ESCAPE from high school!

My final year of high school was spent marking the days until I could spring free from the confines of my parent's home. I had been accepted at the University of South Dakota for the Fall term of 1966 and could hardly wait to let the debauch begin. USD had the well deserved reputation of being a party school of major proportions. South Dakota was a "19" state. The "19" being the age when anyone could legally buy BEER...Reason enough to inspire my "thirst" for knowledge.

My student deferment secured, I enrolled in the University as a broadcasting major. This was meant to be as it was a well known fact that I was destined for radio greatness and just coincidentally that curriculum required not a single course in math OR a foreign language. It was as if Homer Simpson had designed the program just for guys like me. DOH! My freshman year was spinning in greased grooves. I pledged a fraternity and immediately proved to be a phenomenal addition to the TKE drinking team. We took many beer drinking trophies that year with me being one of the stalwarts of the "starting five". Our team anchor, a Minneapolis guy named Tom Pokala, was my hero. I will never forget watching him get up off the puke covered basement floor of the Varsity Tap after we had won yet another chug-a-lug contest against all the other fraternities. He hauled his flabby ass up the stairs to the main bar and ordered himself a celebratory martini before he reeled out the door. He was the Leonardo DaVinci of booze. A man who had mastered his medium. I worshiped the ground he crawled home on.

About this same time I was getting involved in theater at USD. It appealed to the egotist in me and since there was nothing going on in local radio it was...something to do. In the theater department I met one of the craziest, funniest, and most remarkable bastards I have ever known: Douglas Marsden Steckler. "Dougie" or "Steck", depending on whether or not you lifted the lid before "taking a drain", was and is one of the true wild unfettered minds of entertainment. After a long and successful run with Second City, SCTV, and Emmy winning writing credits for some of the biggest comedies on television, Steck wound up in radio teamed with Tim Conway Jr. on KLSX in Los Angeles. After years of giving me grief about radio, he snuggled up to the teat that nourished me for almost forty years. But, that came later; in 1966 we were just a couple of kids with more nerve than brains...And we were going to be STARS.