That’s awesome. That could be a great depiction of how it really is.
Could be?
Like I said, that’s a great depiction of how it really is. And now, of course, I know that. After
my conversation with God, all of this became clear. But back then I thought it was just
another break when one of our better on-air talents, a fellow named Johnny Walker, left the
station two months after I arrived, to take a job in Richmond, Virginia. Soon after that,
Johnny’s boss in Richmond left to join a company that had purchased a small am outlet in
Annapolis, Maryland. Johnny Walker didn’t want to leave Richmond, but said that he knew of
a new, young talent that Dean could use to help give the Annapolis station a new image and
a good sound. That new, young talent was me.
Within a blink I was off to the East Coast, my mother wringing her hands, asking Dad to stop
me. My father said, “Let the boy go. It’s his time.”
“But what if this is all a mistake?” Mom asked.
“Then it’ll be a mistake,” my father said simply. “He knows where we are.
I arrived in Annapolis in August 1963, with one month left in my nineteenth year. My starting
salary was $50 a week, but, hey, I was on real radio! This was not fm, this was am. The kind
of radio they had in cars. The kind they took in little portables to beaches. And by my twenty-
first birthday I had become the production manager of the station, in charge of making all of
its commercials.
I’m telling you these stories, and this one in particular, because I want you to see how God
works in our lives; how we do have a “friendship with God” and don’t even know it. I want to
illustrate how God uses people, places, and events to help us on our way. Or, rather, how He
allows us to, giving us the creative power to determine the reality of our lives—although I
wouldn’t have put it that way then.
By 1966, I’d worked my way into the production manager’s job at a radio station in a city in
the deep south, which I’m not going to name, because I do not wish to embarrass or anger its
present residents. Things are different there now, I’m sure, but in 1966 I thought it was a
mistake for me to go there. There are no mistakes in God’s world was not a concept I had
learned yet. I only see now that what happened was all part of my education, a preparation
for the larger work that I was to do in the world.
What made me think it was a big mistake for me to be in southern city was the racial attitude
that I found there. It was the mid-sixties, and the Civil Rights Act had just been signed by
President Johnson. It had become law because it was needed (just as anti-hate crime
legislation is needed today), and nowhere was that need more apparent than in some
bastions of longstanding racial prejudice in certain corners of the deep south. I was in just
such a corner—in more ways than one. I wanted out. I hated it.
When I first drove into town, I needed some gas. Pulling into a service station I was shocked
to find a cardboard sign stuck to every gas pump that read: WHITES ONLY. “Coloreds” got their gas
at a pump ‘round back. Restaurants, bars, hotels, theatres, the bus station and other public
places were similarly segregated.
Now, being from Milwaukee, I had never seen such things. Not that Milwaukee, or any other
northern city, was free of racial prejudice. But I’d never been confronted with such blatant