My Longtime Best Friend Mike-Part I

I am thinking a bit about writing a book about my broadcasting life. It’s the kind of thing that you go back and forth on, since it’s such a personal endeavor, and you don’t know if the fascination that you have with the whole subject would be shared by a real audience. Things that seem like delightful anecdotes to me might be less so to many others. A book will take a long, long, time to construct, and I guess we all could use some more reading, viewing, and listening material right now, so here’s a little miniature version of what might be a greater (or at least larger) project.

I have been broadcasting basically my whole life. I was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, the first born of the Clinkscale clan which would eventually have six children. My father was just beginning his broadcasting career as a disc jockey. Though I obviously didn’t know it at the time, I got a real taste of the vagabond nature of the profession, since by the time we settled in Hopkinton, Massacusetts when I was five, it was the fifth place that we had lived.

I don’t remember exactly when the first time I might have spoken into a microphone, but it was mighty early. We had a tape recorder in our house from the time I can remember, and my tangible memories started when I was about four. I do remember the first time I got paid to broadcast. It was a soda commercial for a regional brand called Jolly Treat that I did with my brother Jim who was one year my junior. I think I was eight and he was seven. I sounded older than I was and he sounded younger, and the script called for me to use some overly elaborate language to describe just how delicious Jolly Treat was, and my brother had just one line at the end after my diatribe, where he squeaked out “And it tastes good, too”. We made a hundred dollars for it. I think I started my first bank account with my share. That was quite a bit of money for a little kid, and it certainly was no indicator of the less than lucrative profession I would later choose.

I pretty much may have started to choose it then, or maybe it was just choosing me. My Dad had moved on to television, where he would have a successful, albeit typically sporadic career as an TV news anchorman. Likely in part because people knew that, in part because I was a good student, and also in part because I have always liked the language, I always was the choice to be the emcee of about everything from elementary school onward. Flag Day ceremonies, Gym Show host, President’s Day pageant. I didn’t really seek these things out, but I obviously didn’t say no either.

I was obsessed by news and sports from a very early age, and in retrospect, I have always said that either I was going to be a professional athlete, or talk about it. While I was a pretty good athlete, there wasn’t really much of a choice there. I never really gave any thought to doing anything else. I have used this description often, and to those of you who have read my 2016 book “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”, a bit of this will be familiar. But that book was only peripherally about broadcasting, and I have a million broadcast stories that weren’t in it, although there will be occasional duplications here.

The dye was likely cast starting in sixth grade, when my Dad was writing news, not in an on air role. He worked at WHDH television, which also had a radio station, something that is no longer allowed. The broadcast group was owned by The Boston Herald newspaper, and that is no longer allowed either. A court case involving that very entity ended by giving the television license to another group, which would eventually net my father his best job. All that being said, he worked weekends. That mean for a quieter, less buttoned up environment with no executives, no sales people, basically only the content creators on hand.

So for a couple of years, often, but not always, accompanied by my commercial cohort brother Jim, we went to work with my Dad. You couldn’t have had a better playground for a news and sports junkie like me. The options were limitless, I could watch raw football footage of college games featuring Harvard or Boston College, and on Sunday, the (then) Boston Patriots, cranking the film through a viewfinder, allowing for regular speed viewing, or frame-by-frame for big moments. I could race over to the wire service machines as it cackled out news and sports, and there was an even more up-to-the moment ticker bringing scores constantly. One other huge treat was on Sunday’s going to the control room, where monitors (in COLOR no less), were showing all of the NFL games from across the country. My own NFL Ticket.

But there wasn’t just information to gobble up, there was the chance to do performing. Commercial radio production was going on, and children’s voices were often needed. Sometimes the disc jockeys would want to do some comic by-play with a kid. And the big enchilada was the children’s television shows that were recorded on the weekend. Daily shows like “Romper Room” and “Bozo the Clown” were all done in one days block. They had little studio audiences with kids who had written in to win the chance to be there. But for whatever reason, often they came up short, and many days, some production assistant would duck their head into the newsroom and yell out “Is Clinkscale’s kid here today?” Off I would go to appear on dozens of those shows.

So the combination of the fact that your Dad did this, and what your Dad does seems pretty ordinary, and countless “appearances” on camera and the microphone, made this enterprise seem anything but daunting or special. But the real training for what I wanted most to do, play-by-play, came when we played out our own playground battles. I would always do commentary when we played games like “great catches”, when we tossed baseballs into difficult fielding scenarios, and sometimes would even do it during actual street hockey games. Anything even a bit more structured I would shut up, but my friends actually liked it, and encouraged me, at least most of the time.

Likely my best training came in one season of the Boston Bruins, when I did large portions, or entire games, into a reel to reel while viewing the games on television, Hockey is easily the hardest sport to broadcast, and especially off of a nineteen inch television, so if you could develop some acumen under that scenario, you had something going. Eventually all of this was going to lead to heading to college. I was a wildly underachieving high school student. If I cared about the class I made A’s, if I didn’t I made D’s and F’s. We had a huge high school, and the way attendance and open study was done made it very easy to cut class even while in the building, and I did plenty of that. Luckily, I made very high test scores so my academic options were pretty good. But not my financial ones. My Dad was just about to get his best job ever, but leading up to college we were struggling financially so a state school would have to be the route.

I wanted to go far away to school, and I wanted a big school that played major sports to hopefully broadcast on a student station. Using only manuals of the day, I picked out five schools that had good broadcast reputations. For those wondering about Missouri when I trot out this list, it was far better known then for print journalism. I picked Iowa, Kansas, Georgia, Idaho, and Washington State. WSU was out immediately since they didn’t take anyone in the bottom half of their high school class. Georgia was tossed out because they saw my test scores and wanted me in Advanced Placement and I didn’t want classes that hard. Idaho was in the lead, but for the fact that they weren’t in a power conference. Kansas always seemed interesting to me, and in the end, sight unseen, I went to school there. The day I boarded the train for Lawrence Kansas would be the first I had ever spent outside of New England.

The route to my college degree was tumultuous to say the least (much more on that in “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”), but I got great preparation in my time in Lawrence, eventually. I did some work during the times when I wasn’t going to school at a little radio station in Marlboro, Massachusetts. I broadcast my first football game from on the roof of a radio van. One strange assignment was doing man in the street interviews for a “Voice of the People” little drop in the newscasts. You needed about four or five twenty second sound bites. The people generally reacted to you like you were carrying a gun, not a mike. It always took awhile, and many requests. I could never quite figure it out.

My last year of college was a great final prep. As would happen at my first couple of professional stops, you kind of did everything at KJHK. News. Election coverage of the fraternity elections, which was really kind of like doing sports, since you broke down the story, and they were indeed keeping score, sports reports, and more. I did bag the assignment of alternating as the play-by-play man for the basketball games. That was really fun, although ironically the 1982-83 KU season was the last time that the Jayhawks were bad. I did a few games in a half empty Allen Field House, hard to imagine now.

Doing a little of everything was certainly a tremendous primer for my first post-college job at WMRC in Milford, Massachusetts. I was a disc jockey, newsman, sports talk host, and I did all of the games, and there were many of them. There were days when I was on the air much of the time from 9AM until 11PM. If you weren’t a fan of me, you were likely not going to tune in to AM 1490. I was there for a little less than three years, before I moved on to WIBX in Utica, N.Y.

WIBX was a pretty amazing story. It was technically in the Syracuse market, being about forty miles away, but mostly served the city of Utica, whose population was over 100,000 from the thirties through the sixties, but had declined since then, it’s sister city Rome, N.Y, .and the surrounding Mohawk Valley. It was an outstanding example of the full-service AM station, with news, sports, weather, and games in the mold of KMOX, or, before all sports radio stepped in, KMBZ, and many others across the country.

What made this place unique was its heritage serving what once was a significantly more populous metropolitan area, and how it maintained it’s quality. Dick Clark’s family actually owned it at one time, and he started his career there. When I arrived there in 1986, you would have to consider it a small market station, but it didn’t operate that way. Well, except for the pay. They flew me in for my job interview, which I attended in a not so interview appropriate slick Don Johnson Miami Vice suit. Thankfully, this was not off-putting to the man who would become my boss and friend, Jim Jackson, who has been the television voice of the Philadelphia Flyers of the NHL for years, as well as filling many other roles in that market.

Jackson had continued a remarkable trend for this 5,000 watt station. One sports director after another from there had gone on to the major leagues and network assignments. I would eventually somewhat reach that mark as well. When I got there, the news staff was at least ten, there were two farm reporters, and we had three full-time sports people and some support staff as well. The evening hours were all sports with talk shows, Syracuse sports, New York Mets and Knicks games, local high school sports, Utica Blue Sox minor league baseball, Colgate University hockey, a world class 15K running event, the Baseball Hall of Fame game, and eventually an American Hockey League franchise, the New Jersey Devils top affiliate. Jim was the voice of the Devils, I was the Colgate voice for the two years before we acquired the Devils rights, and Jim and I shared duties on literally hundreds of events before he left for Philadelphia and the Flyers radio job before he moved to TV.

It was a wonderful laboratory, but it was the kind of place you were supposed to move on from after a couple or three years. I didn’t hit the fast track like many of my predecessors. Numerous “close calls”, which you never really know are that close. I did actually get the Arizona State job but just before I moved there for the football season, the flagship station was sold, a new station was selected and I was out before I was even in.

My older daughter was born in Utica, I had great friends there, and I did so many wonderful things, but even with the games and all I was barely cracking twenty thousand dollars a year. With a young baby, and after a horrendous winter even by upstate New York standards, my first wife Tracy had had it and wanted to move back to Lawrence, where we had met. I couldn’t blame her. She had been supportive in waiting for the big break which didn’t come then. She went to set up in Kansas with our one year old, while I did one more season of baseball, still hoping for the break to come. It didn’t.

So I was off back to the Midwest in a situation no broadcaster should ever try, moving somewhere with no job. I dug around and on a couple of occasions created opportunities in Topeka, which included play-by-play of Washburn sports and KU women’s basketball. But the operations were doomed to failure, with a couple of calamitous endings you can again access in “Leaving Cancer for the Circus”.

I was almost forty years old, and soon I would come perilously close to actually having to get a regular job and likely ditch the dream forever of never doing anything else for a profession but my true passion. I literally had agreed to be the manager of a hardware store in Lawrence, when a tiny classified advertisement in the Lawrence Journal-World would reignite the flickering flame.

Come on back Thursday right here to pick up the tale. As I wrote this I noticed how many stories I didn’t tell. Hmm, maybe there is a book there.