Motown Strong: The Third Decade Begins

Tomorrow, I officially begin my 21st year in public education. My first four were with the Bloomfield Hills School District as assistant manager of WBFH-FM (1995-99). That was followed by three with the Martin County School District at South Fork High School (1999-2002) And now, I'm kicking off my 14th at Wellington High School of The School District of Palm Beach County.

And it all started, strangely enough, because of a newspaper strike in Detroit and a phone conversation with a former high school teacher about his meeting David Letterman.

Flashback: November 1994. After nearly 2 1/2 years, I resigned my position as a full-time journalist at The Spinal Column Newsweekly for a myriad of reasons, many of which were directly related to my less-than-stellar relationship with the editor of that newspaper. (Despite the name; it was a paper that took a no-hold-barred approach to local politics and news, not a chiropractic journal.) After years of butting heads with an editor who chose to re-write more than edit, who offended a number of employees in a manner that would make Donald Trump blush, and with whom I had absolutely no faith in as a supervisor anymore, I felt it was in my best interest to part ways and venture out on my own as a free-lance reporter for several Detroit-area newspapers; this included working for The Mirror Newspapers of Royal Oak, The Detroit Jewish News, and The Detroit News, the latter of which had been both a goal and a dream of mine. I landed all three free-lance gigs within six weeks of my resignation.

My signing on with The Detroit News was due in part to my friendship with Oralandar Brand-Williams, with whom I worked for two years in the mid-1980s at WWJ radio. She was my connection; she helped guide me to the right person, and in the media business, it's always good to follow your leads. (Networking, my friends.) I started writing Oakland County political pieces on a weekly basis for The Detroit News, up until July 1995, when reporters went on strike. I was approached on the second day of the walkout by management to cross the picket line and write for the paper full-time; it was at this time I was informed I'd risen to the Number 2 free-lance position at the paper. (I don't know if I was told this to sway me to cross the line, or if it was legit, or both, but it certainly boosted my ego!)

But after pondering the decision - and after speaking with Oralandar - I turned down the offer.

I value friendship over employment, even though I knew it looked like a death knell both for future full-time work with the paper and my ability to do free-lance reporting for the short term. And yes, I realized at that moment I was cutting off a decent chunk of my pay, which was a rather terrifying consideration. It made me have to both pick up my game with the other two papers and try to figure out other reporting/photography options.

It was about two months into this sudden financial and employment void I received a phone call from Pete Bowers, the station manager of WBFH-FM, the educational high school radio station of the Bloomfield Hills (Mich.) School District. And here, I must digress into some serious background information.

Pete Bowers and I went back, way back, to my days as a student at Bloomfield Hills Lahser High School; I took his Fundamentals of Radio Broadcasting course during the 1979-80 school year. After taking FORB, I advanced to the radio station staff, and spent two amazing years of high school speaking into a microphone, spinning stacks of wax on turntables (an all-jazz show!), writing and covering local news stories, conducting interviews, doing live sports broadcasts, and being active in the practical application of real-life public communication skills on a 10-watt radio station. There were staff road trips to radio conventions in his powder blue VW MicroBus and the annual March of Dimes Radio Marathon every spring, where students would beg for pledges in the fight against birth defects.

It was a pretty cool gig for high school students in the pre-Internet world.

To say I'd found a calling is a disservice to callings; I spent so many hours at the station after school that many of my other classes suffered en masse; during my junior year, my grades dive-bombed to the point where my parents met with Pete, and my time was restricted to "the bare minimum" to pass the class. Luckily, I found my footing by my senior year, and graduated high school (although there are some who probably consider that a miracle in the grand scheme of things).

My time at WBFH (also known as "The Biff" and "The 10-Watt Big Shot") molded my future in a number of ways. I focused on attending Central Michigan University, which offered one of the top broadcasting programs in the nation at the time, and was Pete's alma mater. (The fact I had relatives in Mt. Pleasant, where CMU was located, and knew the area, was an added incentive.) But in 1985, I chose to take a sabbatical from college, and during that year off, secured an "independent study" through CMU's Broadcast & Cinematic Arts Department at - you guessed it - WBFH for a semester. This became my second time working under Pete's mentorship. It was during this time I snagged interviews with the Detroit Tigers radio team of Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey, which was one of the highlights of my life, then and now.

So here it was, the Summer of 1995, seven weeks after my time with The Detroit News had come to a sudden stop. Pete Bowers called me out of the blue, and we chatted for around 40 minutes. The majority of the phone call was him talking about his trip to New York City in mid-August, where he and WBFH Assistant Manager Ron Wittebols had personally met David Letterman outside the Ed Sullivan Theater (near the famous Hello Deli). They posed for photos, and had tickets to that night's show, so it was a double amazing experience for PB and The Ronster. (In case you didn't know, Pete is a huge fan of Letterman, so this was probably as close to walking on air as humanly possible for him. And if you didn't know this before ... now you do!)

The conversation shifted at some point to Pete informing me Ron had landed a job at a Detroit-area public relations/advertising firm ... and his assistant manager position was available ... and he wondered if I was interested ...

And I think I accepted the job before he had finished the offer. It was a no-brainer among no-brainers.

I spent four years - four glorious years - working with Pete Bowers for the third time in a 15 year span. But this time, it was a little different. As with any new job (and this time, it truly was a job - hey, a paycheck!), I still had much to learn. There was new computer technology to work with, including automated broadcasting overnight and during the summers. There were students working with record label reps from California and New York, securing advance copies of to-be-released CDs. There were live remotes of sports broadcasts, new ways of recording local news stories and public service announcements.

But I had two advantages: (1) even though years had passed and some aspects of the program had changed, I knew enough about how the WBFH functioned and how the program was structured that it made the transition smoother than coming in blind; and (2) Pete is an excellent educator who has made a different in thousands of young adults' lives the past four decades.

I even got a radio show out of the deal! I, with my friend Jeff Falcon, hosted a nighttime program called The Biff Rock Cafe, which we dubbed "fly by the seat of your pants radio at its finest"; shows included bringing in local politicians, doing live local band performances, and running "theme" broadcasts.

{Sidebar: I also started free-lance reporting and feature writing for The Detroit News again. Happy happy, joy joy, indeed!}

About a year into my working at The Biff, I thought, maybe this whole "education" thing might be something to consider. I spoke to several individuals about the idea at length, including my aunt Ruth Moltz (a French & Spanish teacher in Southfield) and Pete. They encouraged me to consider it. So I enrolled in Wayne State University's "Masters of Arts in Teaching" program and started taking secondary education courses. The real fun was my last year (1998-99), when my student teaching commenced at The International Academy, an all-International Baccalaureate high school about five miles from the WBFH studios. For the year, my exhausting schedule was basically Monday-Friday 7am-3pm at the IA, 3:30-10pm at WBFH, and Saturdays 8am-1pm at WBFH overseeing the station's Saturday Jamz program (for area middle school DJs) in order to reach the 40-hour work week expectations. Somewhere in there, I breathed, ate, put together lesson plans, graded papers, and retained my sanity. (Notice that "sleeping" is not included here; that's because I don't think it happened during the entire run.)

In July 1999, I landed an International Baccalaureate English position at South Fork High School in Stuart, Florida, and my third time with WBFH came to a conclusion.

Something I am asked by many of my debate students is about my own high school debate program experiences. Sadly, I have none (to the best of my knowledge, Lahser didn't have a program at the time). But I can relate my radio broadcasting experiences to them, and in many ways, radio to me in high school is what debate is to my students. WBFH is definitely a parallel connection. Both debate and radio involve multi-tasking and various skill sets. Both involve honing critical thinking, researching, writing, and oral communication skills. Both involve mentorship of all students from an adult supervisor, and of newer students from program veterans. Both involve real life knowledge of the world in which we live. And both are comprised of close-knit groups of highly intelligent and motivated young adults, many of whom remain friends long after their commencement exercises take place.

I can only hope to be as positive an influence for my debaters as Pete Bowers was - and continues to be - for his students, as well as for me. I'm proud to be a product of his program.

So, here I am, some 35 years removed from my introduction to the world of radio broadcasting. I carry much of it with me in my debate classroom, as a professional educator. The tools have been modified to some degree (radio and debate aren't exactly clones of each other), and they work. The crux is helping young adults learn how to harness their inner voice and make it shine. In some cases, their voices were already out there, but just need to be fine-tuned; in others, they didn't even realize they had a voice.

Much has happened in the 16 years I've lived in Florida. Just as much has changed at WBFH. A new high school is under construction in Bloomfield Hills, scheduled to open this fall. Modern WBFH studios are part of the new facility. And I know Pete is as excited about this as he was about starting up the model program in 1976, with a fresh degree from Central Michigan University.