FIRED, FIRED EVERYWHERE

I was thinking, recently, about getting fired. I'm not worried about getting fired because I'm retired and I can't get the ax from doing nothing. At least not that I'm aware of. The thought was prompted by a friend's recent blog about being “blown out” of a recent job and the inventive way he handled it. I had a long and relatively distinguished career, but the mere fact that it was in radio came with the understanding that I would be “shown the door” any number of times. The exact number was up in the air, but losing jobs was pretty much a given. Nature of the business, you know. When I read my friends blog, I began to reminisce about some of the ways I had received “the news.” A few were pretty “run of the mill,” but honestly, some were downright innovative. In the late 70's I worked at a very big rock & roll station in Philadelphia where I was proud to have the #1 morning show in the city. It was the first two-man morning show, ever, in rock & roll radio and my partner had recently been sent packing. Since I was only ½ of the morning team, they tried anything they could think of to get me to leave, but I had a family which included a newborn and wasn't about to give up what had become a pretty lucrative position. One day the general manager asked the entire staff to come into his office to view slides of a recent station promotion. This was a guy who would put his arm around my shoulder at station events and parties and declare, “He's like a son to me. He reminds me of me when I was a young, up and coming DJ.” He went out of his way to make me feel special, because I was generating revenue for the station. As they all found seats in his office and huddled in to watch the show, I stepped in and was greeted with, “What are YOU doing here?” from the man who had now taken his arm from my shoulder and was reserving his compliments for the next guy who “reminded him of (himself) blah, blah, blah....” I still didn't get the point until the new program director, who had taken over from my now ex-partner, called me into his office and said, “Close the door.” Jokingly, I asked, “Why are you firing me?” The smile quickly left my face when he responded with, “It's interesting that you should ask that because, yes.....yes I am.” I wasn't really shocked. Stevie Wonder could see THAT coming. I moved to Chicago to work for one of the biggest and most respected radio stations in the country. I was given what I asked for to do the morning show and the GM told me that he was a fan of my show in Philly and was happy that I was there. For the next year and a half, I sat in the morning show chair on the FM side of the station as it changed formats and call letters 3 times. I was hanging on pretty nicely until I was called into the office and told that they were going to begin simulcasting the AM morning show and that I would be moved to overnights. I was used to getting up at 2:30am to go to work but, now I was expected, for the first (and last) time in my career to come in at about the same time that Letterman was going off. It was a challenge but, I told them that, even though they had put me into the graveyard position, they were going to get the best overnight show in the city and things were going well. Until the GM met with one of the bigger “names” in Chicago radio. I questioned him about it and he told me, “It was just lunch. You have nothing to worry about.” A few days later, my phone rang at about 10:30 in the morning. It was the GM and he was very pleasant as he told me that this “name” that he had lunch with had accepted the morning position and that, although it wasn't personal, I was out. I was fired again.......OVER THE PHONE! I was able to land on my feet and, eventually began working at a little start-up that became a huge network. It began as Satellite Music Network and I was privileged to be there from the very beginning. We physically built the studios and experimented with ways to better deliver programming to radio stations worldwide by satellite. It had never been done before and I was the first one to turn on a microphone. We got bigger and better and, as usually happens, sold.....a couple of times. We became the ABC Radio Network and I spent 24 years doing the morning show on my particular format. I must have gotten pretty comfortable because when I was called in to the VP of programming's office on the day I was to start my 25th year and told to clean out my locker, I was a wee bit taken aback. Most people who put in that kind of time get some sort of recognition for their contributions. All I got was a security guard to escort me to the door. My favorite firing, however, came earlier in my career when I was doing an afternoon drive show on a small station in a very small town in Connecticut. The station was so small that they sold most of their time slots. Early in the morning and in the evening, just before sign off, was “The New England Polka Express with Cousin Stan.” Middays was “La Voz Latino Americana (The Voice of Latin America) with Walter & Omar.” Then came Pastor Wendell from the Farmington Avenue Baptist Church and an hour of soliciting enough funds to keep up the payments on his Cadillac and his mansion in West Hartford. I would come on in the afternoon for 4 hours of “easy listening” music that was programmed to be as non offensive as possible with such core artists as Doris Day, Al Martino, The Clebanoff Strings and Mantovani. I had recently been offered a job at a bigger station in a bigger town and had gotten wind of my impending doom. Apparently someone took offense when, while running the controls for the pastor's noon show, I became fed up with his hypocrisy and, instead of his theme music, I played “Sympathy for the Devil” behind his parting words. The cloud was now over my head and I knew it. This was going to be my last show. So, instead of a particular Mitch Miller tune, I put Jethro Tull's “Aqualung” on the turntable, put the needle on the very first track, turned on the microphone, got in my car and drove home listening to the station. Just hearing what came out of the GM's mouth as he scratched the record to get it off the air far was more entertaining than anything else I had done on the air to date. Hell,after that little stunt, I would have hired me based on creativity alone.

EASILY AMUSED.......IN BULK

I get sort of a perverse pleasure when shopping at a bulk warehouse store like Sam’s Club or Costco. Now, I can’t speak for Sam’s, but, I like to make a “Costco run” every couple of weeks or so. It’s a way to replenish our pantry and to replenish my enthusiasm for life. It’s really very invigorating To me, it’s tantamount to that IKEA commercial where the woman looks at her receipt and does a mad dash through the parking lot screaming “Start the car…..start the car,” giving a final, enthusiastic “Woo hoo” as her husband drives away, completely confused. Looking at my receipt from Costco as I lug in boxes and boxes from the car brings me back to that pseudo-satisfying feeling from back in the 60’s that I had gotten one over on “The Man.” It’s a sense of pride that one gets when coming out of a negotiation with more than you had in mind when you went in. I have five kids, so, there was a time when going to Costco or Sam's was justified by virtue of the fact that we went through all the stuff I would bring home in about two days. With growing kids, food certainly seems to evaporate when they come within a few feet of it. But, my kids are grown and have moved on. There are two of us in the house now and we really have no use for an entire crate of peaches or a box containing twelve thousand stalks of asparagus. Even if the produce is out of season here, it may not be in Chile or Mozambique. And yet, I buy it. I figure that even if more than half of them go bad, I’ve really only paid for about a half a dozen peaches or a couple of servings of asparagus anyway, so, I’ve gotten away with something and a poor farmer in Chile or Mozambique has had all of his backbreaking labor justified. Someone just paid, what to him, is probably a year’s wages, even if it IS a literal “pittance” to us. After all, where else will you find an entire crate of peaches for $5.99 It’s not just food. My wife asked me to get some dish washing gel. She pays about $5.00 for a 75 ounce container of name brand gel. Not that much, but, at Costco, they had a 125 ounce container of the name dish washing gel for under $9.00. Now, here is where the deal gets really sweet. Right next to it was the Costco brand. There were two 125 ounce containers of the gel for $8.00. I know that this should last us for about a year and a half. I am tempted to knock on the neighbors doors and ask if they have any dishes they need washed. Paper towels are another incredible savings. A case of 12 mega rolls of a name brand, very absorbent paper towel is only about $11.00. The 12 mega rolls give you the same amount of paper towels as 20 regular rolls. I need to start spilling more. After all, we have plenty of absorbency at our fingertips and I’d hate to see it go unused. Now we still do plenty of shopping at our local grocery store. I suppose it’s because of convenience and familiarity as much as anything else, but, I can truly say that I’ve never walked out of a Publix and had the urge to yell, “Start the car, start the car.”

THE POSTCARD

I’m not sure if it was the perfect irony, a brilliantly crafted plan or the result of psychic phenomena, but I got a strange bit of mail recently. It was a couple of days after I got out of the hospital after turning blue again. I have a tendency of doing that every so often. I think it averages out to about once every year and a quarter. The doctors still can’t pinpoint the problem, but we may have it narrowed down to some outside stimuli interacting with my daily meds causing what some professionals might call: bad juju. At least that’s the diagnosis from my wife, who we lovingly refer to as Dr. Mom, so, you see, it’s coming from a very reliable and trustworthy source. The mail came in an envelope that stated, in bold letters: “Free Pre-Paid Cremation! Details Inside.” On the inside of the envelope was a postcard, of sorts. It said that I could get a $300 reimbursement on my cremation service, free grave space (which is not very much if you’re cremated. A small hole should do it.), a free granite or marble headstone or bronze marker (not very big in conjunction with the size of the hole.) and spouse benefits, whatever they may be. Then came the kicker on this side of the card: “Cemetery Space is Limited”…whoa, I know we are getting older, but, if this is true, we must be dropping like flies., I’d like to know how they knew I was a veteran and had just come home from another leg of the “Bob Leonard Blue Tour.” Does someone hang out at hospitals, looking for older looking guys in Vietnam Veteran hats? Hey, it’s not that farfetched. Look at New York City. There must be at least a thousand stories in the Naked City about people who pick up the paper and head straight to the obits so they can find a rent-controlled apartment. When you think about it, it’s deviantly brilliant. Jerry Seinfeld even did an episode about it. I can hear the guy now as he calls his boss: “Hey, we got a live one, Manny. I’ll get his name and address to you but you better get the stuff in the mail to him pretty quickly……He’s blue.” I had the info within two days. I probably would have gotten it even sooner, but, on the first day, my daughter’s car was parked within 15 feet of the mailbox and we didn’t get a delivery, but that’s a story for better left for another time. I can’t really put too much credence into the psychic phenomenon theory. If someone is THAT psychic, they’re time would probably be better spent helping the police solve crimes. That would certainly make a better TV show than a psychic who knows, through some strange, unexplainable happenstance, that a Vietnam Veteran is getting older and then uses that power sell whatever it is they were trying to sell. Honestly, I’ve searched the card on the front and back and can’t find anything for sale. Everything seems to be free. On the back of the card, towards the end of all this free stuff, it says, again in bold letters: “Return the Reply Slip TODAY.” This is where I make the conscious decision to go with the irony theory. I’d hate to think that in a case like this, someone knows something I don’t.

TO SLEEP – PERCHANCE

Sleep and I have a very tenuous relationship. We haven't seen eye to eye for many years. Being in my mid–late 60's (no need to be too precise), I figured it was time to try and locate the root of my problem, so I decided to do some research. “Why not?” I thought. “I'm awake anyway.” The journey took me back a few generations in my own family. My great grandfather, who we knew as grandfather, a name given him by my mother, his granddaughter, rarely ever slept. Tales have been handed down about how he would sit up all night long, translating volumes from English to Russian to Hebrew to Yiddish and back again. He didn't even speak all of those languages, but at 3am, in a little room in his house, who the hell knew? He was an old man and we all believed him. “Grandfather, what are all these squiggly lines?” I would ask whenever I would visit and snoop around where I didn't belong. “Oh, that's Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” in Russian,” he would say. Or, that's Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” in Hebrew.” We lived in Connecticut and that made it much easier for me to swallow. In fact it, at 8 years old, I bought it....hook, line and sinker. The fact that it was nothing escaped me completely. He was suffering from insomnia and spent the late night/early morning hours doodling. His son, my grandfather, who I also referred to as Grandfather, couldn't sleep either. He would try, as the original Grandfather had, to nod off into dreamland, but spent most of his 89 years sitting awake, reading manuscripts that his father had translated from English to Russian to Hebrew to Yiddish and back again. It never occurred to him that there was really nothing written on these pages but a bunch of squiggly lines that his father had passed off as languages that existed outside the borders of Connecticut. My grandfather was an extremely bright man who, apparently always believed what his father told him, proving that intelligence and gullibility can, indeed, coexist. He must have read Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee.....” hundreds of times in myriad nondescript languages. The fact that he was really just reading gibberish never took away from his enjoyment of this wonderful tale. My father didn't sleep either and he was from an entirely different family than the aforementioned father and son grandfather team. We aren't sure if his father suffered from insomnia. He died young and never had the opportunity to walk around in a sleep deprived haze during the day. The theory is that my father married into the issue and knew what he was getting into when he met my mother, who also suffers this dreaded malady. She figures, after doing all the appropriate math, that she has slept a total of two to three weeks in her 87 years. It looks as though the trait is less a treatable disease than it is a genetic condition. My brother doesn't sleep any better than any of the other family members who are so well acquainted with the night. Even as a little boy, he would wander around our bedroom in the dark, bumping into things, eventually nodding off standing straight up with his head leaning on a dresser. I know because I would lay awake in bed watching him in the hopes that this late night entertainment would help send me off into dreamland. Every once in a while it would work and I have a faint memory of waking up refreshed after a good two or three hour slumber. It was rare, but, if I remember correctly, quite a treat. As for me.....I am no different from the rest of the “kin folk,” but I have a routine. It seems to me that I once read somewhere that routines can make you sleepy. My wife has to get up very early to work, so she goes to bed at about 10pm. That's when I get out my laptop, plug in the headphones and watch 50's TV shows in the hopes that they will put me to sleep. They normally don't. It seems that I always have to see how the Lone Ranger and Tonto get the bad guys in these episodes that I have seen over and over for the past 60 years. You'd think I'd remember how they did it. At about 1am, I turn off the computer and turn over and close my eyes. By 2:15 or so, I have to get up to pee and I can't go back to sleep, so I go downstairs and turn on the TV, where I can usually find an old episode of The Lone Ranger or two. When I realize that I just watched it a couple of hours earlier and I remember how they rounded up the Cavendish gang, I try my hand at translating Mark Twain's “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” in the time tested tradition of my now long departed family members. I suppose I can call the marks that I am making on the paper in my wee hours stupor any language that I want. I just hope my kids will buy it when they are grown and wide awake in the middle of the night, so they can enjoy the fruits of Mark Twain's and my labors and appreciate what their elders have, so lovingly handed down to them.