Sutton said he didn't think anymore about the license until his friend got a job at a radio station in Cartersville and wanted him to come sit with him during one of his shifts.

"I was 17 years old, getting ready to graduate high school, and I didn't have any interest in it," he said. "But I went there and sat with him."

Back then, radio stations were AM - "FM only played opera and elevator music - nobody listened to FM" - and played 45s, "the little records with the big holes," he said.

After a short lesson in deejaying, Sutton said he played a record while his friend took a bathroom break. Fate stepped in when the phone rang, and he answered it, "WBHF."

"This girl said, 'You have the sexiest voice I've ever heard - can we meet?'" he said. "But I hadn't said a word. She was talking about my buddy. I thought, good gracious, what a way to meet girls. This might not be a bad idea."

He decided to do the deejay thing for a year to "relax from school" but ended up never going to college to become an architect.

"It all goes back to that one phone call," he said, noting he doesn't know who the girl was, and he didn't agree to meet her. "I never had any interest in radio."

Sutton, who's lived in Ball Ground for 30 years, started his radio career on Aug. 6, 1970, at that same station in Cartersville, and it's taken him to Rapid City, S.D., Denver, Colo., Palm Beach, Fla., Valdosta and Charlotte, N.C.

Locally, he's spent 16 years working at 96Rock (now Project 9-6-1), Power 99 (now 99X) and Star 94, where he had one of his most memorable experiences as a deejay.

"Few people know it, but I used to work at Star 94 with a guy who worked part time named Ryan Seacrest," Sutton said. "He was working part time at Star 94, and I was doing afternoon drive-time. He would come in and grill my brain for information."

During those years, he also got to meet "a lot of people from different walks of life."

"The main thing was meeting people," he said. "That's what it really was for me. I never looked at myself as a celebrity or star. (Radio work) just happened to be God's gift, and I was able to do it."

He got to hang out with the guys in Chicago one time, and he met his hero, James Brown.

"I got to meet him before all that stuff - running from the police, the wife beating and all that whatever," he said. "Still he was a legend, and that was pretty cool."

His decision to go into radio to meet girls finally paid off - he met his wife, Stacie, when he was doing a remote broadcast, and she was working at Ingles. They now have an 8-year-old