Dan Hurst: No llores por mí

"I had a sense several months ago that things were not going well," Dan Hurst said when I asked him about how surprised he was to be let go as KUDL's morning man after nearly 20 years. "There have been so many cutbacks, especially financial. It actually started a few months ago." He didn't mention it but his on-air partner Darcie Blake departed last year.

"I was told over a month ago by upper management that they were looking for a way to get out of my contract. And that was a little heads-up to me. And sure enough they found a little clause in the contract that they could interpret to get out of the contract."

But don't feel sorry for the son of Honduran missionaries. He thought of Plan B a long time ago. Go to DanHurst.com and you'll see it -- a business in which Dan does voiceovers in Spanish and English. And get this: Spanish is currently 80 percent of his business!

His work includes supplying the throaty particulars for training videos, employee manuals, e-learning stuff and bilingual phone messages.

"I never thought I would be making a living with my Spanish," said Hurst. "Spanish was my first language. It's very generic and fluent. The Spanish clients range from a couple of major car dealer companies ... one in the Northwest that owns 110 dealerships. Whenever they need Spanish spots they call me. Also Winning Colours, out of Canada, which is a cleaner, environmentally-friendly cleaner that's catching on right now. I have a company called Election Systems that provides balloting equipment all over the world. One of their features is they provide an audio version of the ballot for sight- and language-challenged voters, so I do English and Spanish for them."

And the reason you probably haven't known this before, said Hurst, is that "I do almost no voiceover work in Kansas City."

While it sucks that he's not in radio anymore, all things considered, Hurst said he is "so grateful that I had a heads-up."

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