Rick Minerd - Life Is A Jukebox

Our bicentennial year was a strange one for me. Especially on a professional level. In the fall and winter months of that year I found myself working as an instructor in a broadcasting school. It was another one of those cases where networking with colleagues produced strange results.

I had  left "The Friendly Giant" 610-WTVN to pursue this new adventure and it nearly ended my radio career.

A friend of mine, who happened to be the Program Director for WBBY-104-FM had introduced me to the schools director as a recommendation to replace him on the school staff. The friend was Robin Goode and the director was a guy I had admired for years when he worked for WNCI,  Mike Raub.

Also putting in a good word for me then was another friend who was working at the time for 1460-WBNS, and who was also an instructor at the school, Joe Gallagher, who's real name was Joseph Ucker. Don't say that too loud.

The President and CEO of International broadcasting School was Don Gingerich, who for lack of a better way to say it, was a business maverick. Anyway I was hired to teach  a class of 25, about 23 of them shouldn't have been enrolled. But as was the case in those days if you had about $1400.00 and time to kill you could enroll in just about any broadcasting school in the country.

My own arena for "higher learning" was Career Academy School Of Broadcasting.  Similar mess.

IBS was located on West 5th Avenue in Grandview in a building that once was home for either a flea market or maybe a revival meeting house, I forget.

Whatever it once was, it was a smelly, drafty excuse for a school house. The heat rarely worked-remember it was winter and the equipment in our studios looked like something that a radio station might have thrown away in the 1940s.

More importantly our weekly pay-checks rarely showed up when they were supposed to. And by the end of the semester the school locked it's doors and moved to Dayton.

Luckily for me I still had a little something going with WRFD and was gearing up for a seven year run with WMNI. 

I've lost track of both Robin Goode and Mike Raub through the years, and sadly my friend Joe Gallagher passed away last year. And aside from two of my students, I've never heard any of the other 23 on the air anywhere. And I'm still not ready to accept any responsibility for that last stat.  I had nothing to do with taking advantage of these kids by taking money that should never have exchanged hands. But I do hope they all found gainful employment in broadcasting.

Who knows, maybe some of them ended up in bigger markets and went on to make millions. And maybe history will record George W. Bush as our greatest president ever, and maybe when you fill your gas tank tomorrow you'll be thrilled that gas prices have dropped to 1976 prices overnight.  Stranger things have happened.  Look at me!    Rick  

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