Barbara Lawlor, Nederland.   On Sunday morning,  Ross Kaminsky of Magnolia Road, adds chocolate chips to his children’s pancakes as they eat at their kitchen counter. Sunlight pours into the room through the tall windows that look out over the Winiger Ridge and onto the plains.

Usually at this time he would be halfway done with his workday, but now it is his time at home and he was enjoying it.

Kaminsky is usually out of the house by 4:30 a.m. to make it to the Denver Tech Center by 5:30 a.m. to be ready to greet his listening public by 6 a.m. Every weekday at 630 on KHOW radio, The Ross Kaminsky show is broadcast, featuring opinions, facts, inspiring stories, outrageous statements and most of all, entertainment. If it’s boring, no one will listen, and Kaminsky’s job is to keep it moving along.

He never set out to be a radio talk show host. Especially a talk host with conservative opinions living in a county that houses a majority of liberals, his neighborhood included.

Kaminsky was born in New York City to parents who were both doctors for the United States Navy. He grew up traveling, never staying for very long in one place. It wasn’t until he attended Columbia college that he stayed in one place for at least two years. He says that it was life as he knew it.

“I adapted to that kind of life and it treated me well.”

He started college studying pre-med because he didn’t know what else to do and then decided he had no desire to help people day after day. He wanted to help people, but he didn’t want to make it his life. He said that in the mid-1980s, the world was relatively quiet. He would have joined the military if his country needed him. He switched his major to political science and economics, and decided he wanted to graduate early. He took the necessary courses to leave early.

“I went to visit my uncle Lanny who was on the Chicago Board Option Exchange and discovered I loved the stock market, the excitement, the individualism, being reliant on our own ability with the potential to make money. That is the number one reason: I wanted to make a good living.”

Kaminsky says he has visited at least 60 countries in his life and wants to travel more. He also wants to infect his children with the travel bug that he was infected with as a child.

At 21, he was the youngest trader at the CBOE. He worked for his uncle, then became a partner and then worked for himself, becoming an independent trader.

“I was a market maker for CBOE and then I traded for myself. I loved waving my hands and yelling. It was the greatest job ever. Some people think the markets are always busy, but there are many quiet days, when one does the New York Times crossword puzzle. Other days are pure chaos.”

Kaminsky remembers the big crash in June of 1987, when the market went down 20 percent in one day. He says he hears young traders complain about a two percent drop and he has no sympathy. They haven’t seen anything.

After starting his own trading firm, he expanded to other cities. But when president Bill Clinton raised income taxes he says he “Didn’t want to pay taxes to that SOB, so I moved to Amsterdam and became a trader setting up their first operations in Europe.”

It was a fun experience, but not very profitable, says Kaminsky. He was trading in the German market which was already using high tech computers that his company did not have.

“But I had seen that the future was obviously in electronic trading. I started my own trading group which expanded, but it was like being Buggy Whip makers with cars coming on the horizon. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best. I couldn’t convince the company, but they had been successful for so long, they didn’t believe me.”

By 2001, Kaminsky knew he wouldn’t sway them and he quit and moved to Australia where he chased a girl he had met on vacation a year earlier. They have been together since. When they considered where they would live, Kaminsky remembered traveling through Colorado with his dad on the way to the West Coast, thinking of it as the Garden of Eden.

Ross and Kristen married in 2003, went on a six-month honeymoon and then moved to Colorado, to Magnolia Road where Kristen has created a perennial garden worthy of being featured in Country Gardens last fall. They are now venturing on building an apple orchard.

Once in Colorado, Kaminksy began trading for himself, being able to do everything electronically from his home, but it wasn’t as profitable as working for larger company. During college he had been the editor of the Columbia alternative newspaper called the Hamilton Report. At that time, alternative didn’t mean being a liberal, it meant being a conservative.

“I am a libertarian which brought editorial challenges when conservative writers wanted to write about social issues, like anti-abortion, which I don’t agree with.”

Kaminsky said it is a waste of time to target people with messages that contradict their basic beliefs, their faith. He began writing again in 2005, after attending a CATO Institute weekend, a Libertarian Think Tank, and he was encouraged to write letters to editors of newspapers.

He began writing about political and economic issues, finding it difficult to adhere to the editorial rules, the word limits that demand clear messages in a small of words. His letters exposed the economic idiocy and insufficient appreciation of liberty among the elite of America’s thought leaders.

His frustration led to blogging and eventually guest appearances on local radio shows. His first job on radio was filling in for Amy Oliver on KFKA in nGreeley, and then KNUS, KHOW and KOA.

“The first time of hosting a show was like heroin, I was hooked. I loved it and I wanted to do more of it. I was told I was a natural on the radio.”

Kaminsky began to fill in on KOA, the largest talk show in Colorado. Late last year, Mike Rosen announced that he was going to retire and Kaminsky said he was crossing his fingers, hoping he had gained enough experience to host a full time radio show. He wasn’t surprised when Mandy Connell was given the nod for KOA. He was pleased her new job left her old job at KHOW open and he was offered the position.

He says it is a perfect fit for him, that it is a smaller station, but it is more political, that KOA talks about life, culture and sports but KHOW is the best station for politics.

Now, between early morning commuters can hear Kaminsky speaking to callers with a variety of opinions on how the world should work.

“I like callers who disagree with me,” he says.”they offer the best opportunity to use them as a foil, to play off them to express ideas that mean the most to me, especially of personal economic freedom.

“It is my job to be entertaining. I believe that if talk show hosts are aggressive or mean, it makes them money and good ratings. But I am not the next angry white guy. I am nice to the callers. Occasionally I show strong emotions, and then I am more effective because I am not angry all the time. My goal is to change how people think and vote while being entertained.”

Being rude is no way to change people’s minds. Kaminsky said he is an equal opportunity criticizer of both major political parties, but he tends to support Republicans more than Democrats. He says he cares more about the economy and national security issues than the social issues.

Kaminsky tries to keep his life and work separate. He has two children who attend Nederland Elementary School and he lives outside of Nederland town limits so he has no input. He says he knows he is massively outnumbered by the leftist community in the area, but he doesn’t want to get into that where he lives.

Once in a while he gets a message of support, but it is always sent privately, not publicly. They also don’t want to deal with issues of neighbors. “People spend so much time talking about diversity, but they don’t want to allow it. They don’t want to hear a libertarian opinion. But the Obama presidency has made it a lot less cool to be liberal than it used to be.”

So he takes his opinions to the air.

His show is on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. on KHOW or on line at KHOW.com.

On Sundays he makes pancakes.