03-A God Thing

I wanted to be in radio broadcasting since I was seven years old, mainly because I wanted to be a disc jockey. When I retired at the end of twenty twenty one, I had been in the radio business for some forty years, and in that time I did virtually everything there is to do in radio broadcasting except be a disc jockey. What do you suppose that is? Maybe it's a god thing. I'm jimpolling and this is my view from the middle. Now, before you all go hey, waald on me here and say, oh, there he goes with that religious stuff, let me tell you what I'm talking about. If you choose to believe that the whole thing is just a coincidence, then that's your prerogative. But to me, there are no or very few coincidences. To me, logic plays into this as well. After a while, when coincidence after coincidence piles up, you've got to believe there's more to it than pure chance. As I'm speeding down the super highway called life, sorry about that, there are guard rails on either side of the road. It's kind of like the Audubon in Germany. You're free to travel the road as fast as you want to, but occasionally you vary off in one direction or another, and the guard rail puts you back on the right path. Now, I don't know if there are actually guardrails on the Audubon. Don't get tedious on me here. It's just a silly little illustration. But I think that's how God handles us. He'll let us drive down the road at our own steam, at our own pace, but he'll keep nudging us on the left or on the right to make sure we're going where we should be going according to his plan. When I was seven years old or thereabouts, I really don't remember exactly when it all started. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my career. I wanted to be a radio broadcaster. I listened to JP McCarthy every morning while getting ready for school. McCarthy was the morning DJ on WJR Detroit in the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building. His newscaster Oscar Fernett. I listened to Lowell Thomas and the news. I listened to Ernie Harwell called Detroit Tiger baseball games. Not that I gave a hoot about the sport or even the team so much as I cared about the radio broadcasts. I'd sit in my room and mimic what Harwell did and said on the air. Oh I didn't wind up as a sports play by play guy. I'll never know. Well, yeah, I guess I do. I wasn't really into sports. We'd go to games at Tiger Stadium, and while my friends were watching the game, I'd be craning my neck trying to see what was going on in the WJR broadcast booth and maybe get a glimpse of the great Ernie Harwell doing his thing. No, I was never able to see him, but that didn't stop me from trying. Later I got to visit WJR as part of an eighth grade class project. It was the thrill of a lifetime up until that point, anyway, going up those gold plated elevators to the top of the Fisher Building in downtown Detroit, sitting in the lobby and listening as radio commentator Bud Guest gave instructions to his producer in the hallway. Guest at a big, powerful, booming voice that you could hear all over the station, and it was unmistakable. Getting to see McCarthy in his cramped little studio, kind of a contrast to the big, modern, lush studios we had at iHeartMedia when I was working there before I retired. Being able to see the booth announcer, all he did was sit in the booth and do brief announcements or the station id from the golden tower of the Fisher Building. This is w JR. Detroit. He would direct himself with his hands like an orchestra conductor to help him pronounce the words, a technique that I use myself to this day, even while I'm recording this podcast. All these things were an integral part of what led me down the career path I would ultimately take. I listened to the Big eight CKLW first in the Motor City with twenty twenty News. A DJ from CK visited my high school once and later talked about us on the air during a shift. I thought that was so cool. I taped what he said on my sophisticated portable reel to reel tape recorder with a microphone propped up next to the speaker and played it over and over again as he actually mentioned the name of my high school on the radio. I listened to album rock stations WRIF and wwwwor W four as it was called. These were the hippie alternative rock stations at the time. They played groups like led Zeppelin, The Who, and The Doors. The jocks had low, mellow voices and far out man styles of delivery. Visually, they had hair everywhere down to their shoulders and beyond, and usually a long beard and mustache. I got to visit W four once and I watched as the DJ with a full burly beard stuck his entire face in this huge windscreen on the microphone and say the call letters WWWW Detroit far out man well. I added that last part. I tried to get one of those huge face swallowing windscreens from my podcast studio here just so I could do this episode, but they don't make them that way anymore. I listened to WCAR, WDRQ, WXYZ, and the list goes on and on. I think I knew every disc jockey, every newscaster, every play by play announcer, and every set of call letters of every station in the Detroit metropolitan area. When I got older and of working age, I was constantly dropping applications at radio stations, hoping someone would hire me for something anything. The closest I came was a job offer to be a boardop on WCAR, but it was a full time gig during school hours, and that wasn't going to work. It broke my heart to have to turn that down. I told the story in another episode of this podcast series, but it applies here too. I was working at an Albertson's grocery and drugstore Combo and bel Air Bluffs, Florida, north of Saint Petersburg. I had risen through the ranks a bit on a management track at the store when I woke up one day and asked myself what I would doing working in retail when my dream was to be in radio broadcasting. So, just as Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes did in the year fifteen to nineteen, I burned my ships so that there was no chance of turning back. I quit Albertson's with two weeks notice, copied the directory of radio stations from the public library, and set sale in my nineteen seventy nine Toyota Corolla down US forty one along the west coast of Florida, hitting every radio station until I found someone who would hire me. Okay, so I mixed that all up, since you can't really set sail after you burn your ships, but you get the idea anyway. The station that hired me turned out to be an all news radio station, WQSA Sarasota. I did tape editing, commercial production, board operating, newswriting, news anchoring, news reporting, log preparation, programming, and even a little bit of radio engineering in my two years at WQSA, all for one hundred and thirty five dollars a week. It was the greatest learning experience of mind my life, at least when it came to radio broadcasting. I moved to the big market of Orlando to WHOO in nineteen eighty one, and then later to the Florida News Network and WKIS in nineteen eighty three. I added sales and management to my credentials satellite engineering and space shuttle anchoring. But never ever, was I ever a disc jockey. A program director buddy of mine later heard this story and was determined to give me at least one disc jockey shift on his music station just to say I did it. But it never actually happened. So what's the point. Why did I go through all this and not actually do the thing I wanted to do, which was to be a disc jockey. It was God letting me speed down that highway, but nudging me into the right path with his guardrails. Because you see, since I was never a disc jockey, I had more job stability than most. Disc jockeys get fired a lot, mainly because every time a station changes format or slips in the ratings, or they feel like they can automate a shift with as a computer, the disc jockey is the first person to be given to walking papers. I had a little taste of that at Whoo and FNN, but it could have been a lot worse had I busted through that guard rail into the disc jockey zone. I had dis jockey friends who wound up as convenience store clerks because they got canned and couldn't find work anywhere else. Instead, I wound up in managements and making a decent career for myself, saving for retirement, getting married and having a family, and actually having the ability to retire comfortably at age sixty five so I can sit down and do these podcasts for you, Well, good for me anyway. Of course, this all happened so gradually that I didn't realize what was happening until it was all over, when I sat down with my financial advisor and he said I was ready to retire. I look back on all this thinking how blessed I was to have been led down the road bumped into place with the guardrails that I was. Looking back. There are also some other quote coincidences that happened that I can now easily attribut to those nudging guardrails. The fact that I rose to the challenge in high school and became a star student in the drama department. Without that experience, I doubt I would have been able to perform on the air during my broadcast career. The fact that my parents dragged me to Florida from Michigan when they retired. I was a late baby, so as I was graduating high school my father was retiring. He was on the move to Florida, and I had nowhere else I could afford to go but with him, I doubt I would have been a tenth as successful in my radio career if I had tried to start it in Detroit instead of Florida. Another crossroad I came to where the guardrail pushed me back into play was when they offered to promote me to operations manager of the Florida News Network in WKIS in nineteen eighty five. That was nothing but a news reporter and on air anchor at the time, and not too many people get offered a promotion multiple steps up like that, But me, like a dope, I turned the promotion down. My fiance was against me taking the promotion because she knew the previous operations manager and he nearly drove himself to an early grave, working himself to death. But when he found out I had turned down the promotion, my immediate supervisor at the time, the news director, dragged me into his office and asked me, if I was out of my ever loving mind, take the job. You're born to do it, he said, or something like that. I don't remember the exact words. I just remember he was ready to lock me in a rubber room if I didn't take the promotion. Anyway, I took the promotion and know the job didn't kill me, nor did it consume my life as it did my predecessors. I think they just didn't know how to handle it. So those were the major god things that formed my career path, but they were not the only God things in my life. While I was working for FNN, I was also attending Pinecastle United Methodist Church in South Orlando now known as bell Isle Community Church. My wife had taken an interest in the drama department the drama ministry, if you will, of the church, and I wound up getting involved as well. Meanwhile, my eighty three year old father was in a nursing home in Saint Petersburg and not doing well healthwise. He had prostate cancer and things were not looking good. I spent a lot of time traveling back and forth between Orlando and Saint Pete to visit him. During his final days at the church, we were about to perform a full length play for the congregation. It was a play about the relationships between fathers and sons of various generations. Ironically, my father and I had strained relations off and on, but we were finally in a good place. It may have taken moving out of my parents' house to achieve it, or maybe just a little growing up on my part. Anyway, it was before the time of cell phones and I had an answering machine on my home telephone line. We were to do the final performance of the play and our call time. The time we needed to be at the church for makeup was six pm on this day, so my wife and I left the house at five thirty pm. We did the play, which took until about nine thirty that night. We came back to the house with the entire cast in tow since we were to throw the cast party for the final performance. When we arrived, there was a message on the answering machine from my stepmother. Father had passed away shortly after five point thirty pm, just after we had left for the makeup call. They weren't able to get a hold of me, no cell phone and no other way to contact me. Probably a blessing, since doing my part as a son and a father in this play with the death of my own father of my mind might have been more than I could have handled. I'm not sure what this all meant, but I'm convinced it was all part of God's plan. A more recent God thing came in twenty twenty three. I talk about this in more detail in the podcast episode called the Pimple. But I had been diagnosed with parotid gland cancer. Now that sounds more horrible than it actually was. Although the treatment was just this side of horrible. A parodid gland is a salvary gland. This one was on the left side of my face, between my cheek and my jawline. It was squeam of cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer. And it's not the first time I'd had skin cancer. I'm a fair skinned boy who lived in Florida for nearly fifty years, so I'm the poster boy for skin cancer and I keep the dermatilelogists and yacht fuel. Anyway, when it was first detected, it was nothing more than a pimple, and the radiologist said I could undergo radiation treatments right away or wait to see if it got any worse. Something told me to wait on the radiation, so I did well. It did get worse, and surgery and radiation treatments ensued, and about halfway through the treatments, I met with my radiologist again and he said, you know, you made the best decision you could have made by not doing radiation when we first talked about it. If we had started treatments, then I would have done the radiation in the wrong place, the wrong place. Can you imagine they would have had to start the treatments all over again. So there I was in the middle, divine intervention nudging me along those guard rails the roadway below me as I sped along, determined to make a career for myself and my dream job through a church play teaching me what it meant to be a father and a son, while my real father faced the end of days, giving me a renewed appreciation for the relationship he and I had finally carved out, and finally guiding me through a health crisis and helping me make a crucial decision that I didn't even realize. Was all that crucial a coincidence, I think not. It was a God thing. I'm Jim Holing, and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, how does one find himself in the middle of one of the worst maritime disasters in the history of Tampa Bay the day the Skyway fell? Next on my view from the middle,