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She might be a bobblehead,, but she’s no featherbrain. The country music radio station she works for has turned Tara Schneider (BS ’95), into a shiny plastic, big-headed dashboard doll to give away to contest winners, and it’s also true that her two male co-hosts get many a kick from portraying her as a Texas-sized ditz. But it’s Tara who will have the last giggle, because she’s smart enough to have landed a job she likes in the land that she loves. On the day she graduated from here with a degree in radio and television, Tara answered, “A morning country show in Texas” to a friend who asked what her dream job would be.

Actually, this radio personality is clearly one sweet Lion

And that’s what she’s had at 99.5 The Wolf in Dallas going on four years now, following her escape from a classic rock station in Iowa.
“I’ll NE-ver leave Texas again,” she says with emphasis in her endearingly raspy radio voice. “People in Iowa were fabulous — don’t get me wrong — but it’s just not Texas. I guess it’s that Texas pride thing.”
Reared in Richardson, Tara came to ET to be a teacher. But one day, while visiting a sorority sister in the University’s mass media department, Tara ran into Dr. Gerald Haskins, who convinced her to try just one media class.

“He said it’s the first one and the most boring, and if you can make it through that, you’ll know you’re onto something,” she remembers. “I looooved it.
“I’ve always had a big mouth, and I talked a lot. I can remember people saying, ‘She talks so much and she’s always happy. What’s wrong with her?’”
Some people might ask that still about a woman who thinks getting up at 4 a.m. to be “the chick on the morning show,” as the guys on the show call her, is a treat.
“I love my job — I can’t wait to get to it every day. Of course my hair is in a ponytail, and I have on no makeup. I just brush my teeth and go. The guys tease me because the only time I dress up is when we have guests. ‘Why can’t you look like that for us?’ they ask me.”

The guys also sometimes like to foster the impression of Tara as the Goldie Hawn of radio. A recent bit had her claiming the Taco Bell Chihuahua had found other work. It had to be the same dog, she claimed, because on the new ad “He talks just the same!”
Other on-air embarrassments include the time she was taxiing contest winners to an event and got pulled over as she was broadcasting live from the car. Her passengers must have thought it was a setup because they didn’t take the officer’s instructions very seriously.
“The bad part is my dad can hear everything we say,” she says. “He heard on the air that I’d gotten a speeding ticket, and he called. ‘That was just a joke, right?’ he said. It wasn’t.

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