IT'S LIKE STANDING AT A GRAVE
It’s like sitting at the open grave of a loved one. Wisdom tells you to be thankful for the time you had, emotion tells you to mourn the time that you lost.
That’s how I feel today.
I was fired yesterday from the morning show at KNRS in Salt Lake City. After 10 years, I got the antiseptic call and the new interpretation of what the severance clause in my contract doesn’t mean.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Mid-stride, at the top of my game, it’s over. Without even a chance to say good-bye.
My impulse is to be bitter. To think of the days I worked sick and the raises I didn’t get and the motels they stuck me in and the job they made me pass up.
But it is immaturity that mistakes sorrow for anger. And what I feel is sorrow. Because I love Utah, and I loved every day of the decade I worked there. Since my days as a newspaper reporter, I’ve always buried myself in the places and topics I’ve been assigned to cover. Doing that in Utah, losing myself in all its small towns and sparkling cities, learning its history and people, has been one of the great joys of my life.
So yesterday’s firing struck me like a death.
It’s like a large part of my heart was taken away from me. I am sick to my stomach and frantic.
With each passing day for years to come I suspect I will think of what is happening in Utah and mourn the fact I am not there to share it. The peach stands south of Perry, the rodeo in Nephi, the parade on the 24th, Granny’s in Heber City, Idle Isle in Brigham City, running the butte in Midway, the Alpine Loop, mutton stew at the Navajo Hogan, the bookstore at BYU.
And the people who would introduce themselves on the street or at book signings or dinners and say they listened to the show.
But it is what it is.
I think I had the best local-issues talk show in Utah. I don’t think anybody else was even close. I think the show spoke for and was a rallying point for conservatives across much of the state.
But I got killed by a frequency change and something called the People Meter. A new way to measure radio ratings, it took our station from the top to the bottom. It essentially said that 10 years of ratings were all wrong and that nobody was listening to the show. Our sponsors had plenty of customers, our listeners determined the outcome of elections, station events always drew well, and then a switch flipped.
Personally, I think it’s an unreliable system that is going to cost radio companies untold hundreds of millions and it might even gut the talk-radio industry.
But I would think that, it’s just said I’m a failure and the last 15 years of my working life have been a waste.
Of course, being suspicious is my stock-in-trade, and the timing of my termination and the stand I’ve been taking on the looming senatorial primary and the fact I’ve been opposing a candidate who made $600,000 from one of our largest advertisers last year, does make me wonder. Strings get pulled in the real world, and politics is hardball, and our program’s effort helped tip the nominating convention, so it’s not impossible that I lost my job in Salt Lake so that somebody else could get a job in Washington.
Just in case, I’ll have columns tomorrow and Monday on the race and the candidates, for those still deciding how to vote.
But whatever it was, it also cost my son his job. He got into radio independently of me, hired on at a sister station in Salt Lake, learned how to operate the station I was at, became the go-to guy, got promoted to my show, and was fired yesterday.
Because of his last name.
If I end up bitter, that’ll be the reason.
I end this show with a clear conscience, though. I always saw it as a responsibility from God. There was a reason a giant radio company picked an obscure failed Mormon from upstate New York and plopped him into a morning show in Salt Lake City. I always figured that that reason was because God wanted it, and I was supposed to do something while I was there. So I got up hours before dawn every day and told God that if he would help me, I would do my best. Some days weren’t as good as others, but they were always my best.
And because I had, from the very first, asked for his help, I relied on it. I always tried to listen to the Spirit and talk about what I thought it was telling me to talk about when I thought it was telling me to talk about it. If a thought came into my head that felt like it could be a prompting, I dropped whatever I was on and went with that.
Maybe I’m nuts, but 10 years ago I made a promise to God about that job and I kept it. I had a feeling about why I was there, and though I’d rather not say what that feeling was, I earnestly tried to live up to it.
And if God has released me from that responsibility, then so be it.
And if he hasn’t, then I’m sure he’ll work something out.
I’d like to work in Salt Lake another 20 or 30 years. But if I’m never on the air there another day, I will always be grateful for what that job allowed me to see and do, for the things it allowed me to say and the people it allowed me to meet. There is no doubt – the unpleasantness of a corporate firing notwithstanding – that working at KNRS was an incredible blessing and gift, and I have to be grateful to the company and bosses who gave it to me.
I got to meet Cleon Skousen. I sat with Arnold Friberg in his studio. I was humbled to learn that, when he came back in from being driven to early morning meetings, Gordon B. Hinckley had his car radio tuned to my program. I broadcast all day as our nation was attacked on September 11th. I got to meet truly decent elected leaders, like Gary Herbert and Carl Wimmer, and I was able to help boost others into leadership, like Jason Chaffetz and, hopefully, Tim Bridgewater. I met John H. Groberg and Dave Ramsey. I made countless friends. I saw real beauty.
I was a blessed man.
And I still am.
But like countless other Americans, I have to find a new way to support my family. Though I still work for the same company in Rochester, I really made my living in Salt Lake. Making more money in Rochester could be difficult, and making more money elsewhere in the country, especially Utah, could cause conflict with the company that employs me in Rochester.
It all makes me wish I’d had the time and discipline to write that book six months ago.
For a couple of weeks I’m going to catch up on my sleep and exercise, and I’m going to till up more land and put in a bigger garden – it looks like I could be needing it.
Then I’m going to have to make some money.
Unfortunately, the things I’ve done for a living – newspapering and talk radio – are not industries that look to be hiring this century. There’s no money in books, I couldn’t get nominated to run for Congress, I don’t know how to get hired writing political speeches, and nobody gets paid in the blogosphere.
But I’ll lose sleep over that later.
For a couple of days I’m just going to mourn.
I loved that job. And they took it away.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
