I met Mr. Gene Carlton on my new turf at Scotty’s. He was a business-looking brother with steady, dark eyes and a beer belly, wearing a stuffy dark gray suit. His bright red, striped tie was the only thing that told me he was alive, until he opened his mouth. He spoke very directly. I mean, this guy had the kind of voice that made anyone in the vicinity turn and look as if he was speaking to them. We sat down at a booth and had a couple of drinks.
“Bobby, how old are you?” he asked me.
“I turned twenty-nine last week.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Are you living the kind of life you want to live yet?”
I smiled. “Not hardly. What about you?”
“I’ve been there. Now I’m looking to do something else. And you know what that is, Bobby?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out,” I answered him.
“I want to produce a black radio talk show that can become syndicated in twenty markets,” he said. “You ever heard of Tom Joyner?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him. He’s in the Dallas and Chicago areas, right?”
Gene nodded. “Now he’s about to be everywhere. Syndicated. That brother’s a pioneer, Bobby. And since he’s ready to knock down the door, we want to be able to walk in right behind him. That’s how things work, somebody does it first, and then everybody does it. We want to be next in line.
“How would you like to be syndicated, Bobby?”
Gene reminded me of a professional salesman. I said, “Asking me how I would like to be syndicated is like asking a teenager, ‘How would you like to play in the NBA?’ ” He had me hooked already, but how hard is it to hook a hungry, jobless man who is more than willing to work again?
Gene smiled. “So you’d be pretty excited about it?”
“Damn right!” I responded. “But how do we get there? I’m having problems trying to stay in one market.” I was game for any strategy, any that would work.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, as long as you understand one important thing.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
He clasped his hands together and said, “The market is hot right now for conservative black views.”
“What exactly are conservative black views?” I asked him.
“It could be rap music and Spike Lee with the right angle to it,” he told me.
I looked at him like he had just given me the cure to sarcoidosis. I had no idea what he was talking about. I frowned and said, “Rap music and Spike Lee? Where are you getting conservative views from them? You mean more like Shelby Steele and ludge Clarence Thomas, don’t you?”
“Yeah, them, too.”
I shook my head and grimaced. “I’m not following you,” I told him.
“Okay, look at it this way,” he said. “These young rappers understand that the bottom line in America is money. Spike Lee understands that, Shelby Steele, and Judge Clarence Thomas.
“Family is important in America, whether it’s a gang, a fraternity, blood brothers, sisters, cousins, a political party, you name it, these are all families.
“Job security is important, protection of your environment, education, good health, freedom of speech, and all of the Bill of Rights.”
“Okay, so you’re saying that conservative views are made up of the common denominators of society,” I said to him.
He looked at me with surprise. “Bobby, I like you already. That’s exactly what I’m saying, common denominators.” He took a sip of his drink and asked, “How’d you get on that show with Kathy Teals?” I was wondering when he was going to inquire about my background. Usually people do that first. Gene Carlton was doing things backward.
“The program director over at WUCI liked our energy together after I interviewed her on her romance books,” I told him. I took a sip of my drink. “Anyway, that’s what he told me. I found out later on that they were already planning to try to get Kathy on the air; they just used me as a guinea pig cohost. But it worked out for me, too, because now people know me. I just have to rebound and do my own thing.”
Gene nodded his head and said, “I hear she’s working out a deal with DC Cablevision now for a local television talk show called, ah, ‘Washington Love Life.’ ”
I raised my brow. “Are you serious?”
“That’s what I heard,” he told me.
I grinned. “She made the big move to TV, hunh?”
“That’s where everybody’s trying to go nowadays.”
I shook my head and took another sip of my drink. “Not me. I’m gonna make this radio thing work for me. I’ve been through too much shit to quit now.”
Gene smiled. “I like that attitude. Everybody has ups and downs, but you have to stick it out.”
“You’re a lawyer, right?” I asked him.
“Yes I am.”
“So, why the interest in producing radio?”
“Good question,” he said. “Remember all the media coverage the Clarence Thomas hearing received?”
“Yeah. It made me sick.”
“It made a lot of people popular,” he responded. “Anybody black that had any importance got a chance to say something about it. Well, during that time, I was one of them.
“I did this radio program on this white show, and I was amazed at how many people were listening all over the country. The guy was syndicated. So I got this idea to have a brother that could talk about black conservative views, the common denominators, on a regular basis and have it syndicated just like this white boy’s show.”
“Why use the term ‘conservative,’ though?”
“Because it’s popular. And it ain’t nothin’ but a word. You can say any damn thing you want and call yourself conservative and you’ll get everybody to listen. You know why?”
I finished my drink and asked, “Why is that?”
“Because the average black man wants to find out what the hell a conservative black man is, and so do white people. I say it’s no such thing. It’s just a damn word, unless it means ‘the common denominator.’ That’s the only way I can figure it out. But the shit works, because everybody sits up and listens.
“Now if you call yourself a ‘radical black man’ in the nineties, ain’t nobody listening but the unemployed and the incarcerated, because that radical shit won’t get you anywhere. ‘The Conservative Black Man’ is the new title of the day.”
“Is that what you want to call the show, ‘The Conservative Black Man’?”
“Would you consider yourself conservative?” he asked me.
I thought about it. I was a college graduate. I was from the South. My father owned his own business and worked with his hands. My mother was a schoolteacher. My brother was married with two kids and a big new house. And I needed a damn job!
I nodded my head and said, “You know, I think I’m more conservative than I thought I was.”
We both broke out laughing. Gene said, “We’ll come up with a name, but we could just use ‘a conservative black man of the nineties’ as your sign-off.”
“Have you talked to anyone else about this show idea?” I asked him. I was curious about why he wanted to use me. It all seemed too easy. Maybe I’d be too young to be considered a conservative.
He sighed and said, “I kicked the idea around to a few people, but they weren’t really thinking on the same lines of what I wanted to do with the show.”
“And I do?”
“Well, the first thing, Bobby, is getting past the word conservative. Most of the people I kicked the idea around to couldn’t see past that word. They thought of it as a slap in the face to progressive black people. But I don’t see it that way. We used to be conservative before integration started up, and look what we have now: teachers that don’t care about our children, broken families, a lack of jobs, a lack of black ownership in the communities, discipline problems, you name it.
“Shit, Bobby, we need to go back to being conservative and taking care of ourselves instead of depending on the damned government and white folks so much!”
The irony of Gene Carlton’s statements was that we would eventually end up broadcasting from a white-owned radio station in the District and being picked up by other white stations around the country where black and white listeners would tune in. In a word, it was integration, a nonconservative philosophy. I didn’t care, though, as long as it worked.
I called up Brother Abu the next day and got his opinion on it. He chuckled at the idea. “It would probably work,” he said. “This guy’s pretty smart. I would listen to find out what a ‘conservative black man’ is too, and since I know you, I know it can’t be all that bad.
“You should put your own tag on it, though. Call it ‘The Bobby Dallas Show.’ That way people will identify with you instead of just the conservative idea. Put a face on this thing, especially if you’re looking to go syndicated.”
“You think that would be wise to do?” I asked him. “I mean, I know I understood what Gene’s talking about, and I know that you understood, but what about all the listeners?”
“That’s your job, Bobby. You make them understand.”
“But don’t you think I’m a little too young for this? I figure the demographics will be anywhere from thirty-five to seventy. I’m only twenty-nine. I feel like I should be at least thirty-nine or something.”
“Well, again, that’s up to you. They don’t know how old you are. A lot of times older guys act younger to reach the youth markets. You never came across to me as that type. You’ve always been mature for your age, Bobby. You just keep that in mind when you’re on the air.
“Did you two talk about money?” Brother Abu asked me.
“Not yet, but I’m not taking anything less than I was making at WUCI,” I answered. I wanted thirty-five thousand.
“Good. Just try to keep moving forward, and get as much control as you can.”
A few minutes after I had hung up with Brother Abu, I got a call from Angel in California.
“I got the commercial job,” she told me excitedly.
I smiled. “I knew that you would. So how long are you gonna be out there?”
“At least for another two weeks. How are things going with you? Did you meet my father’s friend?”
“Yeah, I met him.”
“Well, what happened?”
“We’re just talking right now. We don’t even have a station, just an idea.”
“What are you gonna call it?”
I smiled again. “‘The Bobby Dallas Show.’ ”
“Really?” Angel sounded as surprised as I was.
“If I can, yeah.”
“Well, congratulations!” she yelled. “I told you, I told you, I told you!”
I held the phone away from my ear and shook my head for a moment. “Nothing is set yet, Angel. You’re jumping the gun.”
“Well, I wish you the best of luck, and I can’t wait to see you,” she said.
I thought about our night in the guest room. “Yeah, me neither. And I wish you luck out there.”
“Thanks. I need it.”
“Don’t we all. Hey, send me a postcard or something if you get a chance,” I told her.
“Okay, I can do that. Well, I’ll see you real soon, hopefully.”
I wanted to say something else to Angel, something important to me, but I didn’t get a chance to. What if the feeling wasn’t mutual? I decided to wait until I saw her face-to-face again, so I could see the look in her eyes. I’d heard that the eyes never lie, and I wanted the truth.
I hung up the phone and stretched out on my long sofa. “‘The Bobby Dallas Show,’ ” I said to myself with a grin. It seemed so long ago that I had graduated from Howard. It was only seven years ago, but it seemed like twenty because I had been through so many changes.
I hadn’t talked to my family in North Carolina since the New Year. They all sent me cards for my birthday, but I figured I would feel better about talking to them once I knew something definite concerning a new job. I hadn’t told them about the contractual dispute with Kathy Teals and WUCI. They had heard enough of my bad news over the years. I vowed to share nothing but good news with them for the rest of my career.
•
Gene Carlton called me that next week with the news. “I got an offer from an FM station, WLRG,” he said. “The format is educational and cultural. I put together a group of dynamite sponsors for the show. And get this, the managers at the station are willing to give us a time slot right after their morning news guy from ten to twelve. They just lost a good show due to a guy relocating to Florida, so I talked them into trying you out in his slot.”
I wasn’t even prepared to respond. “Oh yeah?” The first thing I thought of was the money. “How much are they offering me?”
“I want to hammer out a one-year deal for twenty-five thousand with incentives and bonuses to pull you to thirty.”
“I was making more than that at WUCI,” I told him.
“Bobby, you have to make this show work first. WUCI made a commitment to you based on what you had already done with them. This here is a brand new deal. They like your tapes, though. I gave them nothing but the best. Think about it, Bobby, they’re giving you a ten-to-twelve slot. That’s radio prime time.”
In my talks with Gene, organizing how we would do things, he expressed to me that he loved the shows I had done with Kathy where I got excited. Usually, when I got excited, I reverted back to saying something my father would have said. I guess those views would be considered conservative. I considered a lot of them defensive, though. Kathy had put me on the spot more than a few times.
“That’s the Bobby Dallas that will take you straight to the top,” Gene assured me. “Have you thought about a name yet?” he asked me.
“‘The Bobby Dallas Show,’ ” I answered.
Gene chuckled and said, “Good choice. I was figuring you would do that. Have you ever heard of Petey Green?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I told him. Petey Green was a legend in the District. He had a television talk show where he did and said whatever he wanted. His stuff was classic. He was like a real-life Fred Sanford with a suit and a haircut, uncensored and telling it like it was. Petey Green and Redd Foxx would have made an excellent team.
“Well, I’m not saying to be like him, but you want to give yourself an edge. You want to fire people up and get them listening to you.”
I was wondering if Gene was planning on producing on a daily basis or if he was thinking about developing a team of producers with the station. I had no idea how to produce a show of conservative views. I was counting on him for guidance.
“Are you gonna produce?” I asked him.
“Damn right,” he said. “This is my baby, and I brought the sponsors in, but it’s up to you to pull it off. I can only invite people in and give you ideas. It’s up to you to captivate the audience. And if you come up with any ideas of your own, just let me know.”
I had already brainstormed a little, but I wanted to call him back when my ideas were more concrete. “When do we meet with the station?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” It was definitely short notice.
“I can call them back and confirm it now. We got two weeks before we air.”
What if I wanted to get a haircut or something? I thought. I looked at my clock and it wasn’t too late yet, so I told Gene to go ahead and make the call. I told him I’d call him back with some ideas later on that night. Then I went to get my haircut on Fourteenth Street, close to where I used to live on Thirteenth. The guys inside the shop were talking about being pulled over by police on the highway.
“They really pull you over up there near Baltimore,” one barber was saying to a customer. They were both older men in their early fifties.
“Yeah, that’s a main strip of highway. They got all that traffic going to New York and Philly out of Baltimore and D.C. Then they got the Baltimore Tunnel traffic and whatnot. You gotta make sure you slow the traffic down before you go in that thing,” another barber said. He was the owner of the shop. The younger barbers were just listening.
“I got pulled over up there last week,” one of the younger guys finally said.
“How fast were you going?” he was asked.
“I was only doing seventy-one. They gave me a ticket for a hundred dollars.”
“Seventy-one? You’re only supposed to be doing fifty-five on that road leading up to the tunnel.”
I sat there and thought about so many things that happen in the black community that we didn’t seem to have any solutions for. I snapped my fingers and said, “Solutions.” That could be the name of a weekly show, I thought to myself. I would be doing five shows a week, two hours a day. I needed good ideas to fill up all of that space.
When I realized it, the guys in the shop were staring at me.
“What you say, solutions?” the owner asked me.
I smiled. “Oh, I was Just thinking of ideas for a talk show,” I said.
“A talk show?” the other older barber asked me.
“What’s your name?” one of the younger barbers asked. Suddenly, all eyes were on me.
“Bobby Dallas,” I told them. I usually kept my mouth shut and got my haircut unnoticed.
“Yeah, you was on that show with Kathy Teals!” one of the barbers said. He was really excited about it. “I wanted to call up on that show a couple of times, man, to help you out.”
I laughed and said, “Thanks. She was pretty tough.”
“Yeah, man, that show don’t come on no more, hunh?” he asked me. “I ain’t heard it in a while. They got like some Spanish people on there now.”
“Yeah, we had creative disputes. I’m about to have my own show now,” I told him.
The owner asked me, “What are you planning on talking about?”
“Conservative views and news from the black community.”
The barbers all looked around at one another with smiles. “Hell, we do that in here every day. You ever thought about having a barbershop talk show?” the owner asked me.
“Yeah, call in at the shop and get our views on things,” one of the younger barbers suggested.
I didn’t see anything wrong with it. If any institution was old enough to be considered conservative in the black community, it was the barbershops. “I’ll have to see about that,” I told them. I didn’t want to make any promises that I couldn’t keep.
By the time I got back to my apartment that night, I had a skeleton format for my new show. I called Gene and said, “On Mondays, we could just talk about what went on over the weekend, and call it ‘Monday Morning Views on the Weekend News.’ On Tuesdays we schedule as many interviews as we can, including phone interviews. On Wednesdays we could have a ‘Trouble in the Kitchen’ show where we talk about relationships. Then on Thursdays we got ‘Barbershop Talk.’ And we wrap it up on Fridays with ‘Solutions,’ where we take the best letters concerning issues we discussed recently on our shows and read them back to the audience.”
“Damn!” Gene responded to me. “When did you come up with all of this?”
“I had a few ideas in my head already, and then everything just came together for me while I was at the barbershop.”
“Yeah, well, our meeting is not until three o’clock tomorrow, so we have a little time to sit down and think this thing out,” he said. “We still have plenty of time, so we might even come up with some other ideas before the show airs. What you gave me is a good start, though.”
“All right then. Where do you want to meet and at what time?”
We met and had breakfast at ten o’clock in the morning at a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue in Capitol Hill. The station, WLRG, was within walking distance. I was freshly dressed in a dark suit, with a haircut and a shave, ready to meet with my future bosses.
“I feel really good about this, Bobby,” Gene was saying. He was pumped.
I was more reserved. I had been through all the ups and downs of the radio business before. I told myself not to get too excited until after we had signed a second contract for a guaranteed number of years, creative control, and plenty of money.
To stay in line with the conservative scope of the show, Gene threw in “Bootstraps,” where I would talk about black business developments within the national community, “Ugly Jim Crow,” where I would talk about events going on around the country that remind black people of slavery, and “Uprisings,” where I would talk about black politics and politicians.
“We definitely have a good mix of ideas. And what I’m gonna do is gather a list of good contacts to call up all around the country. I got a lot of friends in the NABJ. That’ll definitely help us to go syndicated.”
The National Association of Black Journalists was a good idea. I had never joined myself, but it was smart to be connected to them. I smiled and said, “You really did your homework for this thing.”
Gene frowned at me. “Bobby, I’m a lawyer, and I’m not walking into this thing unprepared. I’ve been thinking about this day and night for almost two years now. I was setting up the networks and the game plan, and I just needed the right person to pull it off.”
“Well, shit, I wish I had met you earlier,” I told him.
Gene shook his head. “Naw, naw, Bobby, everything happens in time for a reason. As far as the salary situation goes, don’t worry about that right now. We just want to set the groundwork, and then we’ll be able to take this show to the highest bidder.”
Gene Carlton was a salesman indeed. A great salesman!
“Everything sounds pretty good to me,” I told him. I finished up my orange juice and was ready to go over and make the deal right then. It was only lunchtime, though, so Gene and I took a walk over to Union Station to waste another two and a half hours.
“Are you going out with Angel Thomas?” Gene asked me as we strolled through D.C.’s elaborate train station.
“No, we’re just good friends,” I told him. He didn’t need to know more than that.
He nodded and said, “She’s a good girl. Smart. I just don’t see why she wants to be an actress.”
“Different strokes for different folks,” I responded.
“I got a daughter at Georgetown. She wants to be like her daddy,” he said with a smile.
“Is she smart, too?” I joked with him.
“Of course.”
I wondered what she looked like. The next thing I knew, Gene was pulling out his family pictures and showing me his wife, daughter, and two sons. Only the younger son looked like Gene. The other two kids looked more like their mother.
“She looks determined,” I told him of his daughter. She had the look of a serious woman, with intensity in her face.
“Yeah, she fell for this ballplayer her freshman year, and I had to straighten her out. She missed a lot of classes and sleep over this guy. You know how young men like to play on two and three courts sometimes. She wasn’t ready for that. I told her to keep her heart in her chest until she’s ready. And keep them damn skirts up.
“Hell, I need to buy her some pants,” he said.
I wanted to laugh but I held it in. I remembered how predatory Gary Mitchell was with sisters. I hadn’t exactly been a saint back then myself.
“You got any sisters, Bobby?” Gene asked me.
“Nope. I got one brother.”
“A year younger. Married, and two kids down in Charlotte.”
“North Carolina?”
I nodded.
Gene said, “It’s always a good idea to get married. It keeps you focused when everything else goes crazy.”
I couldn’t comment on that. I had never been married, but I figured that it was true because I felt the most secure when I had a steady woman.
Before we knew it, it was time to rush over to our meeting at WLRG. It was a new white building with a lot of glass doors. It wasn’t that many brown faces there either. I felt like a token black. Gene was still pretty confident and secure. I guess he was used to being around that many professional white folks. For the majority of my radio career, I had been around blacks.
They showed us to a large conference room where Gene went over the entire idea of ‘The Bobby Dallas Show” with the program director and the station manager. He included how he would bring in sponsors, local and national.
“That sounds really big,” the station manager, Gordon Dates, said. He was a slender guy with a head of gray hair. He liked to slide down in his chair and make himself look shorter. He didn’t look pleased or disappointed. He was simply listening.
The program director, Michael Hines, was a lot younger and sharper, with dark hair. He had the spunk of a recent college graduate. “If we could pull all of that together, I think it could turn into a heck of a show.” He looked at me and said, “From what I’ve heard so far, I really like what you have to offer, Bobby.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “I’m just ready to move on to bigger and better things.”
Dates slowly nodded his head. “One year, and we’ll see how it does.”
Hines grinned at me and pushed his thumb in the air. The two of them reminded me of a good cop/bad cop routine. I read over the contract with Gene and signed on the dotted line. Everyone in the room was all smiles and shaking hands.
Dates said, “Well, I guess we’ll meet with you guys again in a couple of weeks.”
“No problem,” Gene said.
We walked out of the conference room and Dates went back to his office. Hines proceeded to show us around the building, introducing us to the staff and some of the hosts. I hadn’t worked with that many white people since leaving Food Lion in Greensboro. WLRG reminded me of the station that cut me loose in Baltimore after buying out WMSC. It was going to be a new experience for me. Nevertheless, it was FM and I had my own show. I planned to make the best of it.
Gene and I walked out of the station sometime after five that evening.
Gene said, “Well, Bobby, we’re in. You wanna go celebrate?”
I smiled and responded, “Yeah. Let’s go on over to Scotty’s and get a drink.”