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On Fire With Ignorance
On Fire With Ignorance
On Fire With Ignorance
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On Fire With Ignorance

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You cannot achieve the impossible without occasionally attempting the absurd. If you don’t know you can fail, or refuse to believe it, getting up every day with a positive attitude becomes easier. Getting up off the mat after a knockdown becomes easier. Starting off with another new idea after you’ve finally had to walk away from the last one - for whatever reason - becomes easier. Being an entrepreneur became fashionable in the 1980’s. By the end of the decade, the word itself was big business: it was trumpeted in publications, on Web sites, by inspirational speakers, even in apparel. Many of the world’s self-proclaimed entrepreneurs are flashes in the pan that occasionally make a fast buck but have no staying power. Then there are those who give up when the going gets tough and, tail between their legs, go back to the grind. It really is easier to just work for somebody else and take the check. A full blooded entrepreneur is someone who is willing to take huge risks. Someone willing to run down a thousand blind alleys and knock on a million doors trying to sell new ideas that only they fully understand and believe in, visions no one else can clearly see at first, if ever. I believe it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. So if you’re satisfied you’ve done your homework, go ahead and jump into the deep end and get on with it.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMichael Shaw
Release dateFeb 27, 2019
ISBN9780463464540
On Fire With Ignorance
Author

Michael Shaw

By profession, Mike is a professional musician, working as a keyboard player and private music teacher. Mike has been teaching piano, electronic keyboard and electric organ for over thirty years and as a keyboard player worked in many night clubs and entertainment venues. Mike has also branched out in to composing music and has written and recorded many new royalty free tracks which are used worldwide in TV, film and internet media applications. "My favourite piece of music is "Music" by John Miles, it describes how my life has been and continues to be, I consider myself very lucky" Mike is also proud of the fact that many of his students have gone on to be musicians, composers and teachers in their own right. "Learning to play a piano, keyboard or any musical instrument is the greatest gift anybody can gives themselves" Listen to Mikes royalty free music here: http://audiojungle.net/user/audiomichaeld/portfolio?ref=audiomichaeld See Mike playing the Roland Atelier organ on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/captinmichaeld

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    On Fire With Ignorance - Michael Shaw

    Introduction

    You cannot achieve the impossible without occasionally attempting the absurd.

    Don’t let the title fool you. The appropriate subtitle is, ignorance is bliss and it can be a helpful state of mind for an entrepreneur. If you don’t know you can fail, or refuse to believe it, getting up every day with a positive attitude becomes easier. Getting up off the mat after a knockdown becomes easier. Starting off with another new idea after you’ve finally had to walk away from the last one - for whatever reason - becomes easier.

    For years, I used to resent people who had money to start with, but that was just a convenient excuse. The rich kids have as much right to claim they’re entrepreneurs as I do. However, the reality is that money trumps just about everything else in life. So a great idea with some cash behind it has a lot better chance of seeing the light of day than a brainstorm looking for an angel to invest. And yes you will probably end up losing the majority of ownership if you find the angel(s), but it’s better to have a piece of something than 100% of nothing. Get over it and just accept it as part of the bargain.

    Being an entrepreneur became fashionable in the 1980’s. By the end of the decade, the word itself was big business: it was trumpeted in publications, on Web sites, by inspirational speakers, even in apparel. Then came intrapreneur, the term for corporate thinkers thinking out of the box while on the company clock. It was all very cool, very hip … and very misleading.

    Many of the world’s self-proclaimed entrepreneurs are flashes in the pan that occasionally make a fast buck but have no staying power. Then there are those who give up when the going gets tough and, tail between their legs, go back to the grind. It really is easier to just work for somebody else and take the check.

    Historically, the economy periodically throws a curve ball to the worker bees, many of whom are then forced to become entrepreneurs, or at least to give it a shot. A few have succeeded and wished they hadn’t wasted so much of their working lives working for the man. Far more who find themselves on the street after being thrown under the bus haven’t the slightest idea what to do next. These are the former bankers, bakers and candlestick makers who end up working at the drive-thru or rounding up grocery carts in the parking lot. It’s terrifying to experience and heartbreaking to watch.

    Dreamers and entrepreneurs are not synonymous. A dreamer just dreams but a real entrepreneur does something about the dream, or at least tries to. And not all entrepreneurs are geek founders of software companies or pitchmen turned big box store CEOs. Musicians, filmmakers, wrench monkeys, beauticians, twelve-year-olds, retirees, farmers, little league coaches and soccer moms can be called entrepreneurs. All it takes is an idea and a never-give-up attitude.

    An entrepreneur believes they are either blessed or cursed, mostly the former. An entrepreneur can often be seen late at night, alone at the kitchen table staring at an imaginary half glass of water, thinking it really is half full, not half empty. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely and frustrating choice. It can make you paranoid as you worry about somebody else beating you to the punch. You lose sleep wondering if you’re on the money or out of your mind.

    I believe it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. So if you’re satisfied you’ve done your homework, go ahead and jump into the deep end and get on with it.

    But hey, I’m not trying to convince anyone to be an entrepreneur. I’m just telling you what I think being an entrepreneur is all about. It’s not knowing any better or choosing not to, because life is more exciting that way. Being on fire with ignorance is a way of saying, Damn the torpedoes, FULL SPEED AHEAD! I’d rather die trying than live without ambition.

    A full blooded entrepreneur is someone who is willing to take huge risks. Someone willing to run down a thousand blind alleys and knock on a million doors trying to sell new ideas that only they fully understand and believe in, visions no one else can clearly see at first, if ever.

    Entrepreneurs are willing to work tirelessly in pursuit of a dollar, knowing deep down inside that it’s not just the money that makes them want to get out of bed in the morning. Money is just a measuring stick after all, isn’t it? It’s doing something nobody has ever done before that keeps you going. It’s the challenge that excites you. It’s the chase that turns you on. The possibility that you’re right is what fans the flame of your passion.

    It comes down to hoping and praying and crying and then being determined enough and angry enough and ignorant enough to do it again and again until you achieve your goal. But if you chase a dream and it doesn’t work out, don’t think of it as failure. Think of it as a successful attempt. The satisfaction of knowing you gave everything you had will be your reward. Plus, no one will ever be able to accuse you of not trying.

    This story is about radio and how it awakened and ignited an entrepreneurial spirit in me that led to many adventures. But the same intensity, and sometimes the hopelessness I’m going to tell you about can be found in people in any business. I will share stories and events as I best remember them. Hopefully, the alphabet soup of the radio stations I talk about won’t confuse you. They provide a chronology to my story and therefore are necessary. But don’t worry, if you lose your way occasionally, there won’t be a test later.

    I am someone you’ve never heard of, but you will get to know me. My personal life has impacted my work, but I won’t bog you down with a lot of unnecessary details. Instead, I’ll give you a few snapshots to fill in some gaps. I promise to keep my opinions to a minimum and I’ll limit them to things I actually know something about.

    Prologue

    We all lie, mostly to ourselves.

    ______________________________________________________________________

    I was wearing my favorite ball cap when everything in my life finally came together. Tan with black embroidered letters across the front that said BRILLIANT, all upper case. This was my third one - hat that is - higher quality than the original I bought in Mystic years ago. I paid $24.95 for that first one, more than I was normally willing to pay for a souvenir, but I had to have it.

    The second one I ordered online from the Mystic Gift Shop and the one on my head now on this triumphant day was a birthday surprise from my soul mate. She’d gotten tired of seeing me wearing hat number two with holes on both sides and a brim that looked like the rats had been at it.

    I didn’t know where number three had come from but it had a feature that made it extra special. My initials (MDS) were on the back just above the Velcro size-adjusting strap. She is very thoughtful and I am very lucky. If you don’t have love, no matter what else you have, it will not be enough.

    I’d started wearing ball caps more and more after the new millennium because my hair was thinning and I refused to use the comb-over technique. So I had accumulated a large and colorful collection of caps that still sit on the top shelf in my closet. They say, among other things, Long Beach Island, St. Thomas, Boeing 787, Polo Sport (the bright orange one) and a red Havana 9. But BRILLIANT was and is my favorite.

    It wasn’t the word so much, although I’d had some fun with it over the years. It was the shape and the fit - especially BRILLIANT number three - that just felt right, like a friendly old pair of shoes. In all the years that I’d worn BRILLIANT, only once had a stranger commented on it as I was walking to my car on a fine summer day, a guy leaned out his window and yelled, I love your hat! and drove away. I didn’t even get a chance to explain the true story behind BRILLIANT.

    Brilliant is a schooner located at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. It was built in 1932 on City Island, Bronx by Henry B. Nevins for Walter Barnum. The ship was built as an ocean racing yacht, and on its maiden voyage, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in just over 15 days, setting a record for a sailing yacht of her size.

    During World War II, the schooner was acquired by the U.S. Coast Guard and used to patrol the New England Coast for enemy submarines. During this time, two machine guns were mounted on Brilliant's deck.

    After the war, Brilliant was purchased by the accomplished sailor Briggs Cunningham, who attempted to increase her speed by outfitting her with a larger rig. The new rig consisted of taller masts, a self-tacking forestaysail, and a Bermuda-mainsail, replacing the original gaff main. During this time, Cunningham also invented a tie-down for the tack - the lower, forward corner of the mainsail - that allows the sail to maintain a more efficient shape. This makes Brilliant the first boat to have the device, now standard on racing boats of all sizes.

    I felt immediate respect for this seagoing entrepreneur. Despite the modifications, Cunningham was unable to significantly improve the speed of Brilliant, and donated her to Mystic Seaport in 1957. She’s carried over 8,000 crew members since she was launched.

    The only other time the seemingly arrogant name on the front of my ball cap came up was when a teller at my bank mentioned it and I responded by saying, "It’s a museum boat on the east coast. But of course I am brilliant." The teller laughed and I smiled, but I didn’t laugh.

    There was an ironic and deeper meaning to BRILLIANT that kept me going day after day no matter how many hurdles I encountered. The hurdles had been relentless for most of my adult life, as if I’d been born under a sinister, dark cloud that rained down on every one of my parades. But, all that had changed.

    After years of near-misses, or near-successes, I’d finally been rewarded with the fruits of my labor. I just got lucky I guess. But isn’t luck always part of the game? Don’t entrepreneurs make their own breaks by hanging in there and never giving up? And wasn’t it true that the harder you worked, the luckier you got? What if I’d given up too soon?

    Now the questions came. Did I really need that million dollar yacht that I would name BRILLIANT TWO? I envisioned her gracefully gliding by Frenchman’s Cove Resort overlooking St. Thomas Bay. And did I really need that Lamborghini? It would be silver with black interior.

    The only way to tell this story is to start from the beginning, which for me goes back to the house pictured on the cover, 1119 St. John Street in Toledo, Ohio where I grew up. The photo shows the back of the house and was taken around 1947 from under an apricot tree. The one I fell out of when I was seven that left a scar under my chin. My bedroom window is on the second floor, the one on the right just above the dining room overlooking the plum tree by the back porch.

    Chapter One

    I write like I think; I jump around a lot.

    ______________________________________________________________________

    Before the Golden Age of Radio, there were only a handful of people who owned one. They were mostly hobbyists who built their own transmitters and receivers known as crystal radio sets, so they could talk to each other. But even dedicated ham operators (amateurs) got a little tired of the same old conversations all the time. One October day in 1919, Frank Conrad, a ham in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, got so bored with talking that he pushed a phonograph up to his microphone and played a record of Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe. Normally, Conrad directed his transmissions to a particular person, but this time he had sent it to anyone out there that might be listening. Frank Conrad made history that day. He called his new form of communications Broadcasting.

    Soon Conrad was deluged with letters from other hams thanking him and requesting specific songs. After he’d repeatedly gone through his own record collection, a local record store offered to lend him more. Conrad returned the favor by telling his listeners where the store was located and made history again with the first-ever radio commercial.

    Frank Conrad was an engineer at Westinghouse, a company that manufactured electrical equipment for power plants. Now he urged his company to get into radio. But it wasn’t until Harry P. Davis, a Westinghouse vice president, saw the crystal radio sets advertised in a newspaper that the company finally realized radio had potential far beyond the small pool of ham operators.

    Davis figured the big money in radio would come from manufacturing and selling receivers. But he also knew that people would want to hear more than Conrad’s records a few nights a week. He decided that Westinghouse should build its own radio station, one that would broadcast every night.

    Based on technology developed by Reginald Fessenden, the man credited with inventing (discovering) the AM radio frequency, Westinghouse was granted a government communications license to broadcast on October 27, 1920. The call letters KDKA were assigned and the station went on the air on November 2nd to broadcast the 1920 presidential election returns between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox to a listening audience of between 500 and 1000 people.

    Radio started slowly at first, and then exploded. In 1921, only eight more radio stations received licenses to broadcast. But by mid-1922 there were nearly 600 radio stations on the air. Westinghouse could barely keep up with the demand for receivers. Sales went from almost none in 1920 to sixty million dollars by 1923.

    Somebody once referred to radio as the theatre of the mind. I think it was Orson Wells; it sounds like something he would have said. I have plenty of firsthand experience and I guarantee you, the reference is accurate. In one way or another, radio has influenced everything I have done in my bumpy but always exciting career.

    A lot of big stars started out in radio, people like Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas and Steve Allen. And Bob Hope too, one of the greatest of them all. I was never a big star. That was never my goal. Working behind the scenes in the production room where we wrote and recorded commercials, station promos and Saturday Night Live-like gags and skits, that became my favorite place, my comfort zone.

    Don’t get me wrong though, being a disc jockey back in the 1960’s made me a local celebrity and a chick-magnet. Pretty amazing since I had a face made for radio. It was a heady experience and my ego soared high for a few years until the novelty wore off. I know a lot of people who love radio, but nobody will ever love it more than I do.

    Before FOX and before the cable networks, when watching any of the three previously dominant television network newscasts, we were seeing veteran anchors and reporters, responsible and dedicated journalists who very likely got their start in radio. But radio has become less and less a breeding ground for television in recent years. Radio as it once was has gone practically extinct where quality and creativity are concerned.

    There’s nothing much to learn in radio anymore, unless you don’t already have an unalterable opinion or know how to scream at your guests or use a lot of profanity and sexual innuendo. But where’s the value in that? In my opinion (here I go and you’ll understand why as you read on), Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, who XM Sirius satellite radio pays a hundred million dollars a year should be ashamed of themselves for abusing the privilege of being on radio. And that goes for Don Imus, too. I had a few drinks with Imus at the Cleveland Plaza Hotel piano bar once. I think Don was born obnoxious, so maybe he just can’t help himself.

    The old Jewish comedians like Henny Youngman who used to play the resorts in the Catskills could bring an audience to its knees laughing without having to use even one four letter word. Now that’s talent, or at least good clean entertainment that often offended everybody before the insanity of political correctness redirected our entire way of life.

    Today’s aspiring television broadcasters seem more attracted by the prospects of being seen rather than just heard. Of course, it’s a lot more challenging to communicate without pictures. You actually have to know how to flex your head instead of just reading a cue card.

    I actually feel sorry for today’s 21st Century tube jockeys and those screeching, tent-revival gas bags like Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann. Greta, you get my sympathy too. At least you’re not usually frothing at the mouth like Nancy Grace.

    It’s not their political positions that I disagree with. It’s their style, their alarmist tactics that I find intolerable. Everybody is under extreme pressure to build and maintain their audience in an ever-decreasing television viewer pool. It’s got to be nerve racking, but is it really necessary to incite riots and encourage the whackos in the name of ratings?

    But these people didn’t invent the if it bleeds, it leads formula. In fact another confrontational brute by the name of Joe Pyne was a pioneer with his show on KTTV in Los Angeles in 1965. Pyne to Frank Zappa: So I guess your long hair makes you a woman. Zappa: "So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table."

    Here’s something else about electronic journalists I find irritating. Almost everybody in television news seems to think they’re Woodward or Bernstein, the two guys who, through painstaking research and reporting and extraordinary patience and guidance by their boss Ben Bradlee, brought the Nixon White House down. Today everything is Breaking News Guess what? Most of it is not nearly as important as they’d like us to believe. And somebody should teach these people some manners. The way some reporters speak to The President makes me cringe. I don’t care who’s in the Oval Office. Show some respect.

    I don’t have many heroes, but I have a few. David McCullough is one, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and an exceptional narrator. Charles Osgood is another. I was channel surfing one sleepless night - television still does serve a purpose now and then - and I happened upon C-Span, the Washington, D.C. video link that carries congressional procedures from the House and Senate, among other things. A National Press Foundation awards banquet made me pause.

    I watched several recipients and then out came Mr. Osgood wearing his bow tie, winner of a special award for 52 years of journalistic service including hosting CBS Sunday Morning. He is among only a few that could have continued that show in the same tradition of excellence that Charles Kuralt gave it.

    Osgood delivered an eloquent acceptance speech and tears actually came to my eyes when he said his values and high standards were a result of his early days in radio. Amen.

    It turns out that Osgood started his radio career in 1954 in Washington, D.C. at WGMS. My first radio job was at WMGS in 1961 in Lime City, Ohio. I find the similarity of those call letters and our mutual respect for radio amazingly ironic.

    As he walked off the stage I borrowed one of his favorite lines and said it out loud to my television. I’ll see you on the radio, Charles.

    Chapter Two

    Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable

    ______________________________________________________________________

    The year is 1953. In that big white house on St. John Street in the north end of town, I am sitting at the kitchen table on a snowy morning. I’m eight years old and half asleep with my bowl of hot Quaker Oats oatmeal in front of me. I’m listening to the cream colored radio that sits on top of the refrigerator as my mother cuts my toast into little squares. Jim Ubelhart - he was Toledo’s equivalent of Walter Cronkite on the radio in those days - is reading the eight o’clock news as I await my ride to school with my best friend in his dad’s 1941 black 4-door Dodge Desoto. The floor boards were rusted out in the back and you could see the road pass (snow on this morning) when you looked down. I stare into the oatmeal and yearn to be back in my warm bed next to the sizzling hot water radiator that heats my room .

    At the time, I don’t care much about the news. I don’t even think I understood what news was, but that voice was a part of every morning. Mr. Ublehart’s sponsor was The Gas Company. Not Columbia Gas or The Gas Company of Ohio, just The Gas Company. He would come on and say, This is Jim Ublehart with gas company newscast number two thousand, six hundred and thirty-eight, or whatever the number happened to be that day. Then he’d read the news. The next day it would be newscast two thousand, six hundred and thirty-nine, or whatever.

    The station I was listening to was AM 1370 WSPD, which stood for Speedy radio. In 1927, George B. Storer and his brother-in-law, J. Harold Ryan, were building service stations for Speedene gasoline. Speedene sales were booming, thanks to a cost-cutting device the young proprietors had invented. They bypassed the cost of trucking gasoline to service stations by building the stations beside railroad sidings. This allowed them to sell gas for two or three cents a gallon under the going retail rate at competing stations. Storer decided to buy some radio spots on WTAL in Toledo. The spots were effective, so Storer decided to use his wealth to buy the station and thus Storer Broadcasting was born. The Toledo station became WSPD, symbolic of the gasoline brand.

    Fast-forward here for a minute. Many years later, I found myself in the unusual position of doing a morning radio show in Toledo on Top 40 station AM 1560 WTOD, which stood for top of the dial and an afternoon show on WSPD that had an easy-listening music format. WSPD was not my style, or I should probably say I wasn’t their style. In any event I wasn’t there very long.

    Bob Martz, who managed WTOD at the time and who would become a lifelong friend and mentor, and Reggie Martin who managed WSPD where Bob had started his radio career in the 1950’s were both in a bind. I was up

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