ropes. At nine o’clock, you go on. I’ll be listening. If I don’t call you by nine-thirty, get out of
there, and don’t ever let me see you again.”
His grin became mischievous.
“Fair enough,” I chirped, reaching out to shake his hand. Then I added, “Be hearing from you
tonight.” I walked out—and nearly lost my lunch in the parking lot.
I was still sick to my stomach when I took the mike that night. I gave a tentative station break
and rolled right into music. A couple of songs later it was 9:28. There was no call, and I was
pretty dejected as I prepared to let the regular night guy take over. He poked his head into
the room just as I was gathering my things.
“The boss is on the back line,” he said, and left. I picked up the phone.
“You’re hired,” Larry grunted. “Stay on ‘til eleven. Be in my office tomorrow at nine.”
I’ve never forgotten Larry LaRue for giving me that break. A different kind of person might
have thrown me out of the place. Years later, when I was a program director at a radio station
in Baltimore, I did my best to pass on the favor, using what I had come to call La Rule LaRue:
always give the kid a chance.
I had plenty of kids wanting to break into the business knocking on my door. I couldn’t just
stick them into the studio and put em on the air the way Larry did—we were too important a
station in too big a market to get away with that—but I always invited them into my office and
gave their audition tape a fair listen. I gave ‘em tips, too, on what I thought they needed to do
to improve. I never hired any of them on the spot, though. I guess those days were over in
radio. They certainly are today. There’s no place where you can earn your spurs anymore.
Today you’ve got to hit the ground running in any profession. My generation may have been
the last to be able to sneak in through the side door. And that’s too bad. We need more
places where kids can serve their apprenticeships. The pressure to succeed that is placed on
today’s twenty- and twenty-five-year-olds is enormous.
To make matters worse, many are now more ill-equipped than ever. Which is something I’d
like to talk about. The education I received at South Division High School in Milwaukee was
equal to what a community college graduate would receive today—if he was lucky
You must improve your education systems, reigniting the spirit of inquiry, and the joy of
learning, in your schools. I gave you some wonderful clues on how you might do that in
Conversations with God, book 2.1 will not repeat them here. Rather, I will invite you to review
them and to put them into practice.
Put them into practice?
Life is a process of re-creation. You are invited to empower the world to re-create the
experience of “school” in the next grandest version of the greatest vision you ever held about
what that is.
Re-creating school is not all we need to do. We need to make it clear that we are never going
to ignite the thinking process and encourage independent inquiry if we allow our children to
spend twenty hours a week watching television, then twenty hours more glued to video
games. Children will not learn much that way.
On the contrary, they will learn a great deal. They will learn how to seek instant gratification,
how to expect all life problems to resolve themselves in twenty-eight and a half minutes, and