[Mad Dawg]

For the princely sum of $50 a week I was chaplain at a home for severely handicapped kids. It was an old Virginia Episcopal Insitution. The board was all First Family of Virginia types and they viewd aggressive fund raising as, well, something a Yankee would do. They were right.

I had a friend who was a DJ. I had a little over $1k in my "Discretionary Fund". I went to Pat and said what do I have to do to get on the air?

From the Stations POV Sunday is (a) a waste of time and (b) kind of cheap advertising. So I got a tape recorder and stuff - soon I had three tape recorders and a dual casssette palyer and a CD player and a little, what do you call it, one of the boards which can take audio input from a number of places and shoot it all out on one or two tracks.

In the Pespicola Church, you have an OT reading, a Psalm or piece of one, an NT-excluding-the-Gospel reading , and a Gospel reading assigned to every Sunday. So I would study those assignments until I had a "talk".

I started at 15 minutes on tape, and went to 30 minutes live -- which, as I said, was way more fun -- if you like cardiac arrest, and I do. Bumped in to whatever music I felt like and bumped out to "Sheep May Safely Graze" (I was also running a flock of sheep at this time.)

SO I just ran my mouf. Raised enough to pay for the show and the equipment and to write a weekly check for the Home.

But the check wasn't nearly enough, though I got enough money for a generator and installation in one week! YEAH! And new gummint standards for care meant "least restrictive environment" which mean the kids all went to situations more like being foster children. There were a lot of tears when that happened. They really were a community.

It was fun. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, for free, you can keep your Fifty bucks a week!

Radio, I learned, is NOT preaching. It's intimate. You are talking as it were individually to your listeners, NOT addressing a crowd. The rhetoric is more conversational than oratorical. It's interesting. There you are in this little closet surrounded by electronics....And you are looking deeply into the eyes of somebody somewhere and showing them your heart.

[Forest Keeper]

Radio, I learned, is NOT preaching. It's intimate. You are talking as it were individually to your listeners, NOT addressing a crowd. The rhetoric is more conversational than oratorical. It's interesting. There you are in this little closet surrounded by electronics....And you are looking deeply into the eyes of somebody somewhere and showing them your heart.

That's great! Thanks for sharing about your experience. I think I can imagine it. It's interesting that Rush seems to have taken a different path, but most good hosts I think would fully agree with you.