The East Side of Life

I made it to Joe Hansen's wake last night.

I missed all the radio guys - I saw most of KSTP-AM's staff had signed the guest book when I got there.

I'd never met Joe's family, although there was a guy there that was pretty obviously Joe's brother.

The funeral home was out on White Bear Avenue, out on Saint Paul's East Side. If you're not from the Twins - or even just Saint Paul - the East Side is a different world; you feel in so many ways like you've dropped into the 1960's. And not the Haight Ashbury sixties, mind you - the real decade, with corner groceries and generations-long family loyalties and taverns where guys have worn the grooves from their butts into the naugahyde stools. Never too tony, never too awful, always a little run down and tough, always with a big heart.

If you knew Joe Hansen, of course, the guy just screamed East Side; something about his vaguely-Chicago accent even marked him, in my accent-obsessed mind. The mementoes at the wake - hockey pictures, class photos, and so on - recalled Tom Mischke's classic observance of East Side life; "People on the East Side just play hockey, work on cars and drink beer!".

I've been gratified by the response to my piece on Hansen yesterday - especially by the postings by other people.

In particular, I loved this piece:

Reading the story of Hanson's life and career, I was struck by a sudden case of "what if." You see, I too, once chased the dream called radio. As a young man, I spent more than five years in the medium, working my way through college as a disc jockey, newscaster and football play-by-play man at small market stations in the south and Mid-West. During that interlude, I covered much of the same territory described by Mitch Berg; long nights and weekends at some podunk station in the middle of nowhere, spinning records or making sure that some syndicated program aired at the right time.

...

If the work environment was bad, wages were usually worse. Rush Limbaugh was reportedly fired seven times in his early broadcast career, and found himself (at age 30) earning far less money than he had a decade earlier, as a morning DJ in Pittsburgh. Another broadcast icon, Sean Hannity, earned $1,000 a month as a talk show host in Huntsville, AL in the late 1980s--about the same thing I earned as a radio news director at the start of that decade. Of course, that was a step up from my first, full-time radio job, fresh out of college, with a bachelor's degree in journalism. That gig paid a princely $900 a month--in 1979.

But there was always the dream. Most of us had a mental image of our career, a path that would carry us from the small markets to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, preferably by the age of 30. For me, a couple of years at the local tea kettle station would get me to Little Rock, Shreveport, Springfield, or Jackson, MS. From there, I'd try to land a job in Memphis, Birmingham, or Nashville, followed by a stint in St. Louis, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, or Dallas. After that, a coveted gig at WLS, WABC, or KHJ, and big-money radio stardom. Sure, it was a pipedream, but it was something to keep you going when payday at your 1,000 watt AM station was two days away, and you had $1.50 in your pocket.

It's impossible to explain the seductiveness of a business that treats people so very badly. It's like having an abusive wench as the first great love of you life (indeed, that's how I describe my on-and-largely-off 13 year radio career; my first love. Goodness knows I rebounded hard enough when she dumped me.

And like when that first love dumps you, you learn things. I'm thankful in many ways that I was in radio first; the business teaches you to never assume you'll have a job, much less counting on one - and above all, to keep yourself marketable. It's a lesson a lot of people could stand to learn.

Which was a tough lesson when I was 17 and getting whacked for the first time (of six), but tough lessons are still good ones.

Read the whole thing; it's like a time machine back into my own life, in its own way...

Posted by Mitch at May 26, 2006 07:40 AM | TrackBack