WIP: DYNAMIC DUO OF THE OZARKS

Julie sat silently, looking at Mykel. She noticed there was a tear in his eye.

“Mykel, in all the years we’ve been married, you’ve never told me about this part of your life. This was quite a little adventure. You stopped a kidnapping, dated a pretty blonde girl and was on a radio station that all the kids listened to, but I can see it is making you pretty emotional. Do you want to stop talking about it?’

“No, since you haven’t heard about this, I’ll keep going,” Mykel answered Julie. “This part of the story is where it gets to be a real downer.”

Julie paused, then said, “What happened after Sherry graduated?”

“Everything happened at once. Mr. Ketner died of a heart attack, then I found out I was behind on my credits to graduate and then, I got the postcards and letters I had sent Sherry back. They were stamped ‘Occupants No Longer Reside at This Address.’ I found the phone number of her house in Knob Noster and called to find it had been disconnected. I wound up calling the Knob Noster Police Department, to see if they knew how I could find Sherry or her family. I knew as small as Knob Noster was, someone had to know where they were. The lady who answered the phone said they moved to California. She thought her father had taken a position with a company that made equipment for hospitals. The lady didn’t know what the name of the company.” 

“This sent me into a downward spiral. People didn’t talk about it much in those days, but I guess I had severe depression. I probably wasn’t much fun to be around. Lance never told me whether it hurt the show or not, but for about a month after that I played the Vanilla Fudge version of ‘She’s Not There’ and ‘Andmoreagain’ by Love about every night on my show, along with ‘Nights in White Satin’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’ I could probably talk about all the cliched stuff about what was happening in the rest of the country and the world that year: assassinations, riots, Vietnam, and the election.

“I remember Zela felt sorry for me and set me up on a blind date with a girl from her church. The girl would barely talk to me. Then she asked who I was going to vote for in the election, Richard Nixon or Hubert Humprey. When I told her Hubert Humprey, she threw her coffee in my face. She then told me she was voting for George Wallace. She stomped out to her car and burned rubber out of the parking lot.

“Then there was a girl named Lisa. We had been in a class together at Show-Me State and she worked at Chubby Boy Drive-In. We hit it off because she liked music, and I worked at a radio station. She had great taste in music. She liked the heavy stuff: Cream, Iron Butterfly, Traffic, Steppenwolf, MC-5, Bob Seger System. and Jimi Hendrix. She drove a bright, red, A-M-C Javelin that she and her roommate had painted the words “Peace & Love” on the side in pink letters.

“We started seeing each other the night of the moon landing. The only problem with Lisa was she was being stalked by a truck driver named McGuire. His friends called him Big Mack, which was ironic that a guy named Big Mack was interested in a girl that worked at Chubby Boy. Maybe he just preferred local burger joints,” Mykel paused while Julie laughed at the silly, ‘dad joke’ nature of that statement.

“So, one Saturday night, she came over to my apartment after she got off work. We had got pizza, a six pack of Falstaff, and started to watch Dr. Cadaverine, but he was showing Bowery After Midnight for the umpteenth time, so we decided to put on some music and make-out. She picked out Wheels of Fire by Cream.

“I can’t remember if it was during ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ or ‘Those Were the Days,’ that someone began pounding on the door. I asked who it was, and it was that Big Mack guy. He saw Lisa’s car in the parking lot and decided he was going to “rescue her” from an evil, hippie, radio DJ. She was screaming and clinging to me, telling me not to let him in when he kicked the door open. He was built like King Kong, but in his late 50s or early 60s.

“Lisa was screaming for him to leave her alone. I told him to leave, or I would call the police. He said, ‘I ain’t leaving until she comes with me!’

“Now, I had brought a 22 rife of my grandfathers with me. We had been killing squirrels and moles that were tearing up him and grandma’s garden at his house. I guess after getting Sherry’s cards and letter’s back in the mail, I began taking out my frustrations on those garden critters and getting a little enthusiastic with my killing. Grandpa was worried about me saying had seen men under his command act the same way…especially after another soldier got killed.

“I can’t remember if it was the same day that Grandpa told me I wasn’t really 4-F. You can’t be declared 4-F until you go for an induction. As a general, he pulled strings early on to get me a deferment. I had so many health problems as a kid and because Mom was a widow, he felt I needed to be “the man of the house’ in case something happened to him and Grandma…but back to Lisa’s truck driver friend.

“I grabbed the rifle, which was unfortunately, or maybe fortunately a single shot. First, I smacked him in the head with the stock. That gave me enough time to load a shell. He came toward me, and I shot him…in the foot. He screamed, I reloaded, while he was bent over in pain grabbing his wounded foot. I fired again, this time hitting him in the butt. He was yelling and saying I was crazy. He ran down the hall holding his ass. Lucky for me, he never went to the police, and nobody called the police that night. Me and Lisa didn’t see each other after a few more dates. Like Sherry, she disappeared, and I never saw her again.

“You’ve never told me that you shot some guy!” Julie said.

“Let’s face, my shooting skills were not on the level of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood.”

“It sounds more like you learned your shooting skills from the Little Rascals,” Julie began laughing. “Are there any more violent acts that I didn’t know about?”

“I was arrested for assault and battery.”

“Well, tell me about that one,” Julie’s interest peaked.

“One day, our owner, Cal Biggsley, came to town and broke the news to me and Lance that he was putting the radio station up for sale. He was buying another radio station, and the FCC said he had to sell off one of his radio stations. He decided it would be K-I-L-L since he lived in Oklahoma, and we were the only station he had in Missouri. It became a matter of waiting for the shoe to drop.

“One day in 71, we found out that we had been bought by a group of local investors. It was strange, we never were told exactly who they were…no names of who the buyers were, just a company name: Wholesome Radio Incorporated. I knew with a name like that the programming was going to suck.

“A few weeks later, I was doing my show, which I was now calling “The House of Cosmic Debris,” I had just finished playing ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by the Who, off their new album, and I announced ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath. I had just started it, when I got a call on the private line. The only people who would call on that phone line were Lovable Lance or Mr. Ketner, and I knew it couldn’t be Mr. Ketner. He was dead.

“It was Lovable Lance. He said “Guess what? I just got fired! They also fired T.R, Melinda, Lymon, and Zela. They are probably coming to fire you too. They kept Wally and rehired Bud and Howard. Get this, to take my place they rehired Dick Grimm, the guy that Biggsley punched out when he bought the place. If you want, come over to the Lost City of the Amazon. Me and T.R are getting plastered.”

“I had barely hung up the phone, when I heard a commotion in the lobby. I looked out the glass door of the studio and saw Grimm, Wally, Howard Lowry, and Bud Smith, coming down the hallway toward the studio like those torch wielding villagers coming after the monster in a Frankenstein movie. Being young and slightly stupid, I decided I was not going to put up with any of their nonsense. I would go quietly, if they were reasonable and respectful. Of course, they weren’t.

“Grimm threw open the door of the studio so hard he almost broke the glass out of it. “Turn that noise off!”

“No,” I answered. This was as close to a protest as I got, but I was still ‘defying the Man.’ “During my show, we do not interrupt Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, the Who, or Joe Cocker, and I’ve just added Black Sabbath to that list. Go soak your head until you cool off, old man!”

Grimm tried to take the needle off the record and ended dragging the tone arm across the Paranoid album right about the time Ozzy Osbourne was singing about bodies burning on the battlefield. He then grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and jerked me out of the air chair.

“I’m in charge here now, smart-ass, and you just got yourself fired!”

“So, I did the same thing Cal Biggsley had done to Dick Grimm when he took over the radio station in 1962, I punched him in the face. I didn’t knock him the ground like Cal did, but at least I bloodied his nose. He screamed like baby.

“That is for little, Mary Sue Biggsley!” I said, then I took the record off the turntable, grabbed the other records, and I walked out to my desk in bullpen and got my things out of my desk. The main thing I made sure to get were the photos of Sherry. That was one thing I needed at that moment was to keep the memories of her. Also glad I got those records. All promo copies and one was the Damnation of Adam Blessing LP with ‘Back to the River’ on it, and Sticky Fingers by the Stones, with that real zipper on the cover. The monitor was silent while I got my stuff.

“Then, I heard Wally open the mic and say, “This your old friend, Farm-boy Wally, with a look back at what the weather was like on this day in 1957.” He was reading from that stupid notebook he kept in the studio filled with all of the teletype weather forecast that he had saved since he had been working in radio. If Howard and Bud thought they couldn’t sell rock and roll, they certainly weren’t going to make any sales with Wally reading fourteen-year-old weather forecast.

“I met Lance and T.R in the bar at the Lost City and I had just finished my second Sweet Leilani, when two of Springville’s finest walked in.

“Wonder if they are looking for someone?” T. R said, as he dusted his cigar in the ashtray.

“Mykel, you don’t think they are looking for you, do you?” Lance asked me.

“They might be,” I replied as the officers walked over to where we were sitting at the bar. They were there to handcuff me and take me to headquarters to be questioned. Lance and T. R went to headquarters in case they were needed to bail me out.

They took me into an interrogation room. I was surprised to see Police Chief Carpenter enter the room. I began to think ‘This is serious. I’m going to prison.’ He was carrying a file in his hand. I thought, ‘Oh no! That is that permanent record the teachers in Lemming always told me they were putting all of my infractions in.’

“So, you are the famous Marvelous Mike Daring,” the chief said. “I read your file and discovered you were one of the boys who foiled the kidnapping of Mayor Thomason’s son and future daughter-in-law. You were the one dressed as Robin. Where is Batman?”

“He joined the service. I assume he is in Vietnam.”

“You decided to stay here in Springville and fight,” the chief chuckled, then said, “Tell me your version of what happened at the radio station tonight.”

I told him my version of how they came into the studio and ordered me to turn off the Black Sabbath record. I told how he grabbed my collar, and I punched him.

“Do have any regrets about this?” Chief Carpenter asked.

“Just some kid had requested ‘Woodstock’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and I didn’t get to play it for him. Smacking Dick Grimm in the nose was pretty cool! That guy was even worse than I had been told he was.”

“You are really dedicated to your listeners,” the police chief said with a grin. “Now, back to Grimm. I’m going to tell you what I think of that guy. My first time dealing with Dick Grimm was my first week on the force in 1954. We were called to a neighborhood on the north side of Springville for a report of a black kid being shot by a white man. It was Grimm. He said the kid had picked a persimmon from a tree in his yard. The kids said Grimm frequently yelled racial slurs at them and that day he chose to shoot into the kids as they walked home from school. We arrested Grimm, but he got bailed out. I thought sure it was open and shut case of guilt, but the judge ruled in his favor, saying Grimm feared for his life, from a group of black kids around twelve and thirteen years of age.”

“From then on, I would unfortunately see Grimm’s ugly mug once or twice a year, getting into fights with neighbors and store clerks. We even had to be called to an altercation he was involved in at a Baptist church softball game he was coaching. Worst was that incident with that brick wall, that he and that Schattenkirk guy, that was in on that kidnapping you boys foiled, built that collapsed on those folks. McGillicuddy always laughed that the radio station’s former owner punched him too. Grimm is a proverbial bad penny, yet somehow never does anything drastic enough to get put behind bars for good.”

“By the way, I told the new owners that pressing charges would not be a good idea, because it would be bad publicity for a new radio station. They agreed. You are free to go. I saw Lance Powers out in the lobby. He said was going to post bail, but we aren’t going to hold you. Matter of fact, I think punching Dick Grimm is a good thing.”

Lance took me, from police headquarters, back to the Lost City to get my car. He told me that he would write up a good reference letter for me to give to another radio station for a job. I noticed that the radio wasn’t on in the car.

“Have you heard what they are doing right now?” I asked.

“I’d rather not know,” Lance answered, before reaching for the knob on the radio. “Do we dare?”

“Why not. I’m sure they haven’t got that much music to play.”

“When I followed the cops taking you to the police station, Wally read a weather forecast from 1962 between Sousa’s ‘Liberty Bell March’ and ‘An Open Letter to My Teenage Son’.

“Didn’t you break that one?” I asked Lance.

“Yeah, but I’m sure they found a copy somewhere and brought it in.”

Lance turned on the radio to K-I-L-L to hear Red Skelton explaining the meaning of the ‘Pledge of Allegiance.’ When he finished, Wally opened the mic and basically patted himself on the back for playing that record. He then gave the weather forecast for the next week, then played ‘The Fighting Side of Me’ by Merle Haggard. I reached over and turned the radio off.

“Mykel, we just heard the death of a once great radio station,” Lance said.

I thought he was going to cry.

“So, what happened after that,” Julie asked.

“I was off work for about a month, most of which I spent listening to those LPs I took from K-I-L-L. Especially that ‘Back to the River’ song and ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ by Neil Young.

“Then one day, Dan Cavill called and asked if I would come work for him. I worked at K-R-C-A for Dan Cavill for about a year or so. It wasn’t bad, that Chappel guy was gone, but so was that cute girl named Abby. I was Program Director and moved them away from the warmed-over Big Band stuff and instrumentals and modernized it with some Bread, the Carpenters, and Chicago. The only thing I really hated about that job was when that song ‘We’ll Sing in the Sunshine’ would play. It reminded me of Sherry, and I could hear her, whispering the words of that song, in my ear.

“What happened with K-I-L-L?” Julie asked.

“That format was so unsuccessful that they had to file for bankruptcy,” Mykel explained. “The new owners changed it back to Top 40. By then, I had left Springville, I was fed up with that town. Today K-I-L-L is just another stupid right-wing, talk radio station, like so many of the great Top 40 radio station of the 60s.”

“Where did you go after K-R-C-A?”

“Lovable Lance had landed in Kansas City, and he called me to work for him at the radio station that he was programming. That was around the time of Watergate, so he had me doing my imitation of Nixon on the morning show. People love it.

“A new owner came in and Lovable Lance left. I was there for at least another year, before I got fired.

“I was on the beach about 1978, and Lovable Lance and Cal Biggsley hired me for a radio station in Oklahoma City. It was a low rated country and Western station; I changed it to rock format, and we shot into the Top 10 in the Arbitron ratings.”

“A few years later, we had a radio convention at a big hotel in Oklahoma City. There were always these companies giving you flyers about their products. Back in those days, the company’s booths frequently had girls in bikinis. I remember Oppo Digital Headphones had some cute girls in their booth. One of them had light, brown hair, a nice tan, and friendly, sweet smile.” Mykel recalled the girl in the bright red bikini, who was now the plump, grey-haired, schoolteacher, wearing bifocals, sitting next to him on the couch and blushing as he talked about her.

“Really, what was her name?” Julie said. “As if I didn’t know.”

“Her name was Julie.”

Julie looked over at the man with solid, white hair, combed over a bald spot, but a boyish, twinkle in his brown eyes, smiling at her, as she remembered, “There was a nice guy…he was older than me, but he had thick, wavy, brown hair, and a mustache. He came to the booth, and I showed him some of our headphones. Unfortunately, that jerk kept interrupting my presentation.”

“Jerk is an understatement,” Mykel grumbled. “He kept saying ‘These are too expense…why would you need digital headphones anyway.’ Everything is digital now. Lovable Lance was part of the planning committee and suggested I take part in a seminar on music programming. The first one ran smoothly. That guy showed up for the second one and made an ass of himself. He kept interrupting me and the other three program directors with all of this garbage about how we were, in his words, ‘a bunch of stupid old hippies’ and didn’t know anything. I was just in my early thirties.

“He kept saying, ‘You stupid, old, hippies want to go around telling us what songs to play on our radio stations and you have no idea what good songs are. It’s always you guys that fire me for playing good stuff like Ted Nugent, Lynard Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Point Blank, Ironhorse, Tarney-Spencer Band, Mahogony Rush, and Douchette, but you want me to play shit like Van Halen and Kiss, which is as bad as playing the Bay City Rollers and the Monkees…or you want me to play the Ramones and the Police or the Knack, like that college graduate that fired me in Ohio. We need to Nuke the Knack! I was fired at another radio station in Colorado, because I refused to play the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson and Donna Summer. Disco sucks! The only people who listen to disco are niggers and fagots. I got fired at another station for playing ‘The Ballad of Curtis Lowe’ by Lynard Skynyrd. That is the greatest song ever recorded, after ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ and I got fired for playing it by one of you hippie types. Another dumbass fired me for playing ‘Country Boy Can Survive’ by Hank Junior after ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC. He said I wasn’t supposed to play country music on an A-O-R station. I told the moron that everybody knows people play Hank Junior after AC/DC at parties. Of course, you stupid hippie types want everyone to sit around holding hands and singing ‘Kumbia’ and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ while smoking marijuana and listening to wimpy bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd. My generation doesn’t smoke pot. We get our kicks in better ways. You can’t fly if you are high. Just say no.”

“I said, ‘Are you finished, little man!’ Everyone laughed at him, and he stomped out mad with these three other guys.”

“Later, I was walking down the hallway and noticed the door to the hospitality room was half-closed. I heard a girl scream from inside and I forced the door open. That guy and his three buddies were holding a girl down and they had her bikini bottom pulled down. They were putting lines of cocaine on her butt. It told them to let her go. There was a scuffle, and I slugged that guy in the mouth and lead the girl out of the room.”

Julie was tearing up, but grinning. “You ask where my room was and told me to take a shower immediately. When we got to my room you told me and my roommate what they were doing me, which made me feel even more scared.”

“What I remember was your roommate’s take on it was ‘Not only would they have snorted cocaine off of your skin, but they would also have been smelling your butt and we had Mexican food last night.’ That made me laugh.”

Julie laughed too and remembered, “Shannon was a sweet girl, but she was a blonde through and through. She continued modeling. I just did it while I was in college.”

“If it wasn’t that it would be an embarrassment to you, I would love to tell that story since that guy is now a bigshot, syndicated, talk radio show host with a show on one of the cable news networks,” Mykel said.

“Well, I retire at the end of this year, so I wouldn’t have to explain to the school board about why a famous, talk radio show host was trying to snort cocaine off of my butt,” Julie said with a smile, then she became reflective on the incident. “You know many girls dream of a knight in shining armor to rescue them from a dragon, but I had a knight with a moustache, in blue Jordache jeans and Foster Grant sunglasses, rescue me from a room of cokeheads. I’m certainly blessed that it happened. You took me to dinner that night. I started back to school, and Shannon said, ‘You need to call that cool radio DJ and ask him if he would want to go out again.”

“And the rest is history,” Mykel said.

“And we are still together,” Julie said with a tear in her eye. “But I have to ask, did you ever find out what happened to Sherry? You found out what happened to Clint when you found that his name was on the Vietnam memorial. I just wonder if you had any idea what happened to her.”

“When I was working in Kansas City, I went to a drive-in movie with a girl to see a double feature of What’s Up Doc? and Play It Again Sam. As they always do at the movies, they showed the previews of upcoming movies. There was a horror film, I think it was called Satanic Bloodbath of the Vampires. Midway through this movie trailer, they showed this beautiful blonde girl, screaming her head off. It was Sherry, or at least, I was pretty sure it was her.

“About a month later, Grandma was in the hospital in Springville. Mom wanted me to come see her since she hadn’t been given a very good prognosis. I was in the waiting room, while the technicians were hooking Grandma up to more monitors and apparatuses. They had a large TV in the waiting room, and it was tuned to one of the daytime soap operas. I wasn’t paying attention to it, but I noticed the story was taking place in a hospital too.

“Suddenly, I heard a very familiar, sweet, angelic voice coming from the television, saying, ‘Doctor Peters, here are those X-rays you asked for on the patient in 213. Doctor Horton says he only has two weeks to live.’ It was Sherry playing a nurse. The ironic thing was the guy playing the doctor was played by the actor who played Chad on Laredo. I wonder if she told him that she had his picture on her dorm room wall and did she run her fingers through his hair, like she did mine, when she talked about him. I watched until the end of the show and the credits said, NURSE – SHERRY RIDENHOUR, in yellow, chyron letters scrolling over a picture of an hourglass.’

“The only thing I saw Sherry in after that was a commercial for a feminine hygiene product. She was telling another girl that they no longer had to wear a ‘contraption.’

“However, as time has passed, especially after the COVID pandemic, I have thought about how we laughed and teased Sherry about how she would carry those little bottles that she filled with witch hazel and peroxide, and how she was always rubbing it on her hands, because she thought it would keep germs off of her hands. In a way that was sort of like how people now use hand sanitizer. So, I wonder if Sherry Ridenhour is the inventor of hand sanitizer and now worth millions.”

“And I hope that if she is a millionaire, I hope she calls that jerk Chip Hallwell and his wife, Alice the Goon, every day, preferably at 2 or 3 in the morning, as says, “Hello, this Sherry Ridenhour, your former girlfriend, who invented hand sanitizer. Is that what you were talking about when you talked about liquid assets? Just called to remind you of that. Good-bye!”

Julie was laughing uncontrollably.