Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men."
Colossions 3:23"
When you were a kid did you ever have grownups occasionally ask you "What do you want to be when you grow up?". I guess we all probably did at one time or another. That question was a staple on 1960's television programs involving kids such as Art Linkletter's House Party and, if you grew up in the Houston area as I did, the Kitterick Show on the local ABC-TV affiliate KTRK Channel 13.
Kiiterick (real name Bunny Orsak) was the host of a late afternoon show right after school would let out. The name Kitterick was derived from the stations call letters and their mascot which was a black cat. This was during an era, long before Nickleodeon and The Disney Channel, where many major market television stations broadcast a local kids show. Kitterick's show was wildly popular as was the Cadet Don Show, aired weekday mornings also on Channel 13.
When the question "What do you want to be when you grow up" was asked of children being interviewed on these programs ,the answers were pretty predictable. Boys would generally respond with fireman, police officer, doctor, cowboy, or astronaut. Astronaut was particularly popular especailly in our area as space travel was new and exciting, NASA was located just south of Houston and astronauts were national heroes at that time. A sign of the 1960's, girls typically responded that they wanted to be a mommy, nurse, or school teacher, as those were the most common accepted occupations at the time.
Once I became an adult, people have sometimes asked me that question but in a retrospective manner. "Did you always want to be in broadcasting and the entertainment field?" And the answer is no, but that changed pretty early-on while I was still in school.
Honestly the first thing I ever wanted to be was President of the United Sttaes. I guess I developed at a very young age the attitude of go BIG or go home! This may have been spurred by a collection of Presidential figurines that my Grandpa acquired for me. Weingarten's, a Houston area grocery store chain that my Grandpa shopped, had a promotion where when you purchased a certain amount off groceries you would receive a Presidential figurine. My Grandpa eventually collected all 35 figurines for me along with the styrofoam base to display them. I spent hours looking at and playing with those guys. So much so that at the age of six I could name all the Presidents by name in order, from George Washington to Lyndon Baines Johnson. I'm pretty sure I can still do that, though I might run into a little trouble with that run of non-descript Commanders-iin Chiefs between James Knox Polk and Millard Fillmore! My semi-photographic memory will be detailed a little more in an upcoming chapter.
My interest in politics continued beyond first grade. By fourth grade I was reading the newspaper voters guides and offering advice to my Mom and Dad on how to vote! Looking back, if I chosen to go into politics I think I would have done well. I'm a good people speaker, pretty likeable, honest, could have worked across party lines. Oh wait, all of that would never work today! But that is a story for another chapter.
My next childhood occupational dream was to become a pop/rock star. Like many young guys in the mid-sixties, after The Beatles and the British Invasion took the world by storm and forever changed the music scene, I wanted to be like those pop idols. Admittedly my love for music started earlier than most. My family always had some kind of music playing on the radio or the record player. I had a little radio by my bed & a small record player in my bedroom as far back as I can remember. My folks generally listened to country music, but I was further exposed to other forms of music via my Nanny and Grandpa and their Reader's Digest collections of Big Band, Classical, Show Tunes, and more, plus the latest pop/rock stuff by listening to my older sisters and cousins records, along with listening to the radio. I would watch all the music shows like Shindig, Hullabaloo, and the local Houston program The Larry Kane Show, which preempted American Bandstand in n Houston at that time. And I never missed the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, waiting to see which hot new music star would appear that night. I would soon be asking Santa to bring me albums along with G.I. Joe action figures, Hot Wheels cars, or whatever other toys I had marked in the Sears catalogue. And then there was the pantomiming and playing air guitar (before anybody ever even called it that) to my favorite tunes.
I did in fact have some formal music training between the ages of six and nine when my sister Sandia and I took piano lessons. Our teacher was a big hulking woman, with matted hair, and some terrible skin condition. If that wasn't scary enough, her name was Thelma Link! Doesn't that name sound like someone who could strike fear into a young kid's heart like some Disney cartoon villain, such as Cruella DeVille, or maybe Scut Farkus in "A Christmas Story"?!
I think Mrs. Link thought she had found her newest music prodigies in me and my sister. I did my first recital when I was six, performing on some elementary school stage. For my second recital my sister and I performed the classic Sergei Prokofiev composition "Peter and the Wolf" together, each of us performing the music associated with each character in the composition.. It was during our weekly practice time leading up to that recital at Mrs. Link's house, that she and her eighty-something old legally blind mother brought me to tears. Mrs. Link was working with Sandia and her composition book, while I sat at the piano with Mrs. Link's mother. Apparently I wasn't keeping time up to the old lady's standards as she kept beating on the piano with her right hand keeping time as I attempted to play best I could. Finally she started yelling at me and saying "No, no, no!", as I burst into tears. At that point she and Mrs. Link started to try and ply me with candy to smooth things over.
From that point on I began dreading those weekly piano lessons. I did stick with it long enough to prepare for another recital and was given the extremely challenging theme from the movie "Exodus", which became a #1 hit for the piano duo of Ferrante and Teicher. Mrs. Link had to virtually rewrite my sheet music as the composition required extreme reaches with both hands to play, and my hands were too small at the time. By the time she was finished her markings on the sheet music looked almost like hieroglyphics. It's a wonder I could even read the darn thing! But somehow I did and mastered the song pretty well for a kid my age. But, as fate would have it, our family packed up and moved to Austin in 1969 before my recital, and that put an end to piano lessons and Mrs. Link. Looking back I wish I had kept playing as I had an aptitude for the piano, and even if I was lousey by now I'd have to be pretty decent. Even if I could only play Bruce Hornsby's "The Way it Is", keyboardist Chuck Leavell's incredible piano part in the Allman Brothetr's "Jessica, and Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy", the very famous Charlie Brown theme I'd be thrilled!
Several years later after we moved back from Austin to Houston, Mrs. Link stopped by our house for a visit. Sandia and my folks chatted with her for awhile, but I hid in my room. I had no intention, at eleven or twelve years old, of seeing my childhood tormentor again! Many years later when in my fifties, I purchased an acoustic guitar and began teaching myselfhjow to play. I would search the internet to find the easiest versions of songs I liked. I had no illusions of being a great picker, I just played chords of those songs for my own enjoyment. I actually amassed a pretty vast and varied collection of tunes that I could play without totally embarrassing myself, practicing in the finished basement of our sprawling old home in Lancaster, Wisconsin. Most fun I ever had playing a guitar? It was when I went over to one of my football players Keane Hudson's house where we were joined by another of my players Vincent Gagliano, and we sat and played and sang and laughed for several hours. It was too much fun! Unfortunately my terrible psoriatic arthritis finally cauight up with me and gnarled my hands so badly I can no longer play. But it sure was fun while it lasted
Ok, so my big-time music career never happened. So what did I aspire to next? Well, there was a brief moment in grade school where I considered being a veterinarian because of my love for animals, especially dogs. But when I realized I would need to be proficient in math and science, which I always hated both and never did well with them in school, and would have to euthanize animals sometimes, I was out. I could never put down an animal, especially on a regular basis. I just couldn't stand to do it especially having to watch grieving families say goodbye to their beloved pet.
By the time I was ten years old I had fallen in love with football and wanted to be an NFL player. I 've always had a strong upper body, wasn't afraid of contact, and was very much a student of the game. But by sophomore year of high schcol and multiple school changes, it became obvious to me that I didn't have the speed or the stature to ever realize that dream. But,my brother Eric did have the talent and size plus more athleticism than me, and went on to to be a star defensive end at THE University of Texas, even making the cover of Sports Illustrated. Later he would be drafted in the fifth round of the NFL draft by the Kansas City Chiefs and spent four years with the Chiefs followed by a brief stint with the Houston Oilers. Now there was a dream I could live out vicariously through someone I loved and has been my life-long best friend.
So with sports stardom dashed I turned to writing. I had always done creative writing all the way back to grade school, writing some pretty profound poems for a young kid. I never envisioned my myself as a novelist with books on the New York Times Best Seller List. I considered screenwriting for a time because of my love for movies at the time, especially the old classics which of which I am still a huge fan. But then I zeroed in on sportswriting and became sports editor of my high school newspaper. I began hanging out at Houston Oiler football practices and interviewing players for the high school paper. I enrolled in college as a journalism major writing sports stories for the college newspaper. I even began writing stories for various local community newspapers.
It was during those times interviewing Oiler players that I started thinking about broadcasting. I had always been confident speaking in public and really enjoyed doing interviews. So after about a year and a half of college, I dropped out and enrolled in the Houston location of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, and shortly thereafter in 1980, my broadcasting career began in my Space City hometown of Houston, Texas. In keeping with my mindset of go BIG or go home, that radio career started not at some small market podunk station which is often the case for novice broadcasters, but in one of the biggest media markets in America. And for the better part of the next 45 years that journey would take me to some amazing places and some wonderful experiences, but not without a lot of unexpected twists and turns, both good and bad, along the way.
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