KBTO

One morning twenty-six years ago I was agonizing over a rent-due notice in Provo, Utah. I and my bride arrived in Provo six months earlier on our honeymoon. I was enrolled at Brigham Young University on a skimpy scholarship that barely covered room and starvation. Jobs were hard to come by -- or rather it was hard for me to come by any jobs I wanted to take. Either way, the rent was due and couldn't be paid.
The crumpled bill had barely fallen from my palsied hand when the phone rang. I answered it listlessly. Two minutes later I was a new man. Out of the blue a radio station in North Dakota wanted me as their news director. Not only that, but since it was just going on the air I would have free rein in setting up the news department any way I wanted it. The dead hand of precedent and tradition, so baffling and discouraging in my prior radio news jobs, did not exist.
Even more wonderful, the general manager, Alan Henning, seemed not to know the basic skinflint rules about radio hiring practices. When he asked me on the phone how much I'd want to come work there I meekly quoted him the same salary I had started at in radio several years earlier. He brushed it aside, commenting that he didn't think a person could live on so little, and offered me substantially more. When I got my voice back I quickly closed the deal, telling him we'd be in Bottineau in four days.
But the wonder was not quite over yet. Before he hung up Henning informed me, almost as an afterthought, that all station employees and their families were getting Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage at no cost. Twenty-six years ago in radio this was more progidgal than anything the Aga Khan could come up with.
I informed the gleefull wife. We both jumped up and down like giddy schoolgirls. A steady job with free health insurance -- and our first child was on the way. Glory be!
I am ashamed to own it but we spent the rest of that day packing everything we owned -- and a few things we didn't --from the apartment into our blue Ford station wagon and after dark cautiously pulled out of the driveway headed due east, stiffing the landlord. That's the only time I ever ran out on the rent. The landlord, I recall, was an elderly lawyer. I'm sure he's gone to his reward by now but if his heirs read this and wish to prosecute for the estate I will be glad to hand over the one-hundred-and fifty bucks.
Have you ever driven out of the mountains into the great, overarching prairies of Montana with a new job, a new destiny, in your pocket? The vast horizon and tremendous clouds sailing along in a crystal blue sky seemed to match my confidence and ambition. This was it; the job that would lead to fame and fortune.
Our spirits were somewhat dampened when we arrived in Bottineau in the dead of winter. That season is shabby and mean-spirited up there near the Canadian border. The only place we found to rent was a dilapidated house under the shadow of the tallest building in town, the grain elevator. The sun shown in our hovel for about ten minutes each day. Otherwise the gloom was palpable. One of the bedrooms had a running fungus on the walls. We shut the door and sealed it with a plastic sheet. The air ducts were filled with beer bottles. The carpet had no discernable color to it, having been previously used as burlap sacking on a whaling vessel back when Moby Dick was a tadpole. That house had more strange, discombobulating smells to it than a combination charnel house/chicken coop.
But when your ship comes in it comes in like a house afire. In a matter of weeks the wifey found a snug cottage for sale and we moved in without having to make a downpayment. Mortgage payments, I clearly and achingly remember, were one-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars per month.
My job. Oh, my job. I decided that there was no need for news before eight in the morning, so I got there at seven. The AP teletype chattered away in a disused bathroom --it was too noisey to put anywhere else. I sat on the toilet seat and culled whatever looked interesting to read. No board shift for this boyo, so I wandered the town and county digging up whatever I felt like pursuing. The county sheriff and the police chief, never having dealt with the broadca media before, were friendly and obliging. I didn't have to call them, they called me whenever something happened they thought was newsworthy. One of the evening announcers worked in the town bakery during the day; he innundated the station with bread and sweet rolls, cornish pasties and great puffy things stuffed with kielbasa sausage and sauerkraut. Henning was a heavy drinker. His wife tried to wean him from the sauce by filling the station refridgerator with chocolate milk and fresh-squeezed lemonade and we could take our fill of it whenever we wanted. I ate at home only on weekends. Come to think of it, I never worked a weekend. Always had it off. Amy and I would drive the ninety miles to Minot on Saturday, stay overnight with friends, attend church Sunday morning, and then drive back up Sunday afternoon, often going through the town up into the Turtle Mountains to watch the sun set over Bullhead Lake.
A beautiful moment in my life, now mere gossamer. That imp of the perverse that bedevils all geniuses and ne'er-do-wells finally convinced me I couldn't be happy unless I lived in Florida. Don't ask me now why I had to follow that willow-the-wisp. I did, and the wife and baby dutifully followed me into disaster at a place just outside of Haines City, Florida, called Circus World.
But that is a tale for another day.