Battle Stations Again

For many years I thought that all of the attention and money focused on finding a cancer cure was foolish.  To me it was a disease that primarily sacked old people.  Stupidly I concluded that it was a natural happenstance of piling up too many years on your odometer.  Sure, the occasional kid battled it but mostly it was geezers who, like ripe bananas, succumbed to this malady.  My family was relatively cancer free.  My mom had survived breast cancer and added more than twenty years that nearly got her to  ninety.  Even though my wife had lost a father, brother and sister to it, cancer happened to other people.
And then she felt a lump on her neck.

Linda and I spent most of 2014 in doctors offices and in hospitals fighting her lymphoma with chemotherapy and she was cancer free before the end of the year.  This summer another lump--oh, please please let it be something else--told us the cancer had returned.  Time to put on our helmets and kick some cancer ass one more time.  That's why we are in Seattle.

 The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance is the place to go for a stem cell transplant, which is what all of her doctors think is needed for Linda to send this disease packing for good.  It is the foremost facility in the world for this life saving procedure, having pioneered it several years ago.  The staff is second to none and SCCA enjoys a reputation of having the highest rate of successful transplants of any organization in the world.  Linda is in excellent hands.  She has an entire team dedicated to her victory over cancer and a life extension of many years.

My posts on this blog, which began as minor therapy for withdrawal anxiety brought on by the loss of the catharsis of a daily radio show,  have been a regular thing for me for nearly eight years now.  That may change.  Linda's battle is my battle and now it's time for all hands on deck.  I will post when I can but it may become sporadic as her treatment moves along.  I realize this is no big deal but over the years I have constantly been surprised by the number of you who check in frequently to see what snakes have crawled out of my head.  It's good to hear from old friends.

So, we will be busy for the next several weeks.  Cancer is real and it's non-discriminatory.   These days afford us zero opportunity to lapse into self pity.  There are too many children here for that.

First Day of School

My grandson Dan started school this week.  He will most certainly, unlike his grandpa, do his parents proud and excel  at all that important kindergarten stuff.  He's bright, funny, very personable and outgoing.  At 5 he will, just as the rest of us, start memory banking many of life's milestones like the day he was sentenced to school.  The fun is over!  From now on he will be expected to show up either at school or work for, unless he hits the lottery or gets a government job,  the next sixty years.  It's good that neither he or any of his contemporaries will be aware of this until it's too late, but, like spinach and brussel sprouts, it looms large.

Now it begins...60 years of responsibility.  Ugh!

Kindergarten for this correspondent was a considerable challenge.  I was the new kid, migrating to the neighborhood just prior to the start of school, and I was extremely shy.  Our house was only a couple of blocks from what was to be my elementary school so, of course, I walked.  On the very first day of class when the teacher let us out for recess I made the reasonable assumption that my presence was no longer required in the classroom and proceeded to head home.  I slipped from the playground through the teachers' parking lot, cut through a park. crossed U.S. highway 127 and made for my hacienda.  Mom was a little suspicious of my obviously short day but I assured her that we had been let out early because it was the first day.  The next day I followed the same brilliant plan but instead of going into the house after making my escape from the prison that was school I hid behind our garage where I had ingeniously stashed some toy cars and trucks that deserved my attention far more than the classroom did.

My teacher, being only slightly more mature than her young charges, remained blissfully ignorant of the fact she was consistently missing a student after each recess and I remained "at large" post monkey bars for over two weeks.  I might have pulled off my escape act forever if not for an unfortunate early recess.  One morning there was a problem with the thermostat or something in our kindergarten classroom and we kids were let out for recess a scant fifteen or twenty minutes into our day.  Naturally, since I couldn't tell time, I made my now routine getaway from the school.  I was a rebel who refused to live by their stupid rules!  Unfortunately, as I approached my garage hideaway,  dad was just leaving for work.  The jig was up.  

The interrogation tag team of mom and dad had me spilling my guts almost immediately and I was soon in the Principal's office with my parents as he and they discussed what was to become of me.  The next day I was in a new class with a new teacher who could actually count to thirty and had what seemed to be a special interest in where I was at any given moment.  I still hated school, an attitude that stayed with me until college, but wisely continued to employ my patented school survival regime of doing "just enough" to get by.  It also helped that I was lucky enough to find like minded pals to join me for a variety of trouble making schemes we practiced from the back row of nearly every class we were forced to endure.

I really do hope grandson Dan is better at school than I was.  It will be so much easier for him if he cooperates.  Also, sneaking home in San Diego is just a tad more complicated than taking a powder in Leslie, Michigan.  He'll need cab fare.  Hey, wait,  he's probably got an Uber app.

"Shape up Grandpa!"

A Man Ahead of His Time

His name was Don.  He worked the overnight shift on WAVV-FM in Tampa back in 1975.  From midnight until 6 a.m. he presided over waves of beautiful music interspersed with the occasional weather forecast, low key live commercials, and innocuous station positioning liners such as: "Waves of beautiful music for Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, all night all the time on W A V V." It was a snooze but lots of stations were doing it with great success as FM began its move from something owners regarded as a throwaway to the dominate band in the radio business.  The station was owned by a broadcast company headquartered in Atlanta that had enjoyed great success with its chain of Southeastern U.S.  broadcast properties.

I'm having trouble recalling Don's last name and, by the way, Don wasn't his real name, but the story I'm going to relate really did happen.  WDAE was the company's iconic AM station in the Tampa market and I had recently been hired as the morning man on Florida's oldest and (until my arrival) most respected radio station.  I was 27 years old and 'DAE was my first job in a major radio market.  My world was spinning in greased grooves.

The stations, WDAE and WAVV, were located in their own building in downtown Tampa at 101 North Tampa Street.  The sales, traffic and business offices were located on the first floor; the studios on the second, as I recall.  The AM operation was on one side of the upstairs, the FM on the other with an open office area for the disc jockeys between the two.  Every morning I would arrive around 5:15 a.m. to prepare to go on the air right after the 6 o'clock newscast.  Don, a very large and good looking African American, would often leave the FM studio  and drop by my desk to chat for awhile as he got ready to wind up his all night show.  He had lots of time to do this sort of thing as he was only required to speak every fifteen minutes or so.  As he got to know me better he confided in me that he had a charcoal grill going on the fire escape outside his studio and there were always  plenty of steaks and hamburgers if I was hungry.  This seemed a little weird to me but he was a BIG guy and I guessed he just liked to eat.  Another thing that seemed a little unusual was the constant traffic of very well dressed women who were consistently parading up and down the hallway on the WAVV side of the building.  Don claimed they were "good friends" of his who just dropped by to say hello.  Being young and stupid it didn't occur to me until much later that he had to be lowering the fire escape ladder for them to gain access as the front door and offices didn't open until 9.  Don also kept a rather large handgun in the studio with him.  Once he mentioned in passing that he was always armed and had, a few years earlier, done a little stint in Raiford (the state pen) for "opening up a guy in Tallahassee".   Being mostly interested in getting ready for my show and hanging on to my new job in "the bigs", I never gave much thought to all of this.  I liked Don and he seemed to think I was okay too.

One morning when I arrived at the stations Don had been replaced by another jock.  The new guy told me that Don had been arrested early the previous evening for running prostitutes out of WAVV.  Apparently the fire marshall had also been after him for cooking steaks on the fire escape.

To this day I wonder how it all worked out for Don.  Did he stay in radio?  Get into politics?  Politics would have been a natural transition from being a pimp, or from  radio for that matter.  I'd like to think he was just ahead of his time.  In the age of multi-tasking, old Don would be worthy of an "attaboy".

"Are you ready to party big boy?"