Her True Voice

Rebecca Mack once had her heart set on becoming a singer. It turns out her voice was made for radio where it has arrived, heart and mind firmly attached, at KYRS.

No one has a Spokane story quite like Rebecca Mack’s. The woman on the radio with the probing questions and playful cheekiness didn’t get here in a way that anyone could imagine.
At 16 she flew out of Chicago for Australia to go college. She married young and followed her first husband to Grand Junction, Colorado, on the west slope of the Rockies. There, she converted her natural talents for journalism into a high-paying job as a spokeswoman for Chevron. She eventually re-located to San Francisco before leaving the giant oil & chemical company to start her own public relations firm. The mother of four boys, she found Spokane as a corporate scout at a time when she was looking for a more family-friendly environment to raise her sons.  A turning point for her (and us) is right out of the movies. Literally covered with grime in the midst of a roofing job with her sons on the South Hill, she was discovered by a curious KXLY executive who couldn’t help but notice what a rich voice she possesses.

I love how old fashioned radio is, and it’s free. And you don’t get to choose. There is some beauty in not being able to make a choice about everything that comes into your ears, which is what personal listening devices do for people. With radio there’s some involuntary exposure going on, which I think is a wonderful and splendid thing. –Rebecca Mack

Spokane listeners first got to know Mack as a crisply professional news reporter at KXLY and then as the on-air sidekick for former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman at KGA radio. It still has to rank among the most improbable radio marriages ever, the sonorous and controversial LA cop being shadowed, supported and at times sharply challenged by his smoke-clearing, fact-checking woman partner. And this is where Spokane radio listeners really got to know Rebecca Mack, not just as an insightful questioner but as a woman who wouldn’t shy away from throwing an elbow or two, at least figuratively, to make her points.

‘Rumble Strip’ with Rebecca Mack airs on KYRS, FM 92.3, from noon to 1 p.m.

Of course, the formula and nature of Rebecca’s craft (journalism in general and talk radio in particular) has changed, dramatically, in favor of nationally-syndicated, right-wing fire breathers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.
Our interview with Rebecca was conducted earlier this year in two sessions by editors Tim Connor and Jamie Borgan.
Jamie Borgan: You have a natural predilection to ask questions. Can you think of early experiences that fostered that, or early experiences where you saw it becoming a way of being?
Rebecca Mack: Oh, I was that way since I was little, since I was a kid. Because I was always hungry that way. I took off when I was sixteen and went to Australia to go to college. That was a pretty crazy thing to do, from suburban Chicago.
Tim Connor: Why?
RM: I just was curious about Australia. This was 1973. That’s  a long time ago, too. And I figured the best way to go, and the only way I could justify going, was if I went to college there. And my parents were great. I was a kid raised in the fifties, and my parents could have been one kind of parents, and they weren’t. They weren’t the stereotypical stuffed shirt type parents of the fifties. Stuffed shirt is the wrong word, but they were more spontaneous. Especially my father. He really encouraged me to be a little goofy and inquisitive and have fun and explore. He was a real explorer, my dad.

I could be completely all wet of course, but I think old-fashioned radio, which is kind of what KYRS is, however new-fangled it is in some ways, and progressive, it is also old-fashioned, is like vinyl records, is going to come back. People are tired. People want, I hope, want a more authentic real voice, and a more local voice and not be content with the pap.

JB: Do you remember the first time when you went on the radio?
RM: Oh yeah. It was a blast! I loved it. I just loved it from the minute I did it. Although I have to admit, even then, there was this guy who was this really fat DJ, who wore a cap, and his name was Uncle Don, and on his cap it said, B-F-R-M-O-S, Big Fat Round Man of Sound, and he sorted dominated that station as an on air guy. And then one day he wasn’t there any more. Then I learned about Arbitron, and I learned about ratings, and I learned that in the media, when the ratings come out, people disappear. Overnight. You know, they switch stations, formats, guys they thought were really terrific, suddenly they have no job. The sales people always stayed. And there was one woman in Grand Junction that drove a gold, gull-winged Delorean. Those sales people made bank. And the on-air people made nothing, but they had the vanity satisfaction of hearing themselves on the radio, until the day they got axed when their ratings fell. So I learned, early on, that this is terrific, it doesn’t pay anything, but everybody loves it, radio is a blast, so much fun, but uh-oh, you can get fired overnight through no fault of your own, just because you’re not popular any more. Those were the days when people started out in towns like Grand Junction with the goal of moving to bigger and bigger markets until you hit pay dirt or something. In fact, I worked on the air with a woman in Grand Junction who ended up, I think she’s still the primary anchor at Channel 2 in Oakland, on t.v. I had a chance at one point to go to t.v. or go to work for a big oil company. And I went to work for the big oil company.
TC: Well, what was behind that choice?
RM: Money. (laughing)
TC: And you were there for several years. What did you do?
RM: It was during the synthetic fuels corporation days and it was at the point, then, where the price of a barrel of oil was where it would be economically practical to extract it from shale, which is where the oil is found in western Colorado. So, all the major oil companies were coming to the western slope. And I was doing a lot of stories about. So as used to be the case–actually I think it still happens, frequently–if you’re pretty good in the media and big corporations or small companies want to have a local person who understands local media and who knows the media and knows the community, they hire those people away. They offer them three times as much money, and a company car, and a 401k, and hire them. And that’s what happened to me. So, I went for it and sort of jumped ship for the p.r. job and I got to stay in Grand Junction during a really exciting time. We had a huge project. We had a 7 billion dollar project, Chevron did. It was like crazy over there. It was boomtown. It was insane.
TC: What do people need to know about…
RM: How oil companies work?
TC: And how they think about messaging and how they want to steer public opinion given that they’re oil companies. What does the public need to know about how oil companies and big corporations think and how they try to use the arts of persuasion?
RM: I wouldn’t presume to know how they think. But I can tell you that it was a company, then, of men, male engineers who came out of the war. The Second World War. And I’m not an engineer, and that’s what really drives a big company like that, are the engineers, and exploration geology. Chevron has a…there’s an upstream and a downstream side to an oil company where you’re trying to find the stuff and buy it and develop it and then you have the retail end where you’ve got gas stations. So, there’s a whole gamut. Plus Chevron had a chemical company, it had a mining and minerals division and I worked in a whole bunch of those divisions over the years. All of them are slightly different. The chemical guys are different from the mining guys, by a long shot. I ended up doing a lot of work for the mining guys because I kind of understand the mining guys better than the other guys. But I did a lot of p.r. work for them. I did a lot of legislative analysis and advocacy for them. I helped create material safety data sheets, msds’s they were called. And we had to communicate with our communities about what was going on with the plant and what we were making and what our emergency response plan was in the community if there was an accidental release and all kinds of stuff. And Chevron is really interesting I think in that it is located in San Francisco of all places. Most major oil companies are located in friendlier communities.
TC: I’m thinking Houston.
RM: Exactly. Or Hackensack, New Jersey, not San Francisco. I liked Chevron. I have to say I liked the company, and I enjoyed working there. And I really liked my colleagues. At times I felt conflicted about some of the stuff I was doing because some of it, particularly in the chemical division, was really nasty. Some of the stuff we used to make, right in Richmond, California.
TC: Such as?
RM: Difolatan comes to mind.
TC: Which is?
RM: It’s a fungicide. And I’d be… I had the experience of being pregnant with my first child and sitting on the 37th floor of 575 Market Street in downtown San Francisco and hearing a team discussing the fact that some early results on rats were showing limbs that were truncated or foreshortened or missing in rat pups because of exposure. And what were we doing to tell the workers in the plants and what were we going to do relative to notifying… There’s entrance requirements in fields. Difolatan was used on strawberries, for example, it’s the low growing fruits that tend to get moldy. About re-entry after application, how long you have to wait after the application of a pesticide before you can re-enter the field. And here I am. I have a baby kicking in my own.. And they were discussing whether..

They were all born in Berkeley, we had this great place, I always wanted chickens and there seemed to be this old coop, ramshackle coop. I just thought my kids to stay connected to stuff like where their food comes from. This was a long time ago. They [the chickens] were entertaining, productive, we learned a lot. You learn a lot of life lessons when you have chickens. You learn a lot about the people that live around you, and you learn a lot about all kinds of things, when you have chickens.

TC: It’s like a screenplay.
RM: Oh, it was unbelievable. It was like ‘oh, my gosh’… I remember that moment pretty clearly, yeah.
JB: Was there a uniqueness to being a female voice in that milieu? You said it was mostly the mining guys and chemical guys.
RM: Yeah, it was mostly guys, they all played golf.
JB: Do you?
RM: No, I don’t play golf (laughs). At one point I worked for a guy, a bishop in the Mormon church and an engineer and he was like in his sixties and I was in my twenties. There could not have been a bigger gap in our complete perspective on everything. But I got a long with Earl. He was the manager of our project in western Colorado. Boy, It’s weird to talk about this stuff, I never think about it.
TC: Were you the major bread winner in your family?
RM: Uh-huh. (pause). One of the ironies of not having a job right now, not having been able to get a good job since I was at the newspaper, is that the whole time I was raising little kids, I didn’t want to work. I wanted to be home with my kids but I had to work to support the family. Now, here I am, my kids are almost grown. And I can’t get a job. And it’s just like..it’s goofy.

With radio there’s some involuntary exposure going on, which I think is a wonderful and splendid thing.

TC: When did you come to Spokane and how did that come about?
RM: I think it was ’93. I was working for Dayton Hudson Corporation that owned Mervyn’s department stores. And we were doing a bunch of grand openings all over the country. I’d sat in on a marketing meeting at Dayton Hudson, talking about opening a store in Spokane, Washington. And I heard this report. They have store locater people that research the market, what kind of employees they’re going to be able to hire, the unions there, all that sort of stuff. And I went to this meeting where they gave their report on Spokane, Washington. And I thought ‘man, that sounds like a great place!’
JB: Had you heard of Spokane before?
RM: Yes, because one of my sisters thought it would be a terrific place to live some years prior and she had come up here with her husband. They spent a couple months here trying to get jobs and couldn’t, so they decamped to Albuquerque, where they’ve been ever since. But I’d only heard about it that way.
TC: So what you heard about it made you want to like it?
RM: I did. I liked what I heard. I was intrigued. Our CEO at the time, Walter Rossi was his name, came up here and I came with him. There were like four of us who came up San Francisco and a couple of the guys from Minneapolis. I think it was winter. Yeah it was the winter. And we looked at the location at Northtown Mall and, one of my first impressions was, ‘wow, there are a lot of tacky Chinese restaurants in this town (laughs). Whatever it was, there was this one, like Chinese palace on north Division.
TC: Right, you could see it from outer space…
RM: Holy cow! It kind of reminded me of Grand Junction, Colorado, because it was on the periphery of the state. Grand Junction, you know, is way out in the western part of Colorado, and Colorado’s politics are dominated by the Front Range [cities], Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and, kind of like here. Spokane is an outlyer community, it’s kind of on the edge.
TC: So, other than the Chinese food…
RM: Right, I was like, wow, sweet and sour chicken EVERYWHERE! (laughs). Anyway, but I thought I liked it. But here’s a crazy thing. Sometime in there I got a call from a young guy who worked at a newspaper up here, who wanted to know if we wanted to place some ads in their pull-outs, you know, their Sunday pull-outs. Well, it was Stacey Cowles.

So I learned, early on, that this is terrific, it doesn’t pay anything, but everybody loves it, radio is a blast, so much fun, but uh-oh, you can get fired overnight through no fault of your own, just because you’re not popular any more.

TC: Where do we know that name from?
RM: (Laughs) And he was working in the advertising department, learning the family business. And it turns out he called me because I had a title that looked like I bought advertising, I guess, but I didn’t, so I had to redirect him but when I came up later for the store opening and I came up with Walter Rossi and the guy who was going to be the store manager. We had a breakfast and Stacey was there and so was Bill Cowles, his dad, and they did this big welcome to Spokane thing, and, so that was kind of funny.
TC: But did you understand at the time that this was Spokane’s first family? Pretty much as close as we have to royalty?
RM: I had no earthly idea, no earthly idea.
TC: But you figured it out later?
RM: It took me a while to figure out that such a thing still existed in an American city. It still sort of defies… That their so-called influence, or what what they inspire in people is so dominant in the culture here. I just couldn’t even… I come from bigger places than that. Anyway, we wanted to get out of San Francisco. I had gotten transferred there and he [her husband] had never really loved it. And so, I was thinking, ‘you know, okay, would you be happy if we moved to a smaller town?’ And he came up with me as my–and I think this is emblematic of the era–I think he was my ‘wife,’ in all the things I had to fill out for the company, the traveling ‘wife’ who goes..
JB: How did you transition back into broadcasting once you were here?
RM: I have pictures of Benjamin, my youngest son. I have pictures of him in diapers. I don’t think he was even two when I started restoring houses here. And I had the kids help me. I put ‘em to work. Because I thought it was good for boys to work. I wanted them to work and I didn’t want to farm them out to nannys or do any of that stuff any more. They were going to work with me, we were going to work together, we were going to listen to the radio, and music and talk to each other, and learn how to work with our hands. And that’s what we did. I started Cabin Coffee somewhere in there too, with Kim, my buddy and we were also working on a house that we were restoring. The kids
and I tore off five layers of roofing, we did it all, removing the Mt. St. Helens ash that was under there and the whole bit. And a guy came to look at the house. He was interested in buying it, because it was a beautiful little house. Anyway, he was talking to me on the front porch about the house and he said, ‘you have a great voice and I really like listening to you talk. Have you thought about going into radio?’ And I said, ‘oh gawd, I was in radio twenty years ago. But now I’ve been doing all this other stuff, and I got these kids. And here I am filthy with roof stuff and everything. And he said, ‘well, I work at KXLY and give me a call. I’d like to put you back on the air.
TC: Who was it?
RM: It was Roger Nelson. He worked in advertising but I’m not sure what Roger’s job was. But they called me. So I… Can I say something funny about that?
JB: Please do.
RM: I always wanted to sing. I loved to sing. I did stuff like try out every year and sneak into concerts at the high school I went to. I’d learn all the words and sneak into the big concerts in the alto section where I knew that nobody would know, because there’s all these big groups together. I really wanted to sing, ‘pick me, pick me, pick me!’ and at first I could be in because they let everybody be in but then as you go through high school they narrow it down. And so I never got in. And my wonderful mother and father paid for me one year to have singing lessons. I always wanted to be Joan Baez, I wanted to be Judy Collins, because I yearned and yearned for that, the unattainable. And then it turns out my voice was for something else, not singing, but speaking. But it took me a long time to figure that out. You know, give up the singing. And I haven’t given up (laughs) I still want to sing. Anyway, it’s one of those things.  It’s so obvious, but you yearn for what you can’t..
TC: What people know of your persona is that you’re a person who’s just relentlessly inquisitive and just really interesting to listen to.
RM: God, I hope so. (laughs)
TC: And I just wonder what was the thirst there? It couldn’t have been just that you liked to listen to the sound of your own voice.
TC: With the hair money?
RM: With the hair money. It was such a rich experience in my childhood to have that program on.

And I had the kids help me. I put ‘em to work. Because I thought it was good for boys to work. I wanted them to work and I didn’t want to farm them out to nannys or do any of that stuff any more. They were going to work with me, we were going to work together, we were going to listen to the radio, and music and talk to each other, and learn how to work with our hands.

JB: What of those early radio experiences do you think influences the persona that you bring when you’re on the radio?
RM: It’s just me. It really is just me. I was trying to think if The Midnight Special was anything like what I try to do and it’s really not. And all of this time I’m thinking of some of my family members, thinking, ‘they just wish I’d shut up.’ But you guys are being so nice about it. I think of my brother saying, ‘showboating, quit showboating.’ My family’s all introverted, everybody’s introverted except me and my father, we were the only extroverts. So, you know, extroverts drive the introverts crazy. (laughs).
TC: KXLY in those days, when you started was really steeped in public affairs.
RM: Actually, they hired me to write news and voice the news, which is what I did for quite a while. And then they needed a producer and they asked me if I could produce a show. Well, I’m an English major, I can do anything, right? (laughs) So Dave Sposito. You know of the Breakfast Boys and Molly, he was going to have his own talk show, he had his own talk show and I was his producer. And Molly Allen was on there for a while and I was still doing both, I was producing and doing the news.
TC: Was the morning shift different from the afternoon shift?
RM: Yes, because I think it was the afternoon shift where I did the producing and the morning shift when I was on the radio, doing stories, you know listening to the scanner and calling the cops and all that stuff.  And this is how I got involved with Fuhrman because I was doing the news and producing the Sposito show. And I had heard that Mark Fuhrman worked at the station like every other Thursday or something. He would come in and be on Mike Fitzsimmons’s show and all I knew about him was that he was that horrible, rogue racist cop from the O.J. trial.
TC: Which is how the world met him.
RM: Yep. So I’d never met him, didn’t know who he was. And I was having  babies during the whole OJ thing. I was working and had little kids. I didn’t watch it on television, I didn’t listen to it on the radio, I wasn’t one of those millions of people world-wide that watched that whole thing.

On Mark Fuhrman: He told me to read his book. He said, ‘Mack, let’s not talk any more until you’ve read my book. Have you read my book?’ Of course not. I hadn’t read his book. So I read his book. Murder in Brentwood. And after I read the book–and he quizzed me to make sure that I actually read it–I thought, yeah, he’s a decent guy who got a bad rap.

TC: There was a lot more to Mark Fuhrman than just the OJ case and I think everybody’s curious as to what your first impressions were of him when you met him.
RM: Well, somebody pointed him out one day. Because I was working there but I didn’t even know what he looked like, because I didn’t watch, and I don’t watch television. People don’t believe me when I tell them this, but I really do not watch television. So I didn’t know, even what he looked like. I thought he was going to be short. Most assholes are short. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, and it’s not even true (laughs).
TC: Well, you learn a lot in life…
RM: For some reason I just thought he’d be short. So, I was really surprised that he was tall. And he was handsome. So he was like the celebrity, he’d come in, people were, ‘oh my god, that’s Mark Fuhrman,’ because he was only coming in every couple of weeks and had star quality. He was a very commanding personality with a very commanding physical presence.
TC: And also a good radio voice.
RM: Oh gosh, yeah. But I didn’t really pay any attention. And then it was suggested to me that maybe Mike Fitzsimmons and Mark Fuhrman could use a producer, that their show could use some help. So, could I start listening to it? (laughs). I go, like, ‘okaaaaay.’ So I started listening to the show and I was like, ‘oh my gosh! These guys are talking out their butts. It seemed to me they were making wild accusations and categorizing people. In particular at that point, they were talking about ELF, I think.

And by the time we’d be on the air we’d get so worked up. I’d be so mad at him [Fuhrman], he’d be so mad at me. Because we held such different opinions about a lot of things, or saw things completely differently. I remember having to pipe down because it was disturbing to other people in the station and it made people anxious because it sounded like we were fighting.

TC: The Earth Liberation Front, the eco-terrorists?
RM: Yes. But I thought, you know, possibly what they were saying could be substantiated. Fuhrman was saying things like it’s a bunch of trust fund, hippy kids, parents are paying for them to blow up Suburbans in parking lots and all that kind of stuff. And I was thinking, he might be correct but he probably should check his facts. So, I can’t exactly remember, but I think I said, okay, let me see if he’ll work with me. If he’ll listen to me. At that point, he’d never, like, touched a computer, he hated computers, he was anti-technology. He was a complete Luddite neanderthal when it came to all that stuff. And Google. I had become a huge fan of Google at that point and I was amazed at the stuff you could learn. It wasn’t like the old days where you had to go to the courthouse or the library, had to learn the Dewey Decimal system. Suddenly it was like magic. I said, ‘look, we can Google ELF, and we can learn who’s in ELF, or we can try to get a better understanding of the foundation of this organization, who funds it. It’s kind of an underground organization and not a lot of people are going to be leaving their names and addresses, but we can learn more and be better at talking about this if we know better. And he was amenable to it. He was open to it, and he was willing to learn, and be taught. That sounds presumptuous but I mean he wasn’t like, ‘oh no, I know everything there is to know.’ He was receptive. And to me that was key. So there was that, and I think we had lunch to see whether we could work together, and I told him I had concerns about the whole racist thing, and what was my family going to say? (laughs) if I went to work with this guy.
TC: You mean just by weight of his reputation?
RM: His reputation.
TC: So it wasn’t anything he was saying on the air at the time.
RM: Oh no. He was sort of bull-headed and outlandish in his comments on the air but he wasn’t characterizable as a racist in anything I heard. He was just extremely opinionated and didn’t seem to have done any homework about some of the stuff he was talking about.
JB: How did he address your concerns?
RM: He told me to read his book. He said, ‘Mack, let’s not talk any more until you’ve read my book. Have you read my book?’ Of course not. I hadn’t read his book. So I read his book. Murder in Brentwood. And after I read the book–and he quizzed me to make sure that I actually read it–I thought, yeah, he’s a decent guy who got a bad rap.
TC: Did Dominick Dunne ever come up in this? Because Dominick Dunne was one of the people nationally who helped to dispel the stereotypes about Fuhrman.
RM: Dominick Dunne loved Fuhrman. We had Dominick on the show actually, a couple times. I had his home phone number in Connecticut because he was such a fan of Fuhrman’s. He loved Fuhrman.
TC: And we should explain that Dominick Dunne covered the OJ trial for Vanity Fair and that’s he’s a very well known writer who recently passed away [August 2009].
RM: He was sort of an unlikely champion of Fuhrman’s. And there are a lot of people, it turns out, who are unlikely champions of Fuhrman’s. But I became a lot more receptive. I didn’t want to be guilty of the same thing that people were accusing him of, you know?
TC: Prejudice?
RM: Yeah, Prejudice. You know, who am I to say? I didn’t know enough to be dismissive of the guy. And the qualities that I saw. He was brilliant. He was funny. He was articulate, thoughtful, and I think an extraordinarily talented detective. And he had a genuine desire to help out in Spokane. He missed his law enforcement profession terribly. And we developed a very close and strong working relationship, and friendship. And mutual respect.
TC: But he had to be willing to share the air with you. You were trying to bring journalism to that show.
RM: Yeah. I tried.
TC: And he had to be secure enough on the air to let you do that.
RM: Oh yeah, and we fought a lot. On and off the air a lot, but in a friendly, mostly friendly way. I mean, yelling, they used to have to close the door because we would do prep, an hour before we’d start talking about it. And by the time we’d be on the air we’d get so worked up. I’d be so mad at him, he’d be so mad at me. Because we held such different opinions about a lot of things, or saw things completely differently. I remember having to pipe down because it was disturbing to other people in the station and it made people anxious because it sounded like we were fighting. We were just arguing, and sometimes the arguing went onto the air.
TC: It made for good radio.
RM: He interrupted too much (laughs).
JB: Two extroverts on the air.
RM: Oh my god, and we both had the conviction that we were right. But you know, Fuhrman has a fair amount of humility and good sense, common sense, and he’s extremely perceptive about some things. This business with Otto Zehm. The day that happened and [Spokane then-acting Police Chief Jim] Nicks stood up there and said what he said, Fuhrman smelled a rat. I told my husband that at breakfast this morning. He said if head cops ever over reach on the truth on a feeling that they’re protecting the ranks, it always ends up, as it should, biting them. Everybody gets bitten.

And then it turns out my voice was for something else, not singing, but speaking. But it took me a long time to figure that out. You know, give up the singing. And I haven’t given up (laughs) I still want to sing.

JB: Do you have thoughts on the positive of local radio and what it does for our dialogue and our ability to be civil?
RM: I love how old fashioned radio is, and it’s free. And you don’t get to choose. There is some beauty in not being able to make a choice about everything that comes into your ears, which is what personal listening devices do for people. You know? With radio there’s some involuntary exposure going on, which I think is a wonderful and splendid thing. I remember when I worked at Chevron, and when I worked at Mervyn’s, the whole ethic that drove a lot of what we did at our gas stations and our retail locations, people want to know exactly what they’re getting when they park in that parking space, they want to know what the front door is like, and know what’s to the left and what’s to the right, they want to know the restrooms clean, and that they’re going to get the same tank top in San Lorenzo that they can get in Hollywood, or wherever. A predictability of offering is what Americans, ostensibly, we’ve all been told that that’s what we want. We want that predictability, that reliability, in what we consume, be it in a gas station or retail store. And the thing I like about radio, like KYRS, a real radio station is, you don’t get that (laughs). You don’t know what you’re going to get when you turn it on. And that means you’re going to be exposed and introduced to things that you didn’t necessarily choose, but is nevertheless going to be somehow enriching and eye opening. Maybe not your taste or point of view, but at least is rich in a way that it couldn’t be if it were predictable.
JB: What do you see KYRS or smaller, more grassroots effort, in this millieu that we’re talking about, with the rise of people who yell on the radio and express a certain viewpoint, where you see a place like KYRS fitting in?
RM: I could be completely all wet of course, but I think old-fashioned radio, which is kind of what KYRS is, however new-fangled it is in some ways, and progressive, it is also old-fashioned, is like vinyl records, is going to come back. People are tired. People want, I hope, want a more authentic real voice, and a more local voice and not be content with the pap.
JB: You’ve raised chickens for thirty years.
RM: Yup.
JB: Do you remember your first chicken?
RM: Nope. (laughs) The kids were being raised in San Francisco. They were all born in Berkeley, we had this great place, I always wanted chickens and there seemed to be this old coop, ramshackle coop. I just thought my kids to stay connected to stuff like where their food comes from. This was a long time ago. They [the chickens] were entertaining, productive, we learned a lot. You learn a lot of life lessons when you have chickens. You learn a lot about the people that live around you, and you learn a lot about all kinds of things, when you have chickens. We had ducks too. We had a goat–that was a bad experiment–but I consistently, I mean this was suburban San Francisco, had chickens. And the kids always loved them. They would spend a lot of time down at the coop. I believe really strongly in a lot of unstructured time for kids and having them just do stuff like hold a hose for forty-five minutes and watch the duck preen herself in the stream of the water, you know how they do, I believe in all that very strongly. And chickens help get everybody out. You know, you send the kids out to get the eggs and, it’s so rich. It’s such a rich thing to have chickens. In spite of the fact that they were decimated numerous times by raccoons, dogs, coyotes, disease, you know..
JB: It’s a whole genre, the backyard chicken tragedy.
RM: It is! Oh my God!!