What's Wrong With Us?

And Remember When We Listened to the Radio?

(This newsletter aspires to offer information, insight, and maybe even entertainment. There will be personal experience included since I provide a point of view. But my focus is on this confounding state, its myths and realities. I will write about travel, literature, history, movies, politics, and just life its ownself under the Lone Star, and the broader influence of Texas beyond its borders.

It’s free to anyone who wants it, but those modest paid subscriptions, if you are inclined, can help fire the engines. Go ahead and be inclined. I’ll publish at least once a week, depending on interest, yours and mine. I will also post randomly with stories worth sharing and that are not part of the weekly newsletter).

“If you waste your time a talkin’ to the people who don’t listen to the things that you are sayin’, who do you think’s gonna hear? And if you should die explainin’ how the things that they complain about are things they could be changin’, who do you think’s gonna care? There were other lonely poets in a world turned deaf and blind, who were crucified for what they tried to show. And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time, but the truth remains, and someone wants to know.”

-Kris Kristofferson

What’s Wrong with Us?

The headlined question must be on the conscience of most Americans. Many people are waking up daily to the notion that our country has come undone. Whatever is working, and there is much that can be considered positive, there are symptoms that we confront institutional and cultural challenges that will lead to even more serious problems if they are not resolved. There are, unfortunately, too many elements of our society that appear dysfunctional and we might have already accepted those failures as a new standard of poor performance that we see now as normal.

After watching the testimony of the capitol police officers who defended the building on January 6, I am no longer certain of the precise nature of this country. These are four men who stood up to violent terrorists attacking the seat of the world’s oldest democracy. They put their very lives on the line, were beaten, called racial epithets, threatened with death, and yet held their ground to resist the violence and destruction. Instead of being hailed as heroes, they have been vilified on the right as phony actors, exaggerating witnesses, cops who were not perceptive enough to know what they were seeing was just a peaceful crowd of excited protestors, not attackers.

In an almost incomprehensible rant, FOX news blather generator Laura Ingraham accused the officers of being at fault. She said they were simply unable to hold their perimeter even though they had known for weeks about the protest. Ingraham mocked the men with fake awards for what she considered various embellishments and emotions during their testimony before the House January 6 Select Committee. The diminishment and reconfiguration of the events of that day have been central to the propaganda TV network’s efforts to change public sentiment regarding the terrorist invasion of the capitol.

A day before the officers testified, Republicans, led by Elise Stefanik of New York, held a news conference to suggest House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was responsible for not securing the building because she did not add additional officers. Never mind that Pelosi is not in charge of security and has no authority to request National Guard support. Those responsibilities generally fall to the sergeants at arms of both the House and Senate, and a police board that oversees law enforcement at the capitol, and, to a lesser extent, the mayor of Washington, D.C. The astonishing attempts to deflect blame away from the rioters and Trump’s excitations of the crowd is disgusting beyond measure.

But that is the state of American politics.

President Biden seems almost naïve to talk about bipartisanship in such a climate. Republicans have no interest in accomplishing anything because the credit will accrue to Democrats. The party in power is attacked by the minority party with lies or misinformation until they are destroyed, and the opposition party is then elected. This mandala wheel of constantly changing control of American government has turned into a Democracy-eating bacteria that is ruining any chance of improvement or change. The Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has never been shy about stating publicly that his job is to stop Democrats, not work with them, which means in a narrowly divided Congress, very little gets done, if anything.

The mere concept of justice is suffering, too. The man who is almost single-handedly causing the dissolution of the democratic process is still walking around free. How much more evidence of his treason is required than the latest revelation that Trump pressured the acting attorney general and the acting deputy attorney general to, “Just say the election was corrupt and illegal, and I’ll do the rest with the R congressmen.” Whose oath of office is more sacred than the president’s, who swears to defend and protect the constitution of the United States? Trump did more than violate his sworn oath. He attempted to make irrelevant the very democracy he was originally elected to lead. This is the same man who wanted his country’s military to “crack the skulls” of civil rights protestors or “just shoot them.”

Why has this person not been arrested?

Trump’s conversation with the AGs, and then violating the law of posse comitatus and urging the military to attack US civilians peacefully protesting, are both criminal acts. There are also suspicions still being investigated that he has probably been getting money laundered from Russia for close to a decade to keep his hotel business afloat and has likely cheated on every income tax filing he has ever signed, wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars so he could play golf every weekend while in office, and wantonly caused the proliferation of a deadly virus by spreading lies from the most powerful pulpit in the world. He ought to be arrested, if for no other reason, for trying to overturn a legal presidential election and calling for violence against his country’s citizens.

Help me to understand why we tolerate Trump’s crimes. When one of the testifying capitol police officers was asked what he wanted from members of congress, he suggested they find the “hitman” that sent the rioters. We know who that hitman is, and where he lives. Congress does not need investigative authority and subpoenas to bring him to justice. There is abundant evidence of him fomenting the attack. He is on camera in recordings, watching almost gleefully with his family in a tent near the capitol, as uncontrolled crowds smash windows, climb walls, and physically assault officers of the law.

Why, oh why, has this person not been charged?

There are some signs of life in the body politic that offer encouragement. The three Goofies, Republicans Gohmert, Gaetz, and Greene failed when they tried to distract attention from the testimony before the January 6 committee. Their low-intellect brigade attempted to hold a news conference to suggest that the terrorists who had violated the capitol were now being held as political prisoners, and ought to be released. This gambit failed miserably, however, because protestors blew whistles as the Goofies tried to speak and held up signs calling Gaetz, who is under federal investigation for sex trafficking a minor, a pedophile. Gaetz was chased by a woman with a camera who kept repeatedly asking, “Are you a pedophile? Are you a pedophile?”

I do not think, however, there was anything more pertinent in our current nightmare than the testimony this week of Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican daughter of the war-mongering former Vice President Dick Cheney. In her opening statement, she appeared to capture the sentiment of millions of us who simply do not understand how Trump could get away with trying to overturn an election and foment a violent assault on democracy that cost people their lives.

“If we’re no longer committed to a peaceful transfer of power after our elections,” Cheney said, “If our side doesn’t win, then God help us. If we deem elections illegitimate merely because they didn’t go our way rather than trying to do better the next time, God help us. And if we’re so driven by bigotry and hate that we attack our fellow citizens as traitors, if they’re born in another country or they don’t look like us, then God help us.

“We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House, every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack. Honorable men and women have an obligation to step forward. If those responsible are not held accountable and if Congress does not act responsibly, this will remain a cancer on our Constitutional Republic, undermining the peaceful transfer of power at the heart of our democratic system.”

I am doubtful any god will help us, but Cheney’s words, coming from a conservative, were, nonetheless, reminiscent for me of the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s speech on the House floor regarding the impeachment hearing of President Richard Nixon. His crimes against the constitution look almost quaint when compared to Trump’s. The twice-impeached former president now needs prosecution, and Jordan’s words then sound like they could have been written to speak to Trump’s present crimes against his country.

I realize there is something sacrosanct violated by comparing Liz Cheney to Barbara Jordan, but I also believe we are living in such a time where it is appropriate. Although they come from distinctly opposite political cultures, both women bravely articulated the essence and principles of the founding documents of this country. They defended the rule of law, regardless of the risk to their political careers. Trump is trying to bring down Cheney but has not yet found a viable candidate to run against her. Our democracy may seem dysfunctional right now because there are so few officeholders willing to do what is painfully right, but it’s much worse than we realize. We are not just dysfunctional, we are diseased, and the infection is spreading far too quickly through the corpus of our democracy.

In fact, a pathology has emerged on the political right and it calls for attacking any fact or truth that does not fit the big lie. This means candidates speaking the truth can expect to be called liars regardless of whether their testimony can be corroborated by witnesses, documents, and video. For Republicans, the only acceptable information is the type that comports with Trump’s version of reality, which is the pathological delusion that the election was stolen, and he won. When the public accepts the facts of a situation and they are not favorable to Trump and the right, the tactic switches to blaming the Democrats and progressives for any controversial or harmful outcome.

We are even allowing science to be subverted by crazy people. The GOP has hitched its rickety wagon to anti-vaxxers because without them the Republicans have almost no voters. People are dying by the thousands every day because of this electoral strategy. Unfortunately, for the Republicans, the increasing number of deaths has begun to cause them political instability. The rising publicity about Covid deaths of the unvaccinated is not attributable to Biden and the Democrats, who have urged constantly that everyone get the jab. If the virus is a hoax, as Trump and countless religious conservatives have insisted, the ICUs and mortuaries would not be crowded with victims. Dead people are hard to hoax, which is why Republican leaders suddenly began publicly making pronouncements that everyone should get vaccinated. Their voters are dying, and they have no one to blame but themselves.

This anti-science sentiment repeatedly manifests itself in dangerous fashions. A Maryland man was arrested for threatening to kill Dr. Anthony Fauci, the physician who has been leading the country through the pandemic with a fierce determination to protect medicine and Americans. The suspect was taken into custody after emailing Fauci that his family was going to be “dragged through the street and slaughtered” and, the man wrote to the doctor, “I hope you get a bullet through your satanic skull.” The 56-year-old was charged in a federal court and faces up to ten years in prison.

The Fauci case was just one of those that disturbs public discourse and threatens our government and elections. There are many more. The same Maryland court sentenced a 42-year-old Frederick man to seven months in prison and four months home confinement for threatening supporters of President Biden and Vice President Harris during the fall campaign. The criminal left a note at a private residence telling the homeowners, “If you are a Biden/Harris supporter, you will be targeted. We have a list of homes and addresses by your election signs. We are the ones with those scary guns. We are the ones your children have nightmares about.” Police searched a back room at the man’s house and found what they said “resembled a military outpost bunker” with military issue uniforms, helmets, U.S. Army paraphernalia, bags, packs, and a huge supply of documents related to military tactics, strategy, and history.

Fauci, tragically, gets threatened constantly even by members of Congress. The Republican from Kentucky, Rand Paul, said he intended to send a referral to the Department of Justice for Fauci to be prosecuted for lying to Congress. The doctor, who has shown immeasurable tolerance in listening to Paul’s baseless rants, grew a bit too weary and told Paul, “You don’t know what you are talking about,” during the live broadcast of a congressional hearing. Paul had accused Fauci of lying about research with China regarding projects he claimed the US was involved with and that improved transmissibility of a virus. Fauci denied any such collaboration had ever transpired.

These idiocies and their promulgators are not confined to the federal government. In fact, the serious work of destroying democracy and human life is being conducted at the state level in places like Florida and, of course, Texas. Even as the Delta variant of the virus proliferates and ICUs and hospitals run out of space for the ill and dying, the governor of Texas has issued an executive order using emergency powers that make it illegal for any institution that gets state money to mandate masks. Further, school boards will not be allowed to require children be protected by masks, and local officials no longer have the prerogative of ordering it for their communities because Abbott suspended his previous order giving them that authority. Anyone who tries to impose a mask requirement faces a $1000 fine. In sum, Abbott is using the emergency he declared because of Covid to issue executive orders that are almost certain to perpetuate the pandemic.

How bad is the virus in Texas that Abbott is pretending is not dangerous? In the Austin metro area, health officials announced that there are presently only 16 ICU beds available for a population of 2.3 million people. The Texas Department of State Health Services also reported that overnight another 6400 Texans were infected and 370 more were hospitalized. Hospitalizations have increased from 3600 to more than 5600 and the last week has seen 35,000 new cases of the Delta variant of the Covid virus. Over a third of Americans remain unvaccinated and Texas and Florida are the primary causes of the proliferation of the virus because of vaccine skepticism.

Who is to blame for this? Well, if you are Greg Abbott, you need somebody to take the fall and it cannot be his anti-vax and anti-mask supporters, who are certainly spreading the disease. Let’s see, who can it be? Ha, just kidding. The gov knew immediately who to blame. It’s the immigrants!!! Of course, when you need a scapegoat, turn to the poor, homeless, environmentally displaced. They have no lobbyists to send him money, and they are evil because they crossed a river to save their families from poverty and violence and natural climate disasters. Surely, they must be carrying Covid in their modest belongings and in their lungs.

Abbott quickly drafted what became known as Executive Order GA-37, which restricts the transportation of detained migrants. They can only be moved, according to his language, by state and federal law enforcement. Further, the governor has given Texas law officers the ability to stop a vehicle under what he describes as “reasonable suspicion” of violating his order, and he has also empowered them to reroute or impound the vehicle.

Almost as quickly as Abbott’s venal edict was issued, US Attorney General Merrick Garland urged him to pull it down because it violated the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which, essentially does not allow a state to interfere with the federal government as it executes its mandated responsibilities because federal law supersedes state law. The other frailty to Abbott’s document is the certain violation of individual rights. Language of the order suggests one of the outcomes will be racial profiling. How does a cop suspect someone of being a Covid carrying immigrant in a passing vehicle? If your skin is brown, you get stopped?

Abbott ignored the AG’s demand, and the state has now been sued in the Western District of a US federal court in El Paso. The filing seeks an injunction to stop implementation of Abbott’s order because it “jeopardize[s] the health and safety of noncitizens in federal government custody, federal law enforcement and their families, and our communities,” Garland wrote. “Additionally, because federal law requires individuals processed for release to appear before immigration courts or to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices throughout the country, the Order directly interferes with the implementation of federal immigration law.”

Everyone other than the governor is placed in jeopardy by this scapegoating move. Washington contracts with private companies to move immigrants in buses and vans, and their businesses will be disrupted, and even destroyed by vigorous enforcement. Immigrants are likely to be returned to overrun detention centers and bus stations, which will become Covid hotspots. If Abbott were sincere about reducing virus exposure, he would expedite the transfer of the immigrants through processing centers. He also would not put the state’s police in a position of relying on their instincts, and not the law. Not even a conservative judge is going to uphold arrests or vehicle stoppages when the only evidence is testimony from a cop who said, “I was pretty sure they looked like they had Covid and were illegals.”

Are we supposed to be surprised that a lawyer knows how to ignore the law? Abbott is still threatening to have legislators who broke quorum arrested when they return to the state from Washington, D.C., and force them to stay inside the capitol until they pass voting laws that will have consequences that restrict participation in elections. Abbott’s anger is clearly directed at any voter not a part of the arch conservative primary base and taking on a Democratic administration over immigration problems will animate his crazies, though do nothing to solve either the Covid or border crisis. Two candidates, former Texas GOP Chairman Allen West and Don Huffines, a former state senator from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, are both running to Abbott’s right flank in the primary. There is a calculable risk he might face a runoff, especially if the inane and uninformed celebrity Matthew McConaughey can figure out what party he belongs to, and, eventually, decides to enter the GOP primary.  

I am not sure the question of what is wrong with us can be accurately answered. History’s judgment, however, is not likely to be kind, even if we recover from our current profound lapse. The answer to how this can all be stopped, though, and even repaired, is obvious: American citizens are responsible for the nonsense and dangers that are being provoked in our name, and we can end the stupidity. There are more than 200 million eligible voters in this country, and only 535 members of congress in the House and Senate. If this nation is sane, and wants to preserve itself, Americans will rid themselves of the political pestilence that is loose upon the land. Any failure to do so will have dramatic consequences.

An even greater darkness will draw nigh.  

Remember When We Listened to the Radio?

Remember when we listened to the radio
and I said that’s the place to be?
And how about the job as an FM jock
the day you married me?” – Harry Chapin

The town had two exits off the Interstate, and I thought it was the perfect location to launch a career as an international broadcast journalist. Rows of beets grew in every direction and during harvest the big container trucks carried the produce to sugar mills in Denver after migrant workers up from Texas had brought in the crops. Out on the Colorado and Kansas line, the land of the High Plains was eternally flat and on the very clear days after a storm you might convince yourself the Rockies were visible 150 miles distant.

Less than four thousand people lived in the town but there was a local radio station that sat in one of the beet fields not far from the frontage road of the superhighway. A tower steadied against the wind by strong wires stood out back with a red aircraft warning light that blinked at night. I had seen the structure from a distance when I hitchhiked over from Goodland, Kansas and I asked the trucker to drop me at the first exit so that I could leave a tape of my college radio broadcasts and apply for work. By the time I had walked a mile down the dirt road to the station’s parking lot, I am certain I looked more like a drifter seeking food or other handouts than I did a prospective employee, but the receptionist accepted my tape and resume’ and I went back out to the highway.

Burlington, Colorado, ca 1966

My home phone number was on the documents I had left and a few weeks later the general manager had called my Ma to offer me a job while I was camping down in Southern Utah. When I got in touch with him, he offered me $550 a month plus an extra $25 a week when I did a half hour roundup of local sports each Saturday. I thought my wandering was ending abruptly, but it was just getting started.

A diminutive man with an outsized voice was the program director of the AM station and he was my boss. His name was Tom Toomey and during his on-air shift he referred to himself as Tom “Sock-it” Toomey and he was always talking about going out to the country club after he got off the air to eat a greasy plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters. Tom was from upstate New York and had become inordinately fascinated by the fact that he could consume fried bull’s testicles every night of the week. I did not begrudge him this intrigue, but I thought it slightly an odd thing to speak about every day as he was wrapping up his four-hour broadcast.

Tom did not want to work mornings, so I was tasked with signing on the radio station at 5 a.m. and hosting the first broadcast for the next five hours. My initial morning Tom met me in the lobby holding a large Styrofoam cup of coffee and a burning cigarette with a dangling ash. His expression as he looked at me was one of skepticism and I sensed he had not been fond of the decision to offer a job to a hitchhiker with a backpack. Tom’s attitude grew out of his personal belief that not just anyone was able to operate a radio station and entertain and inform the public and the airwaves ought not be turned over to itinerant drifters.

“Morning, Tommy,” I said, which was apparently a bit too collegial.

“No Tommy, please. It’s just Tom.”

“Okay. Sure. Just trying to be friendly.”

“There are other ways. Follow me. Let’s get to the control room.”

As we walked through the hallways of the portable building that comprised the studio, he looked back at me to see if there was wonder on my face at the fact I was being given access to the broadcast booth. There were only three switches on the transmitter to flip and Tommy showed me the readings to take and how to log them and then he led me to the control board.

“Okay,” he said, “those dials are called pots. You roll them up to control volume to your microphones, the turntables, tape machines, and the network feed.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve had a couple of radio jobs before I got here.”

“College radio hardly counts.”

“Okay, but I worked at a station up in the mountains in Eastern Arizona, too. That was kind of a real job. Just didn’t last long.”

“How nice. Well, we are a professional operation here and you’ll find things a bit more challenging.”

“I certainly hope I can live up to those standards.”

I was struggling not to be sarcastic, but I wondered what kind of excellence was demanded by a listening audience of farmers and ranchers and gas station operators and a few restaurants, nursing home residents, and a couple of doctors’ offices. Tommy was almost imperious in his determination to protect the multiple hundreds of daily listeners from my looming inadequacies. By the afternoon, he would be flawlessly playing songs by “The 1910 Fruit Gum Company,” “The Archies,” and “The Ohio Express.” He doubted I was qualified for a similar endeavor.

“Okay, this pot is the network news feed,” he said. “Click it all the way to the left so you can hear a tone cue over the monitor and as soon as you do roll it up and ABC Radio News will be on the air here from New York.”

“Gotcha.”

“And while that’s on, pull some wire copy with Colorado regional news and weather. The local forecast is on there, too. You read that over the air at the end of the national news and then play a record. Pick out some songs for your first hour.”

“Gotcha.”

I ran to the Associated Press wire machine and tore off news copy and then quickly sorted through a tall stack of 45-rpm records and sat two of them on the turntables, dropped the needles into the grooves, and cued them for play. When the network newscast concluded I threw the toggle switch on the microphone pot and began my first morning newscast on the eastern plains of Colorado.

“Good morning, it’s 28 degrees with flurries at 5:15. In Colorado and local news…..”

Nervous energy made the newscast seem brisk and short. I signed off with my name and started the turntable spinning with music as Tom’s hand touched me on the shoulder. I pulled off my headphones.

“We’re a bit more straightforward here,” he said. “Less earnestness is what works for our broadcasts.”

“Okay, well, I’ll tone it down. Guess I was just over-caffeinated or over-enthused.”

“Very well, then,” Tom “Sock it” Toomey said. He took a step back and folded his arms across his chest and waited for what I might say next when I opened the microphone.

I said, “Music radio. This is Michael Martin Murphy and ‘Wildfire,’” and I turned off the microphone switch.

He again tapped my shoulder. “Please, no ‘music radio.’ That’s big city stuff. We just give it to them without flash. I spent a lot of time developing this format. And it works. Please stick to it.”

“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to say certain things,” I said. “Is there a list?”

“Don’t try to be funny your first day on the job. And especially not your first day on the air.”

“You’re right, I suppose. Humor never works anywhere. I’m sure there’s no place for it on the radio out here.”

“That’s correct. We are a time, temperature, and news format.”

“That’s a format?”

“Yes, it’s our format and it works quite well for our listeners. We don’t use personality.”

“And you developed that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I guess I have a lot to learn.”

“I believe you do. But that’s what I’m here for.”

“Well, I wondered.”

Cottonwoods at Fall on the Colorado High Plains

There was not much time for me to interject any personality into a broadcast even if I had one to share. The entire morning news block was consumed with network and local news, a farm and ranch report, weather, announcement of the school lunch menus, obituaries, swap shop, a few songs, and the daily hospital report.

Community radio was always exploring new concepts for making money and the business managers that had made the strategic decision to employ me had also decided that there was an audience for a daily reading of the admissions and dismissals from the county hospital. In the time before HIPAA, sponsors fought over the availability of buying commercial time on the “Hospital Report.” I was a bit stunned that such private information was broadcast but the list of names was in front of me, and I read it without any trace of earnestness, much less irony. The health reason for their admission to the hospital was also a part of the information we broadcast and just to keep listeners tuned in we broke up the announcements of names and ailments with the sponsor’s commercial.

“I’ll be right back with a list of today’s dismissals from the county hospital right after these words from….”

After I had informed everyone in the bi-county area about who had been admitted and released from the local hospital, and the nature of their illness I got back to music. As the musical intro was playing to a Gordon Lightfoot song, I related a quick anecdote about seeing him in concert and the fact that he had been so drunk he forgot the lyrics to a couple of his songs. When the recording ended, I added a few more bits of information about that concert. Sock-It Toomey was standing behind me wagging his finger.

“Really, what am I supposed to do? Just throw switches and share the time and temperature? Who in the hell goes into this business to do that?”

“It’s what you were hired to do. Nobody needs your little stories.”

“Jesus, I wish I’d known. Maybe I should quit before the day is over. But why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and let me do my job?”

Tommy Toomey’s eyes went wide with an expression that was an indication he had not ever heard such a vile word. He was also pointing behind me. I did not care.

“I asked you to get the fuck outta here. Now please go.”

His pointing turned into jumping up and down histrionics. I turned around and discovered that the microphone light was still on and the morning audience had heard our entire conversation. The “Great Voice of the Great Plains” was swearing at people as they rolled out of bed.

“Oh fuck,” I said one last time before I turned off the microphone.

Fifteen minutes later, in the pre-dawn dark, the pastor of the Lutheran Church was in the lobby waiting to talk to the new announcer. I made profuse apologies and denied I was routinely profane. Tommy Toomey kept giving the pastor skeptical looks and I knew I would have to work hard to gain acceptance into the community. But I was too much of a smart ass to try very hard. I suppose I was also arrogant and viewed the little town on the Interstate as a rest stop on my road to broadcast glory. I grew up to hate guys like me.

I settled into an adobe, played softball, and watched the wind blow dirt across the plains in broad clouds of brown darkness. Because I did not have a radio, at night I often sat on the ground next to my old Opel station wagon and listened to the A.M. radio signal of KOMA in Oklahoma City. The sound of the announcers’ voices and the music made the cheap speakers rattle and sent silly dreams through my head that I might one day work in such a fantastical operation. The night sky was alive with music.

The most exciting part of every broadcast hour on KOMA was always the station identification at the top of the hour. A 50,000-watt clear channel license, the signal bounced off the ionosphere at night and sent radio to remote locales that were known in legal language as “dark areas,” un-served by the publicly-owned airwaves. The station ID began with a loud explosion and then a bass voiced announcer who said, “Serving 22 states and three countries, (another explosion), this is KOMA (dramatic pause), Oklahoma City.”

Which gave me an idea. A very, very bad idea.

I went to the radio station that night after the transmitter was shut down and recorded my own local version for our little beet field town. My voice was squeaky from yelling at that night’s fast pitch game and a couple of beers had pumped up my puny courage and I struggled hard not to laugh as I produced the station identification. Instead of an explosion, I began with the tinkling of cowbells, and then said, “Serving 22 homes, three gas stations, four donut shops, and ten thousand pickup trucks, this is KNAB Burlington, Colorado.”

My sensibilities, if I had any, were not yet to be found the next morning and I played the station ID over the air just as the general manager was parking her car out front. She let me keep my job, but I was certain I was never going to be asked to speak at the Chamber of Commerce monthly luncheon. I moved on in a few months and four decades slipped past without me really taking notice. The general manager became the owner, and she still runs the station out near the Kansas line. I sent her an email recently just to say hello and apologize for my youthful indiscretions. She never answered.

She might still be embarrassed I was ever hired.