Getting a read on radio talker

SUNDAYS ARE SIMPLY fun days for a Fairmount pooch named Lexie.

On that day, the Jack Russell terrier gets the complete undivided and adoring attention of her human pal, Jon Marks.

The other six days, Lexie spends some time with Marks, a sports-radio producer for "The Mike Missanelli Show" and a talk-show host at 97.5 The Fanatic, but it's not the same quality chill as a Sunday.

"I feel on Sundays I owe her a walk because she's been locked up all week," says Marks, 35, an only child who was born and raised in Willow Grove. "Sunday is the day that she gets to do everything."

Not exactly everything.

Lexie, a slightly pudgy pooch picked up by Marks from the Abington SPCA six years ago, doesn't get to join the 1995 Upper Moreland High School graduate in a treasured Sunday ritual, brunch at a restaurant with the Sunday Inquirer. The actual newspaper.

He knows it's old-school. "Young people don't read newspapers," he says while waiting at Sabrina's yesterday for his order of scrambled eggs and home fries. But it's how he was raised. Back in the day, before heading off to school, Marks would eat a bowl of cold cereal "and read the newspaper, the Intelligencer, by the heating vent," he says.

"From a very young age I was drawn to the media, news, radio, newspapers," he says.

Marks attended Montgomery Community College, taking a few classes before dropping out. He had a number of cooking jobs and was a customer-service manager and fraud specialist at National A-1 Advertising, a Center City company that recently pleaded guilty in federal court to a money-laundering-conspiracy charge.

Then he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes and had no health insurance, prompting a reality check.

He went to Hawaii, came back to the Philly area and studied broadcasting at Temple. He's been working with Missanelli since 2008.

He once had dreams of becoming the Howard Stern of the Future. He still has them, he says.

Brunch is over, and Lexie's master returns to take her to a nearby park. It is Sunday, after all.  

- Regina Medina