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"So we must have been having fun": Ric and Dan Welcome George Hale · The Ric and Dan Show

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) He's Rick Tyler, and he's Dan Cashman.
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And I'm George Hale.
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And I'm on the Rick and Dan Show.
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In Maine, we often hear, you can't get
0:10
there from here.
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These are the stories of the risk takers,
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the trailblazers, those who turn obstacles into opportunities
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every day and found their way to get
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there from here.
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And today, they're on the Rick and Dan
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Show.
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Hey, one, two, three, four, five.
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Yeah, it looks like he's...
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And one more time.
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Five, four, three.
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Is this your first day in audio?
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Did you see that we expanded our entire
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podcast studio to six microphones?
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I did.
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We had to order gear and have it
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brought in.
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I know.
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I know.
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Don't be such a...
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Actually, it's small but nice.
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Thank you.
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That's what she said.
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But those things on the wall will fall
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off.
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We keep licking them and sticking them back
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up.
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Yeah.
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Same stuff you got in there.
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That's also what she said.
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Mm-hmm.
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Okay.
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This part isn't being run, is it?
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Oh, you know darn well we're going to
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keep it.
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George and I were just talking about my
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inability to stay awake, George's inability to fall
1:01
asleep, but I will say that one of
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the ways that I do stay awake is
1:04
with Coffee Hound Coffee Company.
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They are in our coffee mugs today.
1:08
And they've got a phrase that...
1:09
Wander, explore, caffeinate.
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I was going to say it's an indelibly
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printed in our brain.
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Coffee Hound Coffee.
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It helps us stay awake.
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CoffeeHoundCoffeeCo.com.
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Dan's show puts us to sleep.
1:20
Why do you go there?
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I don't know.
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Every time, George, every time he's got to
1:24
get a dig in about the legacy of
1:27
the night show of which dozens and dozens
1:29
of people worked on every single show, you're
1:31
criticizing all of them.
1:33
How dare you?
1:34
How dare he?
1:34
I learned it from him.
1:36
How dare he?
1:40
You're going to be the Grand Marshal of
1:41
the 4th of July Parade.
1:42
Yeah.
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That's the third time I've done this.
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I've done that once before with George Garnier,
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my boss and I.
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That's right.
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I knew that.
1:53
Yeah.
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And I did the Arlington Old Home Parade
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and I did Belfast.
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When it was the Boiler Festival.
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Yes.
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I sit well on the top of convertibles.
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We also hear some of the backseat antics
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you've had in convertibles in years gone by
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too.
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Well, no, I'm old enough, Rick, that I
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had rumble seat memories.
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That was the greatest thing ever.
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Having a rumble seat?
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Your girlfriend's mother and father would take you
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for a ride and they would be inside
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the car.
2:28
But you would be sitting outside the car
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in the rumble seat and you would do
2:33
everything within your power to make it rumble.
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The 4th of July Parade, if it's the
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4th of July Parade that it's always been,
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will start in Brewer at the shopping mall
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and go down.
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Now, I bet in years past you ran
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that route.
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I did.
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With Bunkers.
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What's the name of that run?
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Walter Hunt.
2:54
Walter Hunt.
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So you've run that route.
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Yes.
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I've ran it a couple of times.
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One of the times that I ran it
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was 30 days after I'd had open heart
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surgery.
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And they put in a, I don't know,
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some kind of filter and they put in
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a pacemaker.
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My wife did not know I was going
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to run on the race.
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I say, I'll meet you at the finish
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line.
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So she was there and I came up
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over the hill and my wife takes a
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look and here I come over the hill,
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not fast, but I'm over the hill.
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And she's screaming, get off the street, get
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out of the street, you're not supposed to
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be there.
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I figured if I'm going to go, let's
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go here in the middle of nowhere, you
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know.
3:36
Middle of nowhere.
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Yeah.
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A lot of people have asked me my
3:40
thoughts on your broadcast career.
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And two things came to mind.
3:43
Something I didn't realize until Dan, your special
3:46
episode of the Night Show.
3:47
And when I was sitting backstage with you
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and someone said something to me and I
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hadn't realized it.
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It was Tole.
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Tole.
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Tole Tompkins said.
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And he looked at me and he said,
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how long did you work with George?
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And I said, 21.
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We were going on 22 years.
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And he went, huh.
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And then he stopped and he looked at
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me and he said, that's about the longest
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I think anyone's worked with him.
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Well the number shocked me really.
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Every time you've said that, I've said, no,
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it hasn't been that long.
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No.
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So we must have been having fun.
4:17
I remember I came in to do your
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10th anniversary show.
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Oh yeah.
4:20
And talk with you guys.
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And that does not seem like it was
4:24
that long ago, but it was 11 years
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ago.
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Well, my wife once said, how did we
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get so old so fast?
4:30
And you said, honey, you haven't aged a
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day.
4:33
You haven't aged a day.
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Right?
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Yeah, it was quite a while.
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Yeah.
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The other thing that came to mind was,
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and I've said, you could have gone anywhere
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to be a broadcaster.
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And you were in a lot of places.
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Why'd you stay here?
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Well, it's a question people ask me frequently,
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and it's recently a lot, because they made
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note of the 73 years.
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I was working in New Jersey.
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I'd done radio in New Jersey.
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My brother was a program director, WBRE and
5:07
WSCR in Pennsylvania at the time.
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He left broadcasting.
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But I knew that I wanted to be
5:14
in New York, because I grew up in
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two places.
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I grew up in Florida, and I grew
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up in New York.
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But trying to get a job at one
5:21
of those cattle calls in New York was
5:23
impossible.
5:24
Everybody from Hollywood was coming into New York.
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TV was just really getting going.
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So I found that Van Gorman was looking
5:34
for the staff announcer.
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You don't hear that expression anymore.
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Or you don't hear Booth's announcer anymore.
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So I got my old Chevy, and I
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drove up.
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And there was a fellow here, a nice
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man, Bob Patton and Dick Bronson.
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And they auditioned to me on a Saturday
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morning and hired me for the job.
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And I got in my old Chevy and
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drove back to New York.
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And I told my brother and my father,
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you're not going to believe this, but I'm
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moving to Van Gorman.
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And my father looked at me and he
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said, well, that's right near Hudson Bay, isn't
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it?
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And my brother said, they shoot deer behind
6:17
every tree.
6:18
They were both kind of making fun of
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me.
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So I said, look, I'm going up there
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for one year.
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I'm going to try to learn what I
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don't know about television and then get the
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heck back down to New York where, you
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know, that's where you wanted to be.
6:31
I was at the NBC school at Radio
6:35
City Music Hall, and they had some nice
6:38
dancers.
6:39
Rockettes.
6:40
I dated a rockette, as a matter of
6:42
fact.
6:42
She's still talking about it.
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Yeah, she's still, she's 97 now.
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Is she still kicking?
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I think she kicked a bucket.
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But it was a really high bucket.
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So I had been an athlete, I'd been
6:55
a guy interested in sports media.
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And what shocked me about this place.
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I came up and I couldn't believe the
7:03
amount of media attention paid to high school
7:06
athletics.
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I mean, in New York, I was a
7:09
stringer for the Times, the New York Times.
7:11
And if I got an article in the
7:14
Times on the weekend, it was like two
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lines.
7:18
Curtis High School beat McKee High School 75
7:21
to 74 with a bucket buster.
7:24
And that was it.
7:25
And here they were televising it and broadcasting
7:27
it.
7:28
People were talking about it all week long,
7:30
and it kind of fascinated me.
7:33
And one town hated another town.
7:35
You went to what school?
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And you see some of that today.
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So it kind of caught my attention.
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And the more I stuck with it, of
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course, eventually I met someone and got married.
7:46
But I just said, I like this place.
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Now, I had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio,
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Jacksonville, Florida, New Orleans, New York City.
7:56
Those places had very little attraction to me.
8:00
I mean, once you've lived in New York,
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you've been there.
8:02
You know, it wasn't like, gee, this is
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big and the buildings are tall.
8:08
I thought Maine was more attractive than New
8:11
York.
8:12
You love New York.
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I do.
8:14
But my favorite place is Eastern Maine.
8:17
My second favorite place is New York City.
8:20
It has a lot.
8:21
I mean, most people have never had their
8:24
supper in Horn and Hardart's Nickelodeon, where you
8:28
go and put money in a slot and
8:30
take a sandwich out.
8:32
You know, most people are not a gopher
8:35
at NBC, where you take people down the
8:38
aisle.
8:39
I can remember one of the quiz shows
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I worked, 21 or one of those things,
8:44
that they did in New York.
8:45
And I basically took people and put them
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in their seats.
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And I'm working at NBC.
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No, I wasn't.
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I was a gopher.
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It's still working.
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Yeah.
8:55
I've never asked you this.
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How proud were your parents of you becoming
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the broadcaster that you became?
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Well, first of all, my brother was a
9:05
broadcaster who won awards before me.
9:08
And then he later, he was also a
9:10
lawyer, spoke five languages.
9:11
And he became a lobbyist for all the
9:16
trucking companies in the country.
9:18
Now, how proud were they?
9:20
I suppose my mother was.
9:22
My father, not so much.
9:24
My father was an executive at an international
9:27
company.
9:29
It was called Codrington Motors.
9:31
George W.
9:33
Codrington Motors.
9:34
You get the picture here?
9:36
Oh, yeah.
9:36
Oh, yeah.
9:36
OK.
9:36
And it became the motor division of General
9:41
Motors.
9:41
My father was the assistant to the president.
9:44
Now, what did he think of me becoming
9:47
a radio announcer and not joining him?
9:50
He thought I was nuts.
9:52
He said, you're doing what?
9:54
He said, you're going to school.
9:56
I got you all set up for General
9:58
Motors school.
9:59
I know I want to be an announcer.
10:01
He looked at me and he said, well,
10:04
I thought I raised somebody smart.
10:06
So he wasn't awfully impressed.
10:08
Later, he was.
10:09
Later, he came up here and he set
10:11
in on a broadcast with me and I
10:13
did a ball game.
10:14
What was that?
10:16
70s, 80s?
10:17
Later, earlier?
10:19
60s, yeah.
10:20
Really?
10:20
Sure.
10:21
Well, I came here.
10:22
Remember, WABI-TV was the first post-war
10:27
television station to open up.
10:29
That's the reason I found out about it.
10:32
During the Korean War, I guess it would
10:35
have been Truman, put a freeze on all
10:37
new television stations because they needed the equipment
10:41
for the military.
10:42
So Channel 5 was the first one, Maine's
10:45
first station.
10:46
And then there was one in southern Maine
10:48
in Lewiston.
10:50
Later, it probably became Mount Washington.
10:53
And then WTWO came to Bangor.
10:57
Now WLBZ.
10:58
And Guy Gannett owned the newspaper.
11:02
And that's how WGY became what it is.
11:07
I don't know what the call letters are
11:08
anymore.
11:09
But it was after Guy Gannett who owned
11:12
the building out on Mount Hope Avenue.
11:15
When you hit that one year anniversary of
11:17
being in Bangor, did it occur to you
11:19
you had been here a year?
11:20
And did you make a conscious decision at
11:22
that point to stay?
11:23
Or did it kind of sail by you
11:25
when you looked in retrospect and said, oh,
11:27
I guess I've been here longer than I
11:28
thought?
11:29
A little bit of each.
11:30
It really was.
11:32
You got to be a little bit older
11:33
then.
11:36
The other fellow might remember.
11:39
Every radio, every small town in America, everyone
11:44
had a radio station.
11:47
Most of them were situated in hotels, doctors,
11:52
buildings where a doctor had a spare room
11:55
and he put in a radio station to
11:57
make some money.
11:58
And you would send tapes out, reel-to
12:00
-reel tapes.
12:01
And you would mail them.
12:02
And Broadcast Magazine had a whole section devoted
12:06
to people looking for staff, announcer, DJ types.
12:11
So I sent a ton of those out.
12:13
Got a lot of yeses.
12:15
Got some noes.
12:16
The closest I came was West Palm Beach,
12:19
Florida.
12:20
They wanted me.
12:21
And they wanted me to do some spring
12:22
training baseball and stuff.
12:23
My kids have often reminded me, we could
12:26
have been raised in Florida where it's warm.
12:30
But I turned it down.
12:31
And I stayed here because I liked the
12:33
place.
12:33
But I liked the people.
12:35
Remember, I was working with some giants.
12:38
I called them giants.
12:39
Dick Bronson, George Garnier, Lee Nelson, the same
12:44
family, same.
12:46
Lee Nelson of Channel 6 was the son
12:49
of Lee Nelson who worked for me.
12:51
Now, supermodel.
12:52
Yeah, terrific abs on that guy.
12:53
Yeah, supermodel.
12:55
Yeah.
12:55
And so it was the people, really.
12:58
And we had a star here named Hal
13:00
Shaw.
13:02
When TV first went on the air, you
13:03
became something special.
13:05
You'd walk down the street and people would
13:07
point at you.
13:09
He's on TV.
13:10
They had never seen TV.
13:12
You'd go into restaurants and people would come
13:14
over and ask if they could have an
13:16
autograph.
13:17
Talked about where.
13:18
And I think it was Jeannie that once
13:20
expressed that.
13:21
Can we just go out to dinner in
13:23
peace and not have someone come over?
13:26
And what's the fanboy?
13:27
Is that the term?
13:28
And fanboy over you.
13:29
And maybe that's why Pilot's Grill was so
13:31
special because they would put you in the
13:33
Oak Room and set you aside so you
13:34
could have your privacy.
13:35
That's a true story.
13:37
I don't drink.
13:38
So we'd go to a party and I'd
13:40
be sitting there drinking my Coke.
13:42
She'd say, this is the most boring night.
13:45
She said, all you do is sit here
13:47
and talk to people.
13:48
Well, I talked to him because he talked
13:50
to me.
13:52
And Hal Shaw, I mentioned Hal, he was
13:55
a literal god.
13:56
He went on to Washington, D.C., became
13:59
Ranger Hal.
14:00
While he was here, he was hit by
14:02
a bus, injured severely.
14:04
He lived up in Arno.
14:07
And they were running daily bulletins on his
14:10
house.
14:11
He was so popular.
14:12
But we ran locals.
14:14
Everything was local.
14:16
What's her name?
14:17
Miss Nancy.
14:18
Miss Nancy.
14:20
Somebody mentioned his name the other day, Norm
14:22
Lambert.
14:23
We played the organ.
14:25
Dinner time, right?
14:25
Dinner time.
14:26
Dinner time.
14:27
And I had two or three lines with
14:28
Norm that broke him up.
14:31
He would not talk.
14:32
Would not introduce his own songs.
14:34
Give me a list of what he was
14:35
going to play.
14:36
And yeah, you know how organ players are.
14:38
He came out knowing me and knowing the
14:41
personality I had.
14:43
I walked out one night and I said,
14:44
I've got to do something here.
14:46
Hi, Norm.
14:47
How are you?
14:48
And he'd nod and he'd give a little
14:49
flourish.
14:50
I said, and what's on your organ tonight?
14:55
Norm Lambert fell out of the seat.
14:58
He literally was on the floor and he
15:01
was beating on the floor.
15:03
I said, I have to say something, Norm.
15:06
I mean, I've been here for a year
15:08
or close to it.
15:10
Now, Norm, this was the old style of
15:13
New York.
15:14
The dance bands they had in hotels.
15:17
Now, here's the lovely Mary Jones singing, If
15:21
I Loved You, you know.
15:22
And I'd have to come out and say,
15:24
here's our man, Norm, playing the theme from.
15:27
It was boring.
15:28
He was great.
15:29
And I remember the sponsor, Maine Central Railroad.
15:33
They sponsored Norm Lambert's dinner music.
15:37
On the nights when you were there with
15:41
Norm, were you also doing morning drive that
15:44
day?
15:44
Oh, yeah.
15:45
Okay.
15:45
This is what blows my mind.
15:47
We look at ourselves, Dan, and we think
15:49
we work stupid schedules because we work way
15:51
too much.
15:52
You're getting up before the crack of dawn,
15:55
getting in morning drive.
15:56
You might be at some point in time
15:58
going and covering a sports event.
16:00
Not sometimes.
16:01
Yeah, true.
16:02
And then finally, and now you've got to
16:04
be with Norm for the dinner hour.
16:06
And by the time you get home, what'd
16:08
you get?
16:08
Like two, three hours of sleep before you
16:09
had to get up and do it again?
16:11
Well, I had afternoons off.
16:12
I did see the kids after school.
16:14
I would do the morning show.
16:16
John McRae had been the big morning man
16:18
here.
16:19
John was my boss, and he later passed
16:22
away.
16:22
Ralph Hunt was the morning man.
16:24
He left.
16:25
Jim Winters, who went on to be a
16:28
vice president of a major league baseball club.
16:32
He did it.
16:33
And then it opened up and they said,
16:35
well, you're the new morning man.
16:38
So I started doing the morning show.
16:40
Then I would come back for the news
16:42
at six and do sports.
16:45
And if there was a game, I would
16:47
go out and do the game.
16:48
Was someone writing your sports for you?
16:50
You're researching it and prepping it yourself.
16:52
Yeah.
16:53
Everything was on cue cards.
16:55
We would come in in the afternoon and
16:57
write everything in wax, black wax pencil.
17:02
On a white card.
17:03
And some guy would hold it up.
17:05
So you should have done that with a
17:06
night show instead of going through all the
17:07
cardboard.
17:08
Yeah.
17:09
Well, you know.
17:10
Yeah.
17:11
And the first one I did was for
17:14
Viner Music.
17:16
And the idiot boy held it upside down.
17:23
I kept trying to do the commercial and
17:26
I kept going, flip it, flip it over.
17:29
TV was so different.
17:31
Everything live.
17:32
Well, we had a thing called Kineoscope where
17:35
it was film of live.
17:38
All shows at that time in Bangor were
17:42
done on film.
17:43
We had no live interconnection.
17:45
That came later.
17:47
Or whoever was on.
17:49
There were four or five of them.
17:50
I wasn't the only guy.
17:51
And you would come out and what I
17:54
had the most trouble with, they also added
17:57
to my schedule the host of the 10
18:00
o'clock movie at night.
18:02
If I didn't have a game, I came
18:03
in at 10 o'clock at night and
18:04
I did the intros to the movie for
18:08
the Harvard Theater.
18:10
Is this every night or weekly?
18:12
Every night.
18:14
I didn't do it every night because I
18:16
had a game.
18:16
But Harvard Beer sponsored it.
18:19
And a man with a long reputation here
18:22
in Maine named Herman Zahagian, who owned the
18:25
Fairview Wine Company, was the sponsor.
18:29
Now, the problem we had was, remember now,
18:32
I'm fresh out of the Navy.
18:34
I'd gone to school after the Navy, 22,
18:37
23.
18:37
So I was young.
18:39
On a Monday morning, after I'd done about
18:41
the third or fourth show, a group of
18:45
ladies arrived at the studio demanding to see
18:49
the general manager.
18:50
They were from the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
18:53
And they wanted to know why this young
18:57
boy, they called me a boy, was selling
19:00
the devil's brew on this thing called television.
19:05
And I remember his name was Lee Gorman.
19:06
He was a funny guy.
19:08
Called me and he said, can't you grow
19:09
a beard?
19:12
So morning drive, run and cover sports, get
19:15
back here with Norm and his organ, sometimes
19:18
be here for 10 o'clock.
19:20
Do you think that they took advantage of
19:22
you?
19:22
No.
19:22
Because you were the kid that was going
19:23
to say yes?
19:24
Oh, yeah.
19:25
I volunteered for most of it.
19:28
I left Bangor, did the morning show, which
19:31
went six to nine in those days.
19:34
Then you went ABC at nine.
19:36
Then I was off, went to what is
19:38
now the airport, it was an old wooden
19:42
building, I think, out there at that time.
19:44
Got on the Northeast airliner, the Yellowbird, flew
19:48
to Boston, grabbed a flight to St. Louis,
19:51
and did a basketball game in St. Louis
19:55
the same night that I had opened up
19:58
the morning show at 6 a.m. No,
20:01
I didn't do.
20:02
I couldn't get back that night.
20:04
But I was there.
20:05
There I was out in St. Louis doing
20:07
Maine against St. Louis.
20:09
People would ask me, how did you do
20:11
that?
20:11
Well, I fell asleep on the airplane.
20:13
I spent many Christmases, Christmas Eve, New Year's,
20:17
New Year's Eve doing such things as that
20:20
in my...
20:20
The family was okay with that?
20:21
Oh, no.
20:22
My wife, my wife, oh, she's okay with
20:25
it.
20:26
Yeah, I mean, the kids didn't know much
20:27
different, but they were young.
20:29
But she, you know, we would comment on,
20:31
I missed a lot.
20:34
Sure.
20:34
I missed births, at least one birth.
20:37
I missed my mother-in-law passing away.
20:40
That was a hard night.
20:41
I was doing the College World Series.
20:44
I got a phone call prior to the
20:46
first inning from my wife telling me that
20:49
her mother had just died and I'm in
20:52
Omaha, Nebraska.
20:54
And I said, I'll get on the plane,
20:55
come back.
20:56
She said, no, your job's with the baseball
20:58
team.
20:58
And I did the game.
21:00
Wow.
21:00
What if you had gotten on that plane?
21:02
Were there backup plans back then for somebody
21:04
to step in last minute like that?
21:07
Did you have a partner in the booth?
21:09
Along the way, Steve Martin came along.
21:11
Gary Thorne, I hired him.
21:13
He came along.
21:15
Actually, the guy that I replaced on basketball
21:18
in the tournament was Bud Lovett.
21:22
And he wasn't a broadcaster.
21:24
In fact, he was funny.
21:27
But my first tournament was at the old,
21:31
old Bangalore Auditorium.
21:32
Now, remember, there was an old...
21:34
Older, older.
21:35
It was a wooden booth.
21:36
And we televised it.
21:39
I said, we, the station, televised it.
21:41
Didn't have any equipment.
21:43
And Walter Dixon, our great general manager and
21:47
chief engineer, hired RCA and their equipment and
21:51
their team to come in and do the
21:54
engineering.
21:55
So RCA brought the equipment up.
21:57
They brought up the guys that run the
21:59
cameras and ran the shading and all that
22:01
kind of stuff.
22:02
And that's how we did the tournament.
22:03
But my job, the first job, was to
22:07
do live commercials for W.T. Grant on
22:10
the floor.
22:11
I didn't do play-by-play.
22:13
Bud Lovett did it with somebody else, another
22:15
writer.
22:16
Writers owned sports in those days.
22:19
And the commercials for W.T. Grant, I
22:21
remember them well, were for ladies' underwear.
22:25
Now, I want you to understand that the
22:28
people that had me and what we would
22:31
call the IFB now talked to me the
22:34
whole game.
22:35
And you can just imagine what these engineers
22:38
from New York and New Jersey were saying
22:40
to me while I did the live ladies'
22:44
underwear commercial.
22:45
Oh.
22:48
Could you have said no to that?
22:49
No, I would.
22:50
I never said no to anything.
22:52
He's here.
22:54
Point taken.
22:55
Well, I will tell you the truth.
22:57
It sounds like you're bragging, and I don't
23:01
want to ever sound that way.
23:03
I was criticized severely by Walter Dixon and
23:09
Dick Bronson for doing too much.
23:12
Well, yeah.
23:13
Walter was afraid that I was on too
23:16
much.
23:17
He said, we'll tune you on the radio.
23:19
Then you come in, you have to go
23:20
to TV.
23:21
Then you come back in the evening, TV.
23:22
It wasn't that they would get bored.
23:24
He just said, somebody's going to accuse us
23:26
of working you to death.
23:27
So they weren't concerned about there being audience
23:30
fatigue.
23:31
No.
23:31
And they weren't concerned about you getting burnt
23:33
out.
23:34
They were concerned about the accusation that they're
23:36
making you do too much.
23:38
Yeah.
23:38
Remember, I had hair.
23:40
I was young.
23:43
Somebody said that girls liked me.
23:46
I think you said that girls liked you.
23:50
Well, it's hard to explain, especially you would
23:54
understand better, but still difficult, the way people
23:58
looked at you and talked to you.
24:00
I mean, if you got on the bus
24:01
and you rode the bus, everything came to
24:04
a stop on the bus.
24:05
This is the first year of television.
24:08
And I was doing pitch work at times
24:11
for television and dinette sets and things like
24:15
that.
24:15
And there was a place in Bangor called
24:18
the New Central Furniture Company, not far from
24:22
where all those churches up the hill.
24:25
The two characters who ran the New Central
24:27
Furniture Company, their nicknames were Pappy Wrappy and
24:31
Smiling Dave.
24:32
Doesn't that sound like a furniture outfit?
24:35
Sounds like a commercial that could be written
24:37
today.
24:38
Well, Pappy Wrappy and Smiling Dave, this is
24:40
George Hill in the window of New Central
24:43
Furniture Company.
24:44
And we were selling beds and TVs.
24:46
You can't imagine the kind of people buy
24:48
anything you offered.
24:50
Yeah.
24:50
Well, Mitch Sleeper made it.
24:52
Oh, wow.
24:53
He made us a hero out of himself.
24:56
Well, I'll tell you the one that I
24:58
hated after a while was John Paul.
25:01
Big or tall, small.
25:02
Big or tall, John Paul fits them all.
25:04
Fits them all.
25:04
John Paul fits them all.
25:06
I did all of that.
25:07
And they sent me away to school.
25:08
For that?
25:09
No, they sent me away to be a
25:10
pitchman.
25:11
I went to Boston, and one of our
25:15
big clients was Sturdy Dynette.
25:17
It was a dynette that had a ceramic
25:21
top.
25:21
And I would set it on fire, and
25:24
I would hit it with a hammer, and
25:27
I would open the very easy to open
25:30
sliding door that the engineers had in between
25:35
commercials nailed shut.
25:39
And it added something that would blow up
25:42
when I lit it up.
25:43
Was the transition from that style of TV
25:46
to what we're more accustomed to today difficult
25:49
for you?
25:50
No, not really, because in the meantime, I
25:55
had taken up horse race announcing and automobile
25:58
announcing.
25:59
I went to make some money.
26:01
You weren't making a hell of a lot
26:03
of money.
26:04
And so I did things like that.
26:06
And they're all pitchers.
26:09
So pitching was kind of a...
26:11
Jack Barnett, I remember him, was the pitchman.
26:14
They sent me away to Boston, and he
26:16
taught me how to pitch.
26:18
He was the guy at the fair that
26:20
did the knives and all the things that
26:22
would 16 different ways.
26:24
And he made a ton of money doing
26:26
that.
26:26
So they paid him to teach me how
26:29
to do what he was doing.
26:30
Dan and I recently talked about having to
26:33
reinvent ourselves for our careers.
26:36
And part of that episode...
26:38
No, all of that episode was inspired by
26:40
you, because you talked to us about reinventing
26:44
yourself, starting as a radio announcer, becoming a
26:47
television personality, doing weather, sports announcing, Norman as
26:51
organ, eventually becoming a talk show host, and
26:55
racing and serving under four or five governors?
26:58
I think there were six before we got
27:00
done.
27:00
Six, holy cow!
27:01
One was Governor Brennan.
27:04
Actually, I had worked for Governor Hildreth.
27:06
Hildreth, right, because of the television station.
27:09
And one night, the phone rang.
27:13
This is Governor Brennan.
27:14
Really?
27:15
You are the new commissioner of racing in
27:18
Maine?
27:20
All right, thank you.
27:21
No ask.
27:22
Thank you very much.
27:23
Thanks for calling.
27:25
Sure it wasn't a robocall?
27:27
I remember when I went into his office,
27:28
this was an indication of my entrance into
27:31
politics.
27:32
I got into the inner sanctum, the governor's
27:35
office.
27:36
Some people in there I knew.
27:37
And he looked up and he says, glad
27:40
to meet you, happy to appoint you.
27:42
And then he said, have you ever done
27:44
anything that's going to embarrass me?
27:47
I said, sure.
27:49
Today?
27:50
He said, like paying your taxes or being
27:53
arrested.
27:54
I said, no, I've avoided those.
27:55
He said, okay.
27:56
I don't want them coming back and saying
27:58
I hired a corker.
27:59
And then it was one governor after that
28:02
reappointed me, particularly Baldacci.
28:05
But the reinvention, were you intentionally reinventing yourself?
28:10
Or is it circumstance came to you and
28:13
then, okay, I guess I better become this
28:16
person or I better become this professional, I
28:19
should say.
28:19
I don't know which came first, the chicken
28:21
or the egg.
28:22
I think it was more me wanting to
28:25
do it.
28:25
I was very interested in politics in those
28:28
days.
28:28
Less than I am today.
28:31
So Maine was rock rib Republican.
28:33
I had worked for a Republican governor.
28:36
Brennan was a Democrat.
28:38
And all the Democrats in the area liked
28:41
me because I was young.
28:43
And I was trying to remember Margaret Chase
28:46
Smith as the heroine of all heroines.
28:49
I liked her.
28:50
She was terrific.
28:52
It wasn't like it is today.
28:54
Governor from Presque Isle, he was a Republican.
28:58
He was a harnessed race guy.
28:59
Got to be friends with him.
29:01
Was that Governor Reed?
29:03
John Reed.
29:04
Testing my own memory.
29:05
I'm going to give myself a high five
29:06
for that.
29:07
Thank you.
29:07
I walked out onto the field with John
29:09
Reed.
29:10
I introduced him and everybody booed.
29:12
And I said, John, they're booing you.
29:16
He said, yeah, I know.
29:16
They do it all the time.
29:18
Well, it's good to see not much has
29:19
changed.
29:21
Nothing has changed.
29:22
I heard recently, correct me if this is
29:24
wrong, but that you were the person who
29:27
convinced WABI-TV to start televising University of
29:31
Maine games.
29:32
Even if it's not, just take credit for
29:34
it.
29:34
I don't want to take credit for George
29:36
Garnier, who was a graduate of the University
29:39
of Maine and a broadcaster.
29:40
He wanted the games televised.
29:43
And it's true that I was very friendly
29:45
with the coach, very friendly with the athletic
29:47
director and the president.
29:49
And I pushed hard to get the games
29:52
on TV with one camera.
29:55
Black and white, but without George Garnier.