Prostitutes, giant snails and Jefferson Avenue

The last thing any student wants is advice, so I shall not offer any. Instead, I'll share a couple of experiences and readers can choose either to benefit from this invaluable wisdom or to ignore it and suffer accordingly.

When I went to camp as a young boy, we enjoyed assembling for meals. The guys would sing songs and whoop it up in the huge dining room. When everyone was through eating, one of the counselors would stand up with his clipboard. On this was an alphabetical list of all the campers' names. He would give a little speech about the importance of giving freely of one's time for the good of the camp. Then he would read off the next four names from the list. These became the "Happy Volunteers" who would clean up after the meal, wash the dishes and sweep the floors, like it or not. I found this lesson about the joys of volunteering helpful in my adult years when dealing with the Internal Revenue Service.

Another important lesson came from a friend of mine who owned a music store. I went to pick him up for lunch and saw a sign in his window that said, "Girl Wanted." "Oh, I see you're hiring someone to help you," I said. "No," he said. "The sign just says 'Girl Wanted.' You would be amazed at what walks in here." The message I got from this exchange was that I needed to read signs more carefully.

In my former life as a radio talk show host, I once dubbed a bunch of sound effects of elephants, slowing them to half-speed, before going into the studio to do my show. I also grabbed some traffic-jam noises. During the show, I issued "news reports" about giant snails coming up out of the Maumee River. A little later, I described these monsters attacking downtown Toledo and squishing cars on Jefferson Avenue, scaring the prostitutes. (My show was done at night; that street was a notorious hangout.) I had one of my buddies call in "from the scene," actually his living room. During his report, I played the sound effects. It may have been the first time a reporter was swallowed by a giant snail mid-sentence. People called us on the air asking where the snails were, what was being done about it, what kind of damage they were doing, etc. Near the end of the show, my producer came into my studio, looking pale. He said two Toledo police officers were outside and wanted to see me. I told him to show these gentlemen into the studio, where we seated them at the extra mics. Some poor old woman had apparently called the police, babbling about the end of the world, as described by yours truly. She heard it on the radio! The men in blue had guessed it was all a huge put-on. They scolded me lightly on the air for panicking a lot of our fine citizens and asked me not to do phony news anymore. The lesson? Some people have no sense of humor.

One last tale. During my high school years, I had a job in a factory, the products of which included Styrofoam balls, cubes, glitter and sequins for home craft kits. My job was to climb down into the "supply pit" underneath the assembly line where the raw materials were housed, while above, the ladies put the craft kits together. When they wanted gold glitter, they would yell down to me, "GOLD GLITTER!" When they wanted red sequins they would yell, "RED SEQUINS." When they wanted Styrofoam balls, they would shorten it to just "BALLS!" I heard this about 30 times a day. It was with those screams echoing in my mind that I decided I would some day get an education so that I could get a better job.