Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
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Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
From Mississippi Airwaves to Michigan Management: Bruce Rainey's Journey
Meet Bruce Rainey, whose remarkable life journey takes us from the vibrant blues scene of 1940s Mississippi to pioneering telecommunications systems for the State of Michigan. Born in Clarksdale—the beating heart of blues music that produced legends like Sam Cooke and Ike Turner—Bruce's story is a fascinating window into American transformation.
At just 15 years old, Bruce skipped his senior year to enter college, beginning a lifelong pattern of self-directed learning and professional reinvention. From serving in the Air Force during the early days of computerized radar systems to hand-coloring photographs as a professional photographer and becoming a popular radio DJ known as "Bruce Kane," his career evolved alongside American communication technology.
Bruce's narrative shines brightest when describing the relationships formed throughout his decades of work. While managing telecommunications systems for hospitals and later for the State of Michigan, he developed a leadership philosophy focused on bringing out the best in others rather than being the smartest person in the room. The innovative MATCH billing system he helped develop for the state remains in use today, a testament to forward-thinking design.
What makes Bruce's story truly compelling is his genuine interest in people. Throughout the conversation, he recalls colleagues, mentors, and friends with remarkable detail—from his grandfather who told him fantastical stories about "The Iron Man" to young programmers he mentored who later credited him with launching their successful careers. Even in retirement, Bruce continues connecting with others through amateur radio and photography, embodying his philosophy: "I find things interesting about anybody I've met. Almost every time I meet somebody new, I learn something from them."
As Bruce reflects on his journey, he offers wisdom for our divided times: "Listen more, talk less." His story reminds us that behind every technological advancement are human relationships that give our work meaning and purpose.
Good afternoon. Today is Wednesday, april the 9th 2025. We're here with Bozella Bruce Rainey, who served the United States Air Force. So good afternoon, bruce.
Speaker 2:Good afternoon.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you here. So we'll just start out real simple this afternoon. And that is when and where were you born.
Speaker 2:I was born on March 5th 1943 in Clarksdale, mississippi. It's a city in Oklahoma County, about 75 miles or so south of Memphis.
Speaker 1:Okay, you lived in Mississippi most of your life then.
Speaker 2:No, actually left in my late teens okay, all right.
Speaker 1:So did you stay like in the same area up until that point?
Speaker 2:um. Most of my time was spent in the mississippi delta um until I? Uh joined the military okay, okay.
Speaker 1:All right, well, tell me a little bit about growing up. Did you have brothers and sisters? What was it like being a kid in Mississippi?
Speaker 2:No, I would have had one sister who was stillborn, but I grew up as an only child. Interestingly enough, I was reared mostly by my grandparents. Okay. And a step-grandfather who I don't think could have been any better of a grandfather had he been my natural grandfather. He was my mother's stepfather and I think she loved him about as much as I did.
Speaker 1:So he took really good care of you. Yeah, there's something about grandparents. I know my grandparents raised me for a few years. There was a closeness there. What are some of your best memories of them?
Speaker 2:Probably my fondest memories are of my grandfather, who was not quite as overprotective as my grandmother, who placed a lot of restrictions on who I should play with and where I should go and when and so forth. But my grandfather would take me shopping with him, take me to carnivals and circuses. I remember being deathly afraid of clowns as a youngster.
Speaker 1:I still am. A lot of people don't like clowns.
Speaker 2:No, not at all, but he spent a lot of time with me. He would sit me on his lap and tell me made-up stories. Probably his favorite story was one about a character he had named the Iron man. Okay, Iron man lived in sewers, oh oh boy, and he would only come out at night and made a weird sound and it was sort of like. I don't know. I can't remember any of the stories, but I suppose today they probably wouldn't even make sense to an adult. But for me I guess it was the fantasy of what he was talking about.
Speaker 2:I guess it was the fantasy of what he was talking about. So that's probably the things that I can remember most about him. My grandmother was so overprotective that she wouldn't let me walk to school alone, and I recall probably I don't know second grade. Maybe she would always walk to meet me and I would kind of figure out which route she was taking to walk and take a different route so I could avoid her. Oh no, Because I didn't want to be teased by the other kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, Did she figure it out pretty quick what you were doing?
Speaker 2:Sometimes, but there wasn't much she could do about it, because if I was on a different route I would probably pass her yeah, yeah so, yeah, it always seemed like a long way, uh, to walk, and I remember going back many, many years later and realizing that it was only a few blocks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like that whole thing when you go back to your school. You know, when you were a kid everything seemed so big, and then you go back to your school and everything's just not as big as you thought it was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the school was just as I remembered it, but the walk there was a housing project. Back in those days they would have low-income housing but they were in a community and it was probably about, I would say, three blocks by five blocks, but it was sort of like we would see a condominium community today. It was designed sort of like that and they were mostly duplex or triplex units spread out into little neighborhoods, and so I didn't realize it was only about three blocks one way and three blocks the other way, so about six blocks total to get to school. But it seemed like a long way to me when I was small, and so that community was just on the other side of the street of the school. So that community was just on the other side of the street of the school.
Speaker 2:I was originally baptized Methodist but grew up Catholic. My parents enrolled me in a Catholic school in the city of Clarksdale, where my grandparents lived, and so, therefore, I spent most of my school years with them. Sometimes I spent most of my school years with them. Uh. Sometimes I spent summers, uh. Well, most of the time when I was smaller I spent summers with my parents, um, but as I got older and uh began to uh be enthralled by a swimming pool which was uh there in Clarksdale. Uh, I wanted to spend more time in the summer there so I could hang out at the pool, which was only a block away.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of history in the town that I grew up in, specifically around blues music A lot of well-known musicians have come from that general area, but perhaps more blues than any other I should say blues and rhythm and blues than any other genre of music. A lot of famous personalities happen to be around there.
Speaker 2:Even today, uh has a a business establishment there in clarksdale, mississippi oh, okay it's called ground zero and uh, I guess this past year there was a pretty large new year celebration in there. Uh and uh, I guess some of it was. I don't know if it was actually telecast, but someone sent me a video shot of some of the happenings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of cool when things happen in your hometown like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, folks, probably some of the better known folks were Sam Cooke was born in that area. Ike Turner when I was a preteener I used to listen to a couple of disc jockeys, one of whom was Ike Turner, but a more well-known one was Early Wright, who's, I think, now in the Blues Hall of Fame. But Ike Turner was on a local radio station called WKDL and Early Wright was on WROX. And of course Ike Turner went on to make his fame in the rhythm and blues area and early right. Just I don't know how many years he spent on that radio station, but it was kind of unusual in those days to have a minority broadcaster. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even though it was the blues right, yeah, even though it was the blues right Like yeah, uh, even though it was blues, he, he, uh, he didn't limit his music, uh, necessarily to blues, but there was some rock, but rock was just beginning to to find its own at that point in time. Um, you know, folks like Elvis Presley and Pat Boone who did a lot of the early blues covers, right, but you know, so I think, at some point a little bit of crossover, but mostly blues, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, and was that? I mean, was that inspirational to some of the kids in the neighborhood to to see a minority on the radio when that's just wasn't the norm?
Speaker 2:I. I don't know if his being on the radio was necessarily an inspiration. He was somewhat illiterate, didn't matter but he commanded quite a listening audience and I don't know what his level of education was, but he kind of spoke in a vernacular that some people could understand and so there was that kind of an identity. But I'm not sure A lot of youngsters aspired to follow him. There were a lot of. As I grew up, a lot of youngsters aspired for careers in sports, medical field, the legal field. There weren't a lot of. Well, there were just beginning to be more opportunities available for people of color to look into the medical field or become an attorney.
Speaker 2:As I grew up, most of the professionals were teachers, morticians, barbers, maybe a few contractors or construction higher-level construction people. But as I was growing up I was able to see people form their own businesses and do things other than the traditional professions in the minority communities. You know as I, as I went along and I can recall that my my chemistry professor in college, I believe, was the first black person to receive a PhD in chemistry, Dr St Elmo Brady. I'm not certain of that, but I'm pretty certain that he was one of the early pioneers in chemistry from the black community.
Speaker 2:My parents lived in a community called Mount Bayou, Mississippi, which was at that time essentially an all-black town, Perhaps the largest in the nation, and it was formed by former slaves of Jefferson Davis. And the mayor of that town was one of the early minority graduates of Harvard Law School and he was the son of one of the founders and right now I'd have to look back at notes, but I believe there were two Benjamin Greens and I can't remember which middle name he was. Okay, he was Benjamin Green Jr. We'll leave it at that Sounds good, and I knew him as a child. It was quite a prosperous community in its early days. Over time it lost its stature and became a little bit more integrated and that kind of thing, but it still exists.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's still there.
Speaker 2:It's still there.
Speaker 1:So you talked about sports and other things like that, so growing up and during your school. So what was it like being in school and did you play sports? What were your interests in school?
Speaker 2:I played basketball one season. I wasn't much of a sports fan, never have been much of a sports fan. Later, after military, I did involve myself pretty deeply in judo as a sport and I followed judo for a number of years and I even taught it at some point. But you know I had kind of different interests, because I was always I read comic books and I was always fascinated by Mandrake the Magician. Okay, I don't know if you.
Speaker 1:I'm familiar with Mandrake the Magician.
Speaker 2:yes, you know, for comedy was Dagwood and that kind of thing, but for challenges I was always. You know you live in kind of a dream world as a child. Yeah. And it's sometimes difficult to separate reality from, you know, from fantasy right yeah, fantasy yeah.
Speaker 1:Fantasy right yeah, fantasy yeah.
Speaker 2:And Mandrake would put people in trances and do all these magical kinds of things. And so I developed an early interest in magic, pretty quickly realized I didn't quite have the dexterity and memory to be a very good magician and I was always fascinated by the idea of hypnosis. And as I grew up, the library was one block well, two blocks away, one block south and one block I don't remember now it was east or west, I believe it was west of where I grew up. I grew up at 660 McKinley Street, which was on the corner of 7th Street, and our library was an extension of the library on the other side of town.
Speaker 2:Okay, didn't have a lot of books, and if we wanted certain books we would have to request them and then they could be brought from the other library. But we sometimes weren't able to get some of those books. I think to some extent they might have been censoring topics and subjects, yeah, as to what we were allowed to read. So I was not able to find a lot of books on hypnosis, a few books on magic, and so I would read books on hypnosis and magic and um, that was one of, you know, kind of a fantasy thing. Um, that I, you know if one could be said to have had a bucket list at that age yeah those were things I said one of these days.
Speaker 2:One of these days I'm going to learn how to do that. And so there were a lot, lot of things that kind of tweaked my interest electronics and photography and, fortunately, my godfather, who was half Chinese, which was another unusual thing in our community and lived a block away, um, who kind of became a, uh, surrogate father figure for me because he, he involved me in things that my grandfather didn't. My grandfather was kind of a stay at home guy, um, but he would spend a lot of time with me doing things Right, but my godfather was I always refer to him as Mr BT, which is everybody called him BT- yeah.
Speaker 2:And, excuse me, believe it or not, I didn't find out what his initial stood for until his death, really.
Speaker 1:When I saw his obituary. So what did they stand for?
Speaker 2:I'd have to look at my notes.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:But I do have that. I can't recall the name now, but I always thought it was kind of an odd name, uh-huh.
Speaker 1:Which is probably why they called him BT. Right yeah, an odd name.
Speaker 2:Which is probably why they called him BT, right, yeah, his son Daryl. He would spend a lot of time with me. Daryl eventually became well to take a step back. His father and he worked together in an interior decorating and carpentry business that Mr BT owned, and Darrell later became a self-taught engineer Because there weren't too many places he could go to school.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And I remember him having this book about four or five inches thick that he taught himself from I can't recall the title of it and he worked for companies like Delco and RCA moved away to Kokomo, indiana, which is essentially where he passed away. I'm still in touch with his wife. They divorced some years later, um but um. I remember the first time I ever had chili was with his wife and I've liked chili, yeah, and she's still alive and I still communicate with her. She's almost blind now. She's pretty much almost completely blind, but Daryl taught me a lot about photography and a lot of basic electronics. I'd spend time with him. He had a workshop at the rear of his house and they lived in a very small house and I recall him building an enlarger from an old Bellows camera.
Speaker 1:I can picture that.
Speaker 2:And so he was able to control the aperture and exposure settings for his enlarger, and someplace I probably still have some pictures that we did. The last, I think the last birthday party that I can recall was my 12th birthday party and he did pictures of that, and I've taken to writing about some of my experiences along the way and some of those pictures are actually in the the document that I've been putting together. But yeah, so that those were some of my desires, you know, to to learn Um, and as a result of that I later did become a professional photographer on theed, a studio for a brief period of time, primarily portraits. I did school pictures for at that time the largest school picture firm in the country, which was School Pictures, Incorporated out of Jackson Mississippi, Pardon me, and in the interim ran a studio where I had taught some high school students to fill in for me when I wasn't there, and I did proms and senior portraits and taught myself to hand color photographs with transparent oils.
Speaker 1:So some people don't realize this, but it used to be like all you had was black and white and you could get it colorized. I remember my grandparents had portraits done and they had them colorized, and that's an art and a science, is it not?
Speaker 2:Well, typically you take a black and white photograph and use a sepia tone paper, so when it was printed it would have a brown tone which would give warmth for coloring. And you'd use transparent oils, probably some 200 different shades of colors, um, and you would uh then start to tint essentially the picture and you kind of start off with shadows and things like that and build it up. You'd use a lot of Q-tips, wool fleece to smooth out the tones and over time you'd learn how to blend all those tones to get an appropriate flesh tone and that kind of thing. And then people started to brush backgrounds in to give it more on a canvas paper instead of the regular semi-matte, or it would always be a matte or semi-matte paper because the glossies wouldn't hold the color.
Speaker 1:Right, they'd just come right off, wouldn't they?
Speaker 2:Right. Eventually some artists start to actually take those and blend brush strokes onto the photograph to give it more of a formal hand-painted portrait.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like it was a painting that way.
Speaker 2:Yep, but most of them that I was around were people who had more artistic talent than I did with brush-in backgrounds. I tried it a few times, but you need to know a little bit about art. The company that I worked with, school Pictures Incorporated, also had a portrait studio Howard Pippin Studios and I've unfortunately not been able to find much information about either of those on our great internet today, because I don't remember an awful lot anymore. There were two of us, as minorities, that worked for the company. The other was a school teacher who taught art, and he worked when we were not on the road. He worked in the studio painting. Okay.
Speaker 2:He did both types and of course, these would be like 16 by 20s, 20 by 24s, like what you have on the wall over there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the big pictures yeah, people, it was a pretty high-end studio. I worked in the darkroom processing prints and film, because they also ran a commercial film development operation. I mean all aspects of photography. So there were the two of us there. I had some interesting experiences with that because when we were on the road there were very few places that I could stay. Even though I had an expense account, I couldn't use it that often. But that expense account kind of saved me quite a bit because we got per diem and so I'd arrive at a school and the first thing I'd talk to the principal and say, you know, do you know of anybody who takes borders? And so they'd get me a night and a meal and they would charge $7, $10 a night or whatever. Not much, and I don't remember what I got for per diem, but I made money off of it.
Speaker 1:That's the beauty of per diem, if you use it the right way, right. So I want to, I want to, I want to hold that thought, I want to back up a little bit, though, so before we get too far ahead of ourselves. Um, I do want to talk about so you, you, you did you graduate from high school then?
Speaker 2:I never graduated from high school. When I was 11th grade I took an exam and that exam qualified me to enter college and bypass the 12th grade. If I wanted to wow, my parents went. They were both professionals and my father was at that time a high school principal and my mother was an extension home economist for the Department of Agriculture, working with the extension service, and so they had to always go away for summers to do workshops and in-service training kinds of things and so forth. Right, they left the car with me. I was 15 years old.
Speaker 2:In Mississippi at that time you could get a driver's license at 15. So I had a driver's license. They left the car with me. I was with my grandparents and I got this letter that told me I had passed this exam and, as typical youngsters want to get away from home, my parents had always prompted me to save money and I had quite a bit of money put aside and I took my money and I went down to Jackson, mississippi, to Tougaloo College at that time Tougaloo Southern Christian College and enrolled in college and started during the summer session.
Speaker 1:At 15?.
Speaker 2:At 15.
Speaker 1:You know, I got to tell you that's pretty impressive, because a lot of 15-year-olds that I know would take their money in that car and you wouldn't see them again until they were out of money and the car was wrecked. So that's wow.
Speaker 2:I. It was too young, though Right right, and having been overly protected so much of my life, um left me wanting to explore a lot of things. Um, and you know, for a 15 year old, with there were there were still a number of veterans who had been in the Korean War, who were going back to school. So I'm with all these older people and I went in the summer where a lot of teachers were there for in-service training during the summer. That wasn't so bad, because a couple of them knew my parents and kind of kept me in line over the summer.
Speaker 1:There's eyes everywhere, isn't there?
Speaker 2:And there was. There was a, I remember, in in our, in our dormitory. It was a small school had. They had matrons, dorm mothers and that kind of thing, yeah, so there weren't many of those there during the summer and so there wasn't a lot of discipline of the same type that was there during the fall and spring sessions. In spring sessions so one of these ladies I had kind of befriended and it was in the basement of our dormitory, there was like a kitchenette type affair with refrigerator and so forth and she would make meals and feed me.
Speaker 2:Oh, nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that at all, so I didn't have to spend a lot of my money at the cafeteria. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And back then you would buy, like a meal, a ticket, book and the booklet had different values and it was cafeteria style so you could go in and pick and choose what you wanted and pull out your tickets for whatever amount and pay for it values. And it was cafeteria style so you could go in and pick and choose what you wanted and pull out your tickets for whatever amount and pay for it. I think they were like ten dollars for a book.
Speaker 1:ten dollar book would last you about a week okay, when you're out of tickets, you're out of food, right so, um, but I can tell you, during my early years we ate a lot of pancakes and sardines. Together.
Speaker 2:No, oh, I just want to make sure. Because my mother had taught me how to make a baking mix.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:And we could make pancakes and we'd go to the cafeteria and get those small containers of milk and that's all you needed, right? Or you could even do it with water, because some of them were made with dry milk, so you just add water to mixes. And so we weren't allowed to have hot plates, but we had a double burner hot plate. So we'd make pancakes and we'd eat pancakes and occasionally, if we could afford it, we'd get some sausage, various types of sausage, and we'd have pancakes and sausage. When we were pretty low on money I think back then a can of sardines was like 15 or 20 cents or whatever We'd get sardines and I won't tell you the nickname for them. It's not something we can probably say for the public.
Speaker 1:All right, I'll just let my imagination figure out where we're going and I won't tell you the nickname for them. It's not something we can probably say for the public. All right, I'll just let my imagination figure out where we're going with that. It's funny you say sardines, because I used to sit on the porch and eat sardines with my grandfather. We'd have sardines and crackers and my mom hated it because they just smelled so bad. I still, to this day, I eat a can of sardines with no problem at all.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that was not, that was, excuse me, that was a pretty popular meal, excuse me. Canned sardines, canned pork and beans and what they called lunch meats, which could be bologna, could be several other types of luncheon meats.
Speaker 1:Unidentifiable lunch meats and cheese.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those were things that they could keep in a lunch pail without them spoiling for a few hours, so they would eat sardines and crackers was a quick snack. Yeah, it's good food.
Speaker 1:Not going to lie. They're healthy for you, they are, they smell terrible.
Speaker 2:To this day. I don't get the ones in oil anymore. I get the ones packed in water, which don't smell quite as bad. I wash them to get as much of the salt, because they're packed in salt water Right Out. Then I take them, I mix mayonnaise, pickle, relish, hot sauce and chopped onions, I mix it up and I call it sardine salad and I eat it on crackers. It's good stuff and it's good. Occasionally I put a little mustard in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you want to get on the wild side there. Throw a little mustard on it.
Speaker 2:Eat it on crackers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's it. You know, when I need a quick snack and I'm not real hungry, that's what I'll eat. It's not bad for I don't think it's bad for you anyway. So so you're in college, you're 15, you're eating sardines, you're eating pancakes. Things are going pretty well for you, it's not.
Speaker 2:You got somebody cooking for you 15 yeah, um, paid Paid for my first two. Well, it would have been equivalent to one regular session. So by the time regular session started, I had 12 hours. So they called me an advanced freshman. Okay, so here I am. I'm 15 years old, I got 12 hours of college credit and I did pretty well. But then the regular session started. The upperclassmen started to come in, the girls started to come in and there were all kinds of distractions.
Speaker 1:I could see that that's part of what college is about, though.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so my grades were starting to suffer and I decided, being I was surrounded by a lot of veterans, but being I was surrounded by a lot of veterans, I decided that maybe I force um. And then OTS. His name was Franklin Cerruti. He's still alive. There's some interesting things I'll get into a little bit later about him, but at any rate I talked to him extensively about what he was looking forward to, and so that was like October, November of, I believe, 1960. And he went into the Air Force. He went through basic, he was in OTS and I had made up my mind. But then I was only 17 and you had to be 18. And so my mother was balking, not going to sign. So, coming up to the end of the semester, and I said to her I says well, you know. And so, coming up to the end of the semester, and I said to her I says well, you know, if you don't sign and you force me to stay in school, I'll be 18 in March and I'll leave then.
Speaker 1:And you would have wasted your money, always thinking.
Speaker 2:And that's some serious negotiation for a 17 year old kid. And she finally consented in what I've been writing I think I have a copy of the letter, you know, acknowledging her consent and so I went into. And I went into basic training I believe it was in January, late part of January 1961. And had my 18th birthday in basic training.
Speaker 1:Did they throw a party?
Speaker 2:No, no cakes, none of that well, franklin cerruti, which we always called him by his last name, cerruti, was in ots by this time now, that's officer training school.
Speaker 1:Is that what that is?
Speaker 2:officer training school. Okay, excuse me, get a little dry here.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're fine so.
Speaker 2:So somehow, I guess through base locator or whatever, he knew I was coming in, so he was looking for me and he found me and so, pardon me, I think it was about my third week in basic, because I only spent five weeks third or third week in basic. Cause I only spent five weeks third or fourth week in basic, we got base Liberty and we could go to the service halls. So we met, I went to the service halls and so, being aware of non they call it when they're not allowed to associate, oh yeah, the separation of the ranks, right yeah.
Speaker 2:He wore civvies. I had to wear my uniform cause I was still in basic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We were not allowed to have civvies and we met and we had a, a few pops and I don't know sandwich or whatever and talked and so forth. So I already got orders to go to Biloxi to Keesler Air Force Base and a few weeks later I got back. Those days, if you were going into tech school, you spent five weeks in basic and in tech school you finished your basic of an additional three weeks, which was over extended because you were only doing basic about half a day. Each day you were in school half day and then you did training. Okay.
Speaker 2:Excuse me, so wouldn't you know it, I get orders to go to Keesler also.
Speaker 1:Happy coincidence.
Speaker 2:And I didn't realize he was there. One day some of the guys by this time I had become like a squad leader. In basic training At Keesler they had a system called the rope system, which was a red rope, yellow rope, white rope. Red rope was a squad leader, yellow rope was a flight leader, white rope was a squadron leader, if I remember correctly. So it was red rope leader, if I remember correctly. So it was Red Rope, I think at the time. And some of my troops come running in and says hey, rainy, rainy, there's an officer out there in a Cadillac looking for you. Uh-oh, no idea who this is, what An officer. He's parked on the curve outside the barracks and I go out and walk up and then look in the car sheepishly and I said so, rudy, what do I do? Do I salute or what he says? You damn well, better salute me, herman, right? So I salute, of course, because he's in uniform right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so we chat and it was kind of interesting because we couldn't spend a lot of time together on base, but off base we'd meet up and do stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he gets orders to go to Omaha, nebraska, off at Air Force Base SAC Headquarters, strategic Air Command at the time. A few weeks later I'm coming up for graduation and by this time I'm a yellow rope from a flight leader and, interestingly, if you were a rope, you had pretty close to NCO privileges. We couldn't go to the NCO club but we could leave base, come and go as we pleased, so forth.
Speaker 2:Now did you have civilian clothes privileges at this point too, oh, yeah, once we were I don't remember how far into tech school, maybe three weeks into tech school. Okay, Once you got indoctrinated, you could leave the base, primarily during the weekend, because that check was 9 o'clock.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you were pretty busy during the week anyway, weren't you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, although you know we lived in World War II-style barracks upper and lower bays and I had bay chiefs that I could rely on fairly well. Most places in Mississippi back in those days closed around midnight anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there wasn't a lot of trouble to get into.
Speaker 2:I could go out and maybe dance a little bit and come back and be okay. But Reveille was real early in the morning because I had to get my troops out, yeah. But anyway, I got orders for Grand Forks, north Dakota. I thought mm-mm don't want to go there. It was like one or two weeks before graduation and we had one more exam, so I flunked my exam.
Speaker 1:Now, what were you going to school for? I don't want to derail this topic. I just wonder what was your specialty?
Speaker 2:It was called SAGE, which stands for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. It was the Air Force's first, maybe even the nation's first, computerized radar system. It was under NORAD North American Air Defense Command and it was a part of the early warning system for missile attacks, things like that.
Speaker 1:Early warning system for oh for, like missile attacks, things like that.
Speaker 2:Air attacks, missile attacks, whatever. Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay, and um, so I, uh, I thought, well, some of the guys had told me well, you know, if you flunk your, your, your test, you'll get new orders. So I said, any me, any, my, any mo. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I didn't want to go to Grand Forks, North Dakota. So I said, well, you know, I could get worse. I could get Thule, Greenville or Alaska, if I you know, if I flunked, but anyway I did so. It takes several weeks to get new orders, but anyway I did. So it takes several weeks to get new orders.
Speaker 2:And so at that point I was due to get the white belt. It would have been short-lived anyway, Right, and I didn't get the white belt or belt, the white rope. I'm thinking judo now. Yeah, Didn't get the white rope. So they assigned me as barracks chief for the transient barracks during the interim. I had to keep things orderly. It was right across from the orderly room. But by this time you graduated tech school, you got semi-permanent party status, which means you're assigned there until you get new orders. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Excuse me, so my new orders come in Omaha, nebraska.
Speaker 1:Is that better than Grand Forks? Oh, that was much better than Grand Forks, all right.
Speaker 2:But remember, Cerruti was already in Omaha.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah. So is he pulling strings, or is this just luck? I'm curious.
Speaker 2:I have no idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the meantime I eventually get done and end up going to Omaha. But we were not on the same facility. I was at the 789th Radar Squadron which was on the old, actually on the old, actually off. It was not, it wasn't really in Omaha. I was outside of Omaha, yeah, and where I was was in Omaha but on the other side of town, probably about 20 to 30 miles away, and we were like part of the primary air defense for Offutt and that surrounding area. We were part of the Sioux City Air Defense Command at the time and I was there a few weeks after, maybe a few months after he was there, and we of course met up again.
Speaker 2:In the interim. I had become married and it was kind of funny because we would get into our civvies and he would take me out to the officer's club at Offutt. It was kind of funny because we would get into our civvies and he would take me out to the officer's club at Offutt. Not many chances of anybody knowing me out there. Yeah, true, and I would have him to the NCO club on our site. We only had one service club on our little site which was an NCO club, but everybody went officers, airmen, ncos. Everybody had privileges to go there. It's just a different level of membership and, if I recall right, I think we had to pay like $10 a month or something like that. But anyway, so we did that.
Speaker 2:And then when my first child, my daughter, was born, he and his wife, jackie, became godparents oh nice Of our first child. And from that point I went overseas. After two was I there two years. Yeah, I went overseas and I lost touch with him, didn't find him again until many years later. He and Jackie became divorced and he remarried. As far as I know, he's still alive I spoke to him a few months ago and his new wife, um, but um, the internet. It's remarkable when you want to find people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. Uh, it's been a great help.
Speaker 2:That's definitely for sure, so, um, that was kind of, uh, an interesting aspect to my military career short career.
Speaker 1:How long were you in total, four years. Okay. So you did your time in Omaha and then how long were you overseas? A year. Okay, when did you go overseas?
Speaker 2:I was in the Okinawan island Jane, on an island called Miyakojima, which is about roughly halfway between Taipei, taiwan, and Naha, okinawa. At the time it was supposed to be remote service, but I recall there were about 80,000 people on the island at the time and it had one major city and a couple of smaller villages. The people there were just amazing. I liked it so well until I went back 52 years later.
Speaker 1:Oh, had it changed much.
Speaker 2:I couldn't recognize it. Yeah, the airport when I was there was just a strip with a little shack where they would sell tickets and I don't remember how often the flights were, but they weren't very often. It was called Cat Airlines, which was actually run by the CIA Civilian Air Terminal, I think was what it stood for, C-A-T and there's quite a bit of information on the Internet about that whole situation. But that was the commercial airline and when I went back there was fairly good sized airport yeah, legitimate airport with planes and everything, probably about the size, maybe half the size of lansing's airport?
Speaker 2:yeah, I don't know. Yeah, uh, very nice little airport. Um, and I couldn't recognize where I was when I went back to the site of our, our site radar sites, they were called. The only thing that was left of what was there when I was there was the front gate shack still had its typhoon shutters on. The Japanese defense forces had built an entire base around it, but they left that in one artifact.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:I have pictures of all that stuff too. There's a lot more surrounding some of the things I'm talking about that I've been writing about. And I was still treated very well when I was there. I was only there for five days. In five days I appeared in their local newspaper twice the Miyako Minichi.
Speaker 1:Wow, celebrity too.
Speaker 2:I had saved business cards. I had about five business cards over the years and I wanted to see if I could find any of those people. One of them that I had known eventually became the mayor. Most of them had passed away or moved away and I wasn't able to find any of them. But during that process I was able to find the wife of our chief cook when I was there and his son. His son worked for a recycling company there and his wife had worked on the site as well. I think she worked as a housekeeper in the officer's quarters.
Speaker 2:I didn't know her, but I knew his father was called Lucky. I did know him. I didn't see him very often because he was always back in the kitchen, right, but I knew who he was, knew who he was, and so my host hostess when I was there um, I couldn't have found a better. She ran a bed and breakfast but she was pretty well known and she just took me anywhere, anywhere I wanted to go. I had asked about renting a car and she said well, we can talk about that when you get here. So she had found some car rental pamphlets and stuff. She gave me. But then, after I was there the next day. She said don't worry about that. She told me that she had talked to the newspaper and they wanted to interview me. She says I'll make sure you get to wherever you want to go.
Speaker 1:That was nice.
Speaker 2:So it was like the very I think it was the second day I was there the newspaper editor came and so he put this big article in the paper about when I was there. The newspaper editor came and so he put this big article in the paper about when I was there and a picture of me then and a picture of me when I was there. If you recognize this person, contact the newspaper. Well, they had arranged for me to be at the newspaper offices the day after, I think, that article appeared and about five people showed up. None of them knew me, but they knew of things that I might have known about. As an example, there was a fire in the village just below the site. As an example, there was a fire in the village just below the site and we had a fire department at the site and they responded and they were able to get an elderly woman out, but she eventually died Because their houses back then were probably thatched. Right, they burned pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Pretty quick, yeah, and one of the ladies was from that community and recalled that incident and she was there to find out if I recalled it. Yeah. And I did so. There were several other people who were just interested. Well, another irony surrounded that trip. At that time I was working for the Department of Technology. What's it? Dtmb, technology Management and Budget. Okay. It's been a while now, so yeah, oh, that's fine.
Speaker 2:I don't think back, but anyway, it was Veterans Day that year and our department had asked veterans to write a synopsis of their service and they published it on Veterans Day on the intranet. Ask veterans to write a synopsis of their service. And they published it on Veterans Day on the intranet. And almost immediately after the thing was published I got a phone call from a young lady who said you know, all my life I've never known anybody who knew about this island that you said you were stationed at Miyakojima. She said my mother is from there. Oh geez. And I said I've been trying to plan a trip. Maybe you can help me.
Speaker 1:Right, right.
Speaker 2:And she was helpful and I met her mother and her sister and her daughter and two sisters actually, and we met and we talked, and so I was able to plan the trip. Well, my wife is Filipino, so we were going to go to the Philippines and part of my trip was going to be we would travel separately on the trip there. I would go a roundabout way through Miyako and meet her in the Philippines and she would travel directly to the Philippines and spend some time a week with her folks first, and then we'd travel back together and then we traveled back together. So that worked out and I got there and one of those people who showed up was this young lady's aunt who lives there and she lives in probably the nicest house on the island. And then I come to find out that my hostess I don't know.
Speaker 2:I never quite understood whether it was her father's company, but at any rate, the company that she had worked for was an architectural company that had designed the aunt's house. Oh so they knew each other that's a small.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a small, small uh island, but that's a small world right there. That's funny and uh.
Speaker 2:So when, when we found the, the cook's wife and son, they invited us to come out and he, the time we could go he was at work, so we showed up at his workplace, which was only maybe five minutes from where he and his mother lived, and so we went there and we talked and we took some pictures and so forth and he said come on, come on, come on. We followed him to his mother's house because she wanted to meet me, and so she came out and she had some I don't remember what some goodies that she offered me. And he ran into the house and he came back out and he came out with a military serving tray and spoon, the metal trays that we used to eat on.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I remember those yeah.
Speaker 2:And a spoon from the base when his father was in charge. Apparently, when they closed it and gave it back to the Japanese, they gave him a lot of utensils and he gave it to me and I have a picture of him presenting that to me to bring home, which I mean. There were several incidents that kind of took me to tears while I was there. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I couldn't believe the welcome and the attention and everything that you know and everything that you know, all of the kindness that they showed me. The night before I was to leave, they threw a party and there were, I don't know, maybe 10 people and there was a band playing traditional instruments and they played the national anthem for me on their traditional instruments.
Speaker 1:That would have been really cool to hear, yep.
Speaker 2:I have a recording of it. Oh, and then the next day, KL Cole, my hostess, took me to the airport and there were about 10 people at the airport to see me off.
Speaker 1:It's just like you've expanded your family almost.
Speaker 2:And I was able to stay in touch with her for a while, but none of the other folks really followed up much. I had hoped to be able to stay in touch with the editor, who had spent a lot of time in Australia and he spoke almost perfect English, but it just didn't work out and now I've kind of lost touch with Kay Oka, I think she has a presence still on the internet, but she's not responsive very much anymore, and then she moved to one of the other islands, so I don't know how much she would have been able to help me with keeping in touch with some of those people. But right, but she did in the immediate period after send me some other historical information that I've been able to use Well and I want to, I want to back up a little bit too.
Speaker 1:So you, uh, you were there for a year, right, and I mean what a great experience to go back and be welcomed like that and, uh, maybe not to see the people you knew, but to see people who knew the people you knew. That's sometimes even better. So this was an unaccompanied tour. Then, if I'm not mistaken, right, because of where you were at, your wife didn't come with you. No, okay, so she was back home for that year.
Speaker 2:No, If you recall, I said we traveled. She traveled to the Philippines and I traveled there.
Speaker 1:So I'm talking about your initial tour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I was there. My marriage, my pretty new marriage went kind of on the rocks while I was there, which is a different story that I don't really want to get into. That's fine, but a lot of it centered around incidents with my young daughter. At the time While I was in Okinawa. I think I had three visits from the Red Cross with incidents back home, wow. And ironically again on one of those incidents I was on the main island, okinawa. While I was there I kind of served as a chaplain's assistant and I would make trips back and forth for supplies and that kind of thing to the main island. And on one of my trips I was walking to the gate at Naha. Our squadron was stationed out of Naha Air Force Base. I went in and out of Kadena when I landed and left, but I was walking toward the gate and I heard somebody yelling.
Speaker 2:Rainy rainy, rainy. I turned around and here's a young man from my hometown whose father had been the principal of the school that my father retired from.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And he said I knew you were here because I work in the comm center and I saw some messages for you. Of course I'm sure he knew a lot more than he went on to.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, Of course.
Speaker 2:But that was interesting. Yeah, another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's as big as the world is. It's kind of small sometimes.
Speaker 2:And then when I was in Okinawa first or second time I had to, I don't remember, maybe it was when I arrived there we're going through processing. Yeah, I met this young second lieutenant and we started talking and I found out that he had gone to school in Jackson Mississippi, same as me. Talking and I found out that he had gone to school in Jackson Mississippi, same as me. So whenever I'd come back to the island, I'd just get in touch with him. Stay in the BOQ.
Speaker 1:Why not? It's much better than the alternative, right.
Speaker 2:It was just all of these things, that little ironies, that occur.
Speaker 1:Yeah, little things that happen that make it a little bit better.
Speaker 2:And my last year at Tougaloo College I spent on the campus of Jackson State College, which is now Jackson State University, which is now Jackson State University, because a friend of my mother's husband was one of the deans and she my mother's friend was on the staff and they had campus housing. So I stayed there and just took a bus back and forth to where I went to school and that was kind of a cost-cutting thing because she could just pay her kind of a room and board and not have to pay for my campus lodging and campus food.
Speaker 2:Makes sense Since they knew I was going to be leaving anyway, right, so that kind of worked out.
Speaker 1:So you finished your tour on Okinawa then, and then you come back stateside, was that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, came back to the States.
Speaker 1:And then where were you at? So you had about a year left when you got back after that tour of duty.
Speaker 2:No, I was discharged On my arrival. I was discharged on my arrival. I was discharged to Travis Air Force Base.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then, yeah, so what happens after you get out of the Air Force?
Speaker 2:I go back home, marriage had pretty much fallen apart, moved to the area where my mother lived in Mount Bayou and went through a divorce, tried as hard as I could to keep it together, but it just wasn't going to happen. Unfortunately, my first wife could drink two beers and be out of it and unfortunately couldn't keep her away from it. Yeah, but that's too bad. Couldn't keep her away from it yeah, that's too bad. So after that happened I found the job in Jackson. Now I'm left as a single parent and after three different court cases, I get full custody with my parents of my daughter and now I had to try and find a way to make a living. So my daughter stayed with my parents and I went to Jackson and found a job the first day I was there. So it was kind of interesting that I'd had those experiences of photography. I was able to get that job.
Speaker 1:So this is where you started working for the photography studio. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:And was in touch with my mother's friend who I lived with before I went into the military. Yeah lived with before I went into the military. Yeah, and she knew a woman who would, uh, take a border and it was an ideal thing for me because she would have a border who would be gone most of the time. Yeah, so you know, I paid her and again, I'm still getting per diem, right, I think it was like $10 a week or something like that. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:Because usually if she knew I was coming she'd have a really nice dinner meal for me or something and I'd be off to see my daughter. Yeah, you know. And so I traveled all over the state of Mississippi and southwestern lower southwestern portion of Alabama, okay, from Birmingham down to Mobile. Yeah. And all the way across the state of Mississippi. I mean I could be on the Mississippi Gulf coast today and then required to be in the Mississippi Delta tomorrow, 300 miles away.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of traveling.
Speaker 2:I can honestly tell you there were times that I could remember stopping at a traffic light in the town and not having remembered the last hundred miles.
Speaker 1:That's a little scary, isn't it stopping at a traffic light in the town and not having remembered the last hundred miles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a little scary, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm at a sap light and all of a sudden, like I'm looking around, where am I? Yeah. And I guess later on I found out, it's called road hypnosis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it has something to do with the way your brain processes things, right like I, I used to work in mount pleasant and I remember, like I can remember leaving work and I remember getting home, but I don't remember anything in between and that's yep. That can be terrifying so tired.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, that didn't happen too often, but it did happen a few times. Um, I can recall another incident that happened. I was on the Natchez Trace. I don't know if you know anything about the Natchez Trace, but it runs from, I believe, natchez Mississippi all the way someplace into Tennessee and it was an old Indian trail. Okay, and it's perhaps the longest national park in the country. That highway is a national park, so when you travel on it you're not allowed to stop and only can get off certain places and so forth. But it was the shortest distance to where I needed to go and I was so tired and it was like around three o'clock in the morning and I found a fire road, like I don't know, that's what it was called.
Speaker 2:A little two-track road, yeah, I pulled off in there and park ranger came up. Now, mind you, this is not a good time to be out on a lonely road by yourself as a minority, right, um. But he was a National Park Ranger and he tapped on the window and said are you okay? Yeah, I'm okay. He says you know you're not supposed to be here. I said yeah, but I was so tired and I told him what I was doing and where I was traveling and I said I had to get some sleep. And he says okay, I'll tell you what he says. When do you have to be back on the road where you got to go? And I told him he says okay, I'm going to keep an eye on you, you just sleep. Um and cause, he said I'd rather you do that than I have to pick you up off the highway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really nice of him.
Speaker 2:Uh, so, uh, I, you know I. That was another incident that I recalled being so tired, uh, traveling. I don't envy anybody who has a job on the road anymore.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no. And how long did you do that job?
Speaker 2:Almost two years. Okay, um, it's, uh and it's just. Some people think traveling is just so great, you know. But then when I started to work after I finished college, I traveled quite a bit, and living in and out of hotels is not fun.
Speaker 1:No, no, I think it's exciting for the first couple of times, but then, yeah, it probably just gets old. So what did you do when you left the photography business?
Speaker 2:So what did you do when you left the photography business? Well, let's see. When I left School Picture Incorporated, I was traveling and living out of Jackson Mississippi. I moved back to Mount Bayou and at that time President Kennedy's well, it was Johnson's program at this point was the poverty program. There were several poverty programs that had been initiated, one of which was Neighborhood Youth Corps and another was, I can't recall, they fell on an umbrella called Community Action Programs.
Speaker 2:I can't remember what some of the others were, but the first one that I went to was in Oklahoma County, which was where I was born, and I traveled back and forth from Mount Valley to Clarksdale, and it was a basic adult education program where we took illiterate people in and, in the course of several months, would be able to take them from zero to 12 and perhaps do their GED. Now, not everybody got to that point, but that was the goal and we had to be trained in order to do that. And there was a special program, special books that were written for it and that was pretty much at the height of integration, and so it had to be an integrated program. There were no whites enrolled in the program, but there were whites on the staff. Okay.
Speaker 2:Didn't go over too well with the locals.
Speaker 1:I can imagine that it wouldn't.
Speaker 2:And I recall one day dropping off a young lady.
Speaker 2:I can't remember where she was from now To where she was boarding. Of course, that was the only way you could find a place to stay, but where she was boarding was kind of like an alleyway that went back about a block. Can't really call it a cul-de-sac, but it went to a dead end, yeah. And she was living in the last house on the left and so I drove her home and she got out, she started to go in and then a police car came up behind me and I thought, boy am I going to be in for it? I guess they didn't. They didn't really do anything. And and I thought, boy am I going to be in for it? I guess they didn't really do anything. Then they backed out.
Speaker 2:So I started out and I drove through town and out onto the highway and they followed me to the city limits. I guess they just want to make sure there was no hanky-panky, Right, Whatever.
Speaker 1:No, shenanigans right.
Speaker 2:But then I had to drive 26 miles on a dark stretch of roadway. Yeah. From that point on I was a little leery and there was like a little kind of roadside park on US 61. One night I was driving home and to this day I believe, somebody shot at me because something hit my windshield and ironically it hit and deflected but you could see, and so I drove probably the next 10 miles laying on my seat just peeking over the dashboard.
Speaker 1:That must have been scary.
Speaker 2:Yep, it was. But I did carry a gun back then. That's another story. But um, I um went to the sheriff's office the next day and showed it to them, gave them an incident report. They didn't think it looked like a bullet. I thought, well, maybe a rock, it's your windshield, whatever. But in hearing more from that, but from then on I was really careful as I drove and really watched very carefully and I didn't have any more incidents.
Speaker 2:So I worked in that program maybe a year and then I went to the Neighborhood Youth Corps which was in Cleveland, mississippi which was another 10 miles south of Mount Bayou, so I was living in Mount Bayou and it was during that time that I got involved in broadcasting. So I was working during the day, I'd work broadcasting at night. I'd work broadcasting at night At. The station that I worked at was WCLD in Cleveland, mississippi, and I'd work six nights a week in one morning.
Speaker 1:So I'd close the station six nights and open the station Sunday morning.
Speaker 2:It's got to be a long week.
Speaker 1:I was also a part-time deputy sheriff.
Speaker 2:So you're doing a lot of stuff right around this time and I did that for a couple of years. The way I got that job was.
Speaker 2:There was a high school teacher who's 90-some years old now, who on Saturdays broadcast from the station but from the studios. Not as a control operator. He would sit in the studio and somebody else controlled the mic and everything for him. And essentially what he would do is he would buy that block of time and he would sell commercials to local businesses, predominantly minority businesses, and some of it would be church groups. They might take a block of 15 minutes or half an hour Right, so he would run that and he had to go off for training. He was a school teacher so he had to go off for some training and ask me if I would sit in for him and I was always kind of shy and I don't know.
Speaker 2:He says well, you know all you have to do is sit in front of this mic, like I'm doing right here, and talk when they give you the cue.
Speaker 1:How hard can it be right?
Speaker 2:And I says, well, what would I say? He says, well, you have commercials to read and things like that and I'll take care of all that for you. And I said, well, okay. So then he was supposed to come back at a certain time and he extended that time. He said I can't come back when I'm supposed to. So in the midst of all this, um, the general manager was talking to me and asked me never thought about going into broadcasting and stuff like that. And I said no, and he started to explain to me well, you know, you, if you really want to get into it, you have to get a license. Then you have to get a license, then you need to get this license, you have to travel to New Orleans and take a test, and so forth. Okay, why is he telling me all this? So it was like I think it was the last day I was supposed to be there. He calls me into the office and during that period of time, mississippi had been a totally dry state, even though you could get whatever you wanted, right?
Speaker 1:You just couldn't get it legally Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they were doing a referendum to make it legal, uh-huh. So he had this five-minute piece that he wanted me to read and he said would you mind doing this? And I think it wasn't. Well, I was pretty pro doing it, but it was not very partial that way and you know, I just kind of laid out the advantages of having it legal and the disadvantage and so forth, and I said this is about a five-minute piece.
Speaker 2:So I did it. So when it was done he called me into the office. He said some of his board members had called. I wanted to know who I was. So he said so we've been thinking about maybe making a place for you. I said oh. He says yeah, but we're going to have to put it before the board. We're going to have to do some juggling around and see what we can come up with. So I said okay. So he said well, it's going to be a few weeks, he says, but in the meantime you should consider taking that test.
Speaker 1:He's really pushing you to get this license.
Speaker 2:So New Orleans is a long way. Yeah, I had a friend whose family was fairly influential in Mount Bayou and there was really no Democratic Party at that point in time in Mississippi. It was like the Dixiecrat Party Right and they were trying to revamp the party and bring back the more national flavor and so the young Democrats were the vehicle that they wanted to use. So this family.
Speaker 2:I had befriended one of the brothers who was a Chicago police officer but he was also a skip tracer, so he would work all these long days in a row and then he'd have so many days off and he'd do skip tracing and he'd come down to Mississippi. So he was going to be down there and he said why don't you go down to this young Democrat convention with me down in Gulfport, mississippi? And I said I don't know anything about politics? He says, well, you know good experience. And I says how far is that from New Orleans? He says, well, it's not very far. I says can we go to New Orleans while we're down there? Can I go? He says, well, yeah, I got enough time.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, okay, I'll do that Kill two birds with one stone.
Speaker 2:So we went to this convention, which was at one of the biggest hotels on the Gulf Coast at that time, which was another experience for me and one of the oldest and I got to meet Senator, michigan Senator His name's escaping me right now, I'd have to look at my notes but anyway, quite well-known Michigan Senator at that time. And then the other one who later ran for I don't remember President or President, I believe it was from Minnesota. I can't recall either one of them's name right now. That was a while ago, yeah, but anyway I got to meet both of them, which was pretty interesting for me. I didn't.
Speaker 2:Kendra, paul is a youngster Many politicians coming into Mount Bayou for rallies and that kind of thing, not really knowing who they were Dawson is one name I can recall. So we finished that little thing and went down to New Orleans and I took the test and of course you didn't get the results right away, or dude, I don't know, maybe we did get the results right away, but we didn't get the license. You had to wait on the license.
Speaker 1:It wasn't computerized right.
Speaker 2:Oh no, you sat before. I think it was three examiners who did this, but anyway I got the license. I can recall we went down on Bourbon Street and some of the things I can remember were walking down Bourbon Street and coming to a door. Two or three big guys would stand in front of the door, couldn't go in.
Speaker 1:So there was still some segregation going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we just walked up and down the streets and of course my buddy was probably three times bigger than me. He's a big guy, he wasn't really bothered. He's a Chicago police officer.
Speaker 1:What's going to happen?
Speaker 2:But anyway I can recall the parking was a problem because if you parked on Bourbon Street and if you overstayed your parking time, the New Orleans city had their own tow service, Like police vehicles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they'd come get your stuff, yeah, take it away.
Speaker 2:And we saw them take a family away in the vehicle and the father was saying how can I go get my car? I mean, it was just such an interesting thing, but anyway. So we came back and some weeks later I got offered the job and I don't know if it was the first time, but it would have had to be one of the first times that in the state of Mississippi that a minority was actually running the station, Because when I was there nobody else was there. I had to watch the meters, take the station off the air Sunday morning, bring it back up on the air, ran all the controls and fortunately it was a college town, Delta State College at the time, now Delta State University. My little show got to be quite popular, so that's when the moniker Bruce came up. Okay.
Speaker 2:And people were having trouble with my name. So the name I chose that time was Bruce Kane. Later, when I came to Michigan, I changed it to Bruce Ray, which was R-A-Y for the first three letters of my last name, r-a-i Got you. And so most people in Michigan know me as Bruce. If I hear somebody say Bozella, I know they probably knew me when I was growing up.
Speaker 1:So you can kind of gauge. So how long were you in broadcasting then in Mississippi before you came up to Michigan? Two years. Two years Yep, and you went to another station there. No, oh, you stayed at CLD, just at that one station yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Now, during the time I was there, there was another station that came on the air in Leland Mississippi, which was a black station. I don't think it was owned by blacks and I don't, to this day, don't know if the people who were on the air were licensed or not. Yeah, they just did it. Huh, I think engineers ran the station.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:And they broadcast.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah, so you didn't have to have a license just to talk Yep, so in that day, so back in that time, was that pretty common that you would be the engineer on your own show.
Speaker 2:Well, with a third-class license I couldn't be called an engineer. Okay, that was a, uh, actually a what they call the first phone. First class radio license, uh-huh was an engineer. A second class could do certain things with the transmitter, uh, but typically under the first class authorization, you kind of worked under their license. So it was kind of a stepping stone. But with the third class you could read the meters, you could turn the station on and off, but you couldn't actually work under the covers.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right On the transmission equipment which was more of an electronics kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what brought you to Michigan?
Speaker 2:Several things. I think there were some people who thought I was a little bit too open-minded, because some of my friends were, you know, like I had befriended one of the disc jockeys on the air who invited me to his house and his wife had a problem with that, and some of their neighbors had a problem with that and things like that, and I guess it irritated some people and it had gotten to a point where I couldn't make a living at the radio station because that was part-time work and I didn't have. Those poverty programs don't last forever. The grants run out, right? Those poverty programs don't last forever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The grants run out Right. And so my mother had a cousin in Detroit, her first cousin, who was an insurance executive and knew a lot of people. And so he spoke to one of his friends, dr Haley Bell, who owned the Bell Broadcasting Company, and asked him if he could look for a place to fit me someplace. He sent him a letter of introduction and I traveled to Detroit. As I was driving in on 75, I was wondering where am I going? This was right after the riots.
Speaker 1:What did you get yourself into?
Speaker 2:Oh man, dirty expressway back then Nothing like today. I mean they were filthy, garbage and everything on the expressways. Travel through where some of the riots had taken place and my cousin lived right on the edge of where. I mean you could drive two blocks and see burned out buildings. Yeah, that's pretty close, right. And so I was going to be staying with them until I could get situated. It's on 3360 Pasadena, I believe was the address which is basically on the corner of Dexter and Davison in Detroit. I stayed with them several months until I was able to get myself situated and get an apartment and so forth on the west side of Detroit in the famed 10th Precinct. So I still wasn't doing much better in terms of income, because I'm still working part-time, fill-in, yeah, although I think I recall being on the air like almost 24 hours one day because of a snowstorm. People called in, didn't come to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, somebody's got to run it right. Might as well be you.
Speaker 2:Yep, and it was a 24-hour station, yeah, and so you're like trapped there. That was one of the times when I was really thankful for the group Rare Earth. You know Rare Earth.
Speaker 1:I do. That's some good music.
Speaker 2:Do you remember Get Ready?
Speaker 1:I do, I do.
Speaker 2:One vinyl side.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:That was my. Potty breaks, bathroom breaks, lunch breaks whatever. There you go. I'd play that side and that would sometimes take a quick nap. I can recall back at WCLD on that Sunday morning shift was really rough for me. It was one hour of playing gospel music before church groups would come in for their blocks of time. They would do their. It would be a musical group that would play and sing and try and make money, or a church that would have a 15-minute or 30-minute.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do like a little sermon or something yeah right.
Speaker 2:And so from six to seven was the really worst time because nothing was happening and I didn't know much about gospel music growing up as a Catholic. Our music was different than the gospel music that's traditional for the black community A lot different, super, really different. But I played these records they gave me. I'd just play them and sometimes people would call and ask for a record and I'd go find it. But there was this lady who knew my mother. She was an elderly lady and she would listen every Sunday morning. And I remember being awakened to a phone call one Sunday morning. It was probably about 10 minutes to 7. And she said where are you doing? I've been trying to call you for how long? She said for several minutes. She says that record is just going boom, boom, boom, boom. Oh no, I have fallen asleep.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's no good, that's just some new kind of music.
Speaker 2:Right, uh, because the the tone arms on the on the turntables were all manual. Everything was manual you know you put, put it on there, cue it up and I actually have one of those here, a manual, uh, turntable. Yep, I like them so when it gets to the end, it just goes right right.
Speaker 1:Better be awake when it happens, right so, but, so how long did you bounce around the part-time circuit then, before you like, landed a full-time gig?
Speaker 2:I don't recall exactly, but it was several months. Yeah, um, I was on the air there at WCHD. There were two sister stations, wchd and WCHB, and I believe those initials were at the end Excuse me, were initials for the two owners, and I can't recall the second one now. But anyway, I got a call from the program director at WGPR who had been an on-air personality for a while, known as Katie Beebe. His real name was Ken Bradley and he offered me. Well, he asked me if I was interested in a full-time job and I told him well, yeah, it depended, you know on what and where. And by this time I had driven to Detroit in a Volkswagen Fastback, which I bought new, but it had pretty much given up the ghost after that trip. And if you're familiar with Volkswagens, the heaters don't work very well in Michigan.
Speaker 1:No, For those of you listening, volkswagen was, airwagen was air cooled, so you didn't have a radiator to provide heat. You used heat from the engine, which sucked.
Speaker 2:It was terrible even in the fastback, which was a step up from the beetle, oh yeah, but it's still garbage, though still garbage.
Speaker 1:You could buy like little fans and stuff to put in.
Speaker 2:None of it worked so I remember riding around in Detroit in the wintertime with having to leave the windows open because frost would form on the inside window Right and two or three coats to stay warm to get to where I was going. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But anyway, he eventually offered me the job and so I started to work there. I now don't remember. I think it was initially a daytime slot and then eventually moved to an evening slot right after drive time. But it was a full-time job and I was able to do a little bit better. I was able to go and buy myself a new car With heat. Yeah, it wasn't a new car, it was a I don't remember what year now Ford Fairlane. Yeah, but it was a nice car. Yeah, although I recall that it was yellow with a black vinyl top. And I recall in the apartment that I lived in over off of Livernois, going out, excuse me, to my car, and there was so much soot in the air in Detroit, then my car would have this black film on it and you had to be careful to not smudge it.
Speaker 2:You would have to make sure you washed it off carefully or it would stain the paint on your car, you'd rub it right into the paint, right yeah?
Speaker 2:It was so bad, but anyway I was able to get an apartment, a small apartment, I think it was like $110 or $115 a month. It had a living room, kitchenette, walk-in closet, bath and bedroom and there was plenty for me. That's all I needed. So I worked at WGPR for two years, got into some contract disputes. I wanted them to give me a contract. They didn't want to give me a contract and I had initialized a news department for them and one of the top newscasters on Channel 7, wxyz, who was there for years. I gave her her first job in Detroit at WGPR Wow, and she wasn't there for very long before she got picked up by the other place and she came here from Washington DC. She had been a model back in DC.
Speaker 1:Those are the best looking newscasters anyway.
Speaker 2:Doris Bisco.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And another guy that I hired, I think that eventually ended up in Atlanta. So I had a staff of two and they wouldn't give me a budget, they wouldn't give me a contract. Finally, they just said well, you need to find someplace else to go. How nice, yep, I think they had before or after that, but they were, I think, probably in negotiation for Channel 62. It would have been the first black TV station, oh, which I think is maybe CB, I don't know. No, some network is there now, but anyway, it's down on Jefferson Avenue. They were probably scraping money to try to do that. I didn't have top ratings, I had average ratings.
Speaker 1:Sounds like you did a lot of stuff behind the scenes, though. Yeah, help them be successful right. So then I was able to get into wrf as a writer which by I gotta interrupt you right now when I was a kid, riff 101. So this is before satellite radio and it was so cool when you got close to detroit you put on aiff 101 because they played all that music that they didn't play here in Lansing.
Speaker 2:Oh, that acid rock.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a very cool. For me at that time it was a very cool radio station. When you told me you worked at Riff 101, I was like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it was kind of another interesting job because what I had to do was I had to go to the wire services AP. What I had to do was I had to go to the wire services, ap and UPI and anything that was drug-related. I'd pull those stories and then I have to kind of edit those stories to make them not too pro. But that was.
Speaker 1:You wanted to keep your audience happy.
Speaker 2:The drug culture and acid rock music were entwined.
Speaker 1:Right, that's what made the music Right.
Speaker 2:Psychedelics and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you think about the Inigata De Vida, right, yep, right. The whole story behind that is those guys were so stoned, they were supposed to be singing in the garden of Eden and they couldn't do it. And now you have this 40 minute one-sided LP in a gala Davida, which the music's amazing, but still the drugs probably made it more amazing.
Speaker 2:Not that I'm promoting drugs, but that was right, that was the time, that was the thing. So I you know I had to make these articles appeal to the audience right and not and not make the censors man yeah, literally, literally, rewrite them, yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I just sat in a little studio and wrote, pulled music, pulled stuff and wrote and just had to make sure it was ready when, when the uh two shows crossed the time that I was there I remember Pentalo, I can't remember the other guy, he was a blonde guy, I can't remember his name now, but anyway they crossed and I had to make sure I had stuff for when they would read the news. Yeah, read the news.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, and I, I can recall being whenever um what was the famous um sportscaster? Oh yeah, my memory's not that good um abc sportscaster.
Speaker 2:I know you're talking about. Anyway, I could picture the guy yeah, a little abc code on and everything yep, uh, he and he and I, lee, used to have it out a lot yeah but his name's right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't call him right now howard cosell, howard cosell, howard cosell yeah, yeah. Whenever he would come into town he would use the studio that I worked, so he would go to the abc affiliate to do his show.
Speaker 2:Well, he would kick me out of my little little work spot, oh he's howard cosell right, and he would just run in and do his thing and I'd have to go find something to do and then he'd run out again onto his next place, wherever, wow. So yeah, that was kind of interesting too. But I worked there for I don't know for a while and then I got a lead on WGP W know for a while, uh, and then I got a lead on wgp or w? Uh uh, wjbk, channel two, and I worked there for five years now were you on on air like a I was what they called, uh, an announcer, uh that position doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2:Now they either hire the stuff done by individuals or companies or whatever voiceover type people who just do that, but they don't work in the station anymore and it's all computerized. So they go in and they work for half a day or whatever, or they do it from home or wherever they do it, and they send it and they put it into the computer programming thing and it just runs the stuff right. But I sat in a booth the size of a small bathroom right, it's like a phone booth, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with a window looking into the control center, uh-huh, and I had to keep the station log and I had to announce. So that would be like reading doing what they call off-camera movie host and doing voiceovers and tags. A tag is they do commercial and then there's a local tag on the end of the commercial Right, yeah, like it's Chevrolet, and then it's like so-and-so Chevrolet downtown, wherever so. I did that and again 6 o'clock till 3 in the afternoon.
Speaker 1:That's a long time to sit in a phone booth.
Speaker 2:Well, I had a two-hour lunch break in between because we had overlapping shifts. Yeah. But that's one of the most boring jobs I could ever have in my life. I'd sit through soap operas and you had to be precise with your log times.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious. So you were doing this. Okay, so you're doing this live. I'm a little slow. I'm putting this together now. So when you watch TV, now all that's pre-programmed but you had to watch when they were cutting-programmed. But you were actually you had to watch when, when they were cutting to commercial, and then you were doing it. You were like doing it right then.
Speaker 2:I wore headphones, yeah, had a mic, a mic and a headphone and a switch box in front of me when the director and we had one jay from it was his name. He was a very animated director and he was always at his chair, you know, and he's watching all these monitors and he's got it. You know, he's got a sound guy and he's got what they call a switcher guy, that's switching cameras and other pieces of equipment and he's got to direct all this stuff and he was real animated and so when it would come my time, he'd go announce.
Speaker 2:Hit the button and I had to know where I was and what the next thing to do and say was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you didn't want to mess that up, yep.
Speaker 2:Wow, and you know if you announce, announce.
Speaker 1:If you weren't awake you would be right.
Speaker 2:You made me jump when you just did that, so all of his directions came into my ear and I had, like I said, headphone on mic and a button switch panel. That's all it was. In a room in a chair Wow, at a desk I had logs which were big, write down everything that changed. So when the commercial started it's all pre-programmed. When that commercial started, or when that program started or whatever, I had to log the precise time. I had a clock over there. I forgot, yeah, I had a clock over there. I forgot, yeah, I had a clock. And then they recorded all of this and a program director would go through and check the recorded time against your log time. I had too many of them that were off.
Speaker 1:Oh, they probably didn't appreciate that I had too many of them that were off.
Speaker 2:They probably didn't appreciate that Nope.
Speaker 1:And it got to a point where they said we can't have you doing that, so maybe you better go someplace else. Time to find another job.
Speaker 2:So in the meantime I decided to go back to school. I had my GI Bill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why not?
Speaker 2:And so I went and enrolled at the University of Detroit, graduated from there in the class of 1977, in the off, like in the winter session.
Speaker 1:Oh, so you graduated like early then.
Speaker 2:I graduated like in december 76, but it was the class of 77 yeah, yeah so I didn't get to like may I think, or june to march, or whatever what'd you get your degree?
Speaker 2:in communication studies okay, you had the background, now you just need the degree right, so you got your bachelor's in in uh but only about half of my credits transferred, yeah, so I thought I was going to only have to be there for about a year. Well, I had to be there for about two years. Yeah, wasn't prepared for that. So I had to find some additional work. I ended up working for a little company called scientific medical labs, which, uh, ended up working for a little company called Scientific Medical Labs, which was a medical laboratory. So I was a driver picking up specimens all over the city of Detroit.
Speaker 1:You're that guy that opens those boxes and grabs that stuff out of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in those days. Only if they were closed I would actually walk in and they'd hand me a bag. Okay, the worst part of it was the drug clinics. Yeah, a box of little bottles of urine that often spilled. Yeah, no, thank you how long did that job last for you? I want to say a couple years, I don't remember exactly now.
Speaker 1:I guess not a bad gig though.
Speaker 2:Well, I advanced eventually when I finally did leave. I had gotten the job at St Joseph Mercy Hospital in Pontiac when I left, so I worked there a few weeks after I got that job. But I, I, uh, had actually gone into running pap smears, all the things that you could do without having the technical knowledge, so it's just mechanical work, um and um. I don't know where I would have gone had I stayed, but probably was a good move because they eventually went out of business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Uh, and I saw this little one by one type ad. Back when you've had ads in the newspaper. Yep in the paper, Communications director for a large metropolitan hospital and a telephone number.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's about as blind a call as you can get right there.
Speaker 2:I called and wouldn't you know it. Some weeks later, several, many weeks later, I got the job. I'm still working at the lab and afraid to leave right away because I didn't know what I was getting into. And the first day I walked into this office and I started looking through the files and I thought again what did I get myself into? I don't know anything about this stuff, which was telephone systems and radio systems, overhead paging systems, mail rooms, vehicles. I had to learn all that stuff. I had five areas of responsibility the mail center, information center, patient information center, the telephone systems and the operators, the motor pool and the vehicles, and I can't recall one other one I can't remember.
Speaker 1:That's quite a laundry list for the communications director.
Speaker 2:I had all those responsibilities. I can't recall if I had them all initially. I think I only had three of them initially Mail, oh yeah. The other one was the radio systems yeah, so they were changing all their radio systems at the time and going into um putting telemetry in ambulances so that they could send results and stuff back to the hospital from the field.
Speaker 1:You could get like EKGs and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Right, and so those were specialized communication systems, and then that was about the advent of digital paging systems.
Speaker 1:Oh, I remember digital pagers yeah.
Speaker 2:Where you could get a message on the pager. And then when I went in to meet the president after I got hired, he went through everything. He said well, they tell me you're going to put a new phone system in for me. You got a year. Wow, I don't know anything about them.
Speaker 1:You better learn quick, Bruce.
Speaker 2:Right, I ran a switchboard when I was overseas as a relief operator. There was no traffic, no, I was in Omaha I'm sorry when I did that, and you know so. I knew some basics about how switchboards worked, but nothing much else. But anyway, worked there for 10 years.
Speaker 1:Wow, must have done something right.
Speaker 2:Two years later some people called me an expert in hospital. Communications Was a really quick learning curve. I dare say I could do that job today. It's changed that much. Everything is digital and this was just getting into the digital world, but it's grown so fast and so many leaps and bounds I would have had to go back to school to even keep up.
Speaker 1:Right, so you're there for 10 years. So you were there. Right about you left right around the 90s, then the 1990s timeframe.
Speaker 2:Early 90s, late 80s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, sometimes just kind of yeah.
Speaker 2:Late 80s.
Speaker 1:So now you're an expert. Where'd you go from there?
Speaker 2:Where'd you go from there? Well, a friend of mine who I worked with fairly closely, who was director of safety and security, who also is one of the few people still alive his work and my work kind of went hand in hand Because, if you understand, hospitals kind of operate like like little cities and he was like the police department, that was like everything all of the folks he would go to for certain resources. You know what we need to see, what's going on with this phone, or we're doing this investigation, we need some records, whatever, yeah, and so we got to be pretty close. If there was any emergency in the hospital, we always had to work great together and he decided to go to the University of Michigan.
Speaker 2:And he talked me into considering a job there. He says well, they got basically the same systems that you've put in here and they don't know how to make them work. So I went over and talked to them and they wanted to come over and see what I'd done at Pontiac and I said, okay, so I'll let you do that. But we kind of have to do it on the QT. I don't want the administration to know that I'm bringing another hospital in. So it's kind of it has to be on the basis of you just want a tour.
Speaker 1:Right, you want to see what you do.
Speaker 2:But I shared some information with them as to how I got to where I got and I had one of my system of working, really working full bore, and they didn't know how to make theirs work and uh, so they finally talked me into taking the job there. I did not like it. Yeah, I was there for a year. Oh you, really. Months after I was there, I gave him a resignation, you really must not have liked it.
Speaker 1:I did not like it at all and I traveled from.
Speaker 2:at that time I was living in Ferndale. Oh. I was on the board of education at Ferndale and had become president of the board and I was driving back and forth from Ferndale to Land Harbor every day and in the midst of all that my mother had become seriously ill and was in Beaumont Hospital and she wouldn't eat until I showed up at the hospital in the evening. So I had really really long days during that time.
Speaker 1:Sounds like it.
Speaker 2:I gave my resignation after about seven months and said 90 days to get somebody else after about seven months and said 90 days to get somebody else. Well, university of Michigan, one of their rules is if you give a resignation, no matter how long they, let me serve out that year but, you immediately were reassigned, made a special projects director. Some people just sat.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh, I don't think you're that kind of person, though, are you? They gave people just sat. Uh-huh, I don't think you're that kind of person, though are you.
Speaker 2:They gave me five projects.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:I was done with them in two weeks. So then I just looked for every free IT class, computer class, anything I thought would benefit me, that they offered, and I took it if it didn't cost any money. And they had a lot of them.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And so in the meantime, while I was doing that, when I had all that time, I started to build my own consulting company, and so I did that. When I left there I had several pretty high-profile clients small but pretty high-profile, until I got a call from the state. So I had the Ferndale Housing Commission. The city of Ferndale revamped their whole telephone operations. Partially did the city of Birmingham. They had the Ferndale Co-op Credit Union which. I think now is all merged with Lake Trust. I think I had a couple of smaller ones.
Speaker 2:I can't remember, but anyway, I had built that up in the lower year.
Speaker 1:Lots of good, solid work really.
Speaker 2:Yep Kept me busy, and then, of course, those were long days too, because I was my own salesperson, my own secretary clerk.
Speaker 1:When you own your own business you take on a lot of job titles Right, wear a lot of hats. Yep, I was everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I got a call from the state public service commission and I thought, wow, this would give me an opportunity to have say-so into the regulation of various telephone companies and so forth, which would be a nice new step. And so we came into Lansing and looked around and thought this is much better. I never even considered moving to Ann Arbor. This is much better and kind of like the Grand Ledge area. That's where I bought a house, so I'm still there. And of course then I had to give up my position on the school board and, you know, make adjustments for that move. Unfortunately, I was only at the Public Service Commission for two years and was really beginning to get into the swing of things when we had an election and Governor Englert took over and decided to do some of the same kinds of things we're going through right now and downsize everything.
Speaker 1:Limited a lot of positions yeah.
Speaker 2:Yep, which really is destructive to the way things operate.
Speaker 1:But so be it. That's government work sometimes, right, yep, it just depends on which way the wind's blowing.
Speaker 2:Yep, and um so we. I was put on the layoff list because of my low seniority. Yeah. Only two years. Fortunately, uh, my director was real pleased with my work. The commission was real pleased with my work. The commission was real pleased with my work.
Speaker 2:And I had really met all my goals that I'd been charged with when I came there. Because when I came there, my boss said you've got three employees an auditor and two engineers. I didn't have an engineering degree. I didn't have an engineering degree, I didn't have an accounting degree, right, but those were people that reported to me small staff with a lot of responsibility. One of the engineers, he said you'll have two that you're going to have to kick into shape and one's a teddy bear. You'll be able to work with him, and he and I are still friends today. Oh, that's awesome. We try to do lunch at least once a month. Sometimes we see each other more often. He tells me I taught him how to write, but anyway, um, the one engineer, because of his time and service, felt that he should be promoted to the position that I was going to yeah but the director didn't feel that he had the appropriate management skills to do that.
Speaker 2:he wanted somebody who knew communications and also had management skills and some experience, and apparently I fit what he was looking for. When I came for the interview, I wasn't home a half an hour before they called and they wanted to bring me in at the top of the scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they knew what they wanted. Yep For sure.
Speaker 2:But of course then that led to a lot of animosity by one individual Right and the auditor was kind of in support for him. But eventually I convinced the auditor that he needed to not be in that position because you know it could jeopardize his position. As fate would have it, that engineer and I both left on the same day. Only he was walked out with an early retirement retirement and I went to another job because the commissioners were able to find me another position to keep me from being laid off, even though it was a four level demotion.
Speaker 1:Right, it's still a job, right yeah?
Speaker 2:And I'm still in state service, which is the critical thing, because once you're out, getting back in is not easy.
Speaker 1:It's hard enough to get in Right. Yeah, you're out.
Speaker 2:Getting back in is not easy. It's hard enough to get in, right, yeah, and so I went right across the street to the corporations and securities commission. They gave me several projects which I completed pretty quickly. Do you remember the 900 numbers?
Speaker 1:I do. I mean, I don't personally remember them, but I remember what you're talking about the state's first 900 numbers.
Speaker 2:I do, I mean I don't personally remember them, but I remember what you're talking about the state's first 900 numbers and they didn't have a great reputation.
Speaker 1:No, no, If you dialed the wrong 900 number, it was a problem but they were an ideal way to have a service.
Speaker 2:Pay for itself, yes, and corporation securities had a lot of people who were seeking information about companies and licensing and that kind of thing and they would be on hold for sometimes hours if they really needed the information and they had a lot of hangups, a lot of busies and all of this kind of thing. And my background in communications, where I used to study traffic management and that kind of stuff, allowed me to study their services and devise a method whereby they could give better service and still pay for it without having to put the cost back on the customers who were trying to get service. Because if you're sitting on a long distance call for hours, you know that got to be pretty costly and people were complaining right and left.
Speaker 2:The 900 numbers were the ideal way to do it, but it also had to require a certain level of staffing and a certain type of building shifts. So we'd have staggered shifts and sometimes even split shifts, where people would come in in the morning and come back in the afternoon in order to meet the peaks and valleys of the demand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Was that pretty predictable in that business? Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Because the phone company could measure hang-ups. They could measure what we call holding times.
Speaker 1:Right Abandoned calls all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Right and abandoned calls all of those kinds of things could be measured and you applied typical traffic models to those and you could tell, when you needed your average call length, how many people you'd need to handle that yep, aht, yeah, all that yep, fun stuff, yeah, right.
Speaker 2:so um, uh, we put them in and of course, all the negativity followed it, because they're 900 numbers. Oh well, you know you're charging people now says but we're charging them a lot less than what they were paying. Sitting there holding before and half the time not even getting any service, right? And they still pay.
Speaker 2:Yep, but of course when you budget constraints it are in two sometimes, and typically people who are not. But of course when you budget constraints it are in too sometimes, and typically people who are not in the communications business or have never been in a business, a service type business, don't understand traffic modeling or queuing theory. If you run a grocery store you have to understand it. For instance, all these got it down to a science. They can see so many people waiting. They call somebody up Right, take a cash register.
Speaker 1:Right, there's these trigger points, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they typically underfund, even though it's predictable. You tell them this is what's going to cost you, this is the kind of staffing levels you need, and they don't hire the right people, develop the right shifts and over time, and they don't continue to study it. So, anyway, I don't know what eventually happened to it, but I was there for about six weeks before several positions at my level opened within the state, and because I was on the layoff roster and still employed, they had to offer me. If any became available, they had to offer me. Well, at that time time they also had another qualification which they call selective certification, excuse me which meant that you had special kills on a special skills in a certain area. They had to consider you for for, you know, for those jobs before anybody else.
Speaker 2:Um, well, the job was in the at that time Department of Commerce and I'm sorry that was the previous job. This one was in the Department of Management and Budget at the time and the job was a supervisor of telecommunications billing services, and there were a couple people that were in line for that position, but it just so happened that there were three vacancies for three managers at the same level, and so for me, it was a matter of which one they felt that I was a better fit. I felt like I would have been a better fit to one of the other positions which was more in line with what I had been doing though I had been doing it at a higher level as a department director rather than at a supervisory level, but they gave me this position.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure whether they were looking for somebody that had some background in innovative kinds of things and revamping technology and that kind of thing or not, but there was a, a billing system that needed to be badly updated. Uh and uh that wasn't a good term needed to be updated badly, right.
Speaker 1:Or it needed to be updated. Good, or something like that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Uh, and anyway, uh, that was a position they offered me and, uh, it was at the same level. Uh and I ran into the same challenges there. There was a person in management, uh, who had been there for several years and felt that the position should have been hers, and of course then I had to fight through that. The position should have been hers, and of course I had to fight through that. She eventually took an early retirement and there were several Unix-based systems that they were using to do different aspects of the billing operations. There was no ability for them to communicate between each other, so they're kind of siloed.
Speaker 2:Yep, okay, and so you'd have to do all these operations in sort of a sequential fashion. You'd run something on one system, then you'd have to go and take data to another system and run it there, then to another system and run it there to reach a final product which was, at that time, only billing for the telecommunications telephone systems and that kind of thing, circuits, data. Well, I don't even think there was any data Data circuits then, but there was no billing for anything other than primarily telecommunications phone services.
Speaker 1:So was this in the late 70s, early 80s or later than that? This would have been.
Speaker 2:I want to say early 90s.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so right before computers and data and all that stuff really exploded, Okay.
Speaker 2:Um, and so I uh, I had to sit down and really begin to. I had no experience with Unix first of all, um, very, very minimal experience with Unix and um. I had to learn a little bit about Unix so that I could understand how systems work, a little bit about Unix so that I could understand how systems work, and then work on looking for a way to converge all the different operations essentially into one system where we could collect data, do the billing operations and collect from multiple systems. We had several phone systems that we collected data from and, of course, then you have to collect the raw data, you'd have to match it to rates and then you'd have to create invoices and you'd have to supply them to the agencies for their services.
Speaker 2:And so I was fortunate and I had a young student who I'm still in touch with and he had been there through his high school years as an intern and then had come back as a paid student assistant, as a paid student assistant, and he was very sharp. In fact he was so sharp I could sit down with him and say, okay, I want to create an operation that does this and I kind of start to describe the flows and he would sit there at his computer writing that software in BASIC as I talked to him. He'd write them in little modules. Then he would take them away, put them together so they would be more like a program, bring it back to me and say, okay, what do I need to fix? And when we would get it to do whatever we were trying to achieve, he would compile it, write a menu around it and we'd have a program.
Speaker 1:That's pretty handy.
Speaker 2:Wow. So he was able to actually pull the data, parse the data and, in our little intermediate programs that he would write, produce the final product, and I can't remember exactly how much he was able to achieve, but I'm almost certain we were able to generate the invoices as well through his software.
Speaker 1:So did his software like? Allow you to not have to do this handoff the software.
Speaker 2:That was the whole purpose of it was to bring all the data together in one spot, oh okay. We were still collecting it the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But we were processing it differently Took care of the handoff Right, and it took care of a lot of the manual iterations that we had to go through to make those things happen. Mm-hmm, in fact, I was just in touch with him this past week, just in touch with him this past week. From the work that he did, we were able to generate an RFP, a request for proposal to build a system, have a company to build a system that would do everything that we were doing, and we were able to utilize a lot of his flows that he had developed to build into that RFP. And so we, before I get any further into that system, he wrote me a really nice letter after he graduated from college, because he stayed with us through his college time and, if I remember, if I can recall correctly, he graduated from Central Michigan and he had taken an IT degree. Well, because of the background that he had that I had allowed him to experience through telecommunications and his data training, he was able to get a top job in industry.
Speaker 2:I believe it was Tenneco and, if I'm not mistaken, he's still working for Tenneco. That's great and he's still in charge of all of their data stuff and he's still dealing with telephones and data, and now he just basically travels a lot. He got married and he has some kids now, so he's done quite well for himself and he's still just like he was. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How does it feel to know that you were a part of that for him, oh it feels real good and it feels even better and we're still in touch, yeah, and we have lunch every once in a while, even though he doesn't live here, but he still has to come to lansing for, uh, his work, right, so he has some offices here and um.
Speaker 2:But he wrote me this really nice note saying that it was because of the freedom that I had given him to be creative and to delve into other aspects of the field that he felt that he was able to get to the point he had gotten and that someplace I misplaced it in the one of the few things that I wish I still had Um, cause he had it was it was so well written Um. But anyway, we went on. We got the RFP on the streets. We had a lot of consternation from some of the vendors, some of them saying nobody can do that, it was kind of cutting edge, that it was kind of cutting edge. Computerized billing systems were just coming into their own, because this was right after the divestiture of the phone companies from AT&T.
Speaker 1:Right, because it was all one big mob bell right and they busted off in all these different areas.
Speaker 2:Right. So now companies, organizations, were able to own their own phone systems and manage them and so forth, and they were essentially about three or four major manufacturers. Back in that time we were a few years beyond the divestiture, because it had been some 10 years earlier when I put the system in at St Joseph Mercy and that was one of the early systems. And now the state had an AT&T system which was a little bit more difficult to work with than some of the other systems Because there was still a lot of stuff that they held proprietary. And so we I think we sent out 20 invitations thereabouts for bids, we posted it publicly, we got three bids and two of those bids, as I recall, were disqualified, one of which would have been probably my choice if I would have pulled one off the street, and it was a small company in Grand Rapids and one of the reasons was because it was it was kind of a Windows interface, gui interface, I remember that term.
Speaker 2:Yep Now I can't recall what the acronym stands for.
Speaker 1:Can I? I was hoping you weren't going to ask.
Speaker 2:The last, the last.
Speaker 1:I is for interface Right Something? User interface yes, we'll have to look it up after this but at any rate I uh one.
Speaker 2:There were two, two companies out of grand rapids, both fairly small companies, one of which was would have been my choice, only because of how they built their system interface. It was a lot more user-friendly than the typical DOS-style menu-driven interface, and so I thought that was going to be the wave of the future. But these two got disqualified because they had more questions in their responses than they had answers to the questions, and the questions were. You have to answer each one of these questions in each section.
Speaker 1:I almost feel like you'd want to hire the guy that asked a bunch of questions, right?
Speaker 2:Well, but there's no answers. Oh, yeah, they have a whole series of requirements and you have to say how are you going to meet those requirements? Right, a whole series of requirements and you have to say how are you going to meet those requirements? And instead there were well, but we can do this if that kind of thing. Yeah, you know. No firm answers, fortunately, or unfortunately. Fortunately, I suppose, for the other company, the third company, unfortunately for us in that particular period was almost every question they said we understand and we will comply.
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't know if I like that, I don't even know if that's a better answer than no answer, but nonetheless they said they could comply Okay To every requirement.
Speaker 2:How'd that work out? Essentially every one of them. There were a few where they said you know we would have to negotiate this, but we're willing to do that. But in general they had answered all the questions in an appropriate fashion. So essentially they got the contract by default. So essentially they got the contract by default. I recall there was one company out of Nashville that I was pretty familiar with and they were fairly popular around the country. They were just livid when the RFP finally came out because they swore nobody can do that.
Speaker 2:You've written it for some other company, you've written it to favor one company, but we hadn't. So anyway, they got the contract. We started to have our initial meetings. Then they started to realize that this was going to be a real challenge for them. Probably the biggest challenge for them was the state accounting system and its multi-field accounting coding methodology, where they had several fields buried in a 120 some character string, if I recall. I don't remember all the specifics now, but it was a very long string and they had several fields built into that string. So you had to parse all that out because each, each portion of it represented some aspect of accounting. That was a real challenge for them because their system, as it was designed, could not handle that larger field. They, you know 10, 12 character account code right, yeah, like you see on your checks.
Speaker 2:Right would handle, yeah, and so we spent a lot of time over two years as they were designing the system with attorneys until they finally came up with a scheme to make it work, to make it work. From that time on they were able to pretty much achieve everything that the state asked of them. When I left they were still there. They are still there today. I can't remember now how many iterations of that system they've gone through, but it was written for the state, so it has been able to, all along the way, evolve as the state has evolved, and I think now they've been through the third accounting system. Oh, and they've been able to adapt to each one of them Because of the flexibility that they built into their system and for the ability that they had to move from old programming languages to the newer languages easily, without impacting their user interface significantly.
Speaker 1:They've been able to stay there even though they've gone through, I think now, three or four rfps do you think it's that that, initial though that allowed them that flexibility later on down the road, like you, asked for something that a lot of people said you couldn't do, and then you got it, but now it's still kind of working.
Speaker 2:Well, I think because they what they had done is they bought excuse me, they bought a system where they bought the rights to a system that had been developed by nec nippon electric corporation. Yeah, and they tore it apart and built their own system around the different modules so that they had their own interface, but they were still using these different modules and so they were able to customize things a lot more easily because they had torn it all apart and built their own system around it and as time went on, they started to get rid of different aspects of that and they became more custom. And I know they had other clients. They had a large railroad company, they had several other clients and they had done similar things for them. That's how flexible the system that they had built was, right. So I think it was probably the flexibility and the direction that they chose to move in developing their system.
Speaker 2:I should say systems, because each one of them was designed for that customer Right, whereas most of the other systems that we looked at were off the shelf. This is what we have. You have to adapt to us, right? You have to bend your way to our-.
Speaker 2:And they were saying no, we'll make what you want and make it work. Yeah, the interesting thing was I don't think they've ever had more than seven people total in the company. Last I was there they had five that's pretty lean, yep and for what they do and they've been able to survive. Both the principals at the time have since retired. One of the principals bought the other out and his son one of his sons took over the business and has done really well, considering that wasn't even his field.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go. You just never know.
Speaker 2:He's become a very good programmer.
Speaker 1:So how long did you stay in this position and is this where you retired?
Speaker 2:from yeah, I retired from that position. Okay, so I had several titles during that time, but during the same thing.
Speaker 1:Right, well, that state likes to do that, right, we'll just change the title. But so you? When did you actually retire from the state then I think it was 2017. If I remember, Okay, um, so you were, you were going to tell me. Um, so we know that you you retired in 2017, but there was something you want to tell me about the company and how it got its name okay, yeah, the company was m-a-t-s-c-h match and um that stood the the two principals that started the company, I think.
Speaker 2:I think they both left at&t after divestiture. I can't remember now, but anyway, they were uh uh, bob matthews and robert schaefer, bob they. They used robin bob, right, rather, rather, rather than being both Bobs Right, okay.
Speaker 1:That would just be confusing, right.
Speaker 2:Right, so it was Rob Schaefer and Bob Matthews. Okay, so M-A-T for Matthews and S-C-H for Schaefer Match.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, right. That's a marketing genius, right there.
Speaker 2:Well, it didn't stop there, Okay. Each of the telephone systems that were around the state, okay, had collection boxes. In other words, the telephone system would spit out usage data into a collection, a collective, a box that collected that data and stored it for later retrieval so it could be merged and then matched to accounting data and so forth. Well, those boxes, those remote boxes which they would pull periodically to pull the data at each of those switches, was called a matchbox.
Speaker 1:Oh man, oh. So, like you'd have to go, I got to collect from matchbox number 10. Yep, oh, that's brilliant.
Speaker 2:Yep, and so, yeah, it's kind of an interesting concept that they came up with. So they had these matchboxes. I don't know if they still call them matchboxes, because I think now they have internet connections to all the switches. I don't think those things exist.
Speaker 1:They may still exist for backup purposes, because you always need some kind of a secondary device well, if you think about this too, like a lot of that stuff came about and then things progressed and changed, but you still had the match boxes and there was probably a point in time where people were calling them match boxes but didn't even know why.
Speaker 2:That's just what you've always called them, you know I probably didn't, they didn't know, yeah, but that's that's why they were called match boxes, wow, um, so then they. They hired another Robert. She had three Bobs, so we used to call them Rob, rob and Bob, and for a while he had been a partial owner, but they decided to part ways and the two guys kept it. As I said earlier, the one guy, rob Schae, bought out bob matthews. Bob matthews moved down to florida and lived a life and and then they brought in his son and their genius programmer I shouldn't even call him programmer their genius hardware guy, yeah, who took care of all of their servers, all the match boxes, all of the programming that made them talk to each other and that kind of thing. And the son took over the basic programming and then hired a couple students student-type people, you know, early graduates or students who were still in school to do a lot of just the grunt work programming. Here's your, here's your assignment. Go do it Okay.
Speaker 1:I got to ask this question, so I'm going to I'm going to set it up for us and make some statements here. So you know, I worked in corporate America for 28 years and we did a lot of RFPs and and we did a lot of projects and all of that. But here's what I noticed about you that I don't notice about anyone else. You know the people that you work with. Like, I knew the companies that we worked with, but I didn't really know the companies that I worked with.
Speaker 1:But throughout this whole thing like you know, this whole interview that we've been doing I've noticed that you take the time to not just know the name of the company and maybe where they're at, or maybe it's a little bit like you know intimately who owned it, what they did, how the name came about. You know you are so invested in the people that you work with that at some point they write you letters thanking you for what you did for them. Like, you have this thing that you do where you get invested in the people that you work with, um, even some of the people you don't get along with, because you know they left after you got there, but you knew about them, and so what is it about you that drives you to get to know people like that? Like that's a, that's just a whole different skill set Like that's? That's what makes people successful is knowing the people around them.
Speaker 2:I'm just a people person. Yeah. I'll. I'll ask you a question. Okay, you were with me about a week ago with some other people. Uh huh, that's how I do it.
Speaker 1:That's funny because I learned a lot about those guys who were sitting there eating lunch.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, that's how I do it. I find people who I can usually find something interesting about almost everybody that I meet and I try to relate to those people on that level. I can still recall I think I mentioned earlier my Motorola rep. Well, I even knew people at the corporate office Because one of the systems that I had installed to do that answering service and the paging that we talked about earlier, early on they had approached Motorola to market their system and I traveled to Motorola's headquarters in Rolling Meadows Illinois I think it was Rolling Meadows Illinois to see the prototypes of the system that we later installed at St Joseph Mercy and that University of Michigan had installed but couldn't figure out how to make it work. I remember that.
Speaker 2:Okay, and there was. So there were sales folks. I even knew the owner quite well His name was Scott Stingle of this particular system. The company was Interactive Communication Systems, I believe it was called. They were out of Walton, massachusetts, but I made it a point to get to know who I was working with, because you'd be surprised what you can get when you know people on that level. You know because it's harder for them to say no for certain things whether they fly in for a few hours and then they take off and you never talk to them anymore. You know that just wasn't me. I'd have lunch with them, go out to dinner with them, whatever.
Speaker 1:They were people. Yeah, I've been a firm believer in the face-to-face meeting. Like I always jokingly would say, say it's harder to be mean to someone that you know. You know like if you and I sit down, have dinner and we're doing a business deal, we might disagree on something. We're not going to be mean to each other because we know each other. We're going to work this thing out. So I've always kind of subscribed to you, got to sit down and meet people face to face. You can't do it over with all those companies.
Speaker 2:We had our ups and downs, we had our disagreements, we had. It was a lot easier to work through a lot of them right, um, and a lot of times we could have some very difficult meetings and then go out for a drink or dinner or whatever afterwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's, we get stuff. We get stuff done Right.
Speaker 2:Uh, and Rob Schaefer lives in Holland today. In our still friends we visit from time to time. Um, we didn't become very good friends until several years, I mean after he bought the company. It after he bought the company. It was after he bought the company we started to spend time just talking on a one-to-one basis. We were both getting toward retirement and so forth. But what was a neat thing about him, he never forgot special days. Somebody in my staff would have a birthday or whatever. They would always make it a point to, if they were aware of it, to acknowledge it in some way, maybe flowers or any retirements. They would always show up. Somebody from the company would be there, if not two or three people. I think at my retirement there were three people from Match, I believe.
Speaker 1:And that's interesting because a lot of times outside vendors aren't part of those transitions. You know what I mean. Like when I, when I worked at consumers energy, I never saw vendors at a at someone's retirement, even though we worked with these guys all the time, you know you didn't. You rarely would see a um a contractor at a retirement. So that speaks volumes for the relationship.
Speaker 2:There was actually one, one vendor who I only related to indirectly because he sold circuits, data circuits and large scale telephone circuits and that kind of thing. And I'm still in touch with him and when he's in town sometimes he'll call and say let's have lunch. And we had no really direct relationship. He would come from meetings and sometimes he'd just because he knew we handled the billing. So we got the money that made it possible for him to be there. Come on, let's go to dinner. Or he'd bring bagels in or something like that. He lives down in the Detroit area. I try to make it a point of not creating enemies. I don't know how to phrase what I want to say I don't meet. I always to say I don't meet, I always meet friends. Yeah, and if you want it to be other ways, otherwise, that's your choice.
Speaker 1:Well, and the other thing is you don't seem like a transactional person, Like I need you to do this job for me, but there's this friendship relationship that develops and it's not just a you do this for me and I'm going to give you a check. You don't seem transactional like that. You seem more on a personal level.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're at the next lunch, maybe you'll get to meet one of the guys that wasn't able to be there. Pardon me at the lunch you were at, pardon me the lunch you were at. When I was at the public service commission, the first day job I had, I think I mentioned earlier, I had only a staff of three. Yeah, and it was. It was the teddy bear. He's the teddy bear, okay. So all that time we've become friends, um, and I wait until you meet him and you know and you can tell, he can tell you some of the stories and you know too bad for the people listening that uh, they don't get to go to these lunches.
Speaker 1:But you know that last lunch that I went to the interesting thing to me was everyone at that table was different. You know there was some common like interests, but everyone was different. Everyone kind of had a different life, a different path and it was great, like I, if I hadn't had an appointment that afternoon I think I'd still be sitting there. To be honest, like that's a hard table to get up from, yep I, I find it that way as well, yeah I just generally like people.
Speaker 2:My wife gets frustrated because she says you know, I find things interesting about anybody I've met, almost yeah, and I just like to share with them, like to talk to them. I learned from people.
Speaker 1:Almost every time I meet somebody new, I learned something from them and I enjoy learning and my doctor keeps telling me just keep doing that, I'll make you live longer it, will they say, if you use your brain, it uh, it lasts a lot longer, it doesn't wear out well, there's a social aspect to it as well right, because I know several veterans around me who are younger than me who can't do the things that I do.
Speaker 2:That's probably the only way I'd say it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I understand, I understand, so let's kind of transition into that. Then. So you retired and it's been almost transition into that. Then so you, you retired and uh, it's been almost probably around eight years ago that you retired. Um, I don't, it doesn't appear to me that you've slowed down. So, um, the first question is when you retired, what was it like to kind of walk out of that really for the last time? How did that? What was that feeling like for you as you're leaving the state?
Speaker 2:Bittersweet. Yeah, I had worked seven or eight years past retirement I don't remember how many years now I had worked way past retirement, yeah, and it was kind of nice because I could draw Social Security and I could work and not have any limitations and I could put that money away. Social security and I could work and not have any limitations and I could put that money away. And I had several things that I wanted to achieve before I left so that I could say when I left there would be no major challenges, no major hurdles left for somebody else to have to pick up midstream, that they would be at a point where they could just kind of move on and grow. And I stayed until I could see that that spot. There was only one thing left that I wanted to achieve and that was in process, um, and that was just another data matching operation to minimize some more manual stuff that had to be done so that we could have all of our systems interfaced. And that was the last step and at that point I could see that it would probably happen.
Speaker 2:And there was another young, really smart person who is now, I think, at my reasons, didn't seem to like me, but she also didn't seem to like a lot of other people. So it wasn't just you, yeah, I don't know why, but a lot of people just had difficult times getting along with her and she had a large hand in the telecommunications side of the billing and the data collection from telecom and she resented he and I working together because he was able to visualize the concepts that I was trying to move into with those systems and he was doing the same thing that the other young man had done. He was actually writing stuff and coming to meetings and she prohibited him from coming to the meetings. Well, they started to have some difficulties in management in that department, started to have some difficulties in management in that department and, um, they brought in a.
Speaker 2:They had brought in several like temporary directors, um, and the one director that was there. I mentioned to him that. I said you know you have a really bright young man in your area and he says but he's been prevented from working with our group to bring, bring these uh interfaces together. And he asked me who he was and I told him and he said you can have him whenever you need him, I'll take care of that. He's never stopped.
Speaker 2:And now, now he's where you were pretty much a different area but at my level, right From what I what I'm hearing, I he sends word to me through another, through one of the other managers who's still working, that I'm friends with. He sends word to me from time to time oh, tell Bruce that, that, that, that that you know, and from time to time, oh tell Bruce da-da-da-da-da. And so I felt good about that one too, and I guess he told this friend of mine that I was very instrumental in his development as well. So, that feels good.
Speaker 2:It's always nice to be able to help the younger folks.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean, we owe it to them to be mentors. I think our job is to get the next group ready to take our job right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that was you know. Now that you mention that, one of the things that I used to always describe to, I know a lot of managers feel like they have to know everything. You know they've got to be better than anybody that's below them or that reports to them. I didn't like that term and I was always of the opinion I don't need people, I don't need to know everything that people do. I need people who know how to do things. I need to know how to manage those people and bring the best out of them, and I would always tell them it's not me who gets the credit, it's those people who do the work that I need and understand how to make those things happen. Those are the people that deserve the credit. You know, all I did was try to bring them all together and make a cohesive working unit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just need to know people. They need to know their job. Right yeah, 100%.
Speaker 2:And so I recall when I took my first job at St Joseph Mercy and I told you I had a very good mentor there, my boss there. I remember several months into the job I was trying to learn everything. I had so many responsibilities. I was trying to know as much as I could about each one of them. Like I said, they gave me a lot of leeway in terms of training and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But he called me in one day and he said to me he said, bruce, I don't need you to work. I kind of the photo, look on my face. He says I need you to manage. And we had to have a little discussion about it. But you know, he got me to understand what he wanted from me and I started to step back. And it was about that same time that saint joseph mercy had this big emphasis on participative management styles, where you bring staff in and have these brainstorming sessions, get all the ideas on the table, talk about the pros and cons, pull out the best aspects of all the different ideas and solutions, put it together, develop a plan and implement. And I've carried that with me since then.
Speaker 1:I kind of chuckled when you said what you said earlier, though, because I worked for Chris Shelberg probably one of my better bosses, my better supervisors, and I was a manager over a large area and one day she pulled me in and she said look, when I tell you something's got to get done, that doesn't mean you have to do it. That means it's got to get done. You have all these smart people out here that work for you. It can get this done. Stop doing. You know exactly, manage the manage, manage the operation, but let the people do the work.
Speaker 1:yep, you can't do it all for them they're the experts yeah, yeah, I mean, why would you hire smart people and tell them how to do their job? That doesn't make any sense. So I get it. So you know, let's, let's talk about that transition then. So you, you leave the state of Michigan, and then what happens? What have you been doing over the last couple of years?
Speaker 2:Well, I really thought I would miss the work, but because of where I left things, I had no reason to think about it. You know, I had no reason to think about it, right, you know? Oh, I wonder if this happened. It just I didn't need to because I had achieved almost everything that I wanted to achieve all the goals that I'd set for myself, and so it was like okay, so there's this new chapter. I need to go out and figure out what I'm going to do. So I started saving money and buying photographic equipment and radio equipment. I've got the radio station that a lot of people would dream about. Now I enjoy it when I have time to go in there and operate. I like what we call DXing, which is long-distance contacts. The one thing I don't like about it is because in the hobby, so many people all they want to do is to make the contact and get it in their lock. They don't want to talk what we call rack chewing. Okay, I made this contact in my lock, so I talked to some guy in Timbuktu.
Speaker 1:So is the idea to talk to people from all different and kind of fill in.
Speaker 2:It's a very interesting hobby. Yeah, there's so many aspects to it. I mean there's satellite radio, there's moon bounce, there's auroral bounce, bouncing signals off the Aurora. Um, there's um, cw, which stands for continuous wave, which is Morse code communications. There's CW, which stands for Continuous Wave, which is Morse Code communications. There's voice communications, there's gosh, on and on and on, and then within that there are all these contests. How many parks can you? Parks are numbered throughout the world.
Speaker 2:So some guy will go out in a park, take all portable equipment set up and see how many contacts he can make out there, and there'll be on the other side folks who want to see how many they can collect. How many countries, how many states, how many counties can you collect? So all they're interested in is getting that contact in their log and getting it confirmed both ways. Right Checking the box Right and I like to talk to people because I learn again from those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you like to talk to people?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I learn from them. And so every once in a while I'll find somebody in a distant country or a different state that we kind of make a little friendship and we'll talk whenever we can. And I've got contacts all over the world Middle East, asia, south America, all over North America, all over Europe. South America, all over North America, all over Europe. I've had contacts in Antarctica, in the North Pole, new Zealand, australia. Did you talk to Santa Claus? I didn't talk to Santa Claus, but what did get involved in? You know when they follow?
Speaker 2:Santa Claus oh yeah, when NORAD does, the NORAD has its. Did get involved in that one year.
Speaker 1:Oh, tell me about this.
Speaker 2:Well, it's just, you know, there's a network of contacts who will supposedly make contact with the control operations and that kind of thing. Well, santa is here now and he's going through this part of the world. I don't even remember how it works now. It was a while back, when I was still kind of new in the hobby. But I do remember getting involved with it and I haven't listened for it since. I've gotten involved in what they call the seven days for Christmas too. You've got to make some contacts on each of these days, and each day has a different symbolic meaning. All of these different aspects of the hobby that you can get involved in. I just like the voice communications. There's also data communications. A lot of guys nowadays are communicating from their keyboards. Okay, um it just. I don't care for it. There's no personal interaction, right?
Speaker 2:but there's something for everybody right, that's how some people like to communicate.
Speaker 1:You like to do voice and so it works out.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so I did that and, uh, I think I showed you some of my photography. I like really shooting still life plants and insects and animals and sometimes people don't get a chance to do much of the kind of photography I did in my early years anymore, although I've done a couple parties recently early years anymore although I've done a couple parties recently and I've done a couple weddings not formally for friends I had. I had at least one to tell me that the shots that I provided them were better than those that they had from their professional photographer.
Speaker 2:That's nice and I was and I was shooting different angles. But when I do an event like that, I prefer candids. Yeah, I don't like a lot of posts. They're obviously the the family shots and those kind of things you got to do post. But when they're mingling I try and hide myself and just get candid shots. I don't like to be very obvious when I'm taking shots and I'll shoot with my phone and I'll shoot with my cameras and that has more of a warm personal feeling for people. I think they can see those interactions and they're not people looking in the camera, right? Um, one of the things I learned when I was doing portraiture and I didn't believe it when I was, when I was being trained, until later I I found out it's true, never have a person everybody wants look, look right here at the camera. Well, if you're shooting individuals and they're looking at the camera, and then if you put that shot in a frame and you walk from one side of the room to the other side of that room, their eyes will follow you.
Speaker 1:My grandmother had a picture of Jesus that would do that.
Speaker 2:Because they're looking right at the camera, so from every perspective those eyes are there. That's creepy, and so when I was doing portraiture, I would always have a person look over your nose, look across your nose. So if I had the head turned this way, I'd say look across your nose that way, so that the eyes are almost as if they're gazing in the distance Right.
Speaker 1:And it made a lot of difference. Yeah, guess I never thought of. You're right. There are some pictures out there where it's just. I just gotta get rid of this thing. It's eerie, yeah, I don't need this.
Speaker 2:I don't need this at all so that was one of the kinds of things that I learned, but I, I like learning, I like knowing how things work. I don't necessarily have to be able to get into the depths of them, but I like to understand the mechanics of it. So, yeah, so when I, when I left, uh, I thought I'm going to rest for a while and then I will start, uh, spending more time with my friends, more social life, going to movies, which I almost never had time for, finding interesting things on television reading. During COVID, we had a group of friends that we go meet at a park down by the river, we social distance ourselves at picnic tables and have lunch. We're out, we're out in the air. It was summertime and we had a lot of fun doing that, because everybody else was locked in some place, right?
Speaker 1:I think you told me, uh, at lunch. So you guys were, you guys had ordered pizzas or something we'd order.
Speaker 2:We had pizzas. We had chicken yeah, we got popeyes or kentucky fried or whatever and get a big box of chicken, whatever. Some days we bring our own lunches. Um, did it pretty often. But again, I guess that's the kind of people that that I enjoy spending time around them. They're social animals, yeah, um, and you got a flavor. You got a flavor of it, and there were a handful who aren't usually there, that weren't there.
Speaker 1:So next, time, maybe you'll get. I'm excited. I'm excited for two reasons. One, I'm going to see more people in two. Two, you guys said something about popeye's chicken and, uh, if you'll know, my wife doesn't let me eat popeye's chicken. If I say I'm going to have lunch with bruce, she'll be fine with it.
Speaker 2:Popeye's chicken and dirty rice I don't know what it is about that, but man, that's lunch well, I've been married more times than I even want to talk about and I won't get into all of that.
Speaker 1:But well, bruce, let me just say that the third time's the charm, at least it has been for me. Well we'll just leave it at that. We'll leave it at that well, so how long have you been married to your current wife?
Speaker 2:six uh 12 years.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, my wife and I about 10 years, so it's about 12 years, yeah oh nice.
Speaker 2:But number three was, uh, from louisiana. I think I mentioned earlier that her father and my mother went to the same school. Yes. Okay, she could cook Cajun Dirty rice. First time I ever heard dirty rice was from her or her mother, and I don't know that I've had dirty rice. I've tried to make it and it's just not the same.
Speaker 1:It is not. It is not. You know. I'll share with you. I had a chicken dinner in an Iraqi prison. It's a long story and this is your story so we're not going to get into it. But a chicken dinner in an Iraqi prison and it came chicken and rice. It looked like roadkill and I like dirty rice, but I and rice. It looked like roadkill and I like. I like dirty rice, but I don't like rice that's dirty. So they didn't quite have the recipe town either, okay, but uh, yeah, that's a story for another time I make pretty good gumbo, oh well, you should.
Speaker 1:You should have lunch at your house sometime and we'll have gumbo.
Speaker 2:I'd like that well, usually I have gumbo. I'd like that. Well, usually I make gumbo after after. Don't have a big family, no, so no big turkey carcasses. Yeah, but I like to get the turkey carcass. That's the best starter for me. Uh, but uh yeah.
Speaker 1:We know, every year after Thanksgiving we take the turkey carcass and we make uh, we make our own broth with that. It is absolutely.
Speaker 2:Boil it down until everything's off the bone.
Speaker 1:Yep For like like 48 hours on the stove just simmering. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I digress Yep, so yeah Well. Obviously we both like to eat. Yes, yeah Well, I didnress Yep, so yeah Well obviously we both like to eat.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah. Well, I didn't get this lovely figure by not liking to eat.
Speaker 2:So, so, anyway, that's uh, I just never. And now, what amazes me is I can't even recall a lot of the specifics of what I did in those last years. It's just, I guess, when I left, I just left it, and I always thought I wouldn't be able to do that, and the only thing I could attribute it to is that when you achieve what you set out to achieve, you don't have a need to look back. You want to look forward.
Speaker 1:That makes perfect sense. It really does so. So I think this is a great, it's a great segue. We've we've talked about your whole life. We've looked back on everything A lot of your family history, a lot of your own personal history, things you've done, people you've met all of those. As we kind of come to the close of our discussion here, I'd like to look forward and I'd like to ask you a question, and that is you know, if someone's listening to this 100 years from now? I don't think either one of us will still be here. Maybe we will. Who knows? Um, and they're listening to this and they're. They've heard your story and they've heard us talk. What message would you like to leave for people?
Speaker 2:Given the state of affairs in our world today and given the events of the day, with the Holy Father just passing away on Easter.
Speaker 2:Saturday Easter Monday Easter Monday I believe it was right, it was Monday, yep and his message of trying to recognize the common folks and bring together the entire human race in such a manner that we could put wars aside and maybe have some common respect for each other. That's the best framework I can use right at the minute for each other. It's the best framework you can use right at the minute. Just, there's too much individuality, self-aggrandizement and unwillingness to sit down and have just open conversations. So I think you know, I would hope that someday that this country can not just this country this world can come together in harmony. I know it will never be a perfect harmony, but that they could come together for the common good. And if we don't, I have no idea where humanity will end up, because I think today we're on a destructive path. We're on a destructive path.
Speaker 2:So I would just ask that people look around and try and understand your fellow man, listen Something that my wife will kill me for saying this, but I always say to my wife listen more, talk less. Just listen to what the other person has to say, try and understand what they're saying and then take your time to talk so that they can hear what it is that you're trying to say. If you're both talking at the same time, nothing happens. And I recall that my older sister, who was 20 years older than me my only sister is 20 years older than me. I remember her saying to her children who were around my age just remember, it takes two people to make an argument.
Speaker 2:Somebody has to listen. I don't know if there's any more I could say.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thanks for that, thanks for taking time out to come and do this with me, and I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to that next lunch. Thanks.
