Autobiography Chapter 6 - Broadcasting Part 3: Radio During My College Years

CHAPTER 6 Broadcasting Memories, Part 3: Radio During My College Years

by Paul Pakusch

While I was a senior in high school, a family friend gave me the birthday gift of several nights spent in his dorm room at SUNY Geneseo.  I was looking for a college to attend and he thought it would be a nice way for me to experience college life.  He also included meal coupons in the package deal so I could eat.

I spent many hours of that time on campus at the college radio stations, WGBC-AM and WGSU-FM, chatting with other Communications students and learning how college radio worked.  WGBC was a carrier current station, meaning it used a building’s electrical system as an antenna. There were small transmitters in each of the dorm buildings, broadcasting at 640 AM.  It could only be picked up on radio receivers within or very close to the building, much like WiFi is today.  WGSU was and still is a licensed FM station that broadcasts to the local community at 89.3.

It was a no brainer for me to choose SUNY Geneseo.  It was affordable, it was close by, and it had the communications program that I wanted.  Since I didn’t have a car yet, it was also conveniently on the Trailways bus route.

My mom, family friend Ruth and sisters gave me the complimentary first ride to campus.  I was to share my dorm room with two other freshman; we were the first to arrive.  After checking into my room, my mom noticed that there were some knobs missing from the dresser that I chose as my own.  She unscrewed a couple of them from one of the other dressers to put on mine, leaving the other two dressers with knobs missing.  We were out of the room when my other two roommates, Vinnie and David, arrived. Apparently Vinnie’s family did the same thing. Later on, when I met them, David told me he had been the last one to arrive.  He said, “Funny thing we noticed.  When I got here, the dresser I got didn’t have any knobs on it.”

After my family left, I wasted no time heading up to the Blake B building, where the two radio stations were located.  WGBC was on the top floor and WGSU was down in the basement.  I met the student managers of the stations.  Neither was offering any DJ slots for new students yet, so I had to wait for auditions before I could start.

If you read my chapter about WGMC, you’ll recall that I had speech impediments due to my hearing loss. I never liked the way I sounded during my high school years.  Starting in college radio, I still had some issues to overcome, but it was at WGBC and WGSU that I honed my radio announcing skills.  I was also able to get speech therapy, which if memory serves correctly, came in 1980.  There were two older girls who did the therapy for me.  They were both seniors in the speech pathology program.  I was one of the cases in their student teaching programs.  They would analyze my speech patterns and come back at the next session with methods to help me overcome my impediments.  They had a teacher who would listen in on the sessions to monitor my progress and evaluate their work with me.  It was an actual course for me as well since I got college credit for it.

It didn’t take long for me to get past the required auditions for DJ slots at the two campus stations, and I kept them for every single semester of my college years.  In addition to shifts that played the standard formats of both stations, I was also offered a rock and roll oldies show on WGSU, which I hosted for a couple years.  I continued doing newscasts as well.

I held director and management positions at both stations.  At WGSU, I was Production Director during my junior year, and at WGBC, I was Station Manager for my senior year.  A number of my campus colleagues moved on to careers in radio and TV.  Quite a few ended up in the Rochester market; others moved on to other parts of the country.

I did get involved with the campus TV station, GSTV, but it was more of a footnote compared to campus radio.  I did some news anchoring and studio camera my first couple of years.

My college classes were all about radio and TV.  There were the required core classes, of course, but the ones that excited me were Radio Production, TV Production, Radio & TV Writing, Newspaper Writing, Public Speaking, Fiction Writing, Poetry Writing and similar courses.  Many people graduate from college with a degree that they never use; I’m happy I’ve been able to benefit at times in my life from most of the courses that I took in college.

In my sophomore year, I got a job as a DJ at the Statesmen Bar.  It could have happened sooner, but Leona’s policy was not to hire freshmen.  Tony and Leona Battaglia were the owners of the Statesmen.  I heard that Tony was the first person to get a liquor license in Geneseo after Prohibition ended.  I started going to the Statesmen soon after starting college in the Fall of 1979. Leona told me she believed freshmen should get settled in schoolwork their first year, so I would have to wait a year before becoming employed at the Statesmen.  In the meantime, she waived my admission fee every time I went there.  As soon as my sophomore year started, she hired me as a DJ.

A disco floor had been built in the back room, complete with mirror balls, flashing colored lights, and a DJ booth.  This was where I developed some of the dance moves I have today; some of it was by copying other people I saw dancing and some of it was from improvising my own moves. When I hear certain disco songs today, my mind goes back to the Statesmen and I can vividly picture being on the dance floor.  Among my favorites, still today, are “Heart of Glass,” “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground,” “Born to Be Alive,” “Rapper’s Delight,” “Bad Girls,” “MacArthur Park,” and “Ring My Bell,” which always got Leona on the dance floor with her finger cymbals.

DJ’ing at the Statesmen was pretty easy.  All I had to do was play the regular favorites and include new songs.  It wasn’t all disco; we had new songs from the Urban Cowboy soundtrack, Bruce Springsteen’s “River” album, and some New Wave tracks. We were supposed to push the drink specials from time to time. Every night ended with Donna Summers’ “Last Dance.”  We were to never play it until the night was over.

My DJ job at the Statesmen lasted only for the Fall semester of 1980.  I quit because I had also started a weekend job at WPXY over the summer.  Leona was not happy about my leaving; she had expected me to stay the full year.  I told her my career goal was in radio and that I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to work at a radio station.  She lost her chance with me by not hiring me as a freshman, the year before.  The problem I ran into was that my weekend shifts at WPXY started at 6:00 AM.  I finished at the Statesmen at 1:00 the night before.  It meant getting a few hours of sleep and then getting up early enough to drive from Geneseo to be at my job in Rochester by 6:00.  Leona asked me if I could recommend anyone else; I recommended my friend, Sharon, and she was hired.

My job at WPXY over the summer of 1980 began as a full-time automation operator.  It was part of the AM-FM combo originally at WROC-TV. The company that owned the TV station had sold the radio stations.  By 1980, WROC-AM was an all-talk station with the call letters WPXN.  It was being moved out of the historic building on Humboldt Street and into office space at the Chamber of Commerce building on St. Paul Street in downtown Rochester.  The automation system, similar to the one I had operated at WEZO, was in the TV transmitter building on Pinnacle Hill.

The automation was set up in the future sales manager’s office while the rest of the space was being renovated into offices and radio studios.  As was the case at WEZO, my job was to change the reels of music, keep the commercials up to date in the cart carousels, and make sure the weather forecasts and news broadcasts got recorded and ready for playback.  As the studios were being completed, the automation equipment was moved into its new home, and new radio equipment was installed in the other studios.

When summer ended and I went back to college, I changed my hours to weekend mornings.  WPXN was changing, too.  They started doing away with talk radio and changed the format to a mellow music type of format, which added to my duties.  In addition to overseeing the automation for WPXY, I would now be running the board manually for WPXN.  The music was provided on reels of tape, just like WPXY, but nothing was automated.  We still provided regular news updates live from the news booth and we carried Rochester Red Wing baseball games, which I engineered during my shifts.

By the summer of 1981, I was dating Mary. We came up with an arrangement for me to live at her house in Saugerties, NY, during summer vacation, so I quit my job at WPXN-WPXY.  I had worked there a full year.

I needed to support myself while I was in Saugerties.  I got a job working five overnights a week at the Malden Thruway rest stop as a cleaner and dishwasher.  I also got a job working weekend overnights at WJJB-WHPN in Hyde Park, NY.  This became the job I had where I never met my boss.

I had sent resumes to various radio stations near Saugerties, hoping to continue my radio career for the summer.  A program director, I don’t remember his name, called me one day and, based on my previous automation experience, hired me over the phone to work weekend overnights.  I was to work something like 12:00 midnight to 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning.  Training consisted of my showing up at 11:30 the first night so the previous operator could show me the ropes for a half hour. So, I’d babysit WJJB-FM for the overnight hours.  Then at 6:00, I’d sign on WHPN-AM and run religious programs until the end of my shift.  I never saw anyone except the operators before and after me.  After a few weekends of this, my schedule at the Thruway stop changed and the radio hours became a conflict.  I had to choose the job that was earning more money for me, so I called up the program director and told him I had no choice but to quit.  That was it.  I never met my boss.

After returning to school in the Fall of 1981, I once again obtained employment in radio.  This time, a former colleague from WNYR-WEZO, Nelson Guyette, had become program director of the legendary WSAY in Rochester and he hired me for weekend board shifts.  WSAY was no longer owned by Gordon Brown, who had passed away a couple years earlier.  The new owner was Lou Dickie, and he had changed the format to an adult contemporary station.  The legendary team of Jack Slattery and George Haefner had been hired away from WHAM for the morning program.

My weekend shifts were 12:00 midnight Saturday to 9:00 Sunday morning, 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM Sunday, and 10:00 PM Sunday to 5:30 Monday morning.  Then I’d curl up in a sleeping bag in one of the offices for a couple hours of sleep before going to Geneseo for my classes.  Mary was with me on a lot of those Sunday overnights so we could drive to school together.

While I was employed at WSAY, the format and call letters changed to all-talk WRTK.  In June of 1982, I was hired for a full-time summer position in the control room and studio of WROC Channel 8.  The start of my career in television will be the subject of my next chapter.

https://paulpakusch.blogspot.com/2018/04/my-autobiography-chapter-7-broadcasting.html

Niagara Falls

I've been blessed to live all my life about a 90-minute drive from one of the great natural wonders of the world, Niagara Falls. It has given me the opportunity to visit on average of about twice a year.

There's much about the Falls that fascinates me. The natural history of how the Falls evolved to what and where they are today, the cultural history of how humans view, react to and have settled around the Falls, and the two strikingly different experiences of visiting the Falls whether on the American side or the Canadian side.

The Niagara River flows from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and forms a natural border between the U.S. and Canada. Due to erosion, the Falls are actually moving; they have moved from their start near present-day Lewiston along the Niagara Escarpment, seven miles upstream over the past 12,000 years to where they are today at Goat Island. Through those years, the Falls have carved out a gorge, with the Niagara River racing toward Lake Ontario several hundred feet below the surrounding landscape.

Goat Island, seen in the center of the lower half of the picture below, is entirely within New York State. Canada is in the upper half. The island splits the river as the water flows towards the Falls. On the left is the wider portion of the Falls, known as Horseshoe Falls because of its horseshoe shape. The border between the U.S. and Canada bisects this part of the river. On the right side of Goat Island is a much narrower strip of the river leading to the American Falls. Just to the left of the American Falls, creeks within the island lead to a very narrow band of water streaming over Bridal Veil Falls. The bridge at the far right is the Rainbow Bridge.

This is how the Falls look today. Over the course of time, erosion will continue to drive the Falls around both sides of Goat Island, further back towards and around Grand Island, and eventually to the source of the Niagara River at Lake Erie.

Today we are lucky that time and geography have intersected to give us the current wondrous views of Niagara Falls. You get a better panoramic view from Canada, which no doubt has influenced the tremendous growth of its tourist area. For several miles along the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, there is a road and a walkway with unlimited views of the gorge, the Falls, and the river upstream. Look carefully and you will see a barge that has been stuck among the rocks since 1917. There is parking in this area giving access to these sights within walking distance, but during the summer tourist season, you have to get there early to get one of these spots. Otherwise, drive further upstream to a much larger parking area that offers shuttle service back to where you want to be.

Going uphill and into town you will find a vast array of hotels, motels, bars, and restaurants of all varieties plus some of the cheesiest tourist traps you can imagine, including wax museums and haunted houses. I remember when the Skylon and Panasonic Towers were the lone tall structures in Niagara Falls; in recent years, development of modern hotels now dwarfs the Minolta Tower. The Skylon Tower still stands pretty much by itself. Many hotels have been built with all guest rooms facing the Falls. You will pay handsomely for the view; if you want to stay in Canadian Niagara Falls on a budget, choose one of the smaller hotels that doesn't necessarily offer a view. A huge draw are the casinos; there is a casino on both the U.S. and Canadian sides.

Figuring prominently in the landscape is Rainbow Bridge, which connects the two cities of Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York. There are customs and immigration stations at both ends of the bridge, so depending on what time of the day and year you are crossing the bridge, you may end up sitting on it for awhile as you wait your turn for a customs agent. Halfway across the bridge is the international border that bisects the Niagara River. The border point is marked by several flags; carloads of kids can marvel over the moment when half of them are in the U.S. and the other half of them are in Canada.

Niagara Falls, New York has not kept pace with its sister city across the river. Much of it is worn and tired-looking. The bright spots include the area surrounding the casino, which has seen some hotel development in recent years, and Goat Island. For someone who has spent umpteen hours over the years ogling the wide spectacle from the Canadian side, Goat Island represents a quiet, natural retreat in a state park.

To enter Goat Island, you will drive over a stone bridge crossing the river rapids that lead to the American Falls. Once on the island, you will follow a road that winds through the island's forest until you reach a large parking area. Park here if you want to get out and stay awhile. You can visit some of the island's attractions, take a trolley tour, or visit the restaurant that has a view of the rapids and part of the Falls. From here you can get a very up-close and personal view of the edges of the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls. Here are some photos taken on Goat Island.

If you continue on the road, you will get a tour of the rest of the island. One place to make a short stop that does not charge for parking is Three Sisters Islands. You can only park here for 20 minutes, but it's enough time to walk over to the edge of the rapids that lead to the Horseshoe Falls, as seen in the picture above. All views from Goat Island are awe-inspiring. Most of the island is covered in trees and grass, so it makes a stark contrast to the steel forest on the other side of the river. The island is completely surrounded by the rushing water of the rapids leading to the Falls on both sides of it. I sometimes make the 90-minute drive just to visit Goat Island.

Niagara Falls is spectacular to see from any angle, and it is literally possible to see it from all angles. Besides the views from the river's edge, you can take a helicopter ride over the Falls, a walk through tunnels underground on the Canadian side to get a view from behind the Horseshoe Falls, or a walk down wooden stairs on Goat Island to stand beside the Falls. With all the ice that builds up over the winter, these stairs have to be rebuilt every spring. My favorite view is from the Maid of the Mist boat rides, which you can access from both countries. Boarding from a safe distance away, the boats ride along the river into the center of the horseshoe where a nearly permanent column of mist exists. With water spraying from three sides of the horseshoe-shaped falls, millions of droplets collect in this central location and rise with air currents. The Maid of the Mist boats go right into this spray zone, enabling passengers standing on the decks to experience the power of Niagara Falls. Everyone is issued a disposable poncho. Gone are the days when guests were issued rubber raincoats that left you feeling as if you'd stepped out of a humid junkyard.

The peak tourist season of Niagara Falls is the warm summer months. For a vastly different experience, consider visiting in January or February when it's below freezing. The mist will have drifted over the nearby land, coating the trees, buildings and any sort of structure with ice. Certain areas will be closed off to the public because there's too much ice to walk safely on, but park workers do a marvelous job at keeping certain areas clear of ice so you can safely enjoy the spectacle. If you're really lucky, you'll see huge chunks of ice in the gorge below. You will need to dress warm, but the view is well worth the effort.

The Browns

I was first exposed to the country music group the Browns when I was a very young child. My mother had at least a couple albums by them. I especially remember learning the songs Scarlet Ribbons and The Old Lamplighter. As I got older and became a teenager, my music interests headed in a different direction. Around 1996 I happened to be channel surfing and came across the Nashville Network just as I caught the Browns being introduced on a live TV show. Since I often wear headphones while I'm watching TV due to my hearing loss, I had them on when the Browns started singing The Three Bells. I was suddenly mesmerized by the harmony.

The Browns were a country music crossover into pop music back in 1959 when that song hit it big. Although I was aware of the song, it was not one that I knew well at that point. I sat there absolutely spellbound as I listened to their vocal harmony. I've always believed that sibling harmony is the best because the speech patterns are similar. That is certainly the case for Jim Ed, Maxine, and Bonnie Brown. After listening to them sing it on the Nashville Network, I needed to get myself a copy of it, so I did. Thus begin a few month period when I played the song over and over. After that I purchased more Brown's music so I could learn more of their music.

About 10 years later, I came across something on the Internet advertising a book written by Maxine Brown called "Looking Back to See."  The book's title is named after a song that Maxine wrote. It is mostly an autobiography of Maxine's life up to that point, but it is also a general history of what country music was like in the 1950s and 1960s. I decided I needed to contact Maxine and let her know how I felt about the book. I could not find a way to reach her, so I wrote to Jim Ed and sent it to the Grand Ole Opry. He wrote back to me a short time later and said to send a letter to Maxine addressed to him and he would see that she would get it. I did, she received it, and I heard back from her a few weeks later. I was very impressed that she wrote a four-page letter to me expressing how she really enjoyed reading my letter to her.

A couple years later I happened to come across Maxine's Facebook page and wrote to her again, reminding her who I was and she said she remembered. From that point on a very nice Facebook friendship develped between us. She posted some nice things that I wrote about the Browns on her website. I also became part of a movement to get the Browns into the Country Music Hall of Fame, which many of the Browns fans believed they belong in.

In 2013, while on a trip to Memphis Tennessee, my daughter Kristi and I had an opportunity to visit Maxine. We had lunch together and she talked about some of her experiences, including her friendship with Elvis back in the mid-1950s. Elvis and the Browns used to do some touring together.

Back home, I continued my participation in trying to get the Browns into the Country Music Hall of Fame. It took awhile, but happily, thanks to the help of many of their fans, they finally made it in. And just in time, too, because shortly after the announcement of the Browns going into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Jim Ed passed away from cancer. Maxine and Bonnie were there for the induction, and then sadly Bonnie passed away not too long after that.

I hope to get to Nashville sometime in the near future so I can see their exhibit along with many others in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

These days, I continue to enjoy listening to the Browns' music on a regular basis. I have my own collection at home, and I also hear their songs from time to time on Sirius XM Radio.

Here is Maxine Brown's website: http://themaxinebrown.com/

My Idea For Health Care

By Paul Pakusch

There has been a lot of talk about making school districts, governments and agencies run more like a business. Do you know what the purpose of a business is? The purpose of a business is to make a profit. This means that for whatever service the business provides, the priority  is to make a profit for the owners. So that means health insurance companies main purpose is to make a profit for the shareholders of the company. To provide Health Care is a service, but that service is secondary to making sure that the shareholders get their money. To me, this is bass ackwards to the way it should be. I think the purpose of health insurance should be to provide health care, not to make money for shareholders. There's just something wrong with a system where money is more important than someone's health.

In the Declaration of Independence, it states that the United States is to provide for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Much has been said about liberty and the freedom for the pursuit of happiness. But I haven't heard much about the "life" portion of that clause. To me, it means that the United States should provide for the opportunity of life through the most advanced technological means in medicine. Why should just rich people be able to obtain this care? It should be available to all citizens of the United States. That's how I interpret that clause.

Therefore, I believe the system where private health insurance companies are providing healthcare based on who can afford it is just wrong.

My idea is to do away with all of the health insurance companies in this country and come up with one nonprofit Foundation whose main purpose is to provide healthcare for all of the citizens of the United States. It would be recognized by Congress, but operate independently of the US government. Every citizen would fund it through a reasonable and fair income tax, such as Medicaid is funded now. Every US citizen would have access to this program. Every US citizen is assigned a social security number, and this same number can be your ID number for healthcare services.

Additional funding could also be done by individuals and companies making donations to this Foundation and getting tax deductions in return. It would be an incentive for companies to invest in US Healthcare.

Doctors and specialists could continue to operate as they are now.  Patients would schedule appointments just as they do now. A system would be set up so that billing would be done to this Foundation. There could be a reasonable fee system set up so that doctors, specialists, and other Healthcare facilities would be paid for their services. If a doctor or specialist wishes to charge more, they would be free to do so provided the patient is willing to pay the difference. But that would be outside of the normal fee structure and the patient would not be reimbursed by the Foundation for the difference. It would be their choice to do that.

I recognize that you need competition to advance research and keep prices in check. That's where the pharmaceutical companies come in. The pharmaceutical companies can keep researching medications to cure illnesses and diseases. Doctors should be able to prescribe the medication that would be the most effective for their patients without any interference from anyone else. The Foundation would pay for prescriptions. There should not be any incentive from pharmaceutical companies for doctors to pick one company over another, just the most effective medication, and competition among the pharmaceuticals  to keep the prices in check.

This is just a brief description of what I'd love to see for health care.

Autobiography Chapter 5 - Broadcasting Memories, Part 2: High School Job at the #1 Radio Station in Town

by Paul Pakusch

I turned 16 in December of 1976 and was ready to look for my first paying job.  You needed a work permit if you were under 18, so I quickly got one at my high school office.  Getting the first job wasn’t quite so quick.  I don’t remember what I did between December of 1976 and the summer of 1977; did I apply for jobs?  I don’t recall.  What I do remember is that when school was out for the summer, I began in earnest to find a job at a radio station.

I literally hit the pavement.  My mother, at the time, worked for Visiting Nurse Service which was headquartered in downtown Rochester.  On several occasions that summer, I would ride to work with her.  Then I would walk to each radio station’s office to apply for a job.

WNYR and WEZO was an AM/FM combo of radio stations, a popular arrangement in the 1970’s.  There were federal rules against ownership of multiple stations in one market, which is the case today.  WNYR was at 680 AM for daytime broadcasts only, and was a country music format.  WEZO was at 101.3 FM and featured “beautiful music,” a very popular format in the late 1970’s.  In fact, it was the number one station in ratings at the time.  The stations and their offices were located upstairs in a small building on East Main Street in Rochester, across the street from the old Armory.

The first time I walked into WNYR/WEZO, I met Jerry Warner.  He was the voice of WEZO, giving his smooth delivery of station ID’s, times, and morning announcements.  WEZO was a fully automated station.  The equipment racks included 4 reel-to-reel tape decks, 2 carousel cart machines for commercials, two large cart machines that alternated between the even minutes and odd minutes of every single minute of the day, and a few more cart machines from which newscasts were played.

Had there been a job opening on my first visit, Jerry would’ve been the one to hire me.  He invited me to stay and chat a bit.  I remember asking him, “What would my main job be?”  His answer, “To stay awake!”  The position was automation operator; you had to change the reels of tape and the carts in the carousels, based on what was scheduled in the program log.  That, and of course, stay awake while beautiful music threatened to lull you to sleep.

The computer system was extremely rudimentary.  All it did was put the various tape machines in a sequence.  Each of the songs on the reels of tape had a very low-pitch audio tone at the end of them; the tone was below the hearing level of the average human ear.  When the computer heard this tone, it would trigger the next tape deck in sequence to start, whether it was another music tape, a commercial, or one of the carts with Jerry’s ID or time on it.  I can still hear him say in a smooth tone, “The WEZO time is 7:24.”

I think I made about two more rounds of radio stations that summer.  I never got a job then, but on my last visit to WEZO/WNYR, Jerry introduced me to a new chief engineer, John H.  John was taking over the  hiring of automation operators.  Not long after school started in September, I happened to be at WGMC when John called me, offering me a job working weekend evenings.  Wow!  I’d get paid to work in radio!  Of course I accepted!

My job consisted of running the automation for WEZO, and transferring commercials from reels of tape to carts for both stations.  I got to know the DJ’s who were on WNYR and we'd talk about the business.

Not long after I started working there, John told me he needed an operator for the overnights. I was still in high school, so it was not an option for me.  I mentioned it to my friend, Burt, who applied and got the job.  He often arrived early enough so that we could chat for a bit before my shift ended.  We still have a good laugh every time we remember seeing sidewalk snowplows, one night, on the streets below.  It was like bumper cars out there; the plows kept knocking into tree planters and mailboxes!

While we were both employed there, the station was building new offices and studios a couple miles away on East Avenue, in the block of the 111 East Avenue Hotel.  I think it was in January of 1978 that we made the move.  What stands out to me is that I remember another building under construction one block away.  Little did I know that in another few years, I would end up spending over three decades in that building, WHEC Channel 10.

My time at WEZO/WNYR was short.  In February, 1978, I ended up being fired from a job for the first time in my life.  They claimed I had made a mistake in carting a commercial, but I’ve always suspected that there was more to the story than what they told me.  There seemed to be a house-cleaning going on at the time, and it left my friend Burt out of a job, too.

That ended my paid broadcasting jobs while in high school.  More successes came later on in college.  For the record, I spent most of the rest of high school working at two different nursing homes. 

This gives me an opportunity to brag about the shortest job interview I ever had.  My mother had worked as a Registered Nurse at Lake Shore Nursing Home, on Beach Avenue in Rochester.  By the time I stopped there in September, 1978 to apply for a job, she had already moved onto Visiting Nurse Service.  So, I walked in the front door and asked for an application.  After filling it out, I gave it back to the receptionist.  She told me to have a seat. 

A few moments later, the administrator came out and looked at the application.  He said, “Are you Dorothy Pakusch’s son?”

 I said, “Yes.” 

He said, “Can you start today?”

Bang, hired!

I started the next day, in the kitchen. (Thanks, mom, for having a good reputation that got passed on to your son!)

In my next chapter, I will talk about my college radio experience.

https://paulpakusch.blogspot.com/2018/04/autobiography-chapter-6-broadcasting.html

My Blog on Procrastination

We have not yet started writing this blog.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Paul Pakusch

In 2013, while on a trip to Memphis, Tennessee with my daughter, Kristi, we visited the National Civil Rights Museum to see the historic Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  Part of the museum was undergoing an extensive renovation at the time, but we were able to walk around the Motel.  I felt humbled by being there.  I was 7 years old when King was assassinated, so I didn't really understand who he was at the time. I remember I was watching my favorite TV show, "Bewitched," when ABC broke in with a News Bulletin about him being shot.

I was humbled by being there.  We stood on the historic spot on the balcony and I could see the window from where the shots allegedly came from.  Kristi felt a little bit different; I think she was a little freaked out by standing where "someone got murdered."  I think she had a point.

Here's a few pictures from our visit that day.  They show the Lorraine Motel, the spot on the balcony where King was standing, us by King's motel room, and a view of the window from where the shots allegedly came from: