Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  During the fall football season, a group of friends and I would gather on a vacant lot next to the church to play tackle football. We’d be out there for an hour and more. We played without pads, but I had my own uniform: blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. On the back of my shirt I’d stencil in Doak’s number, 37. If anybody else showed up and had that number, I’d get real angry. That was my number. That was Doak’s number.

  Doak went on to enjoy a brief but outstanding five-season professional football career with the Detroit Lions. In that span he earned All-Pro honors and won two NFL championships. He was later inducted into both the college and pro football halls of fame. Eventually an award for the best collegiate running back was given his name. I’ve had the privilege of being present for a number of those presentations in Dallas. That meant a huge amount to me, especially given our later association. Doak was a quintessential Texan. Handsome as a Marlboro Man, so polite that he wrote a thank-you note to the Associated Press for naming him an All-American, he was the proverbial man that every woman wanted to date and every man wanted to be best friends with. I idolized him as a youngster and treasured his friendship later on. Not everyone lives up to their press billing (Doak’s likeness appeared on nearly fifty magazine covers, including mainstream ones like Look and Life) but Doak was that rare public figure.

  Our family’s 1952 move to Austin was fortunate, and Texas has figured large in my life. I left behind some good friends, but I gained a whole lot more in return. Austin, of course, had no professional sports teams. The world was hung from one prong of a Texas Longhorn bull. So, at the end of sixth grade, when my father was reassigned to Austin, I became steeped in UT sports. By that time I was the oldest of four children. My three younger brothers all had been born while in Washington State. Today I think back and imagine we were a handful for my mother, but you wouldn’t have known it from her demeanor. She was always as calm as could be, and no matter what her sons got up to, school activities or some such, dinner was always on the table at six thirty. The vast majority of the time, we were all gathered together for that meal.

  After our move to Austin, I attended University Junior High School, on the campus of the University of Texas. That name was quite a mouthful, so we called it UJH. Lessons come in many forms, and I quickly sized up my chances of playing football at UJH—they were as small as I was. Still, I wanted to be involved, so I got myself a job as one of the water boys for the squad. I know that position can make you the butt of jokes and the object of derision, but I never experienced any of that. I wasn’t too proud to admit that I wasn’t capable of playing the sport. I wasn’t so vain to believe that contributing to the well-being of the team was beneath me. In my family, being of service was a noble calling, and my parents would never cotton to any form of sloth. Be of use was a lesson instilled in all of us. Though it wasn’t one of the seven deadly sins, not carrying your weight, be it with a water bucket or some other way, was no way to live your life. For those reasons, I also ran for school office and became a cheerleader my senior year in high school.

  I also got a chance to play basketball at UJH. I made the squad but only saw playing time in the waning seconds when the outcome, good or bad, was already well in hand. I was okay with that. I had no delusions of grandeur. I loved being a part of the team and worked hard in practice. I briefly “ran” track and field. I finished seventh out of eight runners in a 100-yard dash. As hard as I tried to churn my legs on that cinder track, I produced more of a dust cloud than forward propulsion. So be it. I gave it my all. The lessons were adding up: I had no future as a professional athlete or even a collegiate one. That didn’t diminish my interest in sports; it simply put things in perspective. Besides, I wasn’t so single-minded that my only interests were sports. I sang in the school choir. I wrote a weekly column for the school’s newspaper.

  During the fall term of eighth grade all UJH students had to take a course that was broken up into three parts—home economics, typing, and speech. Now, why they put those three together I couldn’t tell you. Speech actually came first and a lot of my classmates dreaded the thought of speaking publicly. Growing up in a pastor’s family, listening to my dad preach every Sunday, watching him interact and ad lib conversations and speeches, I had no fear of an audience. I never had it. In that class my teacher, Mrs. Marguerite Burleson, had us get up in front of the rest of the group and perform various exercises. I’d see my classmates go pale and bug-eyed and I felt sorry for them. I didn’t want to show them up, but I had to do my best and outshone them with my calm performances.

  Two or three weeks after the six-week segment had started, Mrs. Burleson took me aside after class and said that she had gotten a call from Radio House at the University of Texas. Back then UT had no television department. But they did have Radio House and undergraduates could major in radio. Part of the program entailed radio students tape-recording half-hour dramas every Tuesday night. These dramas would later be distributed by the university to public broadcasting stations throughout Texas and perhaps even beyond that. She said they needed an adolescent, a person with a boy’s voice, to come over that night to take part in this taping with the college student actors. If I was interested, I would go and play the role of a ten-year-old Indian boy. I said, Oh, my gosh, yes. I got my dad to take me to Radio House, and we were there for three hours taping this recorded play.

  To me, the production wasn’t amateurish at all. This was the big time as far as I was concerned. The studio was so well equipped and I was on the other side of that glass partition I’d seen at KRKO back in Everett. I was enthralled by the sound effects guy, who supplemented the voice acting. He sat in front of a small sandbox and used hollowed-out pineapples, coconuts, and other things to simulate the sound of horses galloping or trotting as need be. He used all kinds of other tools to produce more sounds and I was fascinated. They liked my performance enough to ask me back for the next week. And so, for the next year, I went over there every Tuesday, and in the process I got hooked on radio as a participant rather than solely as a listener.

  But the following September, I learned a valuable lesson about the business: you’re only as good as your next performance. Upon returning to school, I heard from Mrs. Burleson that the students at Radio House wanted me back for the next season of recordings, and I showed up that first Tuesday night raring to go. I got the script and I was playing the son of a West Texas farmer, a boy of about ten years of age. No problem. We started the session, and I followed along, thinking about this young man and wondering how to play him. When it came for my first line, I opened my mouth and said, “Well, I don’t know, Dad. I’m not so sure—” I startled myself with the screeching sound that came out with those two S-words. I looked around the room and the rest of the actors sat there with their mouths open and their eyebrows raised. I gave it one more shot, but it was no good; my voice was in the process of changing.

  I was done performing at Radio House.

  Not completely, however. At the end of that school year, my ninth, my dad told me to get my church clothes on. We were going out for the evening. He didn’t tell me where we were going, but as it turned out, we were invited to the awards banquet for the radio department students. I was presented with a diploma and a note of thanks from Radio House at the University of Texas. As I sit here writing this, I can look up and see that piece of parchment framed on the wall of my office. It was signed by the two administrators of the program—Gale Long and Gale Adkins. I don’t know if those two men understand the impact they and their program had on a young boy’s life. As I said before, I’m a rat packer, but much of what I’ve kept has been stored away. I only put on display the things that really, really matter to me. Thank you, Radio House. Thank you, University of Texas.

  Once I got bit by the performing bug, I could find no way to soothe the itch other than to sing in the church and school choir and act in a few of the school’s dramas. I only ever sang one solo and that was a gut-twisting experience. I swear my
knees knocked so much I sounded like a one-man band.

  Even though I stopped being on-air every week, my passion for radio kept growing, even more so after we got a transistor radio. Inexpensive and portable, the transistor radio meant I no longer had to sit in the kitchen listening to games, which felt life-changing in itself. Instead I could go into the room I shared with my brothers, where together we’d spend many nights in bed listening to baseball and other sports broadcasts.

  Crucially, I also was able to tune in to music via clear-channel stations from some of the larger and more influential markets. I pulled the covers over my head and by the dim glow of the dial I’d bring in WLS out of Chicago, Pittsburgh’s KDKA, and WCCO out of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Again, the romantic notion of being able to bring different lives and different experiences and points of view was at the forefront of my mind. It also exposed me to something increasingly popular with American teenagers of the time—rock and roll.

  It may come as a surprise but Uncle Verne sang in a rock-and-roll group in high school. The four of us dressed and styled ourselves as cutting-edge rockers—we wore flat tops with ducktails. That act of hair semi-rebellion set us apart from our parents. In most yearbook photos of the era, students looked like adults, with their dour expressions and trim haircuts and shirts and ties. We even called ourselves the Flat Tops in honor of our more hirsute appearance. We made a bit of a name for ourselves at school. Our manager was a disc jockey at KTBC—a station where I later worked—who was able to book us at what we used to call teen canteens on Friday nights. Our lead singer, Dan Showalter, had a wonderful voice, and the other two and I mostly sang backup, which consisted of variations on “doo-wa-doo” or “bee-bop bee-bop.” We did covers of popular tunes of the day. One of them was the Monotones’ “Book of Love,” on which my great contribution was a series of background “who’s.” We also broke hearts with our tender rendition of “Earth Angel.”

  It makes for a great story that we were on the express train to greatness only to be derailed by our lead singer impregnating his girlfriend. He dropped out of school to marry her and to go to work to support her and the child they were expecting. The part about greatness isn’t true; the rest is. The band dissolved and like my athletic dreams, fame and fortune as a recording artist eluded me.

  Still, my love of music remained. In the spring of 1957, as my sixteenth year was waning, a friend of mine by the name of Perry Moss drove a small group of us to San Antonio in his beat-up Chevrolet. At that time you could get a Texas driver’s license at age fourteen, so Perry had been behind the wheel for a while and our parents all trusted him. Chuck Berry opened the show and his guitar playing electrified us. I’d heard him on the radio, but as any music lover knows, there’s something special about a live performance. He was followed on-stage by Fats Domino. His rhythm-and-blues inflected songs were wonderful and his two hits, “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill,” stirred the soul. Next out was Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. They were one of the first boy bands, each of the five still in their teens when they recorded their big hit, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” Frankie’s boy soprano climbed to places I would never be able to reach. Finally, a young man with a guitar and a haircut that put all of ours to shame stepped out onstage and gave a lip-sneering, hip-gyrating performance I’ll never forget. Elvis Presley was in the house. I’d see him much later on, during his so-called Fat Elvis stage, and he was a mere shadow, albeit a large one, of his former self as a performer.

  On the drive home, my mind was filled with possibility and wonder. Music has always had a transformative and inspirational power. I had vague notions of what I wanted to do with my life. Ill-defined dreams of there being something beyond the city limits of Austin. At the time, Austin wasn’t the musical universe it is today. It was the state capital and home to a major university. Its boom years were ahead of it. And though I couldn’t have known it then, the same was true for me. Whatever dreams I had weren’t anything I had penned myself; like so many other young people of my generation, I pulled together a vision of my future from the lyrics others had written. That view of a self was something I kept private. I was a minister’s son, and obligation and call and duty to others and to my God sat in balance to my performing and radio fantasies. Which way that scale would tip was apparent to me, and I don’t think I understood then what doubts lingered and how I would eventually give in to desire.

  Chapter Two

  Finding My Direction

  Like many young people then and now, I struggled a bit with the idea of what to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to go to college, of course, that was a given, but what to study was problematic. I say that in hindsight because at the time, the decision wasn’t all that difficult. I admired my father and his work as a minister. A lot of people admired him. So, I entered college with the idea that I would eventually follow his path and become a minister. In retrospect, I can see I made that decision partly out of desire and partly out of a sense of obligation or doing the right thing. Countless oldest sons have followed their father’s example and taken up the same line of work. Maybe I was doing the right thing; maybe I was doing the easy thing.

  Regardless, I enrolled at Texas Lutheran College (now University) in Seguin. Seguin is the seat of Guadalupe County, about an hour’s drive from Austin. I lived on campus and was close enough that I could go home as needed or desired on weekends. I didn’t do that very often. Much of my motivation for going to TLC was to get away from home. I wanted to experience more independence, that is, dormitory life, so I opted not to go to the University of Texas. It was, and is, an incredibly fine institution. As you will see, much of my life later on would be shaped by its influence, but being a so-called townie held little appeal for me. Broadcasting had brought the world to me and enlarged my vision of what was possible. Fifty miles south of Austin wasn’t that far, but at least it was a start.

  Similarly, pre-enrolling in seminary—I had to get a bachelor’s degree before I could formally attend—was another kind of start. It got me moving in a direction. Whether that would end up my final destination was uncertain. I was a Christian, of course, but whether I had a calling beyond devotion was still to be decided.

  One of my anchors at TLC was again music. I sang in the choir. That brought me great joy and deepened my love of choral music as well as classical music. I majored in sociology and had a double major in history and Christianity. I also dabbled in radio. Seguin had one radio station, KWED 1580, down near the far right end of your radio dial. Stan McKenzie owned and operated the daytime-only station. He hired one, sometimes two, TLC students a year to work the weekends. I wanted one of those jobs, but for both my sophomore and junior years I didn’t make the cut. Still, I hung around hoping to learn a few things and to show my dedication.

  My junior year, Willie Staats was one of those chosen. He recently retired as chairman of the LSU economics department and is a huge SEC football fan. The other guy was Don Mischer. He eventually went on to work for ABC, producing Barbara Walters’s specials and Howard Cosell’s late-night variety show, ironically named “Saturday Night Live,” and later the Oscars. I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about falling short in those first two years. Radio people have a thing about voices, of course, and I was disappointed my junior year not to meet or exceed Stan McKenzie’s standards with what I was told was a lovely deep baritone. That year, I lost out to Larry Kramer, a guy whose basso profundo voice would have served him well in the Metropolitan Opera. It rattled rib cages and lampshades all over Seguin.

  Finally, by my senior year, my perseverance paid off. I got the job, earning $1.05 an hour. At the beginning of the school year, my job consisted of showing up at the studio just before sunrise. I was shown what switches to throw and what dials to turn and what meters to monitor. Sounds more complicated than it was, but switching on a radio station gave me a thrill of power that’s difficult to explain. Other aspects were even harder for me to understand, but I did them out of rote mem
ory. Most of the weekend programming was remote—church services, primarily—and I had to unplug and plug in various cables. As I said, I didn’t understand much of the technology, but I could follow relatively simple instructions. I sat there all alone in that studio from sunup to sundown, and it was like I was back in Everett. Instead of watching those guys at KRKO, I was one of those guys.

  I got my first paid on-air experience at KWED doing station identifications, saying no more than “This is KWED in Seguin.” As far as I was concerned, I was relating Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Eventually, I got the opportunity to disc-jockey for three hours on Sunday afternoon. I went from switch boy to radio personality pretty darn quick and I was beyond thrilled. After I got word of my big chance, I told everyone on campus I knew—dorm mates, fraternity brothers, friends, classmates—to be sure to tune in the following Sunday.