Joel Murphy

As a child, I spent an absurd amount of time in my bedroom recording my own “radio shows.” I would sit there with a tape recorder and perform bits or introduce songs with my high-pitched, prepubescent voice. Sometimes, I would try to get my brother to be a guest, since he could do impressions (his Goofy and Marge Simpson were both killer), but most of the time I was by myself, filling up countless cassette tapes with “The Joe Show.”

In high school, my best friend Justin Foster and I started a “radio station” at our school (which in reality consisted of us broadcasting through the school’s PA system on Friday mornings before the bell rang for homeroom). Justin and I co-hosted a show, with our friend Mike Adams doing the news.

My interest in radio continues to this day. Now, my brother and I co-host the Hobo Radio podcast, which is a nice bit of symmetry considering how much I had to beg my brother to be on a part of my shows when we were kids. Unfortunately, I can’t get him to do his Marge Simpson impression anymore.

I tell you all of that to tell you this …

My interest in radio and my desire to have my own show can be credited to one man – Michael Sorce, or as he’s known in the radio world, Don Geronimo. While many of you out there spent your formative years listening to Howard Stern, I grew up listening to The Don and Mike Show. Tomorrow, Don Geronimo will broadcast his final show. So today, I wanted to pay tribute to a man who has been a big influence on my life.

My mom got me hooked on The Don and Mike Show as a kid. She would play their show in the car in the morning when they were still broadcasting on WAVA (my mom even won one of their on-air contests when I was a kid – she won a set of Don and Mike pillowcases for winning a photo caption contest). Even though many of their jokes were over my head when I was younger, I always enjoyed listening to them. (It helped that, like me, Don is a big fan of Batman.) I followed them from WAVA to WJFK and listened as they became a nationally syndicated show. I followed them through countless producers and general managers and even through the brief stint where Leah Remini from The King of Queens co-hosted the show with them. Every “radio show” that I’ve ever done has been heavily inspired by their show and by Don especially.

Everyone else from the show (Mike, Buzz Burbank and Robb Spewak) will continue on doing The Mike O’Meara Show, but it will never be the same. Don Geronimo was the heart of the show and his willingness to bare his soul on the air on a daily basis is what made the show so intriguing. While many DJs attempt to share their personal life on the air, often times it seems contrived or disingenuous, but Don had a way of sharing his life that made you feel like he was an old friend catching you up on things over a few beers.

He made his wife Freda and his son Bart a part of the show – but not as characters, just as themselves. Don pulled back the curtain and talked about the behind the scenes aspects of the radio business. While Howard Stern tries to make it seem like he invented radio and pretends that everything he does is 100 percent original, Don was open about the segments and bits he lifted from other shows, often saying, “If you steal a bit from me, you’re stealing it twice.”

Don’s wife Freda was killed in a car accident in 2005. The love he had for her always came shining through over the air and I think that attempting to come back and do the show after such a tragic event took a toll on him. He had always talked about retiring from the radio business and moving to Ocean City, Maryland with Freda. This year, he finally decided to follow through on those plans, even though he is doing it without her.

It’s hard to put his retirement into perspective. On the one hand, I don’t really know Mike Sorce. I’ve never met the man (although I did buy tickets to the show’s Donkey Basketball game years ago and saw Don in person outside of FedEx Field when he was doing a live pregame show before a Redskins game). I have no idea what he is like off the air.

But, the odd thing about the intimacy of radio is that in a way, I do feel like I know him. I know more about Don’s personal life than I know about members of my extended family. I’ve grown up listening to the man. Like I said, he always made you feel like he was a friend sharing stories with you over a beer, so in a way, his retirement makes me feel like I’m losing a good friend.

For completely selfish reasons, I wish Don wasn’t leaving the show. When I moved to Boston, two things helped me to feel less homesick about leaving Maryland – crab chips and The Don and Mike Show. The show isn’t actually syndicated in Boston, but I’ve been downloading the podcasts and listening to them on my iPod. It makes me feel like I’m back in Maryland, listening to their show as a kid while playing my Super Nintendo.

Deep down, I know that moving on with his life and stepping away from the spotlight is probably the best thing for a man still dealing with the grief over losing the love of his life. I sincerely hope that he is able to find happiness away from the radio business. He deserves it; he’s given so much happiness to the rest of us over the years.

So, even though you will probably never read this, I wish you the best, Don Geronimo. I’ll miss hearing about your life. I’ll miss your conversations with your son Bart and your “earth-dog” brother Jim. I’ll miss you busting Robb’s chops and interrupting Buzz as he tries to get through the news. I’ll miss your stories about the glory days of radio. Thank you for being a part of my life for this long. Thanks for the inspiration you’ve given me to be open and sincere in our podcasts and this column.

I barely listen to the radio these days. Most of the on-air personalities are annoying, loud douchebags who think they are funnier and more charming than they actually are. They all play the same carefully-selected sets of songs and tell the same carefully-selected jokes and stories. Don Geronimo was a throwback to an older generation of radio and I’m quite sure there will never be anyone quite like him on the radio again.

I wish you all the best, Don Geronimo. I’ll be listening to your farewell broadcast tomorrow afternoon. And I’ll be stealing all of your best bits and using them on our next Hobo Radio podcast.

Random Thought of the Week:
Paris Hilton was recently in Africa with her boyfriend Benji Madden and asked the locals how much it would cost to buy a cheetah. Dear God, please let this all end with Paris Hilton and the Madden brothers getting eaten by a cheetah. Please.

Joel Murphy is the creator of HoboTrashcan, which is probably why he has his own column. He loves pugs, hates Jimmy Fallon and has an irrational fear of robots. You can contact him at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Murphy’s Law – The Mike O’Meara Show (and common sense) fall victim to WJFK
• One on One with Buzz Burbank

Ned Bitters

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are solely those of Ned Bitters and do not necessarily reflect the views of HoboTrashcan.

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … white America’s racial tolerance.

With Barack Obama on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination for president, every pundit and his mother are writing articles and giving interviews describing Obama’s impending win as a sign of how far white America has come in terms of conquering our racist views. This is true, but only to a point.

Should Obama win the nomination, that’s not going to mean that we’ve finally shucked our centuries-old racist mindset. While any sane American can point out scores of ways in which many whites still see blacks as inferior, nowhere is this latent racism more discernible than in the world of sports.

No, I’m not talking about the actual world of the athletes. (Although Gary Sheffield can, and quite bluntly. And intelligently.) If you are a black man and you can hit monster home runs, defend Kobe with some well-placed elbows or knock the shit out of Tom Brady on a blitz, you will be paid as well as or better than your slower, gawkier, less muscularly-defined white teammates. If you can manage not to hang with Pacman Jones or Chris Henry, you’ll get your big fat endorsement deals. Hell, even the very black Ray Lewis, despite alleged ties to a murder, gets paid to sell Under Armor. So we have come a long way from the days of black baseball superstuds Willie Mays and Hank Aaron having to shut up and just play ball so that white America, already reeling from the tumult of the civil rights movement, would keep coming through the baseball turnstiles during the turbulent 60s.

Of course, the coaching ranks of the major sports are still disproportionately white. It’s still news when a black man is hired to coach a team in one of the Big Three pro sports. (Should a black man ever get hired to coach an NHL team, well, they can play his first game anywhere on earth, because hell will have officially frozen over.) But that’s not where I’m going.

I’m talking about fans, the white fans who make up the bulk of the sports watching public. We like to think we’re pretty evolved on the racial front when we watch our teams and feel love and loyalty toward the blackest of our black stars. But we’re full of shit it we think we don’t see color and don’t let our entrenched racism, however mild, affect how we view certain sports issues.

Let’s start with drugs. When an athlete gets busted for using any kind of drug, the public reaction differs depending on the race of the athlete. Take Ricky Williams. He’s been nailed countless times for having weed in his system, and many white people express nothing but contempt for the man. You hear phrases such as “let down his teammates,” “wasting his talent” and “blowing a golden opportunity.” But let a white athlete get caught with some herb floating through his blood, and the apologists come out of the woodwork to defend him. Bill Lee, an iconoclastic free-thinking pitcher in the 70s, flaunted his marijuana use in interview after interview, and he was seen as just a lovable scamp who thumbed his nose at the old school sports power structure. On a lark, his highness threw a terribly ill-advised blooper pitch in the 1975 World Series, which Tony Perez promptly dispatched over Fenway’s Green Monster, and this unforgivable gaffe is viewed as no more than a heartwarming part of baseball lore. That’s because he’s white. If Lee were black, he’d still be vilified as the dopehead who screwed around in the biggest game of his life.

It’s the same way with alcoholics. Met party boys Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry had well-publicized problems with alcohol and drugs. Despite their on-the-field brilliance and epic World Series win, they are still seen as undisciplined dolts. Some people can barely contain their glee when talking about how far Doc and Darryl fell. But admitted alcoholic Dennis Eckersley is seen as Mr. Inspirational for the way he overcame the bottle to become one of the greatest relief pitchers of all time … save for one hanging slider that a gimpy Kirk Gibson sent deep into the Los Angeles night. Good thing The Eck was white. If Doc Gooden had given up that dinger, it would be a different story, something involving the phrase “dumbass recovering alcoholic.”

When pro players become pro playboys, partying long into the night and finding their way into the tabloids on an almost weekly basis, our reaction differs depending on the race of the good-time Charlie. Mickey Mantle might have broken every home run record in the books if he didn’t show up for so many day games reeking of alcohol and bar smoke (and probably pussy … but you can’t blame a guy for that). White folks love the stories about Babe Ruth spending his nights whoring and binging on shitty foods. Joe Namath never won another Super Bowl, maybe because he spent more time studying under the covers (and under the surgeon’s knife) than he did studying the Cover Two. Jeremy Shockey is the hero of every lunkhead crewcutted white boy at every bar on an NFL Sunday afternoon, and all he’s done is hamper what could have been a Hall of Fame career with his late night shenanigans. Because they’re white, their self-destructive antics are looked at with a knowing smile and a bit of wistful admiration. But let a black athlete get a reputation for partying, and he’s just another out-of-control animal who can’t control himself. (Ain’t that right, L.T.?)

The same double standard holds true for weight issues. Cecil Fielder disgusted people when he let himself turn into the black version of John Goodman. He could barely run or swing a bat, and his girth led to an early retirement. No one showed big fat Cecil any white love once he stopped hitting those mammoth dingers. But fat fuck John Daly is beloved by almost all of white America despite his unquenchable thirst for gambling, McDonald’s, Budweiser and unfulfilled potential. He recently slept in and missed a tee time. (Oh, the venom he’d have gotten for that one if he were black!) Yet he’s the lovable galoot with the big belly and the big drive whom we just can’t help pull for. Some might cite the roly-poly Tony Gwynn as an exception to this, but Gwynn sounded white when he talked, which gave him a pass. Cellulitic nightmare – and whiter than white – John Kruk has parlayed being a fat bastard into an ESPN career and a Nutrisystem endorsement deal.

Announcers are not exempt from applying a double standard based on race. Blacks are often referred to as gifted, natural athletes. This implies that the black athlete has reached the top of his sport due mainly to lucky genetics. However, white guys are often described as hardworking, hardnosed, gritty and grinding, which implies that the white guys work harder, practice harder and have more internal drive. As a devoted fan of the hapless, mostly white Pittsburgh Pirates, I can assure you that this is not the case.

Announcers also imply that black athletes play dirtier than whites. The black guy who wipes out the diminutive white second baseman with a hard slide is maybe playing a bit dirty, but the piece of shit southern redneck (excuse the redundancy) who goes into second base with his spikes aimed at the shortstop’s knee? He’s just a hardnosed player who will do whatever it takes to win.

Announcers also like to laud black players as “good family men,” but you never hear a white athlete described this way. The implication is that most blacks are indiscriminate fuck machines, so the supposed compliment is really a slur. How many white athletes have you heard described as “a good family man”? They must all be, if it doesn’t get pointed out.

I could go on and on. (Yeah, I know, I already have. Eat me.) Brett Favre goes to rehab for pain pills, and he’s just a game guy, a real tough nut who had the balls to admit his problem and seek help. Let a black athlete try that, and the whispers will start. “Hell, that’s just a coverup for something worse. Probably crack.” Roger Clemens has congressmen writing support letters for him after his pathetic congressional hearing, but had Barry Bonds been the one stammering through his testimony, not even J.C. Watts would have come to his defense.

I’m sure that white people can come up with exceptions to every point I make. For example, fat bastard Jerome Bettis was involved in a seedy parking lot blowjob controversy, yet he continued to get affectionately fingerfucked by the NFL and white America for years. But we still are more racist than we’d like to think.

Me, I think I’ve evolved to the point where I’m past all that backward-assed thinking. So let me end this column and go browse YouTube. I feel like watching some great hockey fights. Maybe I’ll catch that classic between Georges Laraque and Mike Grier. Man, those black hockey players can really bring it in a fight.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.

Courtney Enlow

I’ve always been confused by the concept of “The Guilty Pleasure.” It just seems wrong to me that we should feel shame for liking something. (Note: I’m far more confused by the concept of “Ironic Enjoyment,” but it’s a more hateful confusion and I could go on for days about it and would probably just end up yelling a lot and hurling insults and foaming at the mouth and that’s just no way to win the affections of my readers. So let’s just ignore that for the time being.)

There are a number of things that I love for which my friends give me a world of shit for enjoying. Namely the Backstreet Boys and the fact that I have seen them in concert not once, not twice, but three times. And I’ve made no secret of my intense and borderline creepy love for the films The Crush and Fear. I also love Britney Spears, fan-made “shipper vids” (if you don’t know what any of that means, congrats, you’re not a huge giant nerd), flossing (no, seriously, I really love it far more than is necessary or appropriate), the song “Broken” by Lindsay Haun (it’s from a pro-war made-for-TV movie starring Toby Keith), and the “Pure Moods”-esque period of 90s music which includes songs like “Return to Innocence” by Enigma and “In the House Of Stone and Light” by Martin Page. These are all things I love, and love proudly, knowing full well the derision I’ll receive from my peers. I feel no guilt for these things, but a rather sunshiney joy.

On the other end of the guilt spectrum, there is a small handful of things I actually hate myself for liking. Most of it can be found on VH1 Celeb-reality (damn you, Bret Michaels, with your flaxen hair and penchant for strippers). The rest generally consists of mostly celebrity gossip blogs and McDonalds hamburgers. These delights are a weakness, and I’ll never give them up (ooh, which reminds me, throw Rick Astley on the no-guilt-love pile). But I’ll own up and admit to my infatuation with these things. I don’t care if you know that I tune into VH1 every Sunday to watch the eyebrow-less Daisy kiss Bret with her fish lips, or that I scan Lainey Gossip ten times a day and obsess over Blind Items like my life depends on it, or that I can devour those goddamn hamburgers five at a time in under eight minutes. Now, of course, when I admit to these things, I can often be found yelling excitedly and making a devil horn gesture with my hand, which is the classic “I’m quite embarrassed and overcompensating” manner of expressing guilty love. But I’ll still admit it. I love nothing in secret (note: this is because I am one part honest and two parts annoying as all get out).

All that aside, here’s a question: what about the gray area of guilty pleasures? What about the things that about which I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel guilty? How am I supposed to ready myself for the coming Guilt War if I don’t realize something is shameful? Is it okay to admit that I love Jimmy Eat World, for example? Or that I’ve seen Foreigner in concert and loved it and would see absolutely them again, multiple times? And what about songs that were socially acceptable and okay to like before they appeared during a tender moment on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy? How about liking the Counting Crows? I mean “American Girls” is really good. Can I admit that “Let Love In” by the Goo Goo Dolls is the single most played song on my iPod and I’d honestly rather listen to that over anything by Neutral Milk Hotel?

…

Okay yeah fine, I’ll give you that one. Maybe. I don’t know. I mean I love Neutral Milk and all, but “Let Love In” is SUCH a good song. It’s a very tricky area.

I just don’t know, people. I mean, is it so wrong to love these things? Don’t we have a deep nostalgic love for the movies and TV shows of our childhood that upon later adult viewings aren’t as great as we remember? And don’t we all love the songs on our various “GIT CRUNK!!1!” mixes? (Note: Mine is not called that. Mine is called “Foux de fafa.”) Don’t we all watch some sort of painful reality TV show and love how much we hate it? What it comes down to is that we feel guilty for liking anything mainstream, and that’s never okay. Don’t let the man get you down! Own your love, people. Own it I say!

* takes a deep breath *

Look, what I’m trying to say here is that the new Backstreet Boys album is really good, okay?

Courtney Enlow is a writer living in Chicago and working as a corporate shill to pay the bills. You can contact her at courtney@hobotrashcan.com.

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Jeremiah was raised in the deepest part of the darkest jungle. That’s why he smells like adventure. He currently lives in Elkins, WV with his wife, Becky, and son, Isaiah, who is epic and destined to rule the world one day. You can contact him at jeremiahwentz@hobotrashcan.com.