It hasn’t always been like this with me. I mean, I didn’t always have to have things so
exhaustively explained to me before I could trust. In fact, when I was younger, I always
trusted that everything would go right.
I was a person of unbridled optimism. One might even call it reckless optimism. Given the
fact that I’d grown up being afraid of God, this state of mind might seem to have been doubly
reckless. Still, that’s the way it was with me. As a child, I always “knew” I was going to get
what I wanted—and I always did. Usually, I might add, without much effort. This really
bothered my brother, who used to complain loudly that “Neale has all the luck.” Once I
overheard my dad responding to this complaint. “Neale,” he said, “makes his own luck.”
He was right. And part of the reason was my parents. My mother imbued me with a love of
life, and all things creative, and my father blessed me with self-confidence. No matter what
the challenge, he asked me over and over again, “How are you going to do it if you don’t try?”
He also told me something when I was about fifteen years old that I have always
remembered. “Son,” he said, “there’s no ‘right way’ to do something. There’s only the way
you’re doing it. Make your way the right way.”
“How do I do that?” I asked. And he answered, “By getting it done.” Thirty-five years later the
Nike Company put this neat little philosophy into a three-word slogan.
Just do it.
As I said earlier, as a freshman in high school I jumped right into things. All those
extracurricular activities kept me wildly busy, and I did well in the classes I liked: English,
speech, political science, music, foreign languages. I have to admit that I barely squeaked by
in the subjects that bored me—biology, algebra, geometry—but the University of Wisconsin
at Milwaukee accepted my enrollment anyway... on probation.
I didn’t last very long. The dean of men asked me to give up my chair after just three
semesters, but I wasn’t too upset. I was impatient with life, and I wanted to get into radio,
right then, right there.
After I flunked out of college, my father said to me, “Okay, son, you’re on your own. I did what
I could for you, but you want to do it your way.
Part of me was scared out of my mind and part of me was so excited I couldn’t stand it. I’d
already been logging some onairtime working gratis for a tiny fm station that had just gone on
the air. And when Dad cut me loose, I marched into the general manager’s office at another
fm station a little further up the dial, and boldly told him that he should hire me.
Larry LaRue threw his head back and cackled, “And why should I do that?”
I didn’t miss a beat.
“Because I’m better than anyone you’ve got on the air.”
Larry stopped laughing, but the smile never left his face.
“Kid,” he said, “I like you. You got chutzpah. “(I didn’t know what the word meant then. I
remember thinking, This is good?) “Tell you what.” He squeaked toward me in his swivel
chair. “You come back here at eight o’clock tonight and I’ll have the night man show you the