On The Air With Swap Shops and Obituaries

I took a trip to my past a few days ago, and it’s worth telling about.  I was interviewed at the studios of a radio station in Cherryville, North Carolina about the upcoming premier of my new play, “Liberty Mountain,” and it was like going home.

I began my long journey as a communicator in junior high school at the weekly newspaper in my Alabama hometown – first working in the print shop, then learning to report and write.  But when a fellow started a radio station in Elba, I was intrigued.  There was a minister who, as a part-time job, did local news for the station, and he invited me to contribute stories – not just write them, but deliver them on the air.  So a couple of mornings a week, before school, I would go to his pastor’s study where he had a microphone set up, and I would present my stuff.  Wow!  My family and friends could hear me on the radio.  Instant celebrity.  I acquired a new girlfriend.

Then the station manager offered me a job as a disk jockey – working after school, weekends, and summer vacation.  From pastor’s study to studio, operating the control board, reading the news and commercials, and playing records, an inordinate number of which I dedicated to my new girlfriend.  We played “Top 4O” music – Ray Charles, the Platters, Johnny Cash, cool stuff.  My air name was “The Boogie Man.”

I parlayed that experience at WELB (“the mighty 1350) into a college education, disc jockeying my way through the University of Alabama at stations in Tuscaloosa while I got a communications degree.  And from there I went on to a thirty-year career in television news at stations in Montgomery and Charlotte.

But I never lost my affection and admiration for hometown radio, and as I sat in that studio in Cherryville, it all came back.  Just before we went on the air for the interview, they were doing the “Swap Shop,” a staple of hometown radio.  Want to buy or sell an item?  Send in a post card or call on the phone and get on the air.  Connect with your friends and neighbors, one of whom may be on the lookout for that “Sly and the Family Stone” vinyl LP you have for sale or may have that two-gallon crockpot you’ve been pining for.  It’s an electronic community flea market, free for users.

And then there’s the “Obituary Column of the Air,” another time-honored hometown radio tradition.  Obits provided by the local funeral home, read somberly by an announcer, a brief chronicle of the lives of those among us recently departed, along with information on services, memorial gifts, and the like.  In a small town, you’re likely to know the folks they’re talking about.  Family, friends and neighbors.

Radio has changed a good deal since my days as a teenage deejay.  Stations – especially in sizeable markets – are owned by big conglomerates with cookie-cutter ideas about what folks ought to be listening to.  In many cases, programming is automated and the live announcer personality has been swallowed up by a computer.  But search around the AM dial, and you’ll still find echoes of that very local, very intimate radio of the past.  The best of it remains, and for a small-town kid like me, it’s the best radio there is.  It’s my roots, and I’m grateful.

Robert Inman’s novels – Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, Captain Saturday, and The Governor Lady – are available on Amazon Kindle, priced at $3.99.

Bad Weather? Blame an Author

There are some folks who seem to think my writing contributes to natural calamities.  There may be some truth to that.  The evidence keeps piling up.

As I look out my office window, there is a foot of snow in my back yard and on the golf course just beyond the hedge.  Kids on sleds are having great fun barreling down the twelfth fairway while some of their parents are slipping and sliding along the roadways in our area.  It’s the biggest snowfall in North Carolina in a decade.  For those who consider anything more than an inch of snow a calamity, I’m afraid they may start blaming Cooper Lanier.

Cooper is the heroine of my latest novel, The Governor’s Lady, newly-elected governor of her southern state.  On the second day she’s in office, the state is hit by a blizzard which paralyzes everything, and the snow serves as a backdrop against which a test of wills plays out between Cooper and her husband Pickett (former governor and now presidential candidate).  Will Cooper be a figurehead, a stand-in for Pickett, or will she be a dynamic decision-maker in her own right?  How she deals with the blizzard sets the stage for what comes after.

When ill-prepared Atlanta got flummoxed by snow a couple of weeks ago, several readers suggested that the honchos there should have read The Governor’s Lady to see how to handle things.  So far, no one has suggested that my inclusion of the blizzard in the story was a portent of Atlanta’s calamity.  But with a foot of snow in my back yard today, and folks slipping and sliding, I’m a tad concerned that rumblings will begin and Cooper and I will get the evil eye.

Nonsense, you say.  But it has happened before.  I grew up in a river town in Alabama, and during my youth the local lore was rife with stories of the Great Flood of 1929, when the river got out of its banks and inundated the town.  My grandmother and her four kids had to escape their home in a rowboat.  While I was growing up, the river behaved itself.  Then in 1991, I published Old Dogs and Children, set in a southern town much like my own.  One of the major events is a flood.  My heroine, Bright Birdsong, escapes with her small child in a rowboat.

The novel had barely made it into print when – you guessed it – my hometown flooded.  The river, calm all those years, went nuts.  Local folks are invariably nice people, and no one said to my face that the book was to blame for the calamity, but for years after, I got jaundiced looks whenever I visited, even in church on Sunday.  I think most folks have finally forgotten and forgiven.

I would like to share the blame for any natural disaster with my fellow storytellers.  We may all be complicit in this sort of thing, whether we write of calamities or not.  The computer age has a lot to do with it.  I sit at my keyboard typing away and constantly mashing the backspace key or even highlighting and deleting entire sentences – nay, paragraphs – of slovenly prose.  By definition, it is bad stuff, not worthy of human consumption.  Where does all that bad stuff go when I zap it from my computer?  I wonder if it may be floating around out there in the ether, roiling the atmosphere and contributing to floods, hurricanes, forest fires, sun spots, and other assorted natural maladies.  Who knows, it may even be contributing to the dysfunction in Congress.

But if any of this is the case, my fellow storytellers and I will just have to live with it.  We scribble on, employing imagined disasters as grist for our tales.  All we ask is, the next time a blizzard hits your locality, don’t run over your local author with your sled.