Chapter Twenty Six
Not long after the split I was at a party and a colleague, Terry Amburn, said he was about to start a new format at an old automated FM station in town.
FM radio was just coming into its own and was finally being installed as standard equipment in new cars making it more accessible to the stereophonically deprived listening masses.
Terry warned me he'd heard about my reputation of being a loose cannon but that he also knew of my reputation of being one of “the funniest and most talented jocks in the business”.
He wanted to talk with me about coming on board.
The format was to be progressive/outlaw country. It was sort of rock and roll country; country with an attitude.
I liked the idea and we agreed I'd come on as the Mid-day man: l0am - 2pm.
My first day on the air the program director for our sister station ran into the studio and offered me a much more lucrative salary to join the AM side of the station which played more traditional country hits.
I turned him down.
I was committed to being part of this new wave of music and felt I owed my loyalty to someone who’d stuck his neck out to give me a job.
We signed on with the new call letters KBUY-FM, and had an instant audience. We played everything from Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys to Jessie Coulter (Waylon's wife), Emmy Lou Harris, Janie Fricke, Don Williams and all the emerging country rock stars, including David Allan Coe, Joe Ely and Asleep at the Wheel.
I was given freedom to hold forth as much as I wanted but I agreed to stick with a music rotation plan that, at first, drove me nuts.
All albums had a log sheet attached to the cover on which we noted the title and time when we played a cut. We could play anything we wanted as long as it hadn’t been played within 24 hours on the shift immediately before or after ours.
Book work.
It so happened there was a young woman who followed me on the air. She was a rare natural beauty. She had sophistication and talent. She made you drool listening to her show trying to imagine what she looked like in real life.
The beauty of it was: I knew what she looked like and it was a hundred times better than the best your imagination up with could come.
By the way, it is strictly a style issue, as opposed to a rule of grammar, when choosing to use a preposition to end a sentence with. Unless you’re Yoda; then it’s poetic license.
I don't know how it happened but she and I started flirting with each other by using the music logging system.
We began playing records to one another. We'd check each other's last played song and then apply it as if it had been said by one of us to the other. It was uncanny how explicit we could get with the titles.
All very high schoolish.
One thing led to another and soon it really led to the other and she and I began seeing each other after hours.
The only problem was she was married.
I was serious about her, though, and knew her situation at home was tentative at best. I wanted to get really serious with her but I couldn't tell where her priorities lay in regard to her professional career: how far did she want to go?
I wanted to take any route I needed to the top. I kept pressing her for an indication of where she wanted to be in the future: Amarillo? New York? L.A.?
She never seemed to have any great desire to do anything other than hang around Amarillo... and that wasn't where I wanted to remain for the rest of my life.
And then, inevitably, Terry got into the action.
I began noticing his handwriting a little more pronounced on the sheets, now, as ours had become as well.
Now she was seeing Terry, too.
And he was married as well.
I don't know if Terry knew she was seeing me because we never let on at the station, but she and I would talk about Terry when we were together.
But I wanted a commitment from her. Her marriage precluded any.
We continued to see each other on the side, but I started cooling down.
The breakup of my marriage many months before and the lack of enthusiasm from her hit me kind of hard and I began to act erratically to overcompensate.
I got on a power trip: felt like I could do no wrong. I was aided in this delusion with healthy doses of marijuana smoke at night.
One day, near the end of my employment with KBUY, I told the following story...on the air.
First, by way of explanation, you must know Texas is home to one of the most prestigious and highly respected research schools in the country: Texas A&M University. It's about 5 miles from Allen Military Academy in College Station, Texas.
Originally a full military institution, its students are no longer all in the corps of cadets. It trains some of the country's finest veterinarians and agricultural researchers, as well as top ranked physicists.
Its students are called "Aggies" and there are a series of jokes called "Aggie Jokes"(Why did the Aggie get fired from the M&Ms factory? He kept throwing out all the W’s) that, perhaps, were the precursors to the “Polish Joke”.
A series of small booklets of Aggie Jokes was successfully marketed in the 60's and there have been quite a few updated editions ever since. Aggies are proud of their jokes and are not insulted by their proliferation.
And now, the tale I told:
A recent graduate of Texas A&M applied for a job at a general store telling the owner he wanted to become a successful business man. The owner told him success was easy: simply learn what the customer wanted and then supply it.
Just then a customer walked into the store and the owner told the Aggie to stand by and watch as he supplied the gentleman's needs.
"Yessir. May I help you?" asked the businessman.
"I'd like a bag of grass seed, please", came the reply.
"Right this way sir. We have several varieties to choose from. Just make your choice and I'll ring it up for you."
The customer picked a bag and brought it to the checkout stand.
"Alright, that'll be a dollar and a half for the seed and $750 for the sprinkler system...installed", said the businessman.
"Wait a minute!" gasped the customer, "I didn't want a sprinkler system!"
The businessman replied, "Sir. You might as well put in a new system now. They're on sale today, complete with installation; and, if you put it in now, you won't have to dig up your luscious new green yard in the future."
"Well, you do have a point", the customer agreed. "Ok. Ring it up."
"Yessir! That'll be a dollar and half for the seed, $750 for the sprinkling system, $250 for the lawnmower..."
"Lawnmower? I didn't order a lawn..."
"You're going to have to cut your lawn when it grows and the new mowers are half off this week. Might as well save yourself a bundle", explained the businessman.
"Alright, I'll take the lawnmower."
"Let's see. That's a buck fifty for the seed, $750 for the sprinkler, $250 for the mower and $50 for the wheelbarrow we have on sale; today only!"
"Wheelbarrow? Why do I need a wheelbarrow?" asked the customer.
"To haul your clippings to the alley.”
"Alright. I’ll take all of it", agreed the customer, "But that's it! Ok?"
"Yessir. Thank's for your business and come again anytime, y'hear!" smiled the businessman as he closed the cash register drawer.
After the customer left he told the Aggie to try his hand at the next customer who came in the store.
It wasn't long before a young woman came in. The Aggie looked to the businessman for encouragement and, receiving it, made his way toward the woman.
"Yes M'am! Can I help you?" asked the Aggie.
"Yes. I'm looking for sanitary napkins", she replied.
The Aggie showed her through the store to their supply of different brands of napkins and tampons and told her he'd be happy to ring it up when she'd made her selection.
At the cash register the proud Aggie rang up his first sale: "Let's see that'll be a dollar fifty for the tampons and $750 for the lawnmower..."
"Lawnmower? I don't want a lawnmower",
said the woman.
"Well", said the Aggie, "You're not gonna be doing much of anything else this weekend, so you
might as well mow the lawn!"
Terry, who'd been stuck in his car in the parking lot listening till the end of the story on his car radio, came racing back to the control room and stared at me through the glass. He couldn't believe his ears. He was laughing his head off, but he still couldn't believe I'd told that story.
I reminded him there were no dirty words in it and he admitted he couldn't do anything to me for it, but he warned me I'd better watch out.
I watched out, but the rift had been created, by me, and it got deeper and deeper over the next few days till I decided to quit.
I was sad and frustrated. In looking back on it now I realize the breakup of my marriage and the breakup of the affair I was having with my colleaguette and the intrusion of Terry into the equation brought me down.
It was time for me to get out of Amarillo, anyway, and get my life back on track to becoming great and famous, if that were possible.
It wasn't long before I was hired as the new morning-drive jock at KOKE-¬AM/FM in Austin. It was a welcome move.
Austin was "hot" in those days and a perfect place to recuperate from a broken love life.
Not surprisingly, I missed Barbara…and daughters Lisa and Stephanie…the most. Considerably.
I moved into the New Manor Apartments: Austin's newly opened clothing optional, i.e. nude, apartment complex.
When I moved in I had to sign a lease that provided for a "non-aggression truce".
What that meant was that tenants could do anything they wanted anywhere in the compound as long as it did not “physically aggress” anyone without their consent.
I was given a graphic for instance: a tenant could masturbate in front of another lying nude by the pool and not get into trouble because the person could avert their eyes if they did not wish to see what was going on...or they could watch if they wished.
It was not an aggressive act as it could be avoided.
But if a tenant were talking to another and if the other party informed them they no longer consented to the conversation, if they then continued to talk they would be guilty of being physically agressive because the sound was not avoidable and, as a result, the party was being forced to listen to something they could not physically avoid. The act of leaving the area would also be construed as being the victim of aggression in that their free choice of where they wished to be was being “aggressively” altered.
Persons guilty of aggression would be evicted imediately and all tenants agreed to this stipulation in their leases.
There were 78 units, almost all of which were rented.
There were teachers, lawyers, sales reps, photographers, students, families with children of all ages: the same population mix one would find in any apartment complex in the world.
Only here you could take your clothes off and run around buck nekkid!
I loved it the second I got there. And, what the Hell! There were a lot of great looking naked women living there!
I ain't nobody's fool. Sun, fun, a comfortable place to live and naked women...I'd died and gone to a bit of heaven on earth.
Lesson: Sexyism can be a good thing, both ways.
The day I moved in they were having a luau. They'd roasted a pig and everyone brought something to the dinner.
It was a marvelous welcome to the only place where I eventually knew every one of the tenants by name.
Few people can say the same about where they live. Most know a few of their neighbors, but knowing everyone in a large complex is rare, indeed. It spoke volumes to the success of the community.
I must admit it was a little strange at first. I had been nude in public only once: at Black's Beach, north of San Diego, three days before Jeanette and I moved back to Amarillo. I'd been there for only about an hour but I liked the feeling of freedom that nudity in the outdoors gave me.
Here in Austin it came to feel it was the only way to live.
Nudity was not a mandatory state. There were one or two who never took their clothes off in public. One woman was a nudist and her husband wasn't. All the children in the complex were comfortable with the situation and the adults were protective of their sensitivities.
There was lovemaking going on in the pool from time to time; but, if you've ever seen two people making love in a pool you'll have to admit that it's not easy to "see" anything because of the refraction caused by the water. And if they're casually discreet about it, it looks more like hugging than sex.
But clothing optional apartments are not readily accepted by everyone in the world at large and when I'd tell people I lived there I learned to get used to the upturned eyebrow...and nose, in some cases.
I also found it difficult to get people to drop by for a visit, although I loved the challenge of seeing who I could get to come over.
Surprisingly, women were no problem at all. And it was very easy to get things delivered for free that might not be, had I lived in a regular complex.
We used to get a kick out of apartment hunters.
It was a secure community, completely hidden from the view of the outside world. Visitors entered the front courtyard by the pool. In the mid afternoon one side of the pool is shady.
On warm sunny days there was always a line of naked bodies sunning themselves along the sunny side of the pool.
The visitors would come in, try to be nonchalant about suddenly seeing nude bodies stretched out before them, and then quickly turn away make a big thing about looking at the apartment doors behind them.
We knew they wanted to look. And we didn't mind their looking. We looked at each other, too. We were always "looking" at each other, but we didn't stare. We didn't ogle.
So, I was hired to simulcast my morning show on both KOKE-AM and FM. The station was about to change its format from progressive country (like KBUY had been in Amarillo) to mainstream Top-40 Country Western –a fact I hadn’t been aware of when I accepted the job.
I held the distinction of being the last progressive country morning jock and its 1st Top 40 country jock, bridging the change.
KOKE had pioneered the progressive country format; and, winning BillBoard Magazine's highest award for doing so, helped put the genre of music on the map. It was sad to see its demise. But I was there and had to deal with it.
Management said it was because of low income. I could have told them they'd never make money selling Brooks Brothers suits to Cosmic Cowboy Hippies but they hadn't hire me for my sales savvy. They hired me because I was a good entertainer.
One week into my employment they fired the program director who'd hired me. The next PD was a consultant who also had a show in Houston, 70 miles away. He came to Austin once in awhile and held meetings and collected a fat consultancy fee and then went home again.
I was considerably surprised when they asked me what they were paying me. I told them $800 a month plus talent fees for any spots voiced.
They seemed quite surprised, too.
That low a salary for a morning drive jock was an insult. The only reason I accepted the figure was because I knew I could supplement it substantially with the talent fees.
They ultimatumed they'd pay the salary but I could forget about the talent fee arrangement.
I protested that was the only reason I'd agreed to move all the way across the state.
They said take it or lump it, buddy.
I had to take it, didn't I?
Lesson: Get it in writing!
A bit later I learned they thought the PD and I were close friends, but I had only met him once when I traveled to Austin to interview for the job. That knowledge finally answered some questions as to why management treated me with such indifference after they let him go.
Fortunately I was pulling in the business and ratings for them so they left me alone.
There was as copywriter at the station named Maury. She was tall and lanky and mysterious. She was a “natural” woman who disdained all forms of deodorant and the practice of personal defoliation.
She liked to snort cocaine and it gave her a nasty attitude when she wasn't getting any sex or was out of drugs; which seemed to occur on a regular basis.
She was in charge of the commercials we played on the air; and, from time to time, it was her job to come into the control room and lean across me to get a commercial cartridge from the "play" rack.
In doing so she would knowingly afford me an unobstructed view of her dangling breasts through the arm-hole of her earth mother type dresses.
I noticed, but I ignored her. The lack of deodorant was not as easily overlooked.
We knew from the instant we set eyes on each other that this was a relationship made in hell. We never got along and she was directly instrumental in bringing my radio career to a screeching halt.
After I'd been on the air a few months John White called me from the Melodrama Theatre. He asked me if I'd be interested in acting in a version of their next offering: a Sherlock Holmes sendup.
I was indeed interested and accepted his offer to see their current production. It was a smash holiday show complete with villain and heroine and hero and lots and lots of popcorn flying through the air with the greatest of ease.
It was a hilarious evening and I knew I wanted to be a part of this group.
At that moment I realized, above everything else in the world, I had always wanted to become a great and famous actor.
I'd wanted it since I was three years old on the table in the back yard.
I'd been stabbing at it off and on my entire life: Geneva, London, Tucson, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dallas, and even at the Amarillo Little Theatre.
My schedule became a bit hectic as a result.
I signed on the station at 6 am, meaning I had to get up at 4:30am to get my eyes open and then write/produce several regular "bits" I did during the show, before I went on.
There was "Ludwig, the Helicopter Traffic Reporter" -a comedy bit where a German-accented reporter and his disgruntled pilot, Hans, relayed everything but the traffic situation to the listeners. That meant I had to write and produce 2 sixty second episodes each morning.
Plus, I had an on-going segment about silly laws still on the books somewhere in the country; an apt bit for radio in the Capital of Texas.
Then, after my "board shift" as it was called, I produced commercials left for me in my production box by Maury.
At noon I left the station, ate lunch/breakfast and went back home to bed.
At 6:30pm I got up, had breakfast/dinner and headed to Melodrama Theatre and rehearsal. By midnight I was home and back in bed, again.
Repeat.
This went on the rest of the time I was at KOKE. It got a little tricky when I'd wake up at 6:30 pm and think it was 6:30 in the morning and that I'd just missed thirty minutes of my radio show. I didn’t have a phone and no one could have called to wake me.
But I was never late to either job though there were some harried moments before my mind clicked to where I was in the overall scheme of the day.
Maury got more and more pissed that I was leaving at noon, even though my production commitment had been fulfilled. She wanted me to stay around in case anything else came up.
The general manager confronted me about it and I reminded him I was hired to only do the morning show and had never agreed to doing a production shift. I brought up the original verbal contractual agreement and concluded with the point that it was he who had arbitrarily changed it.
I told him I'd do the production for any commercials left in my box before noon and would stay until they were completed, but I wasn't going to hang around waiting to see if any more spots came in to be produced. The other staff could handle them.
He argued I was being paid for a 40 hour week. I told him I wasn't.
I agreed to do the spots out of the goodness of my heart. And a desire to keep the job.
That's when I found out they thought I was a personal friend of the former PD. He had hired me on his own and made the deal with me without telling anyone else what it was.
As a result the manager thought I was hired according to his stated assumptions about my duties. He was never aware there had been any differing discussions.
Then Maury decided to do me in.
I wasn't aware she'd done anything until I was called into the GM's office one Monday morning after my shift. He asked me what boot store commercial I'd played during my Saturday show. I told him I played the one listed on the log.
Jocks rarely listen to the spots they air: they're too busy answering request lines, setting up the next comedy bit, loading commercial tapes, cueing up records (this was pre-cds), writing ad libs (there's nothing better than a well-written ad lib), getting coffee, and trying to make it to the bathroom and back before the record's over.
He informed me I had played a "dead" spot: one that had been taken out of rotation. He explained the spot was for a 50%-off sale that had ended the week before and the boot store had been inundated with customers trying to get two-for-one boots all weekend long.
I didn't have any idea what the content of the commercial I played was supposed to be. I just pulled the numbered cartridge listed on the log and played it whenever the log said to play it. If I played the wrong spot then the number had been placed on the wrong cartridge.
Too, I pointed out, it was an indication of how highly listened to my show was if it drew that many people into the store.
He didn't see what that had to do with anything.
I pushed the point I had no way of knowing what an advertiser wanted to say in their commercials. If they wanted to have a sale, who was I to stop playing their commercials. I just played what the log said to play.
I was only following orders.
He had Maury go and pull the questionable spot and we listened to it. It didn't say anything about a 50% off sale and that's when I knew I'd been set up.
As continuity director for the station she's the only one who numbers the cartridges and loads the new versions into the racks after they've been produced. I surmised she had come in Friday afternoon, typed up a new label with the correct number and put it on the old cartridge with the sale copy. Then she'd loaded it into the racks to wait for me to pull it and play it all through my show according to the dictates of the broadcast log I had to work with.
Sometime after I left on Saturday, and before Monday morning, she replaced the "sale" cartridge with the newer, correct cartridge and no one was the wiser.
And I couldn't prove a thing.
Lesson: If a woman flashes her smelly dangling tits at you, you better notice!
The GM gave me the benefit of the doubt for the moment but, like Sherlock, I knew something was afoot.
The following morning I came into work and found another jock preparing to go on in my stead. The commuting consulting program director from Houston told me they wanted a "team player". The general manager told me that almost everyone at the station "hated (my) ass" and that several had threatened to quit if something weren't done.
I read that to mean Maury had made a to-do.
I was given a week's severance pay with the disclaimer, "I don't have to do this you know”.
Throughout my life I've always felt that revenge was nice to fantasize but that it wasn't worth actively doing anything about. I figured people who did you wrong would get theirs someday. I still like to think that's true.
Somewhere along the line I'm sure Maury got (or will get) hers.
I'm just as certain I'm getting mine for the hurts and wrongs I've done others along the way.
Lesson: Karma – that train’s comin’ to a station near you.
The Melodrama Theatre of Austin was one of two. The original was in San Antonio’s Hemisfair Plaza and had been quite successful there for many years.
Owners Burdette Parks and Guy Bergquist had a winning formula: develop a company of talented character actors and have them perform on stage and also wait tables before the show and during intermissions. Pay them $5 a show plus tips.
On a good weekend actors could average over a hundred bucks, easily.
The theater sold beer and wine and various sizes of wine coolers plus tons of popcorn for pre-show munching and intra-show throwing at the villain.
The atmosphere was solid fun and the room was packed every night.
Over the next two years I did 6 shows there and was made a permanent company member. Each permanent member had a specific job within the organization to do. I was in charge of public relations and was paid $125 a week for my work on top of what I made performing.
My acting skills were getting a thorough polishing and I started auditioning for, and getting roles at other theatres around town.
It was a golden period for theatre in Austin. There was a strong core of talented actors developing to choose from and several venues where they could work.
Clockwise from Left: Scrooge, Daddy O'Hara, Van Helsing, Blackman Redburn
At Melodrama I played the aforementioned LeStrade as well as Daddy O'Hara in a send-up called Gone with the Breeze, Van Helsing the vampire hunter in Dracula, the title role in The Mummy's Curse, and Ebenezer Scrooge in a hilarious musical spoof called A Christmas Melo-Carol. I also played a cowboy villain in Calamity Jane and the Kerrville Kid. Finally, I was in a show of the best of Melodrama Theatre.
In the “Kerrville Kid” my septum was accidentally deviated from the rest of my skull during a stage fight opening the show.
It was a real rabble-rousing dust up just like in the old cowboy westerns of the 30's and 40's. At curtain, there was all kinds of scuffling already going on when my character exited the saloon. As I descend some steps two cowpokes simultaneusly take roundhouse swings at me from both my right and my left side and the resultant blow flings me back upstage onto the steps. It was a hilarious stunt and never failed to bring a laugh.
But, on this one occasion, one of the regular actors hitting me was in the hospital having his hemorrhoids removed and had been replaced by Burdette -an accomplished professional.
At the last possible instant, not having rehearsed the bit with Burdette and normally turning in his direction, I decided to turn the opposite direction. Guy was on that side and his fist connected with my nose with a resounding "crack!"
I completed my spin, my dive, my fall and recovery as choreographed; but, when I hit the ground, I knew there was going to be a bloody nose happening in a few seconds. The crowd roared with laughter right on cue.
I rose as I normally did, tilted my head back to catch the dribble I could feel beginning and made like I'd spotted someone off stage I wanted to pummel and immediately exited!
Fellow actors had seen the hit, if not heard it, and knew why I had come off.
Normally I would have risen from the stage and in trying to recover from the roundhouse blow would be jostled by other actors pouring out of the bar and be knocked into the watering trough below the landing: another laugh riot.
Off stage I asked for a rag and ice and packed my nose with it and used every ounce of mental ability I had to stop my nose from bleeding. I could feel it wanting to; but I only had about 60 seconds before my character had another entrance, with lines, and the play would be solidly on its way.
I froze my sinuses and was lucky no blood leaked out. I made my entrance on cue and the show went off without a hitch.
Once or twice during the first act I could feel a little trickle starting and I would sniffle it back.
I've always been a good clotter.
At intermission Guy came to me and asked how I was. I told him I was fine but I thought something was broken in there. He examined the offended spot and said the bone didn't look broken. He also laughed and told me that of all the hits he'd landed in real life this one was, he was sorry to admit, the most perfect-feeling hit of all. He said he knew when the punch landed it was just right and he felt the “crack” when it happened. Naturally, he was sorry about it, but he had to laugh that it "felt" so good.
By the end of the show my left eye and sinus area were pretty swollen and sore. They stayed that way for a few days.
I didn't have too much of a shiner though and I never went to the doctor for it. I didn't have the money and I figured it would give my face character if it was "disfigured" in any way.
It wasn't, fortunately.
I do have a little trouble breathing through it from time to time as a result, though.
Lesson: If you have to stick your nose into somebody’s business, it may as well be show business.
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