Entries Tagged 'Influences' ↓

In seeing the news of his upcoming retirement, it became apparent who should be the subject of my second influences post, and interestingly enough it’s someone I’ve never communicated with, but I have a feeling that most would consider him a regular guy. Well, I’m sure that many who know him hold him in much higher esteem than that, but I digress.

John Krauss is the general manager of the public radio station WRVO in Central New York. John’s retiring from WRVO in April, after over 40 years of service at the station — the first voice heard when they powered up in 1969.

I know John as one of the hosts of the WRVO Playhouse, the daily program presenting shows from the Golden Age of Radio. When I moved to Syracuse in the mid-eighties, I began listening to the Playhouse at bedtime, and continued the habit until I left for college in 1993. All that time, John told me stories about the shows he was about to play, giving context around the actors, the story line, the program, the sponsors… John’s a curator. The Playhouse reflects that curation. Over time, I’ve listened to tens of thousands of hours of old-time radio — when I found that I could download entire series as MP3s, I did so. Search Old Time Radio at The Internet Archive for plenty. And it’s nice to listen to a series in order… but then it’s… done. What I loved about WRVO was not only the context but the curation and the mixture. Even the other live OTR streams seemed to repeat, or lack context. When I thought to, I would tune into WRVO’s streams, but that required that I listen when the show was on, and I couldn’t do anything else on my iPhone while the battery-draining streaming app was running. The OTR podcasts available in iTunes, while nice, don’t update frequently enough to fill my listening hours… but late last year, I hit the mother lode. I found that WRVO had started a WRVO Playhouse podcast…

Adding to a few hours a week from other podcasts, the Playhouse podcast brings me over 20 more! I hear John’s voice on the weekend shows now, and it brings me back 20 years… and in some cases, he’s introducing the same episodes as he did for me when I was 14.

But now it comes to how John’s influenced me…

John’s work represents to me in some ways the grandfather that I never had. I know some of “how it was in the old days” from television and movies, from books and web sites… but how many people my age can really register it in their heads that sugar and butter were rationed during World War II? Do they realize that if you got a flat tire you had to repair it because you couldn’t just go buy a new one?

Since my teens I’ve had a connection to the past that so many people haven’t had — over time, memories fade or morph. Despite getting my information from a secondary source as well, which was sanitized for broadcast, I get the benefit of a concrete record for my history lessons. Though it was packaged for entertainment, the choice of what was emphasized tells so very much about the times.

The voices… oh the voices. There are some I trust implicitly. John Dehner, the voice of Paladin of Have Gun, Will Travel. Dana Andrews from I Was a Communist for the FBI. William Conrad, Marshall Dillon from Gunsmoke. And then there are the creepy ones, like Peter Lorre who shows up in dark, dank places. Then you’ve got the ever-young Walter Tetley with roles that spanned such a long range of time I just had to look him up when the Internet came along. Turns out that for hormonal reasons, his voice never quite made it out of adolescence.

What about advertising? Long before it was The Choice of a New Generation, Pepsi told Americans, “Be young and fair and debonair. Be sociable, have a Pepsi.” Kids today have never heard a cigarette ad on the radio, but Jack Webb did live reads for Fatima cigarettes during Dragnet – Jack would rattle off the sales percentage growth rates in various areas in the country, such as “sales of Fatima cigarettes are up 38% in California”, before encouraging everyone to give them a try. Dragnet. Jack Webb. Sergeant Joe Friday. The kind of no-shenanigans guy you just… trusted.

Camel asked, “Are you smoking more now, but enjoying it less? Have a real cigarette, have a Camel.”

Anyone who knows what I’m talking about could think of hundreds of more instances, and anyone who doesn’t should start listening to the podcast.

I’ve also found that the audio tone from these old shows calms me. If I’m anxious, I can put Fibber McGee and Molly or Suspense on and just tune it out. Rather than being distracted by it, it’s familiar, like a cat purring. I can focus deeply despite murders acted out in my ear buds.

I’ve been listening to shows from the past for 20 years, and don’t plan to stop for the next 40. And I’m sure that I’ll hear Sorry, Wrong Number on Suspense another fifty times, and each time think of hearing it as a child.

I thank you for that, John. I thank you for the work that you’ve done to digitize the library of tapes that you’ve acquired, and for digitizing them in a lossless format to retain what’s possible and not just what’s “good enough”. I thank you for putting the Playhouse on the air, on the streams, and on the podcast. I thank you for giving me not just the shows, but the labor of love in your research and planning and show introductions.

I’ll miss hearing you “on the air”. Goodbye, and be well.

I’m not a very social person. I tend towards introspection, and I don’t have many friends. To a fault, I too easily lose contact with people, and I presume that it’s a measure of social anxiety which keeps me from assuming that people forgive the injustice I perform when I withdraw and fade.

In any event, I find in my life that I tend to build vocabularies with which to frame my ideas and my ideals. I find concepts that I like, and in order to give myself a shorthand, substitute a symbol for those concepts into this sort of imagery matrix upon which more complex concepts are built.

I wrote poetry from 1994 to 1999 or so. I stopped for several reasons. One was that I was in a relationship which stifled that spark, but I can’t blame her for that – I gave it up, she didn’t take it from me. Another fundamental reason, I think just as important, was that I had built my vocabulary. I wouldn’t say that my life made sense at the time, but when I had to work things out in my head, I didn’t feel big gaps in that matrix. I was busier, and less contemplative… and that may have been why I felt completeness in my vocabulary… I slowed the depth of my thinking and spent more time living. When there was a hurdle, I could build upon my prior poetry, and in particular in little snippets of imagery, upon which I could build my perception of the problem.

Just like the poetry, there are people who touched my life in ways that I still refer to often when I’m working things out in my head. Sometimes it’s helpful in framing experience, and sometimes it’s helpful in what someone has taught me about myself.

I think of many people and events often, and I feel like I need to begin to make tribute to them. I’ll largely cover people with whom I’ve not had contact for years, and I’m not particularly seeking them out, but hoping that perhaps the six degrees of separation in the world (or perhaps vanity, in the days of Google) will allow people to discover themselves how they’ve touched lives in ways they may never have known.

And to begin this experiment, I give tribute to Michael Herf.

In late summer of 1993 — on my 18th birthday, to be specific — I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to study Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. My floor in the C-Wing of the Mudge Hall dorms had an interesting mix of folks, many of which left a lasting impression after my relatively brief stay. Some may appear later in this series, so I’ll leave them unnamed for now.

At the opposite end of the floor lived Michael Herf, of Evansville, Indiana. Mike was a gentle soul, contemplative, amazingly intelligent, with a dry sense of humor which made his eyes glow as his mind chewed playful thoughts. He was a Christian who attended a bible study group, but who I never felt judged my genuine but fairly incredulous questions. He composed beautiful songs on his keyboards and sample mixer thingies (I never really got into MIDI). Mike’s natural inquisitiveness led him to be incredibly well informed about the world in general, and he was certainly the type of person to sit around and talk to for hours.

He also was far ahead of me in computer skills, and when I got a 386 for Christmas, Mike helped me experiment with Linux, giving me just enough to get started and knowing when to answer my follow-up questions, and when to tell me to RTFM. Like an ideal teacher, Mike sensed that I was capable but undirected and helped me get some direction and let me figure the rest out myself. I got the pride of teaching myself, with the safety net to keep me from getting discouraged.

Today, as a manager, I try to pay it forward to my employees in this way. My patience isn’t the best, and I often fail inpractice, overstepping those limits between guidance and execution. But I know the ideal I’m trying to achieve because of what I was taught. Thank you, Mike.

I also found that when Mike played me his long instrumental songs, they evoked stories in my head. I didn’t hear just sounds, but like a good soundtrack, I knew what was happening while the music played. We experimented, with him playing things, me telling him the story I saw and felt, and discussing them. Sometimes we were in sync, other times not, but I look back to this day to that experience to understand how I experience the world. I drew upon that experience when I began writing poetry, and some of the things I wrote then haunt me to this day. After I left Carnegie Mellon, I continued to write poetry, and I believe that I really developed my craft by interpreting the art of others. In sharing my writings with artists, I found a way to communicate what their art conveyed, not so much commentary on the technique. I found that it was appreciated as feedback and a way to connect with their audience. In realizing that my mind works by processing symbols and not images, I’m continuing to develop my understanding of how I understand things, in hopes of finding ways to be more in a state of flow, which is where I find my happiness. Again, thank you Mike.

There are a number of other things that make me think of you as a routine part of my life, and while I’m sure you’ve touched many more, I sure as hell appreciate how you’ve touched mine.