It occurs to me that after just a handful of pages, I may already be giving you the wrong impression of myself, dwelling a little too much on my soft underbelly. I may appear to be a gentle, vulnerable soul with empathy for my fellow man.
This misconception must be corrected.
This isn’t about politics or philosophical leanings. I just feel the need to give my readers a more balanced idea of who I am. And so…
It was miserable and cold in Schenectady.
(Good days in Schenectady aren’t that great, but this one was truly horrible.)1
Even so, I was thrilled to be there. It was, in fact, one of the happiest days of my life. Fortune hadn’t smiled so kindly upon me since the day Herb Elfman decided to answer his wife’s divorce plea with a gunshot to his own head. This was the breakthrough I’d been waiting for, the one that was going to lift me out of small-time radio and into the big leagues. I literally couldn’t wait to get back to our hotel room and tell Donna the news.
I’d just been offered a job hosting a late-night talk show at WGY, the flagship station of General Electric’s prestigious radio chain.
“Our nighttime signal covers about twenty-eight states,” I was told. “You’re going to get great exposure. This is going to be just great for your career. And we’re going to pay you fifteen thousand dollars a year to start.” That wasn’t bad money in the 1970s, especially for a guy who needed a job.
You see, WRNG—good old Ring Radio—had just fired me. I’d been there for six or seven years, filling the morning airwaves with rants on everything from Watergate to Jimmy Carter, but talk radio hadn’t yet become a major force. For the most part, nobody was listening to anything but music. And the music was actually pretty bad during those years.2
A procession of program directors had come and gone at WRNG, but not one of them knew how to make talk radio work. The clueless PD who decided to get rid of me had been a regional director for the John Birch Society, which I mention only to give you an indication of his radio expertise. This guy, who later became a good friend, was adept at locating Communists pretty much anywhere, but not so good at programming a talk-radio station. So, in his infinite wisdom, he concluded I’d been talking for too long, and gave me a six-week notice.
I wasted no time sending resume tapes to just about every radio station between Atlanta and New York City. Then, a week later, I took my remaining vacation days and hit the road. My wife and I got in our car and started driving up the Eastern Seaboard, stopping at every station on my list.
At most of these stops a receptionist would say, “We don’t have any openings.” That’s as far as I would get. Back to the car and back on the road. At a few stations someone in a position of authority did agree to meet me, but nothing of consequence came of it.
By the time we settled into a hotel room in Schenectady, I really wasn’t expecting much. I left Donna in the room and headed over to WGN for the obligatory turn-down. But it didn’t come right away. Instead I spent over an hour talking talk radio and politics with the station’s head honcho.
He bought my line of bull.
The job offer was everything I’d ever dreamed of; by the time I headed back to the hotel I was walking on air. I couldn’t wait to tell Donna the good news.
They still actually had hotel room keys back then, and for the life of me I couldn’t calm down enough to unlock the door. Finally, I fumbled my way into the room, and found Donna standing at the window, looking out over Schenectady. The spectacle on a dark, dreary Schenectady evening wasn’t exactly alluring; this is one room that would have been better off without a view.
“Hey, hon,” I said, waiting for her to turn around so I could say, “Donna, I got the job!”
But the words never made it out of my mouth. When she turned around, tears were pouring down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, stunned.
She looked at me and said simply, “I hate this place.”
My response was immediate.
“God,” I said, “it is miserable, isn’t it?”
An expression of relief washed across her beautiful face.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here right now…we’ll head back south and see what New York City is all about!”
“Can we?”
“You bet,” I told her. “I’m going to go downstairs and check out right now.”
I went downstairs and checked out. Then I walked over to the pay phone, called the program director at WGN, and thanked him for his generous offer.
“I can’t take the job,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it’s just not what I’m looking for.”
Donna and I drove to New York and enjoyed the sights for a couple of days. No job offers were forthcoming there, however, so we headed back to Atlanta.
When I got home, I decided to do something completely different. I enrolled in law school.
A few months later I heard from WRNG. The man they’d hired to replace me had found a better job. He was heading to San Francisco and some station called KGO.3 Once again, WRNG had an unexpected opening.
“We made a mistake,” the station manager told me.
“Well, yes. I knew that at the time.”
“Will you come back?”
I didn’t even have to think before answering, “Not for what you were paying me.”
“We’ll double it,” he said.
And that was that.
I was back on the air. And before long, I had a law degree, too. I think that made me a double threat.
It took me twenty years to admit to Donna that I’d been offered that job in Schenectady.