“You ready John; its going great beyond my dreams boy, sure the whole place is listening”.
In preparation and so as to add realism to my location on the river, I had put an extension cord on my phone, those were the days before mobiles and I had the bath taps running full belt and I was standing in the bath as well. “Over to you John”.
“My God Derry, I can only say that I am seeing a terrible thing, there is a fissure in the ground right before me now and thousands of gallons of water are pouring into it every second, can you hear it” I put the phone down near the water and Derry assures me that he can almost see the water it’s so clear. “I think we are done for with the river Derry, what are the listeners saying to you in the studio”. Derry then took another few reports from the public, one was in Castletownroche and one in Fermoy and they both confirmed that the Awbeg River, as well as the Blackwater was indeed drying up, because they could see how much lower they were now. Then he began getting calls that people were lined all along the bridge in Mallow staring in at the little island which I had earlier confirmed was ‘way out’ of the water. Being a true professional Derry took me back on and this time he was playing the skeptical card and he says, “John I know you know about this stuff, but could it be imagination at all boy, could you be wrong it’s very serious”. I tell him that I have had ‘measuring sticks’ in the river for the past two years, and the water is definitely two feet lower than ever before. Then I add that I have also had friends in Youghal who tell me that the river is only flowing through two of the eyes on the bridge, when it was normally going through six. That was it then he hung up and I thought it was all over for the day, not so. In five minutes he was back telling me that he had some official from the fisheries board on the line going mad about it and would I talk to him. In my innocence I thought that Derry had made him wise to the prank, but he had not, and so I once again got into my disaster mode. The man was really going wild. He attacked me saying I was a fool that the river was tidal and what qualifications did I have to make such a serious allegation, and I defended myself getting more and more heated, but all the time I believed he was in on it. He got so mad that he said we would hear more about this, and he hung up on me as did Derry. The broadcast ended around midday with Derry in hysterics telling the listeners that they could relax it had all been an April Fools Joke. The next day we got a demand for the broadcast logs of the show because it had not gone down well in ‘official’ circles and a court date looked likely. I was all for my day out in court, as I believed no harm was done and a Judge would see the funny side of things for sure and it ended at that, but a week or so later the Phoenix magazine carried a story on Fishy Business in Mallow, fame at last I believed and for years people would meet me in the street and laugh at the prank we had pulled on them. I heard too that one of the other bridges was blocked up with onlookers trying to see the water dropping and arguing about it all. I still laugh at how innocent good people are, and even today a convincing liar will make believers out of almost anyone, sure politics is based on it.
Under a great management team led by Colm O’Connaill, with a great group of broadcasters and professionals, County Sound and 96FM grew and grew. We built new studios into Jack’s old Majestic dancehall, and I designed them in a way that the staff would be bathed in both light and good energy every hour that they worked there. I had a vision that if the broadcasters felt happy in their work environment, then they would come across as happy to their listeners, holding them for longer, giving the advertisers statistically a better chance of having their adds heard. The buzz word for this holding is known as ‘market share’ and we have one of the highest in the country. This vision was brought into reality by two of the most brilliant people I ever dealt with; John Mullane the engineer and Mick Sheehan, a builder and craftsman of immeasurable vision and talent. Above all, those two people not alone saw what I was trying to achieve, but they both also enhanced it, while still surmounting every obstacle that came in their way. Today I am very proud of the edifice we all created together in Mallow. I get a great sense of pride when a new staff member tells me that they love the building, and the feeling they get while working there, not realizing that I had anything to do with it.
As time rolled on we had an ever-increasing pot of money, and pretty soon the station that the IRTC believed would be the first to fail, became one of the strongest stations in Ireland. Some years later this Cork consortium would make a bid for the National Radio Licence, and almost succeeded before finally being sold for over thirty million pounds to the huge media provider, Ulster Television Plc. Unlike so many of the greed-driven corporate companies we see today, our consortium gave one million of their thirty millions back to their staff as a gesture of thanks. I may be wrong, but I believe this was unprecedented at the time, and I know of no other case still where it has happened. In a time when workers are not even being paid proper redundancy, there are many who could well take a leaf from our guys’ books. The pirate radio that began with an idea from four local businessmen in Mallow, and that was first built in my kitchen, had succeeded beyond all expectations, and in line with my madness, instead of owning a quarter of the company I had just ten shares in it. These I had actually bought years earlier unlike other engineers who had argued for, and got, huge share options in similar situations. It was at that stage that I began to question what my life was all about, and how badly I had treated my own family, because of my addiction to radio. Only I was to blame though, as when I had only asked for a penny, it would have been foolish of me to expect to be given a pound. Guard Ryan’s slap in the face was still affecting me, but not alone me, it affected my family as well. It was long past the time for a rethink of my whole life and that I began.
As I write, we are now entering a completely new age. This is fast becoming the age of the iPads, iPods, Podcasts, and Apps. It’s actually easier for my son Adrian to listen to us now in Australia than it is to hear us in some parts of our licensed area, and I predict the demise of FM radio transmissions as we know them. It will soon become both uneconomical and unnecessary for a company to keep an FM transmission system operating, when the internet will offer a much bigger audience at a tiny fraction of the cost. The new kings in broadcasting are now the IT people of this world, and I believe proof of that fact is not far away. I am immensely proud that our internet radio services are now being sent out into the world by the IT skills of my youngest son, Kyrl. He has persistently followed me into this radio work, despite my warnings against it. At this time he is both the Chief Engineer of the Limerick Radio station Live 95, and Head of IT of the very radio stations that started in his kitchen when he was but a baby. No one could possibly have foreseen such an event. Colm O’Connaill has long since left us and his protégée, Ronan McManamy is now in overall charge of the UTV Radio sector in Ireland. We in Cork are still fortunate to have both Ronan and an excellent CEO in Kieran McGeary guiding our great team of radio fanatics. Kieran, a Waterford man, has continued the growth of our radio stations despite savage new competition. He continues to see the value of close co-operation with our listening audience because he was instrumental in bringing about yet another amazing radio appeal. This time it was for the cancer services in the Cork Hospitals. I am very pleased to say that once again our radio work has eased the suffering of numerous children and adults from cancer, and over the past years we must have raised close to two million euros to help combat that terrible disease. I have always maintained that the best radio people in Ireland are in Cork, though they are not necessarily Cork people, and the best team in radio is ours, but of course it is true to say that I would be biased. Commercial radio has been very good to me over the years, and it was while setting up a new radio station for Limerick that I began my Internet chatting and ultimately found my second wife, an American called JoAnn Elms.
JoAnn. Dream Maker.
So as to explain how my life was to take on a new and dramatic turn for the better, I need to return to Buttevant
and the year nineteen sixty five. I was then about fifteen years old and I had an extraordinary thing happen to me during a trip down the castle. This castle was owned by the Barry Clan in past history, and the town of Buttevant had been named after their war cry of ‘Boutez an Avant’ meaning ‘push forward’. If you were trying to ‘get off’ with a girl, you took her on a trip down the castle, and when I was fifteen it was then a Mecca for teenagers. Getting off with a girl covered a multitude of possibilities, and ranged from holding hands to sex in various forms. I can say straight up that I never experienced the latter, but I did have some nice experiences there.
On the day in question my two friends, Hayes and Fowler, were heading down the castle because they both had girlfriends then. As we were all good friends I was asked to tag along for part of the walk at least. Unfortunately I did not have any girl on my arm and I remember feeling a bit odd in myself all that day. It had nothing to do with my lack of female company, or so I thought, I just felt strange.
It was a most beautiful summer’s day with bright blue skies and a blazing hot sun warming our barely clad bodies. We were all so happy in those days with the hippie era beginning. All of our friends were avid supporters of The Beatles, The Stones, long hair and tie dye shirts, with the girls doing their best to defeat the rules and practices of Catholic Ireland.
Quite unlike what was believed of us at the time, none of us ever took drugs or drank alcohol. We were a very strange bunch of hippies indeed, but we rebelled in every other way we could, including the dress code, and our long hair was considered the worst in the town.
As we slipped through the old iron gates, I began to get an even stranger feeling about the day. A kind of sadness and yet elation began to come over me. First I thought it was because the lads had women and I did not, but that really was not it. I just felt more and more odd with every step we took. We walked and laughed and the lads hugged the girls and winked at me. By then we had reached the actual castle. This was where we were parting as I was no longer welcome for the rest of their adventures; an understandable and accepted fact by me. I would kill the time somehow while they had their fun with the ladies. Pretty soon they disappeared into the privacy of rows of very large and very old trees still there today, and I would not see them again for a long time.
I resigned myself to waiting at the actual castle, and decided to sit on a large windowsill which was big enough for me to comfortably stretch out on and enjoy the beautiful sunshine. After a time I began to feel real sorry for myself, especially in relation to the women situation, and my lack of them. It had been some time since I had a girlfriend, and even then she hadn’t lasted very long because I was more into electronics than women in those days, and I probably didn’t treat her right.
I believe I drifted off into a half sleep or into some strange trance-like state, but I know I was neither fully awake nor fully asleep. While that feeling has often happened to me since, on that day I had never experienced anything like it before, and it felt really weird but also fascinated me.
Still in the trance-like state I became more and more miserable and depressed in myself, feeling that I might never find a nice girl. I don’t know how long I was feeling sorry for myself, but I clearly remember feeling a kind of soft thought begin inside me and it said, “It’s all right John, don’t be upset about not having a girlfriend”. This was not an actual voice but seemed more like some kind of feeling inside my head, yet it did not seem to belong to me. I think I argued with the thought in my mind, becoming resentful at the intrusion, just wanting to be allowed to wallow in my own misery that day.
In hindsight, it felt like I was stuck between two different realities and time did not exist for me right then. It was easy to feel two versions of me existing at the same time that day. One of me was laying across the window sill in a gloomy black state, and the other me was a softer, gentler version that seemed to be trying to help the one on the window sill.
Suddenly, right before my eyes and crystal clear, and just as solid looking as myself, I saw this image of a beautiful girl with long hair and a very broad smile. She was obviously not Irish and looked Indian, and I had never seen anyone like her in my life. She smiled at me and then quickly vanished. This image lasted just fractions of a second and I got such a shock that I actually fell off the window ledge in fright. I know I stared for a long time across at the Protestant Church, as that was the direction I was looking at when she appeared, and I so longed for her to come back. I was still there staring and begging for her return when the lads came back, but she never did.
On numerous trips to the castle later that summer, and over the following years, I would try to see her again, but she never came back to me. I never told a soul either about that apparition because I felt I would be mocked to death by my friends, and it would confirm the local belief that we three were weirdo’s, and I was definitely on hallucinating drugs.
From that day on a kind of deep longing began in my heart which I was not able to shake, but I hid it well. I could not get this girl out of my mind no matter what I did. Every dance I went to I would search for her, and every film I saw I would do the same. I clearly remember thinking that Ingrid Bergman was the closest the cinema ever got to her, but even she was not fully like her. At the time that incident made no sense to me, yet I knew that I longed to see her again.
Some years later I began to have a recurring dream where I was a very young Indian boy of about nine or ten. In this dream I played in a rock pool in among the trees, trying to catch minnows. The sunshine gleamed in through the woods and sparkled on the water now and again, and the whole place seemed magical. A large, round, domed rock lay on the edge of the pool and a young Indian girl dressed in a long dress with moccasins looked on, and she seemed to be my girlfriend of the same age.
I would see myself trying to catch the tiny fish in my hands so as to give her one, but they always escaped, and she would laugh out loud each time I failed, especially when I fell over and got soaked in the stream.
In the dream I would get mad, and cupping my hands I’d shower her with this very cool water. Then laughing and screaming, she always ran off into the forest being closely chased by me. I always saw the sun’s rays streaking in amongst us as we ran and laughed, and then there would be a sudden flash of very bright, white light just before the dream would abruptly end. For years and years this dream would happen to me randomly. It was not a nightmare, just a kind of friendly dream and I got quite used to it, almost expecting it. I knew it meant something but I had no idea what that dream was about.
The years rolled by. I was working in radio and married with three teenage children by the time the internet began. I was not keen on the idea of getting the net at the start, as I couldn’t type, and I just did not see the point of typing a conversation that you could easily have had on the phone, even with the savage cost of phone calls.
Adrian, my eldest son, became an avid chatter though, and would be out in the shed at home for half the night talking to women in America because of the time difference. I would say at least a year went by before I gave in and decided to use this net for radio, space, and electronics information.
On Christmas week nineteen ninety six, I bought the ‘Golden Pages of the Internet’, an amazing reference book with hundreds of thousands of web links, and descriptions as well. We had no Google in those days. It was a gold mine for me, and for a long time I used the book purely for research and loved this new information source.
One day, quite by accident, I came across a website called Powwow. The name intrigued me as all my life I had loved the Native Americans and innocently I thought this might be a website made by such people. A further thought crossed my mind that someone on the site may be able to throw some light on Uncle Johnnie’s famous Cahill from the Little Big Horn Battle.
I had no experience of any kind at this chatting though, and so I registered on the site with my real name and real address, even putting down our phone number. This was
insane of course, but I knew no better. I remember so clearly the night I first got on Powwow. No sooner was I registered than I started to get chat requests from Americans, and in particular from American women.
Everyone seemed very friendly and nice, but I was surprised at their fake names known as handles, and I also found out that none of them were Native Americans. Months went by and I developed a good friendship with a lady from Florida, who seemed to be wanting more than chats. When she suggested that I leave my wife and go live in America with her, alarm bells rang and I felt we should end our chatting. Before she did though, she told me how to search what was known as the ‘white pages’. These pages were a directory of those who were on line at any one time. I had never been a searcher, as all the requests kept coming to me, so after ending with the Florida lady, a vacuum existed and I quite missed the chats. I decided to search for the Native Americans on the white pages.
Powwow used to have about half a million people on line at any given time, and I’m sure the night I began searching it was no different. The first thing I noticed was the really weird names people were using on these pages like Cyber King, Sex Goddess, and even more explicit names as well. Then the penny dropped as to why I was always getting so many requests. It was because I seemed normal in comparison to most others, especially with an Irish name like Cahill, an address and even a phone number. How stupid can one get.
Two Walls and a Roof Page 35
