Most mornings, in the late 1990's and early 2000's, lawyers and public officials gather around someone's car outside the Rapides and Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, courthouses. With car doors open and radios blaring full blast, they listen to I.B. Flyin' on the Randy Reynolds Show. They'll be talking about it all day, a common greeting in the courthouse being, "Hey, did you hear what Ol' I.B. said about you this morning?"
The chief
judge in Rapides Parish tells me of the day that a police juror comes running up the steps of the courthouse yelling, "Did you hear what I.B. said about us today? Did you hear him? What does he want us to do?" The judge replies, "Why don't you call him and ask him?"The reason they can't call him and ask him is because he doesn't exist. I.B. is my own voice (pre-recorded) in the dialect of an old Cajun ("Aaaiiiiiyyyyeeeiiii"). I ask him questions and play my pre-recorded answers over the background sound of a helicopter. We call him our traffic reporter---"the eye in the sky"--but he does no traffic reports. What he talks about is what's going on behind the scenes at city hall, the courthouse, the school board...
When the mayor says, "Alcohol has never touched my lips", I.B. says, "That's because he drinks it through a straw." And when the water pumps malfunction at a city water tower, I.B. jokes about it, says the tower is filled with Miller Lite and the mayor must be going there to drink because there's straws all over the ground. The mayor and city council then bestow legitimacy upon I.B. by passing (and publishing in the newspaper) an official resolution denying I.B.'s "accusation" that the water tower is filled with Miller Lite. The council calls on all good citizens to boycott the Randy Reynolds Show. They also write to the FCC, complaining about I.B. Flyin'. He's a cartoon character, but they try to step on him as they would step on any 3-D flesh-and-blood citizen who gets in their way. So the fictional character becomes real...and more dangerous to the powers-that-be.
Newspaper coverage of the city council's fight with I.B. causes our audience shares to grow. Advertising revenues for the station increase dramatically. And the phone starts ringing off the hook with people calling in news tips for I.B. Flyin'. Some are jokes, like the "bit" that started it all--a water-tower filled with Miller Lite. Other tips concern real issues that don't get reported by the timid local news media --or "news meteors" as I.B. calls them.
When four hard-partying off-duty cops on a beer-run drive their pickup onto a sidewalk and get out to beat up a small time drug user and then charge him with carjacking, assault, attempted murder of a police officer and about 7 other things, I.B. has a field day! All the other "news meteors" buy the official story that an unarmed young man tried to carjack a vehicle with four cops in it. I.B.'s laughter (and commonsense) fuel so much public outrage that it's the police, not the accused carjacker, who get bound over for trial on assault charges. When the guilty verdict comes in, the whole courtroom explodes with applause, shouts and prayers. That young man would likely be in Angola State Penitentiary today if I.B. hadn't refused to bite on the official story.
In the I.B. voice, I announce 75 reasons why a 21 year old murder suspect held for three years without a grand jury hearing could not have committed the gruesome crime he is accused of. The young man (Joey Hilton) is released from jail on Christmas Eve after a deal between I.B. and the District Attorney. The deal is simply for I.B. to "lay off" the D.A., (that is, stop making jokes about him,) and the D.A. will release Joey Hilton. (I.B. may have been the first cartoon character ever to make a deal with a real D.A. ) On Christmas Eve, 1998, after three years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit, Hilton is released. He and his mom come to the station and I interview them live on the morning show. It's the most emotional show I've ever been involved in...the kind of stuff 60 Minutes and 20/20 are famous for. What Joey and his mom really want is to meet I.B. Flyin' and thank him in person, but I tell them he's up in the chopper and will have to call them later.
When a state senator's daughter uses his office to run a pyramid scheme, when city government cuts & sells the timber on state-owned property, when a mayor's wife brokers a secret deal for the city to buy some church property at ten times the going rate, when the police chief's sons commit crimes, when the city council buys a fire engine that's too big to fit inside the fire station, when the city dams up a National Scenic Waterway to increase property values in a favored subdivision, when a city crew hooks up sewage pipes to a drinking-water main, when a mayor gets caught having sex in his office and another mayor spies on his police department, and a cop's drug dog dies in a hot car while the "piece" officer is having some afternoon delight, and two police horses get electrocuted because their riders take a coffee break and leave the horses tied to a metal light pole in the rain, when the school board and city spend millions on unnecessary "studies"...
I.B. blows the whistle on them. It sounds like comedy, but it's all true. As I.B. demonstrates every morning, News IS Comedy in Central Louisiana.
I and the station are threatened with numerous lawsuits...but we don't respond to the subpoenaes....and nothing happens. Those who threaten lawsuits want to scare us, but don't want to get in deposition with I.B. They're afraid he knows too much about too many things that need to be kept secret.
As I.B. Flyin' exposes the profit schemes and boondoggles hatched by members of local government and the behind-the-scenes manipulators I.B. calls "the shadow government," we receive numerous threats. For two weeks, a volunteer with a shotgun stands guard outside my studio door during the show. Someone slashes three of my tires in the station parking lot. One night soon afterward, I am assaulted at a political rally. On my way to work, at 2:15 on a Monday morning, I look out my car window and see a local politician's son in the car beside me pointing a pistol at me. As we race at 70 mph across what I.B. calls "the Tallywhacker Bridge," I waver between firing first and waiting for him to fire. Luckily he speeds up and disappears down I-49.
The types of things that I.B. fought with ridicule and laughter are happening in your town, too. But they aren't a part of anybody's official record. The kinds of things I.B. exposed usually go unrevealed and unpunished because, in most places, there is no investigative reporting, no public ombudsman, to connect the dots. But, for a while, in Central Louisiana, there was...
