Deciding on a career at age 10

Movie cowboy Monte Montana lassoes President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the newly inaugurated president watches the parade in front of the White House on Jan. 20, 1953. This image was on every TV newscast and in every paper I saw the next day. I pasted the picture in my new "career" scrapbook.

At age 10, most people don't have a clue about how they want to spend their working lives. I was lucky. I knew.

I remember listening to the GOP national political convention on a radio at the cottage on the Rappahannock where we went every summer. That would have been 1952. I knew I wanted to be part of the excitement someday. Six months later, when Ike took office in January, I started making scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. The image above was one I saved; everybody was talking about what Monte Montana had done. (The Secret Service would never let him get away with it today.) I filled a half-dozen scrapbooks before my next "career-development initiative."

When I was about 12, I wrote to James Jackson Kilpatrick, the editorial page editor of the Richmond News Leader, which was then the afternoon daily. Already I was thinking about what I'd need to know. "What should I study in college?" I wrote. To my surprise, Kilpatrick wrote back promptly. His advice was sound: study the language and journalism, but get a liberal arts education. Take courses in everything that interests you. The broader your education, the better will be your reporting. I followed his advice, but there were a few twists.

A few years later, in my first year at Hermitage High School, I read a notice in the newspaper that McGuire V.A. Hospital was looking for volunteers, and one of the areas that had openings was the hospital's closed-circuit radio station. It wasn't journalism, but it was broadcasting, and I saw an opportunity. A friend of mine and I volunteered to do a live music program. The head of the hospital's Special Services Department agreed to give it a shot.

It was valuable experience. The music we played for the veterans - they could listen through bedside speakers, but we had no idea how many actually did - was their music, mostly 1930s and 1940s songs. Over the course of many months, I learned much about the music of my parents' generation. I was flat-out awful as a deejay at first. Ego prompts the start of most radio and TV careers, and mine was no exception. I was more enamored of the sound of my own voice than I was interested in actually communicating. It took years for me to work past the ego and into the desire to really say something of interest. But I had an early start, I was getting a leg up, and I was still a high school sophomore.

I signed up for journalism when I was a junior at Hermitage and had the great good luck - and timing - to have a very good teacher, Marjorie Webb. (She later quit teaching and began writing for the Times-Dispatch. She was named editor of what was then called the Woman's Page. Then she returned to teaching.) She insisted that we students hew to the basics of good journalism, but she let us have a free hand with story ideas and writing style. I wrote one story about a classmate who had cleaned her dead cat's bones and put them back together as a skeleton. The T-D picked it up. It was the first time my byline appeared in a professional publication, but to this day I think the whole skeleton thing was truly weird.

My writing was amateurish, but Marjorie Webb helped me hone it. For the next two years I worked on the school paper, and by my senior year I was news editor.

At the University of Richmond, I started taking journalism courses in earnest with the great Joe Nettles, who had worked for the Associated Press before joining the UR faculty. He brought in real journalists as guest lecturers, from among his many friends at the Times-Dispatch and the News Leader. We were not only learning from the pros: We were making valuable contacts.

In my sophomore year, I took a part-time job at a new daytime radio station, WIVE, in Ashland. WIVE almost immediately switched formats from middle-of-the-road to rock, and I was offered the morning drive show. It meant getting up in the middle of the night and driving up to Ashland, but I took the assignment without hesitating. I was at WIVE in 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. We all gathered in the studio to listen to the president's speech and the news coverage that followed for days. Those were scary times, perhaps the scariest of my youth.

Six months later, I got an offer from a higher-rated station, Richmond's No. 2 rocker, WENZ, which operated out of studios next to a beauty parlor in Highland Springs. I'll never forget the mandatory station ID: "On the air with music 24 hours a day, Greater Richmond's great, new, music station, the new W-E-N-Z in Highland Springs. It's WENZ!"

The program director who hired me at WENZ was still young himself, maybe 21 or 22, but he knew rock radio and the formula for making it successful. His personal life was something else - a bit of a mess. On one lonely Saturday night at the studio, with no company except the occasional sound of laughter bleeding in from the beauty parlor next door, I was happily spinning Top 40 records when the program director's girlfriend came into the studio. She was distraught. The program director had dumped her. She ranted and raved ... while I played records. When I had to open the mike to talk, she dutifully shut up. But the minute the mike was off, she was back into her diatribe. It was crazy trying to do a live radio show and deal with her too.

After exhausting her emotional outburst, she went to the bathroom adjacent to the studio. I gave her the standard warning: Don't flush while the mike is open.

She didn't. There was no noise at all. And she didn't come out.

After about 5 minutes, I was concerned. I knocked on the bathroom door, but she didn't answer. I carefully opened the door, and saw her sitting on the floor in the corner making cuts on her wrist with a razor blade. Her eyes were wide open, her face was ghostly pale, and she said one word: "Help."

I took off my T-shirt and wrapped it around her wrist, telling her to hold on. The record I was playing had reached the end of its groove, so I slapped an LP on the turntable. I then called the police, who dispatched an ambulance. My next call was to the program director, telling him that he had 15 minutes before the album ran out. When the ambulance arrived and took her away, I walked out of the door and never went back. Conditions at Greater Richmond's great new music station, W-E-N-Z, were too much for me.

A few months later I spotted another announcement in the newspaper. WCOD FM, part of the Havens and Martin station group that also included WTVR TV and WMBG AM, was looking for an announcer to do station breaks and read local commercials during Baltimore Colts games. I applied, got an audition, and got the job. That was the step that started a 20-year career that led to being news director at WTVR TV, the South's first television station and the top-rated station in Central Virginia.

It all started with newspaper clippings of Ike's inaugural 10 years before, but now I was on my way to a career that I loved.