My broadcast journalism career began when I was six years old. Since then, I’ve traveled thousands of miles and met hundreds of people. Some were nice, some were scoundrels, and some were so evil that they can’t be talked about. My career is a series of snapshots, pictures that I carry around in my head, memories that stick with me and sometimes keep me awake at night. Murder victims and triumphant champions lurk in the corner there somewhere, and my righteous indignation is often coupled with either healthy skepticism, or a leap to the wrong conclusion. Those snapshots are the answer to a question that I often ask myself. How did I ever end up in a broadcast journalism career?

I have a vivid snapshot from when I was five. The teacher was visiting my parents, and he explained to them that I was too small to start school that September. I was physically too small. I hated him, because I wanted to learn to read. When I was six, they let me start kindergarten. He made up for it by teaching me to read and write quickly, probably in the first quarter of the year (it was a one-room schoolhouse). The teacher was old, a World War II veteran who’d been wounded in Italy. He became a teacher in Japan during the reconstruction after the war, and earned a black belt in Judo. He broke a brick for us in class one day. HAH! I was dazzled.

I wrote my first book when I was still in kindergarten. It was about a truck driver whose tires all went flat. I illustrated it myself, and then lost it somewhere in the back yard. It was probably the only best-seller I’ll ever write.

Another snapshot from when I was seven, an operation. I still wasn’t growing, so the doctors decided to remove my tonsils. How this would make me taller, I didn’t know. A friend from the one-room school house was on the other side of the hospital room, getting surgery for an ingrown toenail. I remember the stink from the anesthesia when the nurse put the mask on my face. It looked like a piece of equipment from the TV show MASH. “Count backwards from ten down to one, Robert,” said the doctor. I inhaled to say “Ten” and I was out. I had been promised all the ice cream I wanted when I got out of the hospital, but it hurt too much to eat it. Betrayal!

There was a children’s book in the hospital that I loved. Not because of the story, but because of the pictures in it. The animals were fantastic illustrations, and I loved the colors and design of the book. I never knew what it was called. I never saw it again until my wife brought a copy home 30 years later. She’d found it in the free bin at the local library. I read it with my 2-year-old son. She’s getting the pages laminated, so we can keep it forever. Sometimes God’s providence comes softly.

My love for books consumed me for the next decade. By the time I was a teenager, I was reading two or three novels per week. School bored me to tears. I was smarter than the rest of the kids, so I gave up. I got good grades and mostly stayed out of trouble. My classes were so easy for me that I often snuck a novel into every subject with me. Why waste time with Keynesian economics and Marxism when Ray Bradbury, John D. MacDonald, and Louis L’Amour were calling to me?

It dawned on me through the years that I was more intelligent than the rest of my classmates, and a much better writer. I absorbed the English language through all of the books I was reading, and secretly looked on my fellow students with disdain. Why were these subjects so difficult for them? Why didn’t anyone else debate the teachers when they were so obviously full of it? That arrogance, narcissism, and unbridled pride welled up inside me until there was only one more logical step for me to take, lest I go completely mad. I had to set myself apart from the masses of stupid people that I was surrounded by, these sheep! I had to become the antithesis of all that was decent and good and mediocre, if I was going to obtain fame, power, and money! So I became an atheist.

This vanity project continues here…

Technorati Tags: atheism, Broadcast Journalism Career, John D. MacDonald, Judo, Louis L'Amour, MASH, Ray Bradbury, tonsils

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Tags: atheism, Broadcast Journalism Career, John D. MacDonald, Judo, Louis L'Amour, MASH, Ray Bradbury, tonsils

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