by Randy Reynolds
On July 1, 1982, I start growing a beard as a symbol of the new, more determined, more ambitious, reinvented me. On that same day I sit at the flimsy table I use for a desk in the radio station in a converted laundry building in West Monroe, Louisiana, and write something on my calendar 92 times, once for each day from July 1, 1982 to September 30, 1982.
I write I. W. B. G. M. O. T. S. B. T. D: 9/30/82. ....
On July 1, 1982, I start growing a beard as a symbol of the new, more determined, more ambitious, reinvented me. On that same day I sit at the flimsy table I use for a desk in the radio station in a converted laundry building in West Monroe, Louisiana, and write something on my calendar 92 times, once for each day from July 1, 1982 to September 30, 1982.
I write I. W. B. G. M. O. T. S. B. T. D: 9/30/82. ....
................... ........................................................................
The initials stand for I Will Be General Manager Of This Station By This Date: 9/30/82.
I don’t do anything to undermine Gary, the current General Manager. In fact, I work harder than ever to make him look good. He asks me what’s up with the beard a
nd why am I wearing a suit to work every day and I say I just feel like it’s time for a change. He asks about the three months of strange entries on my calendar. I tell him it’s my new mantra. Knowing how weird deejays are, he doesn’t probe any further.
There’s a higher authority in this radio station: Roger, the owner. I hear him say more than once that deejays are like the tire-changers he employs at his tire dealership—by which I assume he’s saying we’re the bottom rung of the social scale—people without safety nets, the kind of people who need occasional salary advances to pay the doctor, people who quit at the most inconvenient times for him and move on down the road to get slightly higher-paying jobs.
Though I’ve had better jobs in the past, I’m down on my luck in 1982 when I write I. W. B. G. M. O. T. S. B. T. D: 9/30/82 on 92 consecutive blocks on my calendar.
My wife wins a free pizza. We go to pick it up and they won’t let us have it because we don’t have the 12 cents tax. We retreat to the parking lot and take the back seat out of the car, hoping there’ll be some stray coins there but, for once, there isn’t. She goes back in and begs for the pizza. They won’t let her have it without the twelve cents tax... so no pizza for the Reynolds kids this night.
I sit at the kitchen table with a .410 shotgun, loaded and cocked. When the enormous rat I’m waiting for scurries out from behind the washing machine I blast him. I used to be an anchorman on TV. I’ve interviewed presidents and Nobel Laureates and movie stars and astronauts. I’ve programmed radio stations. I’ve been in politics. I’ve had stories published. I’ve won writing awards and sales awards. Yet here I am living in such a dump that I’m having to shoot rats in my kitchen with a shotgun.
And after fifteen years of working my ass off, my net worth is less than 12 cents.
My wife Sherry gets a job managing apartments in Bastrop, Louisiana. Part of her compensation is a free apartment. I get a night-time deejay gig at the Bastrop radio station; my days are spent doing apartment maintenance. Voluntarily. For free. Forty apartments are vacated that summer. I re-paint them, all 40 of them, every inch of every wall and ceiling, four and five room apartments. I do it to prove to the company that hired my wife that they made a good decision. But one day while I’m in the bathtub washing paint out of my hair I hear voices in the living room…the owner of the property, evicting us from the premises because we’ve made a 35-cent long-distance personal phone call on the office line.
That day, while the kids are in school and Sherry’s out looking for a job, I single-handedly pack our four-rooms of furniture, (including the shotgun-damaged washer) into a U-Haul and move us across town to a rental house. I unpack the trailer, hook up the appliances, arrange the furniture and return the U-Haul. But Sherry has gotten another apartment job in nearby Monroe. They want her to start today. I rent another trailer, load it by myself before the kids get out of school and move everything again. We never even spend the night in the rented house. (This is the shortest of our 59 moves and the only day I had to move twice.)
Any deejay or tire-changer can probably tell similar hard-luck stories…but I am determined that I’m not going to end up like this. I get a job at Roger’s station in West Monroe. The facilities are a dump. It has no listeners—a mere 2.2% in the ratings. He’s barely making ends meet, selling $19,000 per month worth of advertising, which is what it takes to run the place. I think he’s doing everything wrong, but I bite my tongue and bide my time and try to be the best employee he’s ever had. Every day, I look at that promise on my calendar, and touch it with my fingers and whisper it to myself, a private mantra. I refuse to shave until this dream has come true and so I have my changing appearance looking back at me from the mirror to remind me of what I want. I wear the suit. I lose 40 pounds. I'm going to think like a manager, act like a manager, look like a manager...and AFTER that, I'll BE a manager. Or so I tell myself.
My wife reads about dream charts and starts keeping one. While I'm writing I. W. B. G. M. O. T. S. B. T. D: 9/30/82, she's cutting things out of catalogs and magazines and pasting them to a piece of poster board. She cuts out a new house, one that's way too upscale for us, of a certain kind of bricks that look like a mixture of new and old brick, skylight, fancy doors, swimming pool, oak trees in the yard--the works. She also finds a picture of a car--a gaudy, silver luxury car and glues that onto the dream chart, too.
"What the...?" I exlaim the first time I see her chart.
"You've got to be able to see it in your mind," she says. "I'm putting this in the bedroom, so the first thing every morning and the last thing every night, this is what we'll see. Once it gets real in our minds, it will happen." I know better than all this, but I've got to humor mama, so the poster with the childish cut-outs goes up in our bedroom. And a few days later, she adds a dark blue van for me. And a black muscle-car for our daughter who's about to get her driver's license.
Roger almost fires me one morning that summer because my Question-Of-The-Morning on the Randy Reynolds Show rankles him. My question is: “Should secretaries make coffee for their boss?” He calls me into his office after the show and pounds his rickety desk, which is held together by a piece of rusted tin nailed across the front. “Of course secretaries should make the coffee!" he shouts. "And I don’t want any more of this crazy women’s lib stuff on my station. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Two of Roger’s favorite sayings are, “Don’t worry about the mule going blind, just keep loading the wagon” and “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”
In the summer of 1982, I just keep loading the wagon. And by the time 9/30/82 rolls around, I’m the dog the sun is shining on: Gary has moved on down the line and Roger has appointed me General Manager.
I work the salespeople too hard and I have all these bat-shit crazy ideas about writing down goals and making dream charts and accounting for all their time during the day, so they quit. Roger has always been the main salesman for the station, but he goes out and tries to give away 100 free spots, no strings attached, and the client turns him down. He tells me to hire some new salesmen, pronto, it doesn’t matter who, just so we can get some warm bodies on the street. He's desperate. “Hell, tell your wife to come in on her lunch break and make some phone calls for us. I’ll pay her twenty percent commission if she sells anything. Just for now. Till we find some good salespeople.”
There’s a television show called The Jeffersons, a sitcom about the adventures of George and Louise Jefferson
becoming successful and “Movin’ on up….to the East Side…” We feel like George and Weezy for a time there…after Sherry comes to work for me, because shy, sweet Sherry who makes pitiful dream charts and dreams big dreams can handle clients like no one else. Before Roger sells out and the new owners fire us, Sherry is selling $100,000 of ads per month. We buy our first new house on July 25, 1985. It has oak trees in the yard, fancy doors, skylights in the roof, the works; even the bricks are the same combination of colors as the house on her dream chart. Roger buys $4,000 worth of furniture for us. We go to a car dealership on that same day and Sherry sees the fancy silver car of her dream chart on the showroom floor. "That's it! That's my car!" she squeals. We buy it without a test drive. A week later, we buy that black muscle-car for daughter Kerri. And a few weeks after that, we go out and buy the dark blue van that was on the dream chart. We pay sticker price. Who has time to comparison shop or haggle? 
The radio station is all-consuming. We dedicate ourselves to it and it succeeds beyond everyone’s wildest imagination.
There are articles about us in national publications (Radio & Records; Sound Management.) The I.R.S. starts probing my $100 business lunches. I claim several per week on my tax returns, accompanied by the actual receipts, but they decide to disallow them, as well as certain other business expenses, and I’ve been paying I.R.S. taxes, penalties and additional back taxes ever since. (As of this writing, in 2008, the take-home pay from my current job is less than $4.00 per hour. The I.R.S. gets all the rest. My young grandsons keep saying, “Pop, I wouldn't have a job like that! When you gonna get a job that pays more? You never have any money!” I guess they don’t quite understand how the I.R.S. works. Neither, of course, do I.)
Roger sells the station for an enormous profit. New owners come in and figure they can save a lot of money by not paying commission on Sherry’s sales. So, on her birthday, 1988, they fire us both.
A few months later, we're again on intimate terms with our old friend Poverty. We live in an orange grove in Weirsdale, Florida, (our fifth-grade son calls it Weirds-dale) in a house that migrant orange-pickers use in season. Our only furnishings are a waterbed, bunkbed, dining set and TV. Naturally, Sherry gets out her scissors and paste and buys a poster board we can't afford and starts putting together another dream chart. We still have two cars, so the new chart doesn't contain cars...but it has a house on it that's practically a mansion--even bigger than the one recently repossessed from us by the bank. We have no credit. I'm in a dead-end job. We've just used our last $6,000 to pay for our daughter's wedding. And Sherry's doing a dream chart!
Flush with failure, I ridicule her for it.
Still struggling to climb the corporate ladder, however, I send my resume' and application to a station owner in Alexandria, Louisiana, not realizing the man is now deceased and his wife, who has Alzheimer's, is the new owner, and her affairs are in the hands of a lawyer who has hired a Washington consultant who is looking for ME.
The consultant somehow knows about the Randy Reynolds success story from West Monroe, and is searching for me all over America when, out of the blue, my letter to the dead man arrives on his desk. The lawyer, the consultant and I meet at the Atlanta airport in a private lounge for VIP's, and ink the deal (as they say in show business) and I'm back on top!
Within a year, Sherry and I have our bigger, better dream house, and our stint in the sharecropper's cottage in the orange grove in Florida is all but forgotten... until, twice more in our radio careers, the radio stations we devote ourselves to are sold and new owners come in each time and fire us and try to prove they can run things just as well without having to pay for a Randy and a Sherry.
................................
Like Roger always said, “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”
I don’t do anything to undermine Gary, the current General Manager. In fact, I work harder than ever to make him look good. He asks me what’s up with the beard a
nd why am I wearing a suit to work every day and I say I just feel like it’s time for a change. He asks about the three months of strange entries on my calendar. I tell him it’s my new mantra. Knowing how weird deejays are, he doesn’t probe any further.
There’s a higher authority in this radio station: Roger, the owner. I hear him say more than once that deejays are like the tire-changers he employs at his tire dealership—by which I assume he’s saying we’re the bottom rung of the social scale—people without safety nets, the kind of people who need occasional salary advances to pay the doctor, people who quit at the most inconvenient times for him and move on down the road to get slightly higher-paying jobs.
Though I’ve had better jobs in the past, I’m down on my luck in 1982 when I write I. W. B. G. M. O. T. S. B. T. D: 9/30/82 on 92 consecutive blocks on my calendar.
My wife wins a free pizza. We go to pick it up and they won’t let us have it because we don’t have the 12 cents tax. We retreat to the parking lot and take the back seat out of the car, hoping there’ll be some stray coins there but, for once, there isn’t. She goes back in and begs for the pizza. They won’t let her have it without the twelve cents tax... so no pizza for the Reynolds kids this night.
I sit at the kitchen table with a .410 shotgun, loaded and cocked. When the enormous rat I’m waiting for scurries out from behind the washing machine I blast him. I used to be an anchorman on TV. I’ve interviewed presidents and Nobel Laureates and movie stars and astronauts. I’ve programmed radio stations. I’ve been in politics. I’ve had stories published. I’ve won writing awards and sales awards. Yet here I am living in such a dump that I’m having to shoot rats in my kitchen with a shotgun.
And after fifteen years of working my ass off, my net worth is less than 12 cents.
My wife Sherry gets a job managing apartments in Bastrop, Louisiana. Part of her compensation is a free apartment. I get a night-time deejay gig at the Bastrop radio station; my days are spent doing apartment maintenance. Voluntarily. For free. Forty apartments are vacated that summer. I re-paint them, all 40 of them, every inch of every wall and ceiling, four and five room apartments. I do it to prove to the company that hired my wife that they made a good decision. But one day while I’m in the bathtub washing paint out of my hair I hear voices in the living room…the owner of the property, evicting us from the premises because we’ve made a 35-cent long-distance personal phone call on the office line.
That day, while the kids are in school and Sherry’s out looking for a job, I single-handedly pack our four-rooms of furniture, (including the shotgun-damaged washer) into a U-Haul and move us across town to a rental house. I unpack the trailer, hook up the appliances, arrange the furniture and return the U-Haul. But Sherry has gotten another apartment job in nearby Monroe. They want her to start today. I rent another trailer, load it by myself before the kids get out of school and move everything again. We never even spend the night in the rented house. (This is the shortest of our 59 moves and the only day I had to move twice.)
Any deejay or tire-changer can probably tell similar hard-luck stories…but I am determined that I’m not going to end up like this. I get a job at Roger’s station in West Monroe. The facilities are a dump. It has no listeners—a mere 2.2% in the ratings. He’s barely making ends meet, selling $19,000 per month worth of advertising, which is what it takes to run the place. I think he’s doing everything wrong, but I bite my tongue and bide my time and try to be the best employee he’s ever had. Every day, I look at that promise on my calendar, and touch it with my fingers and whisper it to myself, a private mantra. I refuse to shave until this dream has come true and so I have my changing appearance looking back at me from the mirror to remind me of what I want. I wear the suit. I lose 40 pounds. I'm going to think like a manager, act like a manager, look like a manager...and AFTER that, I'll BE a manager. Or so I tell myself.
My wife reads about dream charts and starts keeping one. While I'm writing I. W. B. G. M. O. T. S. B. T. D: 9/30/82, she's cutting things out of catalogs and magazines and pasting them to a piece of poster board. She cuts out a new house, one that's way too upscale for us, of a certain kind of bricks that look like a mixture of new and old brick, skylight, fancy doors, swimming pool, oak trees in the yard--the works. She also finds a picture of a car--a gaudy, silver luxury car and glues that onto the dream chart, too.
"What the...?" I exlaim the first time I see her chart.
"You've got to be able to see it in your mind," she says. "I'm putting this in the bedroom, so the first thing every morning and the last thing every night, this is what we'll see. Once it gets real in our minds, it will happen." I know better than all this, but I've got to humor mama, so the poster with the childish cut-outs goes up in our bedroom. And a few days later, she adds a dark blue van for me. And a black muscle-car for our daughter who's about to get her driver's license.
Roger almost fires me one morning that summer because my Question-Of-The-Morning on the Randy Reynolds Show rankles him. My question is: “Should secretaries make coffee for their boss?” He calls me into his office after the show and pounds his rickety desk, which is held together by a piece of rusted tin nailed across the front. “Of course secretaries should make the coffee!" he shouts. "And I don’t want any more of this crazy women’s lib stuff on my station. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Two of Roger’s favorite sayings are, “Don’t worry about the mule going blind, just keep loading the wagon” and “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”
In the summer of 1982, I just keep loading the wagon. And by the time 9/30/82 rolls around, I’m the dog the sun is shining on: Gary has moved on down the line and Roger has appointed me General Manager.
I work the salespeople too hard and I have all these bat-shit crazy ideas about writing down goals and making dream charts and accounting for all their time during the day, so they quit. Roger has always been the main salesman for the station, but he goes out and tries to give away 100 free spots, no strings attached, and the client turns him down. He tells me to hire some new salesmen, pronto, it doesn’t matter who, just so we can get some warm bodies on the street. He's desperate. “Hell, tell your wife to come in on her lunch break and make some phone calls for us. I’ll pay her twenty percent commission if she sells anything. Just for now. Till we find some good salespeople.”
There’s a television show called The Jeffersons, a sitcom about the adventures of George and Louise Jefferson
becoming successful and “Movin’ on up….to the East Side…” We feel like George and Weezy for a time there…after Sherry comes to work for me, because shy, sweet Sherry who makes pitiful dream charts and dreams big dreams can handle clients like no one else. Before Roger sells out and the new owners fire us, Sherry is selling $100,000 of ads per month. We buy our first new house on July 25, 1985. It has oak trees in the yard, fancy doors, skylights in the roof, the works; even the bricks are the same combination of colors as the house on her dream chart. Roger buys $4,000 worth of furniture for us. We go to a car dealership on that same day and Sherry sees the fancy silver car of her dream chart on the showroom floor. "That's it! That's my car!" she squeals. We buy it without a test drive. A week later, we buy that black muscle-car for daughter Kerri. And a few weeks after that, we go out and buy the dark blue van that was on the dream chart. We pay sticker price. Who has time to comparison shop or haggle? 
The radio station is all-consuming. We dedicate ourselves to it and it succeeds beyond everyone’s wildest imagination.
There are articles about us in national publications (Radio & Records; Sound Management.) The I.R.S. starts probing my $100 business lunches. I claim several per week on my tax returns, accompanied by the actual receipts, but they decide to disallow them, as well as certain other business expenses, and I’ve been paying I.R.S. taxes, penalties and additional back taxes ever since. (As of this writing, in 2008, the take-home pay from my current job is less than $4.00 per hour. The I.R.S. gets all the rest. My young grandsons keep saying, “Pop, I wouldn't have a job like that! When you gonna get a job that pays more? You never have any money!” I guess they don’t quite understand how the I.R.S. works. Neither, of course, do I.)
Roger sells the station for an enormous profit. New owners come in and figure they can save a lot of money by not paying commission on Sherry’s sales. So, on her birthday, 1988, they fire us both.
A few months later, we're again on intimate terms with our old friend Poverty. We live in an orange grove in Weirsdale, Florida, (our fifth-grade son calls it Weirds-dale) in a house that migrant orange-pickers use in season. Our only furnishings are a waterbed, bunkbed, dining set and TV. Naturally, Sherry gets out her scissors and paste and buys a poster board we can't afford and starts putting together another dream chart. We still have two cars, so the new chart doesn't contain cars...but it has a house on it that's practically a mansion--even bigger than the one recently repossessed from us by the bank. We have no credit. I'm in a dead-end job. We've just used our last $6,000 to pay for our daughter's wedding. And Sherry's doing a dream chart!
Flush with failure, I ridicule her for it.
Still struggling to climb the corporate ladder, however, I send my resume' and application to a station owner in Alexandria, Louisiana, not realizing the man is now deceased and his wife, who has Alzheimer's, is the new owner, and her affairs are in the hands of a lawyer who has hired a Washington consultant who is looking for ME.
The consultant somehow knows about the Randy Reynolds success story from West Monroe, and is searching for me all over America when, out of the blue, my letter to the dead man arrives on his desk. The lawyer, the consultant and I meet at the Atlanta airport in a private lounge for VIP's, and ink the deal (as they say in show business) and I'm back on top!
Within a year, Sherry and I have our bigger, better dream house, and our stint in the sharecropper's cottage in the orange grove in Florida is all but forgotten... until, twice more in our radio careers, the radio stations we devote ourselves to are sold and new owners come in each time and fire us and try to prove they can run things just as well without having to pay for a Randy and a Sherry.
................................
Like Roger always said, “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”
