Category Archives: Personal History

Before Wikipedia and YouTube

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I’ve been sharing old photos from the early days of radio station KBOA. I worked there in the 70s and my dad before me. I’ve been updating content on the website I created about the early days (1947-1957) of the station. KBOA830.com was my first shot at a website, back in 1997 and didn’t get much attention after the initial setup because it focused on that ten year period.

While updating this week, I kept find relevant stuff on Wikipedia and YouTube and couldn’t figure out how I’d missed this stuff when creating the site. Then I realized Wikipedia didn’t come online until 2001 and YouTube in 2005. And I found other sites with great material about performers and on-air talent at KBOA.

My first interview

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I remember the first recorded interview I did (1972). It was with Bill Walsh and Jack McDaniel, two local businessmen who organized the Fall Festival Parade every year in the little town where we lived. When I got back to the studio and dubbed the audio from a cassette to reel-to-reel tape, I was horrified to hear how awful I sounded. Long, rambling questions. It still makes me cringe.

I grabbed a splicing block, a grease pencil and some splicing tape (look ‘em up) and sliced out my questions. But first I had to record the questions without sounding like a moron… and then — oh so tediously — splice them back with the answers. Yes, the interview still sounded like shit.

No idea how many interviews I recorded during the next 40 years. A bunch. And I don’t think I got much better at it. Looking back it’s easy to see what I was doing wrong: talking too much. I mistakenly thought I was and equal part of the interview. A natural hubris, I suppose.

Few things infuriate me more than listening to an interview with someone who really has something interesting to say but never gets to say it because the interviewer continuously interrupts. Or eats up vast amounts of time with endless, rambling questions.

In recent years I’ve found a way to address this failing of mine. I write out every question I want to ask (trying to stay close to 10) and do my best not to vary. But more often than not, when I listen to the interview, I find I can delete my questions entirely, leaving the listener/viewer with what they came for.

There are some interviewers who add more than they detract. I’m fond of Daniel Tosh’s interviews (if one can really call them that). I like James Lipton’s (Inside the Actor’s Studio) style. But — like me — most interviewers simply can not shut the fuck up and let the subject talk.

Am I alive because of the atomic bomb?

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I’m about halfway through Genius, James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, considered by many the most brilliant American physicist of the 20th century. Feynman was probably the smartest of the scientists working on the Trinity Project (America’s atom bomb program). The first (and only test) of the bomb took place July 16, 1945. American bombers nuked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks later (Aug 6-9). Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.

My father was in the Navy from May, 1943 until March 9, 1946. He served on the USS Mount McKinley; USS Appalachian; USS New Jersey; USS War Hawk; USS Iowa; and one or two others. All of which saw action in the Pacific.

According to Gleick, building the atomic bomb dramatically affected the lives of the scientists who created it. The Japanese lives lost to this terrible weapon have always been balanced against those that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. Like my father, for instance. Japan surrenders, they turn the ships around and head home. Discharged March 9, 1946 in St. Louis. Meets and marries my mom (March 23, 1946) who was living in St. Louis. Happy ending. For some.

I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes trying to boil down some meaning from this bit of history. But “what if this event hadn’t happened” is a pointless game. It did happen.

“Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.”

The ravages of time

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The photo above was taken last September at the 50 year reunion of the Kennett High School Class of 1966. Richard Peck and Larry Mullen standing; Joe Browning, John Robison and another guy seated. I attended my ten year reunion but skipped all the others. I’m glad I went to this last one. Got to spend a little time with Joe whose energy was released back into the Universe this week.

I took the other photo in 1968 in Richard Peck’s basement. A place to drink beer and be as young as we would ever be. L-R: Richard Peck, Jim Bob Green, John Robison, Jane Marshall and Lynn Strickland. Charlie Peck and Joe Browning down front. This photo became (for me) iconic of that wonderful time. How we came to be the old men in the class reunion photo is a mystery.

Hamra’s Department Store

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The photos below were taken by Johnny “Mack” Reeder, probably in the early 50’s but perhaps as early as 1948 or 1949 (maybe a vintage car buff can help me narrow that down). This just off the “courthouse square” in Kennett, MO. The first photo is facing West.

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I remember Hamra’s from my youth (born in 1948) but I’m hard-pressed to tell you exactly what they sold. Clothing and fabrics, obviously, and I recall a shoe store next to the main store shown in these photos. There were several stores like this in “downtown” Kennett. Graber’s, James Kahn’s, Penney’s and some I can’t remember.

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I don’t think this was a “grand opening” so I’m guessing this was some sort of special sale. The photographer was one of the original employees of KBOA (the local radio station) and might have been recording the big crowd that resulted from advertising.

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The third photo speaks to the rural flavor of our small town. Lots of bib overalls. I remember hearing stories about hundreds of people flooding into town on a Saturday to purchase supplies for the farms that made up the local economy in those days.

AirPods

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I spent some money on headphones back in the 70s. When I started at KBOA in ’72 all they had were these WWII-era Bakelite hockey pucks with a piece of vibrating tin inside.
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When I saw my first pair of Sennheiser open-air headphones (in a magazine) I ordered a pair and paid for them myself. And, yes, I took them into the studio for my shift and took them with me when done. They were pretty expensive (for the time) and a bit fragile. But I sounded soooo good in those headphones. More accurately, I could hear what I really sounded like and that was important.

Steve Mays KBOA control room

Fast forward several light years to the first iPods and the famous white earbuds that all serious music buffs hated. I loved them. They sounded fine to me and they fit my ears just fine. I’ve been using them ever since, pretty much every day.

In a few weeks Apple will start selling AirPods ($150) and I’ll buy a pair on Day One. And I might not be the only one. From Business Insider:

12% of U.S. consumers surveyed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch say they intend to purchase AirPods, apparently on the strength of Apple’s marketing, given that few people have actually seen and tried them out. This is a very bullish sign for Apple, says BAML. “12% of the US installed base could lead to up to an incremental $3bn in revenue,” writes the analysts.

“Apple’s marketing” is one explanation. Another might be that people like me have been using Apple earbuds for fifteen years and like them.

Meditation: 271 Days

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After 271 consecutive days of meditation practice, I missed on Saturday. I was attending my 50th high school class reunion and just spaced it off. My previous streak of 371 days (starting on December 4, 2014) ended during a bout with pneumonia (December 5, 2015). I don’t get hung up on the quality of my practice or the duration but I do try to be consistent in sitting every day, if only for 10 minutes. Which is the only reason I keep track of my sessions. As I’ve noted previously, missing once a year might not be a bad thing if it keeps me from focusing on the string instead of today’s session. So today is two in a row!

50th High School Class Reunion

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30 or 40 eighteen-year-old ghosts trapped in ravaged, aging bodies shuffling around the room desperately trying to recognize people you knew half a century ago. The time-honored tradition of name tags featuring photos from the high school yearbook was honored. So we smiled and shook hands and looked down at the kids we once were, unable to conceal the “what the fuck happened to you” horror.

We only lost 30 or so classmates (from a class of about 150) which is sort of amazing given that we all grew up eating nothing but fried food and breathing crop dusting chemicals and the toxic plume that was sprayed every summer night to battle the clouds of mosquitos.

I went with some trepidation (I went to the 10 year reunion but none after) but wound up enjoying myself. I can’t speak for others but the person looking out of my eyes was/is that 18 year old who went to school with all of the old people in the room, with their titanium knees and heart stints. I couldn’t see the old me they were seeing. I hope and assume it was the same for everyone.

No, what I thought would be a depressing shuffle down memory lane turned out okay. Maybe a little “survivor high” if there is such a thing. We made it! We’re still here! “Fuckin A!” as we said in 1966.

50th high school class reunion

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In a few weeks I’ll make the five hour drive to the little town where I grew up for the 50 year reunion of the Kennett High School Class of 1966. I attended the 10 year reunion and vowed I’d never go to another. And didn’t. But there’s a strange (morbid?) appeal to the 50th. Like stumbling across the finish line of a marathon, throwing up and crapping your pants, yet elated to have completed the race.

I suppose this qualifies as a “right of passage,” and there won’t be that many more. Of the approximately 150 people in our class, 33 (22%) have been called to the office of The Great Principal’s Office in the Sky.

I’ve been fantasizing ways to make this event more fun: A prize for the most marriages/divorces? A little trophy for most number of times arrested/years served? Or a plaque for Best (and Worst) Cosmetic Surgery?

I’m not on Facebook so I have not kept up with most of my classmates. I don’t remember much about the 10 year reunion. I think that is the one where you show off your second/trophy wife and hand out business cards with titles of success. Those vanities will, I’m sure, have faded. Replaced by… what? The unspoken reality that this is the last time we’ll see most of these people. A bon voyage party for the Great Beyond.