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As an aside: for years and years, my father - and several like him - were a local, living embodiment of the old WKRP In Cincinnati clique. Up and down the dial for a lot of their careers. It honestly drove the man to too much chain-smoking, some late nights at the corner tavern, and eventually an early grave. He finally started to try to discourage me from going into commercial broadcast radio; I had the voice according to many (until 30 years of chain smoking toasted it nicely), but too many times I heard him tell me, "Don't get into this business if you want to stay sane. Pick a better hobby." Great sentiment from your dad, who you wanted to follow into whatever infamy it led to. Well, after moving to D.C., I was living there with him when he took a plunge and landed at a new station there, snagged a plum interview with Larry King when King was on fire in the radio syndication business and about to hit the CNN cable network arena; I even fielded phone calls for him from the likes of Pat Buchanan and others. The whole enterprise folded and he moved back home with even more venom for the industry*. I stayed, and years later, recovering from a failed marriage, we were talking on the phone one evening, and in the middle of the conversation, he stopped and asked me, "Son, why didn't you ever want to follow in the old man's footsteps and go into radio?"

If it were physically possible, I'd have reached through the phone wires and strangled that sonofabitch.

*A definition of irony. After he'd gone home, I stayed and landed as a security supervisor in the metro area; I got contracted out to pull duty for the new CNN headquarters for Washington (known as the Black Granite building then), On my first shift as a newly minted lieutenant, I found myself standing right in the broadcast studio of King's new show. Only after Dad died twenty years ago did I begin to understand the perverse, twisted sense of humor that fate can drop at your feet like a cat dropping a dead mouse on the doorstep.