Fried Chicken Radio
One of my myriad followers from my days on the radio in Redding sent me an email about my ex-showmate getting himself into a peck of trouble, albeit it with a small but vocal minority in the heart of Redneckville.
Some background...I moved to this city of 60,000 at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley in 1998, following my heart, marrying a family law attorney who had built a practice there. She insisted that she wanted to move, though if she ever did she hasn’t yet.
There was nothing much up there, so I pitched myself to the local community college and had an experience that’s being turned into a "based on a true story" major motion picture.
Then I pitched the local talk radio station, where the right-wing sang its off-key screeds to the mind-deaf choir. I tried to raise the standards, producing the best elections coverage they had known or would. And I co-hosted an afternoon talk show with a Ray Roberts, a long-graying genial if hard-bitten conservative from the Memphis area.
We did fine for a while, until station politics showed me the door. Four years after I was out, locals were still thanking me for my contribution toward actual thinking.
Anyway, Ray was fired a couple of years ago and then brought back. The talent pool up there isn’t very deep. But he may be on his way out again because speaking of what he perceived as degradation of the Oval Office he said, "Now we have people going in there and eating fried chicken and throwing the bones over their shoulder."
Oops. The local NAACP was particularly unhappy with the remarks, calling them "in-your-face racist." Ray tried to "explain" that he didn’t say it or didn’t mean it, but alas, few were buying his duck-‘n-cover that he was referring to Jimmy Carter.
The doubters had good reason, but there was a lot of snickering. Many people up there thought Ray was right.
©2010 SetonnoteS
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