Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [32]
However, the crowd gathering for the ceremony was much larger than anyone had expected, and with about three minutes to go before airtime, I said, “Homer, I can’t see a thing.”
“Quick, get on top of my car,” Homer replied.
I put the hand mike in my coat pocket, and as fast as I could, I clambered up on Homer’s car. Homer alerted me: “You have one minute, Bob.”
I reached into my coat pocket for the hand mike, and to my horror, I couldn’t get it out of my pocket. The call letters KTTS had become entangled in the lining of my coat. Homer cautioned me: “Thirty seconds, Bob.” I pulled and hauled on the hand mike to no avail.
Homer began a ten-second countdown: “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” The hand mike was still tangled up in my coat pocket. “… Six, five, four, three, two… You’re on!”
And I did the only thing I could. I pulled my coat up to my face and spoke into my coat pocket. “Good afternoon, KTTS listeners. We are live at the cornerstone ceremony for the new field house on Drury College campus….” That’s how I described the entire affair, speaking into the pocket of my coat.
When we got back to the station, Mr. Ward complimented Homer on the quality of the sound during the remote. Homer didn’t tell Mr. Ward that the sound was “filtered.”
• • •
I had taken the job at KTTS to augment my income from the GI Bill while I finished my degree at Drury, but I enjoyed working in radio so much that I thought I would like to stick with it after I finished school.
As I mentioned earlier, I did anything and everything that I got a chance to do at KTTS. But if I wanted to make a living in radio, particularly on a network level, I knew that I should choose one thing and concentrate on becoming as good as I possibly could at it. As usual, I discussed the matter with Dorothy Jo, but we didn’t come to a decision. We agreed that I should continue getting experience in various facets of radio and that we would talk more about it.
Eventually, I got an opportunity to host an audience participation show, talking with people out of a studio audience—the type of thing I did for fifty years on television. Dorothy Jo listened to that first show, and when I got home, she said, “That’s what you should do. You did that better than you have ever done anything else.” She didn’t say I was good. She just said I did it better than I had ever done anything else. From that day forward, Dorothy Jo and I worked together with one goal in mind: to get me a national audience participation show.
Before I left KTTS, with Dorothy Jo working right beside me, I had done shows from a studio we had at the station, from a drugstore, a grocery store, a theater, and out on the street. All of these shows required ideas and then more ideas. They also needed writing, research, questions and answers, and staging. Dorothy Jo was right at my side all of the way, doing her share and more. Of course, she was still teaching, too. But she and I worked evenings and weekends—vacations, too.
• • •
In early 1947, I heard very good things about a summer radio course taught at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. Dorothy Jo and I talked it over, and decided that when I graduated from Drury in June 1947, I should go out to California and take the course.
Then, much to our delight, we learned that our friend Jim Lowe, who was graduating from Missouri University at the same time, was going to California to take a course sponsored by NBC. Of course, Jim and I decided to drive out together, and as a result, we shared a piece of American history: we were among the first drinkers to imbibe on what was to become the legendary Las Vegas Strip.
We drove into Las Vegas, and all the lights, all the people, and all the action was in downtown Las Vegas. But Jim and I were curious about comments we had heard concerning a new casino called the Flamingo. Some of the comments were hopeful, even optimistic. Some comments were snide. Jim and I decided to check out the Flamingo for ourselves. We drove clear out of Las Vegas and into the desert. There, surrounded by nothing but more desert,