Speaker 1: Frost by the Vigo. Here's some of his favorite interviews.
Speaker 1: It is another edition of American history on the radio
Speaker 1: on the Nightcap on seven hundred WLW, Gary Jeff Walker.
Speaker 1: You know, over the past months, even over the last
Speaker 1: year or so, I have been interviewing people in this
Speaker 1: profession who work in the business that I do because
Speaker 1: I respect them and their reputations in their careers speak
Speaker 1: for themselves. But tonight I am letting them speak for
Speaker 1: themselves once again. And our guest in the spotlight is
Speaker 1: the one, the only, Eddie Fingers, who was a co
Speaker 1: afternoon host here on seven hundred WLW, but for years
Speaker 1: was the captain in chief of what was called the
Speaker 1: Dawn Patrol on web and Eddie Fingers, welcome to the Nightcap.
Speaker 1: It's great to finally get you. It's great man. I've
Speaker 1: wanted to add here for a long time. I had
Speaker 1: your partner, Rocky Boyman on a while ago, because this
Speaker 1: is a.
Speaker 2: Guy who's got oh Jam milk an hour out of
Speaker 2: that guy. He's been on radio for about ten minutes.
Speaker 1: But I combined that with his football career there you go,
Speaker 1: and his current football you know, career and everything he
Speaker 1: has does his political career, So there were lots there
Speaker 1: was lots of material fodder there with Rocky, but with you,
Speaker 1: it's just enormous. We could sit down for probably two
Speaker 1: or three hours. You said, before we sat down for this,
Speaker 1: you were on the phone with one of your perpetrators
Speaker 1: at the Dawn Patrol, Bob Berry producer.
Speaker 2: Bob we all keep in touch yet, Bob the producer,
Speaker 2: I love that guy. Well, look, you know him as
Speaker 2: well as anyone you work with, the bush and uh,
Speaker 2: he's a different cat.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: What could you say? I don't know what kind of
Speaker 1: species he is, whether it's a cat or something else,
Speaker 1: but he's definitely different. And he was screwed up before
Speaker 1: he fell and hit his head, roll hard at Symphony
Speaker 1: Home big time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I want to go back. I want to
Speaker 1: start with where it started for you.
Speaker 2: I will tell you, man, when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: I had I think I was in third fourth grade
Speaker 2: and it was my birthday and my mom's like, what
Speaker 2: do you want? And I said, I like a tape recorder,
Speaker 2: and so I I just wanted to fidget with it,
Speaker 2: you know, And uh, I never thought about getting into
Speaker 2: this as a as a career but I played with
Speaker 2: and I've still gotta I guarantee you, if I dug
Speaker 2: hard enough, I could come up with some of those
Speaker 2: tapes me interviewing my grandma.
Speaker 1: They were totally they were totally disintegrated.
Speaker 2: Yet I would guess they probably have but if I
Speaker 2: could find them right exactly, you interviewed your grandma When
Speaker 2: I was like eight, I recalled doing that, and uh
Speaker 2: and it which is something. And my brother, my brother
Speaker 2: and I would pretend we were just shockeys, and we
Speaker 2: would the DJ was on Wing Radio and Dayton Top
Speaker 2: forty and uh, so the DJ would be talking up
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Do you remember who it was? Who the DJ was?
Speaker 2: The mojo man, Steve Kirk, oh Casey Petrowski.
Speaker 1: I worked with Kirk. Well, he was actually retired when
Speaker 1: I worked in Dayton for the ten months I did
Speaker 1: before I came here, and was one of the coolest
Speaker 1: dudes I ever met and one of the guys that
Speaker 1: was instrumental in bringing the Beatles to the area. But anyway, so.
Speaker 2: But that was it, you know, And but we would
Speaker 2: we would let them talk over the beginning of the song.
Speaker 2: It'd be in the background, so we'd be talking up
Speaker 2: the record and then try to hit the post and
Speaker 2: hold the hold the microphone up to the radio and
Speaker 2: play I want to hold your hand or whatever that one.
Speaker 1: You know what is synonymous And almost all of these
Speaker 1: interviews that I've done for this particular topic, Eddie, is
Speaker 1: that all of us either did that with tape recorders
Speaker 1: or built our own little radio stations that maybe went
Speaker 1: five hundred feet to whatever John records Land Decker's shotgun time.
Speaker 1: I did it when I was like twelve years old.
Speaker 1: I was in this special education class for good kids
Speaker 1: who'd gotten a's through the year in summer school, and
Speaker 1: one of the projects was building your own FM transmitter. Damn.
Speaker 1: But everybody that I've talked to who's a lifer in
Speaker 1: this business started out doing exactly what you just said.
Speaker 2: It's amazing, yeah, And it was just something that, like
Speaker 2: I said, me and my brother and I just thought
Speaker 2: it was fun and cool. Never in a million years
Speaker 2: thought I could do this. I mean, I grew up
Speaker 2: blue collar. I know, I'm sure you did as well,
Speaker 2: blue collar. Like Kamala Harris came from a middle class family.
Speaker 1: There you go. I don't know, I think we were
Speaker 1: middle middle class. I mean boom. You can't get more
Speaker 1: middle class.
Speaker 2: And uh, you know, my parents both worked for GM
Speaker 2: and Dayton, which was a giant gmtown back then it was.
Speaker 2: And if you could get a good GM job, man,
Speaker 2: you were set the pension, get your thirty one out
Speaker 2: and retire at fifty five. And and I had done
Speaker 2: well in school and stuff, so they wanted me to
Speaker 2: go to college.
Speaker 1: No idea what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2: And uh, this is sad to say, man, but I
Speaker 2: I thought I'm going to go to pre med at
Speaker 2: Ohio State and be a dentist because I thought, how
Speaker 2: hard can that be?
Speaker 1: You really thought, dude, I was seventeen years was an
Speaker 1: easy path.
Speaker 2: I thought, seventeen by easy path to wealth. I'm like, hell,
Speaker 2: so what you looked? People said, Okay, that needs philled,
Speaker 2: come over here and do that.
Speaker 1: Well, actually, Anie, I need some work done. Can you
Speaker 1: help me?
Speaker 2: Fortunately I did. I didn't pursue that path. Yes, but
Speaker 2: I a girl I went out with a high school.
Speaker 2: Her brother was friends with a guy from ud who
Speaker 2: they had a radio station back there in wvu D,
Speaker 2: which is where I ended up working. And I was like,
Speaker 2: you know what, guy who's on the radio that's cool.
Speaker 2: And I go home and tell my mom and dad he, uh,
Speaker 2: remember the dentist thing, scotch ned, I want to be
Speaker 2: a disc jockey.
Speaker 1: How did they react? How did they react? How do
Speaker 1: you think?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 2: They were, well, my dad was like he looked at
Speaker 2: me like I've grown another head.
Speaker 1: It was like, you're going to do what now? And
Speaker 1: my mom was like, let him do whatever he thinks
Speaker 1: he can do. Blah blah blah blah blah. So mom
Speaker 1: was on your side.
Speaker 2: Mom was on my side because what they both my parents,
Speaker 2: they never finished high school. So the fact that I
Speaker 2: was going to go to college, they were like, well,
Speaker 2: he must know what he's what he's doing, because he's smart.
Speaker 1: Enough to go to college. Yeah. Well, obviously all parents
Speaker 1: always want their kids to be better than they were
Speaker 1: and right, so sure.
Speaker 2: So then I because I thought, I don't know how
Speaker 2: you felt about it when you were a kid, but
Speaker 2: I thought radio announcers, TV stars, movie stars and stuff.
Speaker 2: I thought they came from a special they grew on someplace.
Speaker 1: Oh, we're definitely special people. At me, there's no you know.
Speaker 2: I was like, I'm not special. What the hell those
Speaker 2: guys are good?
Speaker 4: My god?
Speaker 1: There I'm mute. I've known you for thirty years. You're
Speaker 1: definitely special.
Speaker 2: Special at I've heard that a lot anyway. But anyways,
Speaker 2: so I go to school the UD And here's how
Speaker 2: dumb I was. I didn't even know that. And I
Speaker 2: grew up in Dayton. I didn't know that the University
Speaker 2: of Dayton was a Catholic university.
Speaker 1: That meant nothing to me. The Jesuits must have loved
Speaker 1: you absolutely, and I go and so, you know, my
Speaker 1: first week of school, I was living at home and
Speaker 1: my Mom's like, so, WHOA, what's it like there? And
Speaker 1: I said, what was kind of cool because there's all
Speaker 1: these priests and nuns that are coming back and apparently
Speaker 1: advancing their education. And well, I was talking to one
Speaker 1: of the one of my friends at.
Speaker 2: School, and he goes, dude, you do know this is
Speaker 2: Catholic university And I said, I don't even.
Speaker 1: Know what that means. So you're on wv U D.
Speaker 1: Yeah they have. I was like, they have a radio station.
Speaker 1: That's all I care about.
Speaker 2: Well, I wasn't yet, because I the first day I
Speaker 2: walked in there and it's like, you know, you got
Speaker 2: to work your way into it. Sure, I mean it
Speaker 2: couldn't have been second day of school, and and I
Speaker 2: walked into the office and like, when do I start?
Speaker 1: I'm here, I'm here, the one you've been waiting for.
Speaker 2: I am now entertained me and they were like, okay, cool.
Speaker 2: And so I ended up working at a carrier current
Speaker 2: station w SB and for you know what I carry, yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah you do. But for people who don't, it was
Speaker 2: just on the campus, right, you had to have your
Speaker 2: radio plugged in. It came through the outlet, your sawl
Speaker 2: outlet exactly. And I was doing one to three in
Speaker 2: the morning one Sunday morning, and that's where it all started.
Speaker 1: They gave you the prime shift, right, I know, right,
Speaker 1: that's how I'm going kicking ass man. So when did
Speaker 1: did this evolve into an actual career?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 1: How long were you there? And what was your first
Speaker 1: professional paid job.
Speaker 2: That would have I worked at View after I got
Speaker 2: on VUD. Eventually I worked there for two years and
Speaker 2: then I got hired at SAIFM here in town, which
Speaker 2: is ninety four to one. I don't even know what
Speaker 2: that is.
Speaker 1: Was it an album rock station? At the time, it
Speaker 1: was ebn's competitor. What year is this seventy nine, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, the year I graduated high school, and.
Speaker 2: They I first came in just as part time filling.
Speaker 2: I was working at a record store to fill in
Speaker 2: the gap, living with my girlfriend, who, thank god, got
Speaker 2: a job as a dental hygienist.
Speaker 1: So I was like, you still had that dental connection.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, maybe it was one of attracted me to it,
Speaker 2: and so I did that for a little bit. Then
Speaker 2: they fired the production director and said can you do production?
Speaker 1: And I was did you have any idea? No, what productions?
Speaker 2: I mean I had done stuff, you know, I cut
Speaker 2: tape and stuff in college.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This is another thing that people don't understand today
Speaker 1: with all the technology we have at it is that
Speaker 1: back in the day when we started, there was a
Speaker 1: reel to reel machine. There was a splicing block, there
Speaker 1: was a grease pencil, and there was splicing tape. And
Speaker 1: that's how you did edits, and that's how you put
Speaker 1: commercials together. You got your razor blade and the way
Speaker 1: you went unless you were good enough to be a
Speaker 1: one take jake all the time, or you weren't editing
Speaker 1: concert spots or record spot. I remember a sixty second
Speaker 1: record spot used to take me an hour to do
Speaker 1: in the production room now because I was slow. It's
Speaker 1: just it was a painstaking process back you didn't have
Speaker 1: the punch it in digital technology or computers, then.
Speaker 2: Well that's what kills me these days. But it is
Speaker 2: digital editing. I don't know how to do it. I
Speaker 2: ain't gonna lie to you, but it's so much easier
Speaker 2: than what we used to do. I mean you could,
Speaker 2: I would, and you've done this. You would take a
Speaker 2: piece of tape and set it to the side, yes,
Speaker 2: in case you needed it later, and then put it
Speaker 2: where you needed it because you would.
Speaker 1: Find that you had made the edit at the wrong
Speaker 1: place correct, or you had omitted something that was essential
Speaker 1: to the piece of production you were working on. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, So I started doing that and got fired after
Speaker 2: a year.
Speaker 1: You're not really a professional in this business until you've
Speaker 1: gotten fired. I believe that.
Speaker 2: And they said they were eliminating the position. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure about that long story. They were eliminating you, they
Speaker 2: were eliminating me. They said, we're just getting rid of
Speaker 2: that position. I was like, no, you're firing me. But
Speaker 2: luckily I got a job at a production agency ad
Speaker 2: agency not too long after that. And worked there for
Speaker 2: a year it went bankrupt, so you can see I.
Speaker 6: Was a.
Speaker 1: Success everywhere he walks ladies and gentlemen. Now I've got
Speaker 1: to ask you, and I know most people believe, and
Speaker 1: it may be true, that your name is actually Eddie Fingers.
Speaker 1: Where did Eddie Fingers come from? Because I can tell
Speaker 1: you the Gary Jeff story if you want, if you oh,
Speaker 1: absolutely full honesty, But yeah I was.
Speaker 2: I was in Cleveland and the guy uh was like,
Speaker 2: we don't really like your real name. I was like, okay,
Speaker 2: he said you got a name and I said no.
Speaker 2: He goes, We're going to have a staff meeting next
Speaker 2: week and talk about it.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So he calls me a couple of days later and said,
Speaker 2: all right, we got two names for you, Eddie Fingers
Speaker 2: or Woody Fingers. Yeah, that's what That's exactly my reaction.
Speaker 1: It's like, what are your fingers? I was like, man,
Speaker 1: that sounds like Pinocchio's brother or some such. So how
Speaker 1: long are you in Cleveland?
Speaker 4: Then?
Speaker 1: Is this before you went to Cincinnati?
Speaker 2: Before you came this was after the agency closed. I
Speaker 2: got hired in Louisville to work part time, and my
Speaker 2: old buddy Tom Owens.
Speaker 1: You remember, I remember Tom I was I was here
Speaker 1: when Tom.
Speaker 2: Was Yeah, And so I worked there for a few
Speaker 2: months and then I got a call from Cleveland or O.
Speaker 2: Buddy Allen Sells said, hey, we're looking for a guy
Speaker 2: up here, and I'm thinking about quitting, so you see,
Speaker 2: if you can get my my job. So I went
Speaker 2: to Cleveland, worked for about five or six months, and
Speaker 2: guy by the name of Mike McConnell that sounds familiar, Yeah,
Speaker 2: called Cells and I answered the phone because I was
Speaker 2: living at his apartment. And uh, I'm like, hey, buddy,
Speaker 2: what's up. I'm just calling Cells. I need some I
Speaker 2: need a midday guy down here. And I hear he
Speaker 2: wants to leave Cleveland, and I said, well, you know
Speaker 2: I'm available. Just basically said, had you known Mike this point? Yeah,
Speaker 2: we went to college together at u D.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, and so you've heard that Christmas story too
Speaker 1: many damn times.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, go ahead, No, but that was it, and
Speaker 2: uh so move back down here. And he he said,
Speaker 2: what are you going to do about your name? Because
Speaker 2: I was only I was doing production and I was
Speaker 2: going to do a couple hours on the air a day,
Speaker 2: and I said, I think I want to go back
Speaker 2: to my real name. And he said, man, you know,
Speaker 2: keep the Eddie Fingers thing. Nobody else is doing that.
Speaker 2: What's a cool air name?
Speaker 1: I love it. So where was this that you ninety
Speaker 1: six rock? At ninety six Rock? And that sets up
Speaker 1: the radio wars of the nineteen eighties. Perfect and it's
Speaker 1: a perfect time for us to go ahead and take
Speaker 1: our first break. Excellent. We have another segment with Eddie
Speaker 1: Fingers and yes, that might be his, No it's not.
Speaker 1: It's the Nightcap American History on the radio, Eddie Fingers
Speaker 1: in the Spotlight tonight on seven hundred WLW. Maybe you
Speaker 1: missed one of our shows because your Karate Sinse has
Speaker 1: it in for you. Ouch, don't worry. You can get
Speaker 1: the podcast of our shows and here what you miss
Speaker 1: check them out on the iHeartRadio. Ass child abuse is
Speaker 1: not about parents.
Speaker 7: Twelve hour shift watching the salt Pile. Here's another one
Speaker 7: of his nightcap favorites.
Speaker 1: When we last left Eddie Fingers and the story of
Speaker 1: his radio life, we were at ninety six Rock. Eddie Fingers,
Speaker 1: welcome back into American History on the radio and the nightcap.
Speaker 1: And so you're at ninety six rock what year is this?
Speaker 1: This is eighty one, eighty May of eighty two, eighty two, okay,
Speaker 1: and McConnell was running the place. Al Sells came.
Speaker 2: McConnell's then wife, Mary Cuzon was doing mornings and she
Speaker 2: was pregnant, and I was doing production and night I
Speaker 2: think noon to two, just kind of ice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the midday Guy production happened a lot back in
Speaker 1: the day, and so that happened.
Speaker 2: That lasted for about a month, and Mary, as I said,
Speaker 2: was pregnant and she was out walking her dog and
Speaker 2: another dog and long story, but basically a dog tackled
Speaker 2: her and blew up her knee. Oh she's like five
Speaker 2: months pregnanty and just ran right through her leg, absolutely
Speaker 2: destroyed it. And so McConnell comes to me and he's like, man,
Speaker 2: I need you to cover the morning show. And that's
Speaker 2: when I was young and dumb, and I haven't learned
Speaker 2: much since. But he he goes, just fill in for
Speaker 2: a couple of days for me, Man, I really need you.
Speaker 2: I'll cover your show in the afternoon. I was like, whatever,
Speaker 2: I'm going to bet about that time getting up at six,
Speaker 2: come on and and I never left mornings.
Speaker 1: Huh, so you're doing mornings at ninety six Rock and
Speaker 1: then what happened to lure you to WEBN and the
Speaker 1: down of the troll? Like I said, the radio wars
Speaker 1: of the nineteen eighties in Cincinnati and well you guys,
Speaker 1: you guys, ninety six we Rock and EBN are button heads.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I did the show by myself for two or
Speaker 2: three months, I think, and I wanted off, and McConnell
Speaker 2: by that time m one O five, where I'd worked
Speaker 2: in Cleveland, had disbanded and they went contry or hell,
Speaker 2: I forget what they did. And so the morning guy there,
Speaker 2: a guy named Marty Sobel who became Marty Bender, was
Speaker 2: hired to do mornings, and mcconne was like, work with
Speaker 2: him for a little bit. You is going there and
Speaker 2: be his partner for a little bit and then we'll
Speaker 2: go back to the way it was. And I said fine.
Speaker 2: So Marty and I started working together and it jelled
Speaker 2: in a jailed Yeah, well I've always said that Marty
Speaker 2: pretty much, I didn't know how to do mornings, and
Speaker 2: Marty pretty much I just learned from watching how to
Speaker 2: handle all of it. Then we were doing all these
Speaker 2: service elements with traffic and that type of thing, you know,
Speaker 2: helicopter traffic, which was cool. We had Mad Dog Mike
Speaker 2: and John Phillips and and those guys. They became characters
Speaker 2: on the show. And Marty and I. He'd basically he
Speaker 2: had a weird sensibility about him. So he was like,
Speaker 2: I got this idea, let's do this thing, and we're
Speaker 2: just gonna improv the whole thing. And I was like, okay, fun,
Speaker 2: sounds fun, and that's and that's.
Speaker 1: What we did.
Speaker 2: And so that lasted for three years, and I foolishly
Speaker 2: wanted to get into programming. I wanted to be program
Speaker 2: director of the Radius. Yeah, that's a bad move, big time,
Speaker 2: big time. And so the program director was fired and
Speaker 2: Marty was much more qualified to do it than me,
Speaker 2: and it pissed me off that they were going to
Speaker 2: give him the job over me. And it was about
Speaker 2: that time that I got a call from bow Wood
Speaker 2: to he tried to hire me to go to Louisville
Speaker 2: to do afternoon Drive and be music director, right, which
Speaker 2: I thought, okay, that's kind of management, and so I
Speaker 2: went down there. I took Mike mcconnall with me and
Speaker 2: we drove around and listened to the radio station, and
Speaker 2: he and I went out to lunch and I said,
Speaker 2: what do you think? Because I was ready to take
Speaker 2: the gig, and he said, do you really want to
Speaker 2: make a sideways move to Louisville? I mean, Cincinnati is
Speaker 2: a bigger market. You're kind of you know, you're right on,
Speaker 2: you're knocking on the door, you know, because he was
Speaker 2: already an elder w by name and uh so I
Speaker 2: had to go back to Boatwood and say yeah, because
Speaker 2: he totally thought he had me. And I said, I'm good,
Speaker 2: I don't I don't want the gig, and he's and
Speaker 2: he was pissed, and I said, uh, I said, hey,
Speaker 2: you ever want me to come over and work with
Speaker 2: your sister in the mornings, I'll be glad to do that.
Speaker 2: A couple of months later, boom, it happened.
Speaker 1: It happened. And so regardless whether it was Louisville or Cincinnati,
Speaker 1: Bowwood wanted wanted you to work for him. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you eventually did. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He wanted one of us off of the competition because uh,
Speaker 2: bender and fingers were starting to breed.
Speaker 1: Down the Don Patrols neck a little bit. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you come to work at web N in what
Speaker 1: year is this now? Eighty four eighty August of eighty five,
Speaker 1: and you already have a set kind of morning show there.
Speaker 1: Robin Wood is there, It's been there, Craig Copp was
Speaker 1: Bob Berry there yet no all right.
Speaker 2: While man Walker was just starting to come into prominence,
Speaker 2: and uh they had Craig Copper brick Bird doing doing
Speaker 2: the news, and yeah, it just kind of took off
Speaker 2: from there. And then I joke, I can't even tell
Speaker 2: there who who is the morning show in Louisville at
Speaker 2: QMF down there? Oh geez, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I can't think of their names. Yeah, Terry, Terry Miners, yes,
Speaker 2: Terry Mine. I forget the other fella's name. I think
Speaker 2: I unfortunately passed. But they did a joke of the
Speaker 2: day and that was both station down there, and he said,
Speaker 2: I want you guys start doing a joke of the day.
Speaker 2: So we started doing joke of the day. Well, he
Speaker 2: he said to one of the females who worked in
Speaker 2: the station, who I happened to being.
Speaker 1: Yes, we were.
Speaker 2: Out to lunch one day and she goes, you know,
Speaker 2: I was I was talking to overheard both saying that
Speaker 2: the joke of the day, isn't it cutting it?
Speaker 1: You guys got it's gotta be picked up a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I said, what do you mean minute? He said, well,
Speaker 1: I think I got the impression he wants dirtier. I said, okay,
Speaker 1: we can do this.
Speaker 3: We can.
Speaker 1: I definitely got this.
Speaker 2: And uh so the next day I told you again,
Speaker 2: I wish I could even kind of tell you that, right,
Speaker 2: talk around the edges of the joke, but I can.
Speaker 2: And uh but it was right there, tip to it
Speaker 2: over the line. It was probably over the line, but nonetheless,
Speaker 2: so the same lady a little uh a little later
Speaker 2: on seize me and again at lunch and is like,
Speaker 2: he's pissed.
Speaker 1: I said, what right, I just did what he asked me.
Speaker 1: I just I just did what he wanted. But the
Speaker 1: thing was, he didn't tell you that directly. It was
Speaker 1: from a conduit, and it may or may not have
Speaker 1: been from bow Well. But the thing is that became
Speaker 1: kind of a hallmark. And it was.
Speaker 2: I realized that from again my time of working with
Speaker 2: Marty and improving and all that stuff. Sure that the
Speaker 2: more and you know that man, the more over top
Speaker 2: you are with some stuff like this, go for it.
Speaker 1: We know it, and it's a template for what I
Speaker 1: do every Saturday morning. One of the most popular segments
Speaker 1: on my show is the what I call Gifts from Wally,
Speaker 1: which is basically a joke of the day and I
Speaker 1: a thirty five people are locked in. They know, and
Speaker 1: that's the thing. It's that time stamp. It's that benchmark
Speaker 1: that people get. Okay, I'm going to tune in for
Speaker 1: this and it really works. Appointment radio really works. Your
Speaker 1: first fireworks, your first TB in fireworks, Tell me about that.
Speaker 2: Well, the first the first time I announced it. The
Speaker 2: first couple of years, I mean I wasn't I wasn't
Speaker 2: allowed on the area yet. I was getting sued by
Speaker 2: Randy Michaels for breaking a contract at ninety six okay,
Speaker 2: and uh, and he was just mucking He was just
Speaker 2: mucking up the works because he you know, he was
Speaker 2: just he already knew that he and bo were teaming up. Sure,
Speaker 2: so he was just like, I'm was gonna screw it
Speaker 2: with Boe. So I couldn't talk on the air for
Speaker 2: the first month I was there, and the next year
Speaker 2: we had Boomerissias and I think. And the year after
Speaker 2: that it was Sam Kennison, Oh wow. And the year
Speaker 2: after that Tom was like, you're going to do the
Speaker 2: fireworks this year, and I got to be once with you.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 1: I was scared to death. Scared to death still to
Speaker 1: this day, Eddie. There is something about being in that place,
Speaker 1: in that crowd, in that electricity, in that environment that
Speaker 1: would scare anybody to death. You're standing there with a
Speaker 1: half a million people, half on one side of you,
Speaker 1: half on the others, with the biggest event that the
Speaker 1: city has every year, and you're in charge of getting
Speaker 1: it all started. That's that's remarkable.
Speaker 2: I mean you're looking at a kid who used to
Speaker 2: be scared less to go wep in front of a
Speaker 2: class and give an oral book report.
Speaker 1: Stand in front of a half a million people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so over It took me a couple of years,
Speaker 2: but then then I look forward to it.
Speaker 1: It was fun, sure, you know, well the party the
Speaker 1: Barley Corns boat was the best. You were there, Yes,
Speaker 1: I was. I mean just the fact that people after
Speaker 1: two or three hours were still climbing the stairs to
Speaker 1: the next level and able to do it well amazed me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I will. I'm sitting here. I've had enough free booze
Speaker 1: and food. I just want to see the fireworks and
Speaker 1: go home. There was when Kennison did it.
Speaker 2: I was in the men's room when I walked in
Speaker 2: as he was standing in the middle of the men's
Speaker 2: room doing coke off of his thumbnail and and one
Speaker 2: of the owners of Barley Corns walks in and he's, look,
Speaker 2: you can't do that. You cannot do that. He's like,
Speaker 2: you already did. And later he was with his girlfriend
Speaker 2: and her twin sister, who were porn stars. They had
Speaker 2: one of their little brother was with him, and he
Speaker 2: was about thirteen, and he's sitting there drinking like gin
Speaker 2: and tonics and stuff.
Speaker 1: It did not go well. It is it is the
Speaker 1: primary cocktail for most thirteen year old's right, exactly A
Speaker 1: respectable I hope, hope. What with the quality is yet,
Speaker 1: Let's let's do some just word association. First thing that
Speaker 1: comes to your mind. You don't have to elaborate. Robin Wood, lovely,
Speaker 1: Bob Berry, funny, wild Man nuts nuts. Okay, I still
Speaker 1: talk to wild Man, so yes, I would agree. I
Speaker 1: would concur uh Rick Bird great guy, just smart, smart
Speaker 1: as a whip. Yeah, I remember drinking many a lunch
Speaker 1: with Rick Bird at Lungworst. Adam did the exact same thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: Mark Chase, What do you remember about me? Friend of me?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll say that, okay, because the taste that I
Speaker 2: think had.
Speaker 1: I I put.
Speaker 2: I pushed back on a problem harder than I should have,
Speaker 2: But I think we had a mutual respect for each other.
Speaker 1: How about that? Who is the most influential person in
Speaker 1: this business that has helped I don't know shape the
Speaker 1: eddy fingers we know today? Is there one particular guy
Speaker 1: that just stands out and go, you know what, If
Speaker 1: this guy hadn't come along at this point in my life,
Speaker 1: I probably would have not had the success that I've had.
Speaker 1: I will say three three guys. Yeah. The guy named
Speaker 1: Jeff Vargo, who was the program director at VUD in Dayton,
Speaker 1: all right, who pulled me aside the first after I'd
Speaker 1: started and was full of myself. I did full time
Speaker 1: and I should have had the full time gig and
Speaker 1: pulled me aside and said, I'm not going to fire you,
Speaker 1: but you suck. It's good to hear.
Speaker 2: It is good to hear because we all do when
Speaker 2: we first start who's the second. Uh Tom Owens who
Speaker 2: ran who hired me at s A I and then
Speaker 2: ended up hiring me in Louisville and then hired me
Speaker 2: at EBN. And I'm going to go for Bo Would
Speaker 2: of course, owner of EBN back in the day. And
Speaker 2: Randy Michaels, Randy's on my list too, who he the
Speaker 2: the benderin Fingers team thing. He really encouraged us to
Speaker 2: push it. I mean it's like I told you with
Speaker 2: Bo saying that he make the jokes dirty. But then
Speaker 2: Randy would told Marty and I, look, do whatever the
Speaker 2: hell it is you guys want to do, and we did.
Speaker 1: It was cool. Yeah, Uh, instrumental in my career. We've
Speaker 1: got a couple of minutes left, Eddie. Let's flash forward
Speaker 1: to to from e b N the end of the
Speaker 1: Dawn Patrol to w l W and you moving into talk. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 2: No probably late November of seven, okay, and and I'd
Speaker 2: been craving that the gig here and Gary was leaving,
Speaker 2: and I had filled in with the forum several times
Speaker 2: and they kind of told me I was their apparent.
Speaker 2: Gary told me he wanted me to take this show well,
Speaker 2: and then Gary kept kept working, which is fine, I
Speaker 2: don't care. But I was fifty playing Metallica records at
Speaker 2: EBN and I was like, this is this is turning
Speaker 2: to get at.
Speaker 1: Last year I was at the Fox, I knew the
Speaker 1: station was going to be sold. I knew that I
Speaker 1: would have a couple of choices when it was in
Speaker 1: January of nine and I decided somewhere during that year
Speaker 1: that I was tired of babysitting music and I wanted
Speaker 1: to do talk. I'd wanted to do to talk ever
Speaker 1: since nineteen eighty seven, the first time I heard Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh and I, you know, I finally got the chance
Speaker 1: in ninety seven and I said, you know what, I
Speaker 1: want to do that full time. And what about today?
Speaker 1: Are you content with where you're at? Are you happy? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, big time. I mean I love working with rock.
Speaker 2: We have a good time. We've got a good rapport,
Speaker 2: I think. And you know, it took me a while
Speaker 2: to settle into doing this because, like I said, when
Speaker 2: I came in, I wanted to do a Burbank style show. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I thought that's what they wanted. Well, they wanted
Speaker 2: to go a little more issue oriented, issue oriented Foxy
Speaker 2: Talkie thing. Yeah, And I even said to him, I'm like,
Speaker 2: I don't know if I can do. I'm not good
Speaker 2: at that, you know. Like I said, I idolized Burbank
Speaker 2: and and I wanted to follow in his Footsta.
Speaker 1: Well, for me, when you're in music radio, you may
Speaker 1: talk for fifteen seconds or thirty you know, unless you're
Speaker 1: interviewing somebody occasionally. But the first time I was on
Speaker 1: WLW in nineteen ninety seven doing Saturday mornings, even I
Speaker 1: was like lost, I'm good because I'd never rambled for
Speaker 1: five minutes or six minutes at a time without breaking
Speaker 1: you know what am I going to talk about?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the things that Tom Owen said
Speaker 2: to me years back. We're doing an air check session.
Speaker 2: If you don't know what, I remember this, so you
Speaker 2: remember those they take you in and play a tape
Speaker 2: and go that sucked you, right, And he doesn't. He
Speaker 2: stopped the tape and he looks at me. He goes, buddy,
Speaker 2: let me tell you something. Anything you have to say
Speaker 2: is not more important than the best Beatles record we.
Speaker 1: Play exactly, all right, fair enough? I work for those guys.
Speaker 1: I know, Eddie, it's been a joy. That is a
Speaker 1: great man. All out of time for this, and of
Speaker 1: course here Eddie and Rocky every Monday through Friday three
Speaker 1: to six here on seven hundred WLW. This has been
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. Thank you so much. A lot
Speaker 1: of Budweiser. Here's another nightcap favorite. This is American History
Speaker 1: on the radio on seven hundred WLW. Taking you back
Speaker 1: to August of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 6: Eight, WSKZ Chattanooga, Tennessee now begins its broadcast day. WSKZ
Speaker 6: with studios on Pineville Road and transmitting facilities on Signal Mountain.
Speaker 6: Broadcasts with one hundred thousand watts vertical and horizontal and
Speaker 6: stereo at our assigned frequency of one hundred and six
Speaker 6: point five megahertz. WSKZ Chattanooga ten is KZ one O six.
Speaker 1: And that's how that began on the nineteenth of August
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight. A few years later it would be
Speaker 1: our home radio station. Why I see hours, I mean
Speaker 1: mine and won Eric Page the pager. Together. Eric and
Speaker 1: I worked the knights and dominated the airwaves because there
Speaker 1: literally was nothing else on, and we boomed all over
Speaker 1: North Georgia and that part of southeastern Tennessee and into Alabama.
Speaker 1: It was crazy. It was a great way to really
Speaker 1: get a firm footing on my radio career. And again,
Speaker 1: the man that I shared this with, this experience and
Speaker 1: all these experiences that we're about to relate to you
Speaker 1: is on the line with this Eric Page. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Nightcap and American history on the radio. How are you?
Speaker 5: Wow?
Speaker 3: That was a quick look back. But that's unbelievable, unbelievable.
Speaker 3: How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Oh man, I'm well, And this is so much fun
Speaker 1: because we have some stories to share. We probably have
Speaker 1: stories that we can't share, but we have stories to
Speaker 1: share about those early halcyon days in radio together in
Speaker 1: the early eighties. It's can you believe Number one that
Speaker 1: in June of this past year it was my forty
Speaker 1: fourth anniversary being consistently on the air somewhere, and you
Speaker 1: had quite a run yourself, although you haven't done anything
Speaker 1: in years, and I think that's a shame, because you
Speaker 1: are truly one of the great radio talents I ever
Speaker 1: worked with and ever listened to. And you taught me
Speaker 1: so much, especially in those early days, the good and
Speaker 1: the bad. You taught me a lot of things. But
Speaker 1: we were in our early twenties, and we were pretty
Speaker 1: much given the freedom to do pretty much anything we
Speaker 1: wanted to on the radio and have fun. And we
Speaker 1: did both of those things. Don't you think that was.
Speaker 8: Really Yeah, that was really the key that we just
Speaker 8: really got the keys to the radio station there and
Speaker 8: we covered ninety two counties. I mean, you talk about
Speaker 8: the reach of that radio station. We got calls in
Speaker 8: our request line at night. You know, you and I
Speaker 8: both from as far away north as Bowling Green, Kentucky,
Speaker 8: as far away south as Atlanta, and I mean almost
Speaker 8: to Burningham and way into the Carolinas and stuff, and
Speaker 8: it was just incredible to reach that that station had.
Speaker 8: And you're right, it was just a blank slate. There
Speaker 8: was nothing going on between and radio between Atlanta and Nashville,
Speaker 8: and we filled the giant boyd for a whole lot
Speaker 8: of people. And we showed up in Billboard magazine one time.
Speaker 8: I think by the time we'd been only a year
Speaker 8: or so, eighty two or eighty three, maybe we showed
Speaker 8: up as one of the top rated shows in the country,
Speaker 8: you know, on a list with Scott Shannon at Z
Speaker 8: one hundred and Rick D's a Kiss at Them in
Speaker 8: La and just it was an incredible time. Yeah, and
Speaker 8: we had so much fun doing it, didn't we Oh.
Speaker 1: God, so much fun. And you know what. And we
Speaker 1: had like a I don't know, an eighty or ninety
Speaker 1: share at night, which is unheard of. And it was
Speaker 1: partly due to the signal and partly due to the format,
Speaker 1: and we may have contributed a little bit to that.
Speaker 1: It was just the right place at the right time
Speaker 1: for both of us and it was a blast. There
Speaker 1: are many things that come to mind when I recall
Speaker 1: those days in Chattanooga, Eric in the early eighties. One
Speaker 1: of them is not exactly one of our finest moments.
Speaker 1: When we were we were on a tag team against
Speaker 1: female mud wrestlers at the National Guard Armory in Chattanooga,
Speaker 1: got our butts kicked, you know.
Speaker 8: I still feel that to this day. We got tossed
Speaker 8: around like rag dolls on a mud pit elevated playwood
Speaker 8: stage they built. It looked more like gallows pretty much.
Speaker 8: And wow, there were three thousand people crammed in this
Speaker 8: little armory there as dead o winner right as January.
Speaker 3: And we didn't get the Chicago Knockers that they.
Speaker 8: Were traveling mud wrestling troop and they just about killed us.
Speaker 1: Now, Eric, we went to a meeting before the bout
Speaker 1: and they told us about the choreography and what we
Speaker 1: were supposed to do at what time, and they would
Speaker 1: do this and then we would do that. And we
Speaker 1: did not necessarily adhere to the plan. And I think
Speaker 1: that's where we got into trouble.
Speaker 8: Well maybe we did. We showed up with t shirts
Speaker 8: and said I wanted all We were wearing wrestling tides,
Speaker 8: and we both weighed maybe one hundred and thirty pounds,
Speaker 8: were soaking wet, and yeah, we paid for it that night.
Speaker 8: But it was fun. It was a great show. It
Speaker 8: did damage me badly, though.
Speaker 1: We did something else then that I I could not
Speaker 1: do now. I mean, we did plenty of things I
Speaker 1: could not do now, but one in particular was the
Speaker 1: Studio in the Sky, which was basically a billboard with
Speaker 1: a built on extra catwalk where we would actually broadcast
Speaker 1: from at night on one of the busiest streets in Chattanooga,
Speaker 1: brainerd Avenue. And we were what how high, We're like
Speaker 1: fifty sixty feet up and forty feet up.
Speaker 3: Probably sixty feet you know.
Speaker 8: We had to climb the pole, get in a ladder
Speaker 8: to get up to the ladder, they got up to
Speaker 8: the catwalk, and you know we did We broadcast Mayor.
Speaker 8: We used to give away stuff from Jean Juris from
Speaker 8: a Warner Brothers Records, came down from Nashville and bought
Speaker 8: a bunch of cool stuff. And we were hanging posters
Speaker 8: over the over the railing and the first person I
Speaker 8: could pull across the street and to the payphone and
Speaker 8: call the radio station and tell us who it was,
Speaker 8: we'd win the poster and stuff like that. It was
Speaker 8: a blast and and it just caused all kinds of traffic,
Speaker 8: champs and stuff. I think that was the key there.
Speaker 8: We got out. We did stuff all the time. We
Speaker 8: got out and met everybody. I mean, you and I
Speaker 8: visited I don't know how many schools, uh during our
Speaker 8: time there. We did sock hops and just regular appearances
Speaker 8: and we just go talk to kids and stuff. The
Speaker 8: we most that we did were like constant, you know,
Speaker 8: several times a week we're out someplace doing everything and
Speaker 8: meeting people and they got to know us, and it
Speaker 8: really helped a lot. It's that radio station is thriving
Speaker 8: today forty years later because of all that.
Speaker 3: It truly is.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you talk about going out to schools.
Speaker 1: There was one particular dance we you know, we did
Speaker 1: sock ops. Like you said, our dance is at schools
Speaker 1: for extra money, and it was, you know, we lugged
Speaker 1: the equipment. They actually paid us just to lug the
Speaker 1: equipment in and lug it out. What we did in
Speaker 1: the meantime usually didn't matter. But we're at a junior
Speaker 1: high school, it's a middle school or something, and the
Speaker 1: students had gotten good grades, so the principal wanted to
Speaker 1: award them, reward them with a concert featuring the disc
Speaker 1: jockeys at KZ one oh six, and so Eric and
Speaker 1: I get out. We get out and they have a
Speaker 1: setup in the middle of the gym floor and all
Speaker 1: these sixth and seventh graders and eighth graders are staring
Speaker 1: back at us from the bleachers because they weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to dance number one. So we're just out there in
Speaker 1: the middle. We're just playing records and talking to them.
Speaker 1: But it's like totally disconnected. It didn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: This is a reward. This is like more of a
Speaker 1: punishment for the kids in a reward.
Speaker 8: And then we used to being completely surrounded by kids
Speaker 8: and swamped, you know, and we're playing that while we're
Speaker 8: playing music and they're all dancing like crazy and they're
Speaker 8: sitting in the bleachers with their hands and their lapse. Yeah,
Speaker 8: I remember that.
Speaker 1: So do you remember what the principal came up and
Speaker 1: told us before tell that story?
Speaker 8: Yeah, Well, they were opening in the new arena in
Speaker 8: Chattanooga at that time.
Speaker 3: We called it the Roundhouse.
Speaker 8: It was the UTC Arena, uh and Van Halen was
Speaker 8: going to be the opening act for the christening of
Speaker 8: the stadium, and so it was a big deal.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 8: They were the biggest band in the world really at
Speaker 8: that time. And we set up our stuff and went okay,
Speaker 8: and we played Pretty Woman by Van Halen, which was
Speaker 8: the Roy Orbison you know remake, and the principal came
Speaker 8: up and said, I'm sorry, but you can't play that
Speaker 8: because we.
Speaker 3: Don't like that guy that downhill from there brother didn't it.
Speaker 1: Well, the first record we played was He Really Got
Speaker 1: Me by Van Halen, And he had no idea that
Speaker 1: we were playing van Halen Rights.
Speaker 8: Records playing vanill yeah, until we played Pretty Woman, you know,
Speaker 8: but he'd heard of a million times before because he
Speaker 8: grew up with, you know, listened to Roy Orbison, you
Speaker 8: know whatever. But these kids, it was awful. And then
Speaker 8: we went back to the radio station. I remember I
Speaker 8: signed on at six o'clock that evening, and you and
Speaker 8: I went on like a twenty minute diatribe.
Speaker 3: About what had happened and all this.
Speaker 8: And just how ridiculous that was, and it just, oh
Speaker 8: my gosh, it was crazy.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 8: Tell we had so much of it, with so many
Speaker 8: great other great times. At the time you disappeared, we took
Speaker 8: a bunch of records, uh, a big box load of
Speaker 8: h forty fives from the station and that we didn't need.
Speaker 8: And you were out at the center court of this
Speaker 8: basketball gym and you got just swamped by a couple
Speaker 8: one hundred little kids, and then you disappeared. You started
Speaker 8: off at center court and wound up underneath all the
Speaker 8: other basket in the far end, just and disappeared. And
Speaker 8: giving these kids these records and so much fun, just
Speaker 8: all that stuff was crazy.
Speaker 1: We have to talk about. But the softball game. Chattanooga
Speaker 1: is like thirty miles from Fort Payne, Alabama, and I
Speaker 1: have two Alabama store. One was their infamous June Jam
Speaker 1: or their famous June Jam that would happen every June
Speaker 1: in their hometown of Fort Payne. I got to helicopter
Speaker 1: in with two winners from the radio station right into
Speaker 1: the middle of the festival grounds to see Alabama and
Speaker 1: their guests. And Alabama right now is like one of
Speaker 1: the hottest bands in the country. We're a rock station,
Speaker 1: but we played ton loads of Alabama because it was popular,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, I had to so anyway, Alabama had a
Speaker 1: celebrity softball team that traveled all around for charity, and
Speaker 1: we had our own KZ one oh six softball team,
Speaker 1: and through our machinations of knowing people and being in
Speaker 1: such close proximity, you know, we got a deal together
Speaker 1: where we were going to play the Alabama softball team
Speaker 1: at the local Ingles Stadium, which that's that Ingle Stadium
Speaker 1: is no longer there. There's another minor league baseball park
Speaker 1: in Chattanooga now and that place was about to fall
Speaker 1: in in nineteen eighty two. But there we were set
Speaker 1: the scene for the crowd size and everything else.
Speaker 8: Eric well, it absolutely packed it out. We charged the
Speaker 8: admission was like a can of food for the local
Speaker 8: food bank, which nobody had even done something like that before,
Speaker 8: and almost ten thousand people showed up its pad twelve
Speaker 8: deep down the baselines all the way out as you know,
Speaker 8: the defenses, and it was just nuts. It was like
Speaker 8: a World Series kind of atmosphere. Randy Owen and Teddy
Speaker 8: gentry student at home plate and sang the Star Spangled
Speaker 8: Band and a cappella and it just brought down the house.
Speaker 8: I wish I had a recording of that because it
Speaker 8: was one of the best things I've ever heard in
Speaker 8: my life, you know, ten feet away and uh, and
Speaker 8: the crowd was just into it all the way.
Speaker 3: And we had a pretty good team. Uh, we had
Speaker 3: women on our team. They did not.
Speaker 8: And you know, we got to the end of the
Speaker 8: game and I got I got hurt during the game.
Speaker 8: I was catchy for some reason, and uh, Randy Owen
Speaker 8: came to bat for the first time, and he took
Speaker 8: a first pitch and the second pitch he popped it
Speaker 8: up a foul ball right straight behind up and straight
Speaker 8: behind home plate, and I turned to go try and
Speaker 8: catch it, and I dove and missed. It went up
Speaker 8: and skipped up with my glove and I like smashed
Speaker 8: my face into the hard ground and so he was
Speaker 8: like nice, Trim. But he remembers that game to this day.
Speaker 8: I've talked to him many times over the years since then, uh,
Speaker 8: and he remembers that like it was yesterday. It was
Speaker 8: so much fun and we won the game at the
Speaker 8: end and wound up getting booed off the field because
Speaker 8: they were so popular. Were just people couldn't believe me.
Speaker 8: You know, they didn't come there to watch, you know,
Speaker 8: then lose or whatever it was. It was just so much.
Speaker 3: That was the.
Speaker 1: Biggest That was the biggest crowd in Ingles Stadium. That
Speaker 1: stadium's history too, and you know, it was a Wire
Speaker 1: League ballpark and uh, I think today it's a Reds affiliate.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if Chattanooga is a Red's affiliate or not.
Speaker 3: I don't know, you know, they was, but anyway, yeah,
Speaker 3: at that time.
Speaker 8: The next year, Oh Jackson's very first professional baseball game.
Speaker 8: He got signed by whoever and was I think playing
Speaker 8: for Birmingham for like ten minutes and came to Chattanooga.
Speaker 8: Was his very first game. And it drew like six
Speaker 8: thousand because he was Bo Jackson.
Speaker 1: We out drew werew We out drew Bo Jackson.
Speaker 3: We out Drew bo Jackson.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Bo, no, second place.
Speaker 8: Well, that's how popular Alabama was. Yeah, is incredible. And
Speaker 8: then and they're so nice, you know. That was one
Speaker 8: of the great things we did. Lots of neat stuff
Speaker 8: that the Haunted Caverns at Ruby Falls, inside the out Yeah.
Speaker 1: The sky show, the sky Show, the big balloon show
Speaker 1: at Raccoon Mountain.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's the very first spring we were there. We
Speaker 8: got there and you and I got there like basically
Speaker 8: the same week, and I think February of eighty one.
Speaker 8: And then that very spring in May, I think or June,
Speaker 8: we had the sky show with the balloons and the
Speaker 8: ultra light hang gliders and that was at Raccoon Mountain.
Speaker 3: That was a nice place.
Speaker 1: I always remember too, the trip that you and I
Speaker 1: took to Nashville for Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam underneath the
Speaker 1: War Memorial Auditorium in downtown Nashville. And we've got a
Speaker 1: broadcast table there in the basement underneath the stage and
Speaker 1: all of these I mean you're talking about Marshall Tucker
Speaker 1: and the Outlaws and Black Oak Arkansas and all of
Speaker 1: these Southern rock bands are all playing on this one
Speaker 1: night and Charlie Daniels and we got to broadcast from
Speaker 1: there and just see, you know, all of this basically
Speaker 1: Southern rock Royalty all in one place. That was very.
Speaker 3: Special and other people too.
Speaker 8: We met James Brown, remember, carl Perkins was there, yep,
Speaker 8: Crystal Gale. It just the whole spectrum. It was thirty
Speaker 8: acts in eight hours, the best concert ever. Everybody came
Speaker 8: out and played twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and then they
Speaker 8: would disappear. Then they'd come back out later and play
Speaker 8: as part of a jam band with Charlie or whoever.
Speaker 8: The one year I think Woody Herman and his Thundering
Speaker 8: Herd opened the show. You know, they were like a
Speaker 8: Guy Lombardo kind of thing. Stevie ray Vaughan, the only
Speaker 8: time I ever got to see Stevie ray Vaughn was
Speaker 8: at a Charlie Daniels volunteer jam I seen watching with
Speaker 8: Redbeard from Rock Pelchie in Memphis. We snuck up from
Speaker 8: behind the doing the interviews and stuff and went up
Speaker 8: and just to see Stevie ray vaugh for the first
Speaker 8: time both of us. It was just like unbelievable, unbelievable,
Speaker 8: but you want to see Welly and you got see
Speaker 8: cool bands. You never got seene anywhere else. Willie Nelson
Speaker 8: would show up once in a while, and whatever. I
Speaker 8: would need to see Don Henley at the Volunteer Jam
Speaker 8: and John.
Speaker 1: That's crazy, that's great.
Speaker 8: Little Richard got booed off a stage one year, remember that, Yes,
Speaker 8: I do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a little.
Speaker 8: Richard got up on stage and started talking about how
Speaker 8: he was the Elvis was nothing without hit little Richards.
Speaker 3: Everybody started booing, Oh God, here we go.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what. Let's let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: and we'll come back and share a few more memories.
Speaker 1: Because you were here in Cincinnati with us at seven
Speaker 1: hundred WLW four too short a time in my opinion,
Speaker 1: but I want to talk about some of the things
Speaker 1: that you brought to the table, both in Nashville when
Speaker 1: we work together and here in Cincinnati. It's Eric Page,
Speaker 1: my old radio pal from the Wings of Rock and Roll,
Speaker 1: on American History, on the Rate, on the Nightcap on
Speaker 1: seven hundred WLW, and do you know.
Speaker 7: The guy who sets up Mike McConnell, Gary Jeff Countless others.
Speaker 7: Tonight I'm here to interest some of Gary Jeff Walker's
Speaker 7: favorite interviews. It seems like Gary Jeff has some Seg
Speaker 7: Dennison disease. If it snows, they don't go. Here's another
Speaker 7: helping of Gary Jeff.
Speaker 1: Once again, we are talking to Eric Page, who was
Speaker 1: Eric Page only one of the finest radio talents I
Speaker 1: ever worked with in my entire forty four year career,
Speaker 1: first in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and then in Nashville. And we
Speaker 1: worked together again here in Cincinnati, actually at seven hundred WLW,
Speaker 1: and that's where this is airing at the moment, just
Speaker 1: in case you hadn't noticed, it's the nightcap Gary Jeff
Speaker 1: with Eric Page the pager. And you had these brief
Speaker 1: stints in other places besides Chattanooga, in some pretty interesting
Speaker 1: and wonderful radio stations, the least of which certainly why
Speaker 1: one of seven in Nashville at the time you were there.
Speaker 1: We were number one with a bullet and you would
Speaker 1: come to the station and added a wonderful I found
Speaker 1: a photo Eric, of you, me and Mark Chase somewhere
Speaker 1: We've got our station shirts on it, and we're looking
Speaker 1: very eighties preppy, but somewhere with microphones in our hands
Speaker 1: doing something, and we still looked like we weren't lizard
Speaker 1: people yet, and.
Speaker 3: We were a small band of renegades.
Speaker 1: Yes, we were the outrageous FM. You worked in big markets.
Speaker 1: You worked in Washington, d C. For one week. I
Speaker 1: remember that I did, and you told me. You told
Speaker 1: me the story. Washington, d C. Is a union town.
Speaker 1: And what that means in radio is that the talent
Speaker 1: which I've I've discerned that the term talent stands for talking,
Speaker 1: asslecking every no necessary tool. But we were talent with
Speaker 1: the talent in a union radio station doesn't do anything
Speaker 1: but talk, basically, that's right. And you're doing You've got
Speaker 1: a guy playing the records across from you when you're
Speaker 1: on the air, and you couldn't even listen to the
Speaker 1: tape of yourself in the production room without someone barging in.
Speaker 1: Tell me that.
Speaker 3: Story, you know, well, you know how we were.
Speaker 8: We were used to like being on the air, but
Speaker 8: while a song is playing, we run back to the
Speaker 8: production room and starts splicing something up to bring back,
Speaker 8: you know, play on the air. I wasn't allowed to
Speaker 8: put a cassette in a machine. I went nuts.
Speaker 3: It was like, you got to be kidding.
Speaker 8: I had to get wake up an engineer off the couch,
Speaker 8: you know. Hey, Yeah, it was the most incredible thing
Speaker 8: I've ever seen in my life. It was so unlike
Speaker 8: what I really wanted to be doing, which is what
Speaker 8: I was used to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're used to We're used to engineering our own thing.
Speaker 1: We're used to quelling up the record, getting the CD
Speaker 1: or the cart ready, you know, and fire in that.
Speaker 1: Answering the phone at a Union radio station. You didn't
Speaker 1: do any of that. You you didn't even get to
Speaker 1: answer your own phone on the air.
Speaker 8: We used to hand edit seven or eight or whatever
Speaker 8: responses to something and play it immediately, coming out of
Speaker 8: whatever we just came out of, you know, and and
Speaker 8: doing it like that. And then it was just not
Speaker 8: like that anymore. And they brought me there to compete
Speaker 8: against Howard Stern because the DC one O three or
Speaker 8: what they had, I had hired Howard Stern and uh,
Speaker 8: and I could just beat the crap out of him.
Speaker 8: So they brought me therefore, and it just it just
Speaker 8: didn't work out.
Speaker 1: Didn't work out. How did how did you eventually land
Speaker 1: in Nashville? Because the details on that are kind of foggy.
Speaker 1: I know that Mark Chase brought you in and we
Speaker 1: were all there in the late eighties, and like I said,
Speaker 1: in the greatest days of that radio station, which of
Speaker 1: course doesn't exist, is why one of seven anymore? It's
Speaker 1: I think they call it the River.
Speaker 3: But I no.
Speaker 8: I add to my experience in DC. I wound up
Speaker 8: it kicks one on four in Nashville from there where
Speaker 8: you've been, yep, and a lot of folks, a bunch
Speaker 8: of people we know, you know. I'd gone through theres
Speaker 8: A Kyote, McLeod, many many more. And then because I
Speaker 8: met Mark before at one of the volunteer jams, I think,
Speaker 8: and so we kind of had a relationship, and you
Speaker 8: were already working there, and so it just kind of
Speaker 8: helped and I was able to slip in there after
Speaker 8: getting a lot of going One on four went under
Speaker 8: and changed to something else, and yeah, I was on
Speaker 8: the air like ninety minutes later at ye Else seven.
Speaker 1: Eric Page, if you were a Reds on the radio fan,
Speaker 1: and many of you are, even though there's been less
Speaker 1: reason to be a fan lately than ordinarily. Uh But anyway,
Speaker 1: if you're a Reds Radio Red's on radio fan, you're
Speaker 1: familiar with the pregame show that's called the Inside Pitch.
Speaker 1: Eric Page is the one that branded that show and
Speaker 1: actually started it, because before that they were doing a
Speaker 1: pregame show, but it was just kind of an amorphous.
Speaker 1: It's Red's pregame, and Eric came up with the name
Speaker 1: Inside Pitch, and you did so much work in getting
Speaker 1: that pregame Red show up to par to this day.
Speaker 1: To this day, you were the template for a great
Speaker 1: pregame radio show before Reds Baseball. Any thoughts on the
Speaker 1: development of the Inside.
Speaker 3: Pitch, Well, yeah, thanks for that.
Speaker 8: It's well, it was not my idea entirely, of course,
Speaker 8: it was marking a bunch of other people. Baseball pregame
Speaker 8: shows had been a five minute kind of thing before that,
Speaker 8: from nineteen to nineteen twenties. When radio broadcast started, it
Speaker 8: was the announcer. That main announcer talked to the manager
Speaker 8: for a couple of minutes. It was some commercials. They
Speaker 8: came back at the starting lineup, probably the national anthem,
Speaker 8: and then first pitch boom. We decided to do a
Speaker 8: thirty minute formatted pregame show and it was you know,
Speaker 8: the big team. Scott Spring, a huge Seggy was in
Speaker 8: on all that, and we just put it together every
Speaker 8: single day. We started going to spring training and just
Speaker 8: just banking tons and tons of conversations and thoughts with people,
Speaker 8: and so when something came up about you know, the
Speaker 8: infill fly rule or whatever, we had something on tape
Speaker 8: and ready to go. And then we did the updates
Speaker 8: and from the field, and we highlights from around the
Speaker 8: league and all this kind of stuff, and it was
Speaker 8: a big spot.
Speaker 3: It was a hit.
Speaker 8: I think from the beginning. It was a lot of
Speaker 8: fun to do, but it was a year round thing.
Speaker 8: It took a year. You know, there was never a
Speaker 8: day off in baseball. It's but I really love about it,
Speaker 8: you know, getting to work with Marty and Joe people
Speaker 8: like that on a daily basis, it's just incredible. I mean,
Speaker 8: you can't describe that. And then maybe I got to
Speaker 8: work with the Atlanta Braves and Skip Carry and Pete
Speaker 8: Van and Don Sutton, and I learned more about baseball
Speaker 8: every day than I knew in my whole life because
Speaker 8: I just love baseball. I never played, and but doing
Speaker 8: reds Baseball at WLW was nothing. There's nothing like it.
Speaker 8: It never was, never will be. It was the best
Speaker 8: thing I ever did, most fun I ever had. I
Speaker 8: wish it would have lasted a lot longer, but it didn't.
Speaker 8: But you know, I've been lasted a day. I told
Speaker 8: Marty this, you know, more than once.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 8: If it only lasted a day, it was worth it.
Speaker 8: And everybody that loved baseball as much as I do
Speaker 8: could do that for one day, then maybe that would
Speaker 8: be great.
Speaker 1: You're your hometown is Evansville, Indiana, which happens to be
Speaker 1: the hometown of one Don Maddingly don Donnie Baseball. Did
Speaker 1: you know Donny Baseball? Growing up?
Speaker 8: Grew up don yup, grew up with Donnie Baseball. He
Speaker 8: played the Little League and Baby Ruth League with coming up,
Speaker 8: growing up with some of my best friends and was
Speaker 8: around Don a lot that known Donald forever. I mean,
Speaker 8: we've done a bunch of fun stuff together.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 8: When he had the the campaign that was I think
Speaker 8: Nike or something that uh, he and Kim Grippy Junior
Speaker 8: did where manually hits a baseball at Yankee Stadium and
Speaker 8: Grippy's in centerfield there and he chases the ball all
Speaker 8: the way across the country and catches it in Seattle.
Speaker 3: We did the radio version.
Speaker 8: Of that with Nike, and I did those in Evans
Speaker 8: Will It was with Don He had a really cool
Speaker 8: bar there and we did a lot of charity stuff
Speaker 8: together over the years. And he's a wonderful guy. I
Speaker 8: hope he's the next manager of the Yankees.
Speaker 9: A little dude you have, you have kind of a
Speaker 9: I mean, maybe not a direct tie, but you have
Speaker 9: kind of a relationship with another Indiana boy, John Mellencamp too.
Speaker 8: John, I've known for more than almost twenty five years.
Speaker 8: I guess we first met nineteen eighty Yeah, before you
Speaker 8: and I even met. I've been friends ever since. Got
Speaker 8: to go backstage at one of his concerts at the
Speaker 8: Grand Ole Opry, which is in eighty four, and it
Speaker 8: was so cool. John was great that night. He was
Speaker 8: one of his best shows. There was the first rock
Speaker 8: show they had, a like regular rock show. They scheduled
Speaker 8: to play at the Grand Ole Opery or a minute
Speaker 8: after afterwards. But I got to meet roy A Cup
Speaker 8: that night, and Minnie Pearl was there, and John Prime
Speaker 8: was there, and just so a lot of great memories
Speaker 8: of John. Yeah, from Indiana. We played at the same time.
Speaker 8: In nineteen seventy nine, he was still playing at a
Speaker 8: bar called the Blue Note in Bloomington. I was a
Speaker 8: club jock and a block down the street at the Regulator,
Speaker 8: and I was a kid in nineteen I can't only
Speaker 8: believe it.
Speaker 1: No doubt. My tie to John Mellencamp is very It's
Speaker 1: way different. Never were friends, never had a lot of
Speaker 1: time together. But I'm sitting in my radio class. Actually
Speaker 1: this was years after I had graduated from vall State
Speaker 1: there in Gallaton, and I'm talking to my old professor,
Speaker 1: Skip Sparkman, and he's got a picture on his desk
Speaker 1: of these just him and a bunch of kids from
Speaker 1: like the seventies. He goes, you know who that is?
Speaker 1: You know who's in He said, that's John Mellencamp. He
Speaker 1: was a student of mine at Vincennes Junior College in
Speaker 1: radio he did, and.
Speaker 3: He was there to be a DJ. He wanted to
Speaker 3: be a radio DJ. And he told me wasn't good enough.
Speaker 1: Well, let me tell you the conversation that Skip had
Speaker 1: with with John. He said he pulled it aside after
Speaker 1: the first quarter of school and said, John, what do
Speaker 1: you really want to do in life? And Johnson want
Speaker 1: He said, I want to play music. He said you
Speaker 1: should go. After that, he said he was the worst
Speaker 1: student he'd ever had.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, John's not like anybody else. He's really not.
Speaker 8: He's an a quiet taste too. He's worriable, and I'm
Speaker 8: glad he's you know, they're still doing well. But he
Speaker 8: always seemed like he was the same age as me.
Speaker 8: But he's not. He's eight or nine years old. He's
Speaker 8: seventy seventy one hours something of him, and I'm a
Speaker 8: mere sixty four. We were nineteen years old. I think
Speaker 8: are twenty years old when we when we started working
Speaker 8: in Chattamerica.
Speaker 1: Absolute kids, man, twenty years old.
Speaker 3: I live on Don't Own.
Speaker 1: February of nineteen eighty February of nineteen eighty one. I'm
Speaker 1: twenty years old. It's my first time away from home.
Speaker 1: And then I get to meet you and you're my
Speaker 1: tour guide through this crazy malay.
Speaker 8: Thanks oh man. You know I was and I was
Speaker 8: married with a little baby. And that little baby is
Speaker 8: will be forty four years old next month.
Speaker 1: How about that? Hats off, Hats off to Brett. So
Speaker 1: I got I gotta ask. I gotta ask you a
Speaker 1: question and you may not have, you may have want
Speaker 1: more than one answer for this. Eric, we're talking to
Speaker 1: Eric Page American History on the Radio and the night Cap,
Speaker 1: And the question is, you've been out quite a while
Speaker 1: of the business. Do you miss it all the time,
Speaker 1: do you miss it some of the time, or do
Speaker 1: you not miss it at all.
Speaker 8: I miss doing a show. I miss actually showing up
Speaker 8: and just doing the work, just doing you know, the
Speaker 8: actual broadcast.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 8: I don't miss anything else outside of it. I sometimes
Speaker 8: I missed the production. I missed being able to be
Speaker 8: in a production room for a couple of hours a
Speaker 8: day and and out stuff with it. It's just a
Speaker 8: commercial for somebody's lawn and garden center or whatever, just
Speaker 8: or just creating something else for the show tomorrow, doing
Speaker 8: the show prep. I missed that. But I still do
Speaker 8: it all in my mind, so I really I'm still
Speaker 8: doing it. I think I think I never stopped. I
Speaker 8: just I just don't actually broadcast anymore. And I think
Speaker 8: that's the only difference.
Speaker 3: Really. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I tell the people too, I miss you, guys. I
Speaker 8: miss everybody, but everybody's gone. I mean, you're you're like
Speaker 8: the only guy left. Who's laugh Who's Mike McConnell. I
Speaker 8: love mcconnord.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank god.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I missed, you know, I missed Jim Scott. I'm
Speaker 8: going to mention Jim Scott. I thought it was just
Speaker 8: a wonderful person to work with. I can I can't
Speaker 8: imagine a better pro He was just always so welcoming
Speaker 8: and so encouraging and everything to me because I was
Speaker 8: just a nervous wreck, you know. Can you imagine going
Speaker 8: on with Jim Scott like the very first time is
Speaker 8: and I'm filling in for Springer or somebody, and it says,
Speaker 8: I'm just a nervous wreck.
Speaker 3: He was great.
Speaker 8: You let me do my thing, you know, because it's
Speaker 8: a little different, but.
Speaker 3: He was great.
Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned, you mentioned, you mentioned Jim, and
Speaker 1: we all excuse me, you got me. We all missed you.
Speaker 1: But the thing that made Jim Scott so special and
Speaker 1: so popular was you talked about us. In the early
Speaker 1: days in Chattanooga, we were out somewhere every day, and
Speaker 1: you know, at least or four times a week meeting people.
Speaker 1: That is what Jim Scott had and that's what he
Speaker 1: did for the entirety of his radio career here. Jim
Speaker 1: Scott never met a stranger, and he was literally somewhere
Speaker 1: every single day. After he got off the radio out
Speaker 1: in the public.
Speaker 8: And it was We were neighbors in East Waller Hills
Speaker 8: for while. I lived there too, and I got to
Speaker 8: see him a lot from just outside of work, which
Speaker 8: was great because he was just a little bit a
Speaker 8: little bit there, you know, and I thought he was
Speaker 8: a great person. I miss her. I miss Marty alive, sure,
Speaker 8: miss Joe.
Speaker 3: Good grief.
Speaker 8: Marty was one of the funniest people. They were man.
Speaker 8: Until I met Skip Carry. I had Skip Carrey's Harry
Speaker 8: Carey's grandson, Josh Carrey was my action. Was my intern
Speaker 8: in Atlanta one summer when I was a sports director
Speaker 8: at ninety six Rock and WGST there and doing it
Speaker 8: and abrace baseball, and I just couldn't believe it just
Speaker 8: blew me away that Harry Carry's grand Center was my inturn.
Speaker 8: It's like, shouldn't I be working for you? What's the deal?
Speaker 1: No question? Well, brother, it's so good to share some
Speaker 1: memories with you. Oh and uh we we do it
Speaker 1: occasionally just personally over the phone, and that's great too.
Speaker 1: But the fact we get to share some of it
Speaker 1: with the Nightcap listeners under this platform is meaningful to
Speaker 1: me and I really appreciate your time tonight, and thank you.
Speaker 8: I love you, and I miss everybody in Cincinnati. I
Speaker 8: love you all. I hope a see scene sometimes.
Speaker 1: All right, stay Rocky Mountain High out there in Colorado, brother,
Speaker 1: and watch out, watch out for the Democrats. They're surrounding you.
Speaker 3: They're not out They're not out here. This is an
Speaker 3: Enclay red on Clay.
Speaker 1: All right, Eric, take take care of everybody. It's the
Speaker 1: nightcap and it continues at seven hundred WLW wind huddles.
Speaker 1: We're talking about basketball.
Speaker 7: I'm a hooper and how he used to play back
Speaker 7: in the day, however long ago that was, and he
Speaker 7: tried to show me his move. He went with the
Speaker 7: up and under pump fake. I don't bite on pump fakes.
Speaker 7: I sat there like a stone wall and I swatted
Speaker 7: his shot, made him fall to the ground because he
Speaker 7: tried to go through my strong body.
Speaker 1: He hits the side of the bar. I thought it
Speaker 1: was over for him.
Speaker 7: He had a softball size swollen elbow, and everyone else
Speaker 7: was saying I committed elderly abuse.
Speaker 1: But that's besides the point.
Speaker 7: Kerry jeff Sure as a fan of All American college
Speaker 7: basketball player and multiple time NBA champion Will Purdue.
Speaker 1: Here's the archival interview. Welcome back to the night Cap.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk a little college basketball, a little
Speaker 1: pro basketball, and about my my fanboy fascination with our
Speaker 1: next guest. And I hope he's not creeped out by that.
Speaker 1: I'm a little creeped out when I think about it.
Speaker 1: But back when I lived in Nashville and the Vanderbilt
Speaker 1: Commo Vanderbilt Commodores were experiencing their halcyon days of being
Speaker 1: coached by C. M. Newton and then Eddie Fogler, and
Speaker 1: they went to the NCAA Tournament. They won the NIT Championship.
Speaker 1: One of the key pieces, in fact, maybe the key piece,
Speaker 1: certainly the big man of those Vandy Commodores was a
Speaker 1: guy named Will Purdue. When I first moved to Cincinnati,
Speaker 1: a chance at a chance meeting was Scott Droud at
Speaker 1: a UC football game. He spotted me from Nashville. He
Speaker 1: remembered I spotted him. I said, that's Scott Droud and
Speaker 1: we started talking and we've had a few conversations here
Speaker 1: in the air. You may have been privy to in
Speaker 1: listening to past shows, and I said, God, I would
Speaker 1: love to talk to Will, because I've talked to you,
Speaker 1: I've talked to Barry Goheen, another one of their teammates,
Speaker 1: part of the Vandy Baum squad. And I got to
Speaker 1: talk to Will Purdue. I mean four NBA Championship rings
Speaker 1: to his credit, three with Michael Jordan and the Bulls,
Speaker 1: one with the San Antoo Spurs, and now he is
Speaker 1: one on the line with us tonight. And I'm just
Speaker 1: beside myself, like a bad picture on an analog TV
Speaker 1: right now to be talking to the one and only
Speaker 1: Will Purdue. How are you doing well?
Speaker 4: I'm doing well. So it's just TV black and white.
Speaker 4: It got yeah, you know, what what are we talking about?
Speaker 1: I'm I'm gonna try and bring it into high definition
Speaker 1: if I can control myself. Buddy. Here, here's here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you. I was such a hoops fan
Speaker 1: back then, back in my uh my mid and late twenties.
Speaker 1: I mean before that, I thought I could actually play basketball,
Speaker 1: and I was a gym rat, and then I was
Speaker 1: in radio for a while, but I was still just
Speaker 1: absolutely a huge college hoops fan, especially of Vanderbilt. We
Speaker 1: lived in Nashville. I don't know why I never was
Speaker 1: a UT fan. I will tell you a story about
Speaker 1: that as we go along, about being a Vandy fan
Speaker 1: going to Knoxville to watch Vandy play UT and absolutely
Speaker 1: cleaning the Vall's clock, which I'm sure you'll appreciate. But
Speaker 1: I remember I would get the Street and Smith's high
Speaker 1: school and college yearbook every year so I could look
Speaker 1: at what my team was going to do according to
Speaker 1: the prognosticators at Street and Smith. And I remember, I
Speaker 1: guess it was the late eighties. I saw Vanderbilt about
Speaker 1: their new incoming freshman class and they say, they have
Speaker 1: a seven footer out of Merritt Island, Florida. Who's you know,
Speaker 1: you can't teach tall? Who was a big man that
Speaker 1: could bring promise, you know, not maybe his freshman year,
Speaker 1: but later on down the line to the Vanderbilt Commodores.
Speaker 1: And they were very prophetic with that because you, in fact,
Speaker 1: did become that final piece that this team needed to be,
Speaker 1: you know, to be successful in the SEC and to
Speaker 1: get all the way to the NCAA Tournament, the Big Dance.
Speaker 1: So what change between your freshman year and the time
Speaker 1: you were a senior and SEC Player of the Year, will.
Speaker 4: Well let me see how much time do we have.
Speaker 1: Well, we got about fifteen sixteen minutes. Can you condense it?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So I think so, But it's I think the best
Speaker 4: way to put this is and in no specific order,
Speaker 4: except for maybe some timeline was one was me finally
Speaker 4: figuring out what my priorities were because like most kids,
Speaker 4: you know, if you're not strictly disciplined. And I always
Speaker 4: thought I was from a basketball standpoint, yeah, but there
Speaker 4: were other and basketball, to me was my number one priority.
Speaker 4: But there were other aspects in my life. And you know,
Speaker 4: I'm a teenager, so I'm not too concerned about it.
Speaker 4: But you know, I didn't remind myself that I was
Speaker 4: at Vanderbilt. I wasn't at and I don't want to
Speaker 4: mention any other names to kiss off any of your listeners,
Speaker 4: but I would just say I wasn't at another university.
Speaker 4: I was at Vanderbilt School. Yeah, how about that. I
Speaker 4: wasn't playing you know, other somewhere else. I was playing
Speaker 4: at Vanderbilt. I was playing for C. M. Newton, and
Speaker 4: priorities were mixed up. Now, part of that was from
Speaker 4: a distraction purpose. We don't have athletic dorms at Vanderbilt.
Speaker 4: So I was you know, I kind of used a
Speaker 4: jail term. I was amongst general population. So my roommate,
Speaker 4: Glenn Clem was a basketball player, but the two guys
Speaker 4: across the street weren't, and the two guys to the
Speaker 4: are right were not. So, you know, I get to
Speaker 4: get to Vannerbilt, and you know, like most college kids,
Speaker 4: I'm not playing whiffletball at one in the morning in
Speaker 4: the hallways playing pranks on each other because it was fun.
Speaker 4: I was having a good time. This was my outlet.
Speaker 4: But what I didn't realize was I wasn't getting enough sleep,
Speaker 4: I didn't have my priorities right, and I literally almost
Speaker 4: plunked out of school. My GPA, I think after my
Speaker 4: freshman year, was like a one nine.
Speaker 1: That didn't work at Vandy.
Speaker 4: Uh No, C. M. Newton sat me down, had a
Speaker 4: stern talk with me. Remember seem Newton hardly ever.
Speaker 3: Score.
Speaker 4: So when he would occasionally pull out the foul word
Speaker 4: or one of those four letter words, literally you would like,
Speaker 4: you know, like the gyp, your head would snap back
Speaker 4: and you.
Speaker 1: Can't believe that CM is using profane language.
Speaker 4: That is correct. That's how that's that's how you know
Speaker 4: little he used it, but he had a few choice
Speaker 4: words to say. He gave me an opportunity to transfer
Speaker 4: or stick it out. I chose to stick it out.
Speaker 4: I red shirted and I became the pupil one John Bostic.
Speaker 4: Meaning my first semester of my red shirt year, which
Speaker 4: was now my second year on campus, I had to
Speaker 4: be over at the Magoogain, which was one of the
Speaker 4: buildings over there at the Athletic department. At six am.
Speaker 4: We would do a forty five minute workout that I
Speaker 4: was literally, I kid you not, would walk out on
Speaker 4: all fours because I was so tired. At times, I
Speaker 4: did get sick, grab a quick meal, take a shower,
Speaker 4: and get to my eight am class. Then I'd have
Speaker 4: to go to practice, which is always started at three
Speaker 4: o'clock to five o'clock. Then I had to go to
Speaker 4: study hall, and I was the only player on the team.
Speaker 4: There was no such thing as study hall. It was
Speaker 4: a one person study hall, and I did that for
Speaker 4: a semester and I wasn't allowed to travel with the
Speaker 4: team either. That first semester, I could only practice and
Speaker 4: then I would sit on the bench at home games
Speaker 4: wearing a sweatsuit. Knowing that I wasn't going to play.
Speaker 4: The second semester kind of lightened up a little bit.
Speaker 4: I was able to travel periodically, but I learned my lesson.
Speaker 4: I got my priority straight. And then the second thing
Speaker 4: was a gentleman by the name of Ed Martin came in.
Speaker 1: That's who I was going to ask you about. The
Speaker 1: old coach from TSU who CM had brought into the
Speaker 1: Vanderbilt fold to help big men.
Speaker 4: Specifically, Yeah, we had I think it was John mcclennan
Speaker 4: had passed away. Unfortunately they needed an assistant coach. He
Speaker 4: tagged at Martin and I became his project. And also
Speaker 4: there was a female player by the name of Wendy
Speaker 4: Schultens who kind of became a project of Ed Martin's
Speaker 4: as well, since we both played center, and I think
Speaker 4: she's got a bunch of records now over at Vanderbilt,
Speaker 4: and we kind of worked out together. We did early
Speaker 4: morning runs out of the hills of Nashville, all kinds
Speaker 4: of things, and it just things slowly started to come together.
Speaker 4: And also one of the big things was a former
Speaker 4: State of Kentucky guy, Brett Burrow, was a pretty good player.
Speaker 4: He left and that opened up the position for me.
Speaker 4: And then, as most people know, for my junior year
Speaker 4: and my senior year, I just took off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a there was a referee in particular
Speaker 1: that did not like Vanderbilt for some reason and certainly
Speaker 1: didn't like you. And I remember it was a game
Speaker 1: against Florida and I think you got two technical fouls
Speaker 1: at the end. What was his name? You got to
Speaker 1: remember this ref's name, and I know I don't, and
Speaker 1: it's escaping me now, but I learned it cost it
Speaker 1: costs Vandy the game though, I remember.
Speaker 4: That, right. I I learned this early on in my
Speaker 4: career because I was a little I had a little temper,
Speaker 4: and I made a I specifically would not learn officials
Speaker 4: names because I knew that if I learned an officials' names,
Speaker 4: and it's got me in trouble a few times in
Speaker 4: the NBA, because you saw these guys so many times
Speaker 4: sure game season that if I used the guy's name,
Speaker 4: he knew I was talking directly to him.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 4: And and you know, I didn't get enough technicals where
Speaker 4: I got kicked out. I got kicked out occasionally, but
Speaker 4: you know, technicals in the NBA cost you money.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, so it was Clawfordy.
Speaker 4: Point not to learn officials name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a guy named Clawfordy in my career.
Speaker 4: So that you know, so I tried to stay out
Speaker 4: of trouble.
Speaker 1: The guy named Clawfordy I believe was the guy's name. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: as a basketball fan and an art and Vandy basketball fan.
Speaker 1: In fact, I came out. I was working for a
Speaker 1: radio station in Nashville at the time, and I came
Speaker 1: out and met you guys at the airport and was
Speaker 1: doing reports over my primitive cell phone at the time.
Speaker 1: When you got back from New York from the n
Speaker 1: t H. I was always a Michael Jordan even before
Speaker 1: he played his first game in the NBA. So I
Speaker 1: instantly became a Bulls fan when they drafted him. And
Speaker 1: of course it took a couple of years before they
Speaker 1: even got to the playoffs, and then they started, you know,
Speaker 1: their incredible run under Phil winning the six NBA championships,
Speaker 1: of which you were a part of three. What is
Speaker 1: there one memorable thing outside of winning those championships? Is
Speaker 1: there one memorable thing that you took away from your
Speaker 1: time with the Bulls that you wanted to relate or tell.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's a lot of things, but the one
Speaker 4: thing that really always stands out is that first championship
Speaker 4: that we won against the Lakers. You know, the Lakers
Speaker 4: had the experience, they had Magic Johnson, they had guys
Speaker 4: that have won championships. We weren't supposed to win, even
Speaker 4: though we had Michael Jordan, even though he had just
Speaker 4: swept to Detroit Pistons four to hero. But you know,
Speaker 4: they just talked about, well, we weren't quite ready for
Speaker 4: that stage yet. And we end up winning for to one,
Speaker 4: you know, and we lose game one at home. I
Speaker 4: remember the lead late, we gave it up, we lose,
Speaker 4: we're down one zero, and then guess what, we went
Speaker 4: four straight games. But it wasn't even that. It was
Speaker 4: it was seeing guys that I had looked up to
Speaker 4: as grown men, guys that I had gone to battle with,
Speaker 4: guys that I had literally fought with in practice. But
Speaker 4: just just seeing the release of emotions of everybody seen
Speaker 4: the film of Michael Jordan hugging, hugging, Hilarry O'Brian trophy,
Speaker 4: crying and his dad rubbing his shoulders. But it wasn't
Speaker 4: just him. The guy that I had become really close
Speaker 4: with was Bill Cartwright, who had been through a very
Speaker 4: roller coaster career, most notably because of injuries.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, I mean Bill Cartwright at the
Speaker 1: end of his career, basically both knees were completely shot.
Speaker 1: You could tell.
Speaker 4: But I think it's unfortunately because people forgot how good
Speaker 4: he was. This is a guy coming out of the
Speaker 4: University of San Francisco, was on the cover of Sports
Speaker 4: Illustrated that I.
Speaker 3: Remembered he was.
Speaker 1: I had that copy. That's how that's how big of
Speaker 1: a basketball fan I was at the time. Will So yeah,
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 4: But it's just seeing that release of emotion in that
Speaker 4: locker room afterwards, because of the adversity that these players
Speaker 4: had dealt with tysically, emotionally, you know, it was just
Speaker 4: I was, quite honestly, I was stunned. You know. I
Speaker 4: thought that when we win this championship, we're all going
Speaker 4: to celebrate, which we did, but I didn't expect that,
Speaker 4: and that kind of was an eye opening for me
Speaker 4: in the sense that it just this is because I
Speaker 4: was still young, you know, this is what my third
Speaker 4: year in the league, right, long ways to go. I'm
Speaker 4: just I'm still green behind the years. I'm still trying
Speaker 4: to figure it out. And these guys that didn't put
Speaker 4: so much into this this game, into this league, into
Speaker 4: their careers. That's kind of when it hit me, you
Speaker 4: know what the NBA was, what it stood for, how
Speaker 4: much work you have to put in, both emotionally and physically,
Speaker 4: and it just that kind of changed my approach, That
Speaker 4: changed my mentality, you know, and it just kind of was,
Speaker 4: as I said, very eye opening and it's always stuck
Speaker 4: with me to be a part of that and just
Speaker 4: experienced that.
Speaker 1: Will Purdue as our guest for the next few minutes,
Speaker 1: Michael Jordan. How much of a you hear this time
Speaker 1: and time again about Michael Jordan. It didn't didn't just
Speaker 1: relate to basketball. It related to anything that he participated
Speaker 1: in as a game, as an activity, as a sport.
Speaker 1: How much of that competitive just relentlessness rubbed off on
Speaker 1: you and the other players around Michael Jordan?
Speaker 4: It was the fabric of what's our team became because
Speaker 4: one of the things we used to always talk about.
Speaker 4: It wasn't like the games were easy, I mean not
Speaker 4: you know, underplay exactly what was going on, but it
Speaker 4: just the games were easier than practice. That's how competitive
Speaker 4: practices were because of Michael. And that's one of the
Speaker 4: many things. Yeah, we we were very skilled. We had
Speaker 4: a lot of talent, but I mean you laced it
Speaker 4: up when you came to practice. I meaning you you
Speaker 4: may not have your A game in a game, you
Speaker 4: may not have your A game in practice, but those
Speaker 4: practices taught you how to be effective if you didn't.
Speaker 3: Have your A game.
Speaker 4: And that was all about competing every day, every play,
Speaker 4: every minute. You know, there was no taking time off.
Speaker 4: And that started with him, and that permeated the fabric
Speaker 4: everybody on that team. And that just that's one of
Speaker 4: the many things along with skill that made this team
Speaker 4: so good. Was is it, you know, just our ability
Speaker 4: to compete every single night?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean every minute. I heard a story and
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know if that was true
Speaker 1: or not, but when the Bulls lost in the conference
Speaker 1: finals the year before that first NBA Championship to the
Speaker 1: Detroit Pistons, what I heard was is that Michael had
Speaker 1: built a court at his house and during the off
Speaker 1: season he had Scottie Pippen and Hoe Grant over to
Speaker 1: his house. During the off season every morning to practice defense,
Speaker 1: and that kind of sounds like what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: just a dogged determination to compete and to so I mean,
Speaker 1: I can imagine that being kind of a meat grinder
Speaker 1: until you got your mind in that mode of saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, this is, how it is, this is
Speaker 1: what it takes to win.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it does. And you know what, I tell people
Speaker 4: this all the time. Everybody talks about, you know, the
Speaker 4: whole thirty thirty for you know, ESPN, and yeah, the
Speaker 4: whole thing. But I thought what they did, and I
Speaker 4: always try to make sure I'm very clear with this,
Speaker 4: I thought they did an excellent job of showing what
Speaker 4: it was like to be a teammate of Michael's. You know,
Speaker 4: at first, it was it was hard, you know, it
Speaker 4: was difficult because of the expectations he not only had
Speaker 4: for himself, but everybody every the expectations he had for
Speaker 4: everybody in that locker room. Okay, and it took you
Speaker 4: a while to win his respect. Number two, I thought
Speaker 4: he did an excellent job of showing what it was like,
Speaker 4: you know, to be on those bulls teams and travel
Speaker 4: and play, and I thought that was, you know, the goal.
Speaker 4: But I also tell you know, people are like, well,
Speaker 4: you know, Michael didn't want people to see certain things.
Speaker 4: Well that's not true because the only thing, yes, Michael
Speaker 4: had final say so. But the only thing that Michael
Speaker 4: changed in any of those ten episodes was he went
Speaker 4: to the producer and said, listen, you need to put
Speaker 4: in that game winning shot that I hit against the
Speaker 4: Atlanta Hawks right before we went to New York and
Speaker 4: I scored fifty five because I thought that would help.
Speaker 4: I think that will help explain the context of scoring
Speaker 4: fifty five against the Knicks. He didn't cut anything out.
Speaker 4: That was all he did was add that he.
Speaker 1: Wanted to add something instead of cut something out.
Speaker 4: So now the producer always talked about maybe we should
Speaker 4: have tried to put in more, but I think they
Speaker 4: did an excellent job of showing what that was like.
Speaker 4: Because I've always said, you know, Michael Kobe, you know
Speaker 4: Kevin Garnett. Yeah, guys, that just they they want to
Speaker 4: win at all costs. And that's the one thing I
Speaker 4: also tell people to focus on those three words at
Speaker 4: all costs. And when I say that, I mean that
Speaker 4: I just had all costs at basketball, personally, emotionally, sacrificing relationships. Sure,
Speaker 4: you know, it's just and some people, you know, may
Speaker 4: say that's just not right. Well that's what separates great
Speaker 4: Hall of Famers, goats the best of all times, from superstars,
Speaker 4: all stars and other players.
Speaker 1: So it was I mean, just like a minute laugh,
Speaker 1: what's life for? What's life like for? Will Perdue these days?
Speaker 4: Well, hey, this is talking about taking advantage of a situation.
Speaker 4: The Bulls are supposed to have a game tonight and
Speaker 4: I do pre half and posts for NBC Sports Chicago.
Speaker 4: So normally I would have been working tonight, but I
Speaker 4: was able to come on your show and thank you
Speaker 4: do that, and then I try to work on my
Speaker 4: golf game in the offseason. You know, I got a
Speaker 4: son that's eighteen and a senior at Trinity High School
Speaker 4: in Louisville. He's a lacrosse player, so I'm looking forward
Speaker 4: to That's where I'll spend my spring at lacrosse games.
Speaker 4: And then he'll be going off to college next year,
Speaker 4: so you know, and those people in Ohio will be
Speaker 4: happy to know that he's looking at Miami. Ohio is
Speaker 4: one of his schools. Now, I'm not sure where end up,
Speaker 4: but that's just kind of what my life consists of now.
Speaker 4: And I spent a lot of time in Chicago because
Speaker 4: my wife, we live in the city, and she has
Speaker 4: a very good job here. So I'm just kind of
Speaker 4: shuttling back and forth between work, personal life, my son's schedule,
Speaker 4: so it keeps me on my coast.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to thank you number one for coming on,
Speaker 1: and number two, more importantly for me personally, is I
Speaker 1: want to thank you for all the great memories you
Speaker 1: gave me as a college basketball and a professional basketball fan,
Speaker 1: both for the Vanderbilt Commodoors and the Chicago Bulls. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much.
Speaker 4: I appreciate it. And I had one question for you
Speaker 4: real quick. Yeah, where are all those streets in Smith's
Speaker 4: Where are all those sports illustrators? Because those things are
Speaker 4: worth a.
Speaker 1: Lot of money now, Yeah, I know, so are my
Speaker 1: baseball collections when I was eight that I put in
Speaker 1: the spokes of bicycle tires when I was a kid
Speaker 1: not understanding. So there's somewhere out there that's all of us.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: I don't have them anymore, but I have I owe
Speaker 1: all our memories.
Speaker 4: And oh well that you'll never lose.
Speaker 1: Nope, exactly.
Speaker 4: Very Jeff I appreciate it. Man, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: I'm glad we were able to catch up. And I
Speaker 4: will say this, Scott Brown was a great teammate. He
Speaker 4: was a guy that was a little rowdy and during
Speaker 4: his Vandabilt days. And I always laugh when I'm saying
Speaker 4: this guy is modeling and molding our future. That's kind
Speaker 4: of scary.
Speaker 1: I'll tell Shooter you said that. Well, you know who'll
Speaker 1: talk to you will. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: All right, Gary, Jet, thank you, take care.
Speaker 1: We'll purdue on the nightcap on seven hundred WLW. We
Speaker 1: continue our hour long conversation on this Memorial Day evening
Speaker 1: with the Great loll Ponte. You're on seven hundred WLWT. Gary,
Speaker 1: Jeff and Lowell. We were talking about cigarettes not being
Speaker 1: addictive but habituating, and it was it was interesting while
Speaker 1: we were talking about cigarettes and you're not a smoker.
Speaker 1: I haven't had one for forty five years. You started coughing.
Speaker 1: I hope you're okay, okay, I'm okay. Yeah, you said
Speaker 1: you kept it from It took me back.
Speaker 5: To my childhood. I would smoke in the crib.
Speaker 1: Well, you said that the reason you never got hooked
Speaker 1: on cigarettes is because you would what.
Speaker 5: I would smoke only those cigarettes I could bum from friends,
Speaker 5: and of course, after two weeks of that, they would
Speaker 5: cease to be my friend and I'd have to go
Speaker 5: find someone else who could borrow cigarettes and.
Speaker 1: A spare nail. But anyway, we're talking about the addictive
Speaker 1: nature of meta and of the Internet and the little
Speaker 1: screens in front of us, and how it changes our
Speaker 1: brains because of the spikes and dopamine that it produces.
Speaker 1: And the purveyors of all this know this very well.
Speaker 1: They've known it for a long time.
Speaker 5: That I said, the Valdi shooter made three postings I'm
Speaker 5: about to kill kids, I have killed kids and so
Speaker 5: on Facebook. Yep, I mean he was to some degree
Speaker 5: a Facebook junkie. Was certainly a fame seeker in that sense,
Speaker 5: and a very peculiar person. We don't have a full
Speaker 5: picture of him yet by any means, but he was strange. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: this first president of Facebook, looking back on it, said,
Speaker 5: Facebook literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.
Speaker 5: God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
Speaker 5: That's the president of Facebook. No wonder that in the
Speaker 5: California legislature there is a bill right now that would
Speaker 5: give individual parents the right to sue Facebook for up
Speaker 5: to twenty five thousand dollars if they could plausibly argue
Speaker 5: that it had altered their child's eating habits self image,
Speaker 5: any kind of shift that would be deemed addictive and
Speaker 5: hence medically harmful. So that actually has passed the lower
Speaker 5: house of state legislature in California so far. And it's
Speaker 5: an interesting argument to make because we don't know the
Speaker 5: extent of which Facebook is actually a factor in the
Speaker 5: minds of these shooters, but we know that the minds
Speaker 5: of a whole lot of young people are being broken
Speaker 5: down by the way. Nearly half of LGBTQ teams said
Speaker 5: they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with fourteen
Speaker 5: percent of their heterosexual peers. Sadness among white teens seems
Speaker 5: to be rising faster than among other groups. And why
Speaker 5: not They're being systematically persecuted in the society.
Speaker 1: Strictly because of the color of their skin.
Speaker 5: Yes, oh, absolutely, and because, of course Democrats do have
Speaker 5: every reason for revenge in the pure sense. After all,
Speaker 5: white America has not a majority who voted for a
Speaker 5: Democratic presidential candidate since the time of Lyndon Johnson. People
Speaker 5: are are one group in the society that's utterly immune,
Speaker 5: well partly immune to the poison the Democrats deal in
Speaker 5: the poison of hate and so on. The cost Elon
Speaker 5: Musk to say he used to vote Democrat, but now
Speaker 5: that they've become the party of hate and division, he
Speaker 5: really can't anymore.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to see that Elon has now pretty much
Speaker 1: given up on buying Twitter after all because of and
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's exactly the case, but interesting
Speaker 1: when it was so many of us had held out
Speaker 1: hope that one of these social media platforms would actually
Speaker 1: be a level playing field for ideas.
Speaker 5: Among other things. Elon Musk had some hope that Trump
Speaker 5: would come over to Twitter again become a major draw
Speaker 5: on the side, and of course when he chose not
Speaker 5: to preferring his own site, that was disquieting, but to
Speaker 5: go back to Facebook, which is more system and groups
Speaker 5: that are owned by Facebook, like Instagram, use the similar technique.
Speaker 5: A former Facebook vice president has said, I think we
Speaker 5: have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric
Speaker 5: of how society works. And he's not referring just too
Speaker 5: or even mainly to the manipulation that these giant websites
Speaker 5: with their special government privilege, engage in. Remember these are
Speaker 5: our crony companies to the Democratic Party in big government.
Speaker 5: They depend on government giving them a special status and.
Speaker 1: You're talking you're talking about Section two thirty right, yeah, okay.
Speaker 5: Which allows them to have all the benefits of being
Speaker 5: a common carrier like the phone company, and all the
Speaker 5: benefits of being able to edit without taking blame for
Speaker 5: what that editing does. Normally, if you're a magazine, you
Speaker 5: can be sued for doing editing that is destructive. You
Speaker 5: are held responsible for your edit. But these big companies
Speaker 5: like Facebook have arranged things in such a way with
Speaker 5: lawmakers that they are exempt from being sued, and they
Speaker 5: are exempt from having to carry everybody equally, so they
Speaker 5: get all the benefit of manipulating the political environment on
Speaker 5: their website as they wish, and of course do so
Speaker 5: in a purely ideological way. For that it appears I
Speaker 5: say that because if you are a leftist then you
Speaker 5: happen to be a mass murderer. There is no problem
Speaker 5: at all you're appearing on Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Speaker 5: It's only if you're Donald Trump or some Republican that
Speaker 5: you're considered unfit.
Speaker 1: The last time I checked, President Trump had not been
Speaker 1: actually guilty of perpetrating any kind of violent crime on anyone.
Speaker 1: And I know there are people that point to January sixth,
Speaker 1: and he personally endorsed breaking into the Capitol, which he
Speaker 1: did not. He personally endorsed violence, which he has never done.
Speaker 1: You know, all of this, and they point to him
Speaker 1: saying at a rally, somebody ought to go punch him out.
Speaker 1: And you know, that's about as violent as Donald Trump
Speaker 1: has ever gotten in public, in any kind of forum.
Speaker 1: To my knowledge, he is not endorsed or engendered any
Speaker 1: kind of violence against another human being, and yet he
Speaker 1: gets blamed for it. Yet, I mean, I see the distinction,
Speaker 1: and I see the.
Speaker 5: Contradiction and where Trump has behaved that way. Remember it's
Speaker 5: when they would ask the police stop this person who's
Speaker 5: disrupting our rally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the.
Speaker 5: Police are told, I'm sorry, we've received orders from the
Speaker 5: Democrat mayor of this town or whatever not to intervene.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 5: In other words, when people are not given protection, the
Speaker 5: only response of Democrats is, how can we take away
Speaker 5: your guns so you are not able to protect yourself
Speaker 5: in any way.
Speaker 1: Well, this is a good point Lowell I think to
Speaker 1: make is that in Uvalde there wasn't a school resource officers.
Speaker 1: It was first reported who was armed. No one on
Speaker 1: that campus was armed. And yeah, there were all kinds
Speaker 1: of a tragedy of errors you could say that led
Speaker 1: up to the slaughter of these nineteen Pressures children and
Speaker 1: the two teachers who were gunned down. But the police
Speaker 1: always in every situation, and to blame the police, I
Speaker 1: think is a little half witted, to be sure, and
Speaker 1: maybe more so. But the other thing is if you
Speaker 1: have someone who was trained in armed whether it be
Speaker 1: a teacher, a principal, and administrator whatever, inside that school
Speaker 1: which did not exist, the police always. I think police
Speaker 1: generally do a fantastic job of protecting and serving, but
Speaker 1: they're there. They're called after something has begune, whether it's
Speaker 1: a robbery, whether it's a shooting, whether it's an assault.
Speaker 1: The police are there to clean up and to hopefully
Speaker 1: apprehend the perpetrator. But your first line of defense is
Speaker 1: you in a society that allows polite, law abiding citizens
Speaker 1: to carry firearms. If someone is inside that school trained
Speaker 1: with a gun, and the perpetrator has no idea who
Speaker 1: that person is. You know, all the better, all the
Speaker 1: better to protect people. The police are kind of like
Speaker 1: a second wave, coming in after the crime has been initiated. Correct, correct.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And by the way, the Border patrol which supplied
Speaker 5: the expert who went in and finally took out the
Speaker 5: Uvaldi shooter that even though they were delayed by thirty
Speaker 5: minutes or more from being allowed by local police to
Speaker 5: enter the school, that person got a bullet hole through
Speaker 5: his beanie. I mean, he was just wearing a golf cap,
Speaker 5: which amazed me. Why wasn't he wearing an armored helmet?
Speaker 1: No, no kidding, no kid.
Speaker 8: It was truly surprising.
Speaker 5: But understand the kind of environment that we're now seen
Speaker 5: the more time. This is from the American Journal of
Speaker 5: Epinemiology in twenty seventeen. They looked at Facebook programming and
Speaker 5: they said the more time people spend liking posts or
Speaker 5: updating their Facebook status, the less happy they felt.
Speaker 1: Oh I can believe that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, I mean, this is basically an exercise that, at
Speaker 5: a minimum seems to deplete little things like well useful
Speaker 5: chemicals in the brain in order to keep you hooked
Speaker 5: on doing things like a trained monkey and don't shock
Speaker 5: the monkey, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 1: I can gauge my personal happiness pretty high at this point,
Speaker 1: although I do have my moments, my fits of anger
Speaker 1: and frustration at times, mostly at what's going on around
Speaker 1: me in the real world. But I have never participated
Speaker 1: in Facebook. I tried Twitter for about, I don't know,
Speaker 1: three or four months, and was not on it every day.
Speaker 1: I did not tweet every day, but I found it
Speaker 1: to be pretty much an environment of hate and sadness itself,
Speaker 1: you know, a showcase of those things. And I rate
Speaker 1: my level of happiness fairly high. Now. I have a
Speaker 1: wife that loves me, or at least I believe she does,
Speaker 1: and I love her. I have a pretty good life.
Speaker 1: I don't make a lot of money, but money is
Speaker 1: not the key to happiness. And I think one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that I have this level of happiness is
Speaker 1: that I'm not surrounding myself and involved in diving in
Speaker 1: to this online life that we're talking about. And I
Speaker 1: can understand how people who are involved in this every
Speaker 1: day and who were swimming in it by moment twenty
Speaker 1: four to seven, I can understand how it would make
Speaker 1: you unhappy. I really I would.
Speaker 5: Think I would think, so, well, what do you do
Speaker 5: if you were a Mark Zuckerberg, for example, with all
Speaker 5: his money and what he found it important to do
Speaker 5: A couple of years ago was when talking to Jijien Ping,
Speaker 5: he literally begged the Chinese dictator and slave master to
Speaker 5: give the name that his own firstborn child would carry.
Speaker 5: Zuckerberg asked Jijien Ping to name his child. That seems
Speaker 5: to me a rather striking thing for someone to do. Uh,
Speaker 5: Barack Obama, I mean you know, as you know, I've
Speaker 5: written a great deal about the Obama White House, yes,
Speaker 5: over past years, and one of the things that I
Speaker 5: found intriguing in it is it had its own Office
Speaker 5: of Mind Control. Oh it didn't call it that, but
Speaker 5: effectively that's what it was. It brought together a whole
Speaker 5: team of mind control expert, psychiatrists and psychologists to use
Speaker 5: techniques that would be most effective in selling Obama's program
Speaker 5: as a matter of mind manipulation. Every once in a while, though,
Speaker 5: the Left comes out and is just literal the way
Speaker 5: that Janet Yellen, our Treasury secretary a few days ago,
Speaker 5: came out and declared that outlawing abortion would do serious
Speaker 5: harm to the economy.
Speaker 1: I saw this.
Speaker 5: It would lead women to give their lives to having
Speaker 5: a family instead of serving a corporation, preferably, of course,
Speaker 5: a global corporation. How dare we rebuild the American family?
Speaker 5: The lack of whit is a major well. It played
Speaker 5: a major role in these two serious shooters we were discussed.
Speaker 5: They were both products of strangely broken and twisted homes.
Speaker 5: And you know, if you look at the degree of violence,
Speaker 5: it's still about seventy percent of African Americans, for example,
Speaker 5: who are born to single mothers.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 5: Because the Democrats deliberately set up a system were by
Speaker 5: your welfare payments depend on you accepting the state as
Speaker 5: the father and fathers the technical term guars government assuming
Speaker 5: the role of spouse.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, They and fathers started fleeing Black families as
Speaker 1: soon as this welfare state was established, the so called
Speaker 1: Great Society in the nineteen fifties, and people told, oh,
Speaker 1: you just want to go back to the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: and Jim Crow actually, in the nineteen fifties, black communities
Speaker 1: all over this country, we're thriving, even in urban core
Speaker 1: centers because fathers were staying with their families, and they
Speaker 1: were eighty.
Speaker 5: People were born to stable, two parent homes right exactly.
Speaker 1: And it makes a difference. It makes a serious difference.
Speaker 5: One could say, it makes all the difference.
Speaker 1: All the difference. And you know what, people will hear this,
Speaker 1: who are who are race paid real race paiders? And
Speaker 1: they'll say, oh, there are more white people on welfare
Speaker 1: than there are black people. I hear that argument all
Speaker 1: the time, and it does not negate what we're saying.
Speaker 1: The reality is, in the nineteen fifties, even in the
Speaker 1: cities where Jim Crow was alive and well in this
Speaker 1: country and there was separation by skin color in restaurants
Speaker 1: and hotels and nightclubs and the like, the black community
Speaker 1: was actually more prosperous and and more resourceful and more
Speaker 1: progressively pro family than they are today in this country.
Speaker 5: And it almost traditionally said for a long time what
Speaker 5: Lyndon Johnson did to the black community was as destructive
Speaker 5: as if the Klan had made the policy. Well, the
Speaker 5: Klan did deliberate attempt to wreck the black community.
Speaker 1: The Klan did make the policy, just nobody knew it.
Speaker 5: I'm afraid though, Yes, as as Joe Biden and his
Speaker 5: good friend, the Grand Legal of the Klan made.
Speaker 1: Clear, Yeah, it's just a it's a secondary plantation system
Speaker 1: that we have in this country, and it was started
Speaker 1: by the Democrats. The same way that most of the
Speaker 1: people who supported plantations and slavery in the Old South
Speaker 1: were Democrats, just as the same people who supported and
Speaker 1: held up planned parenthood as a fantastic thing were Democrats.
Speaker 1: Were racist, real racist, not fake racist or or made
Speaker 1: up racist for you know.
Speaker 5: Of planned parenthood.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. Democrats have a long Democrats have a long
Speaker 1: history of being evil and racist, and yet they're the
Speaker 1: ones pointing fingers at at people who oppose them as
Speaker 1: being the real racist.
Speaker 5: It's it's of having a brainwashing office in the White House, yes,
Speaker 5: generation after generation, because it allowed this is one of
Speaker 5: the greatest acts of manipulation of a people ever seen
Speaker 5: in world politics. The black people who, as you say,
Speaker 5: the slave owners, the plantation owners, the Kouk DeLux clan
Speaker 5: people were all Democrats, indeed, and yet black people have
Speaker 5: been tricked into voting for them.
Speaker 1: It is just astonishing that was part of the plan
Speaker 1: of LBJ. He's been quoted as saying it's a word
Speaker 1: I can't use on the radio, nor would I want
Speaker 1: to use. But all we got to do is give
Speaker 1: these n words enough that they they quiet down, not
Speaker 1: enough to make a difference, but enough that they'll be
Speaker 1: voting Democrat for the next two hundred years. That was
Speaker 1: an actual quote of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Speaker 5: YEP. Now, now there are things in the current argument
Speaker 5: we must abolish guns that are rather strange. Not only
Speaker 5: does it violate the entire American tradition in the American Constitution,
Speaker 5: but there was once a notorious study comparing Seattle, Washington
Speaker 5: to Vancouver in British Columbi, Canada, and they found that, oh,
Speaker 5: there was so much more violence in Seattle. It was
Speaker 5: just horrifying. But then another university took that very data
Speaker 5: and just reanalyzed it, and they said, what if we
Speaker 5: just compare white people in Vancouver to white people in Seattle, Washington.
Speaker 5: And you know what they found The rate of gun
Speaker 5: violence was in both cases almost zero. In other words,
Speaker 5: the entire difference was because of the minority population in
Speaker 5: Washington state or in the Seattle area, that's where the
Speaker 5: gun violence was. And the same happens in the streets
Speaker 5: of Chicago today and so on, you know, every day
Speaker 5: in in the city of Chicago. And this argument that
Speaker 5: you are going to stifle the police who killed, by estimate,
Speaker 5: about ten people a year who are African American and
Speaker 5: supposedly not armed.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: But the interesting thing is a lot of police nowadays
Speaker 5: are black. Indeed, and the odd thing that the researchers
Speaker 5: find when they compare them is a black policeman will
Speaker 5: shoot a black suspect much faster than a white policeman will.
Speaker 1: Well, certainly because there's going to be a you know,
Speaker 1: a month long investigation and a trial many times because
Speaker 1: of this false narrative that there were a lot of
Speaker 1: racist white police in this country. Listen, lo with that.
Speaker 1: We got to wrap up, and I'm sorry there's not
Speaker 1: more time, but we're at the end.
Speaker 5: That's always its pleasure, Gary.
Speaker 1: Jeff, always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend.
Speaker 1: I love you, I love your perspective and your knowledge
Speaker 1: of history. Loll ponte with us on this Memorial Day
Speaker 1: evening as we get ready to close on seven hundred WLW.
Speaker 1: The cold weather is here, so you and your heating
Speaker 1: system will be