24-Ya Gotta Do What Ya Gotta Do

I had my blue vest on along with my impressive Dino labeled name tag. I was standing on a ladder in an island in the middle of the toy store, putting Barbie Dreamhouses or some such things on the top shelf when I heard a voice below me say, what the hell are you doing. I look down, and who do I see but a boss from my radio career. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm jimpulling and this is my view from the middle. One of the things I'd like to be remembered for is the fact that I have a healthy respect for those who make an honest living. I don't care if you're a grocery clerk, a cash here, a stock boy, a cab driver, a bank president, a radio broadcaster, or the market president of a multimillion dollar a year business. I have respect for you all on the same level. Just because you're a stock clerk at Public's doesn't necessarily mean you're any less intelligent or any less ambitious than the president of a major financial institution. It always grinds my gears when I hear people who went out of work, turned down or refuse to pursue an honest decent paying job just because they think it's beneath them in some sort of fantasized class war. I've known some people who would rather be out of work completely than take a job they consider to be below their skill level or below their perceived position in life. In nineteen eighty seven, I was laid off from WKIS and the Florida News Network, and I was out of steady work for ten months. But that doesn't mean I sat on my button didn't do anything. I had a wife and two children to think about, so I needed to do what I needed to do. I wound up experimenting with several odd jobs. Some were totally out of my wheelhouse, some didn't last, some were fun, and some are horrible. But I took a shot. Nonetheless. When I worked for WKIS and FNN, they were owned by Susquehanna Broadcasting in the late nineteen eighties, I became friends with the afternoon talk show host on the radio station. Some might remember Dick Norman, who was on the air every day from three to six pm on then Am seven forty WKIS. In those days, our desks were in cubicles, and Dick's cube and mine were right across from each other, so we could hear each other's phone calls and meetings with other employees. Dick used to laugh at the things I would say after I hung up the phone with a particularly difficult vendor or affiliate. I was pleasant enough to them on the phone where they could hear me, but sometimes when they aggravated me, I would hang up the phone and mutter dirt bag. Dick thought that was hysterical, so he started doing it too. I think he even did it on the air. He'd see me in the hallway and he'd say, Hey, how are the dirt bags doing today. I've mentioned before in this podcast series how fickle the radio broadcasting business can be and how air personality, including disc jockeys and talk show hosts, seemed to get fired a lot. Well, much to my chagrin and his that happened to Dick Norman. I guess his ratings just didn't justify the money spent, and they gave him walking papers. But he rebounded very quickly and wound up as a talk show host and program director of WFLA Radio in Tampa. Good for him, But then in nineteen eighty seven, it came time for me to get my walking papers from WKIS and FNN. I cleaned out my desk and headed home. But when I walked in the door, the telephone was ringing. It was Dick Norman. I'm coming over and I'm bringing alcohol, he said. Now, Dick was always the friendly bulldozer, as I called him. He was one of these guys who would give you the shirt off his back if he thought it would help you. But he knew he was right about everything, and there was no talking him out of it. I guess that's what made him a good radio talk show host. So as promised, Dick showed up at my door shortly after the phone call. Since Dick was working in Tampa, I don't remember why he was in Orlando that day. Maybe he was put there from my benefit. Anyway, he indeed had alcohol with him, and he and I sat in my living room getting numb from it. When my wife came home from her job. We had to be a strange sight. But at one point Dick blurted out, you're coming to work for me. I didn't know exactly what to say, since I had no real desire to uproot my wife from her job and my kids from their school to move from Orlando to Tampa to work for Dick at WFLA. But the Friendly Bulldozer Dick Norman had spoken and I guess I was working for him. Now, what the heck? What else was I going to do? I went to work at WFLA as an evening news anchor on the station. Luckily, my brother and his wife lived in Saint Petersburg, so I stayed with them until I could figure things out. But after a couple of weeks, I realized that the logistics of working in Tampa with my family still in Orlando was just not going to workanked Dick for his kindness, but we parted ways. A couple of years later. That Friendly Bulldozer was driving a rented nineteen eighty nine Chrysler pulling out of a convenience store in Brandon, Florida, when he was struck by a Ford Bronco. His car lurched forward and somehow got into reverse and traveled backward through an intersection until it crashed into a propane tank. The tank didn't explode, but Dick was pronounced dead at the scene. All of the Tampa Bay broadcast community felt the loss, even Dick's competitors. After my brief stint at WFLA, Tampa, I moved on to other things. I worked for a company that sold thermostats door to door. I spent a couple of days, yes I said days, working for a company that sold wine directly to consumers over the phone. What a mistake that was. I wasn't the only one who dumped that turkey of a job After the second day. I spent some time selling long distance service to companies. That wasn't a bad job, but they laid me off after a couple of months. Apparently the company wasn't doing very well. I worked for the satellite company called IDB Communications and ran an uplink facility at the Los Angeles Dodgers spring training camp Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida. Take a listen to the podcast episode A Clueless Brush with Greatness to learn about an embarrassing moment I had there with a ultra famous baseball player. By the way, I got the job at IDB through a friend of mine who was the chief engineer of a radio station in Tampa at the time. Like Dick Norman, Ralph Beaver was a guy ready to do you a favor. At the drop of a hat, Dick and Ralph made the list of the top people in my life that helped me maintain my sanity. Of course, the Dodgertown gig was only supposed to be temporary since it was only during spring training, So after that was over, I was back on the job hunt again. Since I had worked for Alberton's Drug and Grocery and Toys r US in the nineteen seventies, and since apparently no radio jobs were presenting themselves in Orlando, I figured getting a job in red made some sense. Again, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, so I entered a help wanted to add for the toy store chain KB Toys. I wound up getting hired as an assistant manager at the KB Toys Florida Mall store in Orlando. This took a lot of energy for this gig. This particular store was a very high volume outlet for KB and moved a lot of merchandise out the door. I can't say that I enjoyed it. It was a job job, not a career, But when you're supporting a family, sometimes you just can't be all that picky. KB was owned by Melville corporation at the time, which owned several retail chains like Marshall's, Chess King, Linen's and Things and CBS Pharmacy. Melville went out of business in nineteen ninety six, but there was a lifelong benefit I got from working at KB. This was management training. After working at the Florida Mall store for several months, they decided to send me to a management training store in the bustling metropolis of Athens, Georgia for five weeks. Now, no offense to the people of Athens, but this was not a very exciting place. The idea was that after I finished, I would be given my own KB toy store to manage. Now, this turned out to be extremely valuable training. It was well organized and regimented as it needed to be, and I was shown the proper way not only to run a retail store, but how to manage employees. I talked this experience up to one of those god things you've heard me talk about in this series. I'm convinced that the whole reason I was at KB was for this training, because it proved to be invaluable for me as I've moved back into my radio career in management. After the toy store experience. Oh, a funny story that happened while I was at KB As promised, I had been given a brand new store to manage in the Colonial Plaza Mall in Orlando. One day, I'm standing on a ladder in my store, stacking Barbie Dreamhouses or some such goofy things on the top shelf, when I hear a voice from below say, what the hell are you doing. I look and it's the news director from WKIS and FNN, the place I had been fired from a year or so earlier. So now we've crossed the streams. As they say in Ghostbusters, My two careers converged at that moment. Although he thought the situation was somewhat amusing, both my old boss and I knew that sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. But I did move back into radio. The new general manager of the Florida News Network, now under a different ownership, sought me out to hire me back. That was in nineteen eighty nine, and I stayed working for the network until I retired at the end of twenty twenty one. Not only did my unemployment or some might say underemployment experience help me in management training. It also helped me mature. Before it all happened, I was a pretty cocky guy who took a lot of things too seriously and that was probably a little hard to work for as a result. But when I came back, I had a whole new perspective on things and was able to take each day stride. This, coupled with the management training I had at KB, made me a better manager and a better person. Overall. There's that darn god thing again keeps popping up. When I got hired back, I wasn't brought in as operations manager like before. They already had one of those I've talked about him, John Channon. But John was a big fish in a small pond since he came from ABC Radio Networks before joining FNN. Unfortunately for him, he spent money like he was still in the big pond, and that became his undoing at FNN. So when he was asked to leave, I took over again as director of operations. One of the last straws for John was one he bought the national radio rights to the Citrus Bowl, played on New Year's Day in Orlando. Yeah, it was a prestigious event, but it was also a big black hole when it came to making money. John had put himself up as the producer of the radio broadcast. All fine and good, but they fired John like two weeks before the broadcast, and he hadn't even hired the play by play announcer yet, so it was all dropped in my lap. Luckily, I had some contacts in the business and called David Steele, who at the time was the play by play announcer and broadcast coordinator for the Florida Gators broadcasts. David is now and has been for years, the broadcast voice of the Orlando Magic. David was and is an extremely nice and talented guy. I worked with him while he coordinated the radio broadcasts of the Gator Network. Anyway, David said he would be delighted to do the play by play for our Citrus Bowl broadcast. Now here's an embarrassing moment for me. I had produced many baseball broadcasts on the radio and even did some freelance work for the NBA, but I never had produced a football broadcast on the radio before. Different sports have different format requirements. Baseball is easy. Commercial breaks happened between half innings. Who can go wrong? There? But in football you have to look for full timeouts to insert commercial breaks. Referees usually will guarantee that a full timeout will last long enough for a radio or TV station to insert two or three minutes worth of commercials, but never confuse a full timeout with a partial or twenty second timeout. You can't shoe horn a commercial break into a twenty second timeout. Well, that's what happened to me during the national broadcast of the Citrus Bowl. I was the guy producing the broadcast, so I was the one who would cue David Steele when to take the breaks. Somehow I misread the ref on a timeout and cute David to go to a break. Yeah, you guessed it. Turns out it was a twenty second time out, not a full timeout. Oops. This meant we were still in commercials when the play action started, and we wound up joining the next play in progress. David, always the professional, covered it well, but off air to me at his next opportunity, expressed his displeasure at being put in that position. Now'll skip ahead twenty years or so. I'm still running the Florida Network and David was the voice of the Orlando Magic. I had been invited to a pregame media event at the arena by the Magic and who do I run into but my old friend David Steele. We exchange high how are you's and other pleasantries. But within two minutes of our reunion, what does David bring up but that ill fated goof up I made decades previous during that Citrus Bold broadcast. Hey, you remember when you called for that break during that twenty second time out? Yeah, David, I remember, man talk about carrying baggage with you. So there I was in the middle a radio career temporarily delayed by a layoff, my friends Dick Norman and Ralph Beaver to the rescue, a diversion back into the retail business that actually helped me train for future management positions, Then an embarrassing moment that kept me humble during a national radio broadcast that apparently David Steele will never forget. But whether you wind up being a butcher, a baker, a bank president, or a corporate mover and shaker in life, no matter what your actual career path happens to be, sometimes you have to swallow your pride and do what's needed. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. I'm jimpolling and that's my view from the In the next episode, spending forty years in the radio business can teach a person a lot. For one thing, it teaches us that radio is just plain weird. Next on my view from the Middle