Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [31]
She attended the conference in Estes Park, Colorado, with one thousand delegates, most of whom were clean, crew cut–wearing Christians. James S. Kunen, author of The Strawberry Statement, also attended. “I didn’t think they could find this many straight kids in America,” he said. As traditional as the young delegates looked, their recommendations from the conference were anything but conventional.
For five hours in one session, some of the crew cuts sat in the front rows openly smoking pot as their drug task force made its report on legalizing marijuana. The conference attendees denounced the invasion of Cambodia, opposed the war in Vietnam, supported a withdrawal of U.S. troops by year’s end, and asked for an end to the draft. They proposed a guaranteed income of $6,500 for a family of four, stipulated that one quarter of the national budget be allocated for education, condemned slavery and its evil legacy as “the country’s darkest blemish,” and asked President Richard Nixon to proclaim racism “the cancer of American society.”
Despite the antiestablishment resolutions of her delegation, Oprah did not return home a political activist. Quite the contrary. “The only march she ever took part in,” said her boyfriend Anthony Otey, “was the March of Dimes.”
That march led Oprah to WVOL, the black radio station in Nashville, to look for sponsorship. “She explained that she walked so many miles and I would have to pay for the number of miles she walked,” said John Heidelberg, one of the disc jockeys, who later became president and owner of the station. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ ”
A few weeks later Oprah returned to collect the money. “I admired her voice,” he recalled. “She was very articulate. Her grammar was good.… I’m from outside the boondocks of Mississippi. The concept and image that people get of blacks living in the South can sometimes be very negative.… [When I heard Oprah] I thought, ‘Hey, here’s a young lady who can go places.’ ”
He asked if she would be willing to make a tape. He took her into the newsroom, ripped some copy off the wire, and listened to her read in a rich, deep, clear voice without a drawl or dialect. He promised to give the tape to the station manager.
“[For years] it was hard for women to get into radio,” he said. But when the FCC required radio stations to begin affirmative action programs, things began to change. “Station managers hired them because they needed a minority. They felt like, ‘Well, we’ve got to protect our license, so we’ll hire some females.’… We were a training ground for a lot of young blacks who otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to make it in radio.”
Heidelberg soon convinced WVOL management to take a chance on the seventeen-year-old and give her on-the-job training. “Oprah knew she had something on the ball,” he said. “She didn’t feel intimidated or threatened by anything. Nothing bothered her.”
“She was aggressive,” said Dana Davidson, who worked at WVOL with Oprah. “She knew where she was going.”
Shortly after Oprah started working part-time, the station manager’s house burned down, and the fire department responded so quickly that the manager decided the radio station would participate in the upcoming Miss Fire Prevention contest. Each year several Nashville businesses selected a candidate, usually a white teenage girl with red hair, to represent them in the contest. WVOL, whose call sign derives from Tennessee being known as the Volunteer State, volunteered Oprah. “I was the Negro surprise of the day,” she said.
“Miss Fire Prevention was a big deal back then,” said Nancy Solinski,