The Greatest Gift
On the week before Christmas more than a half-century ago, I received the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. And it changed my life.
Let me tell you a story. I grew up in Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley of California. We did not have a lot of money.
But Mom did have enough cash one year when I was at Hamilton Junior High to buy me a transistor radio, which I used every day. During the week, I’d listen to the great rock radio war between KYNO and KMAK — one that would become legendary in the entire broadcasting industry.
On Saturdays and Sundays, I tuned into NBC Radio’s incredible weekend-long “Monitor” program — which aired on KMJ Radio. Then I’d go to school on Mondays and tell my friends what fascinating people or places or events Monitor’s hosts — including Gene Rayburn, Ed McMahon, Henry Morgan, Barry Nelson and Brad Crandall — had brought to the program’s nationwide audience of about 30 million.
You get the idea. I was a radio nerd. But I was also a “study” nerd in junior high and at Fresno High. Great grades. And that led to great expectations on the part of Mom and Dad.
Dad, especially, wanted me to go to UC Berkeley and get a law degree. Well, the very idea of that bored me to sleep, even though I had never gone to sleep watching “Perry Mason” when I was growing up.
And I really had no desire to go to Berkeley. Didn’t think I had the social skills or confidence to “make it” there.
So I wound up, happily, at Fresno State. I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to major in, or what I’d do once I got out. But I loved being on that campus.
One day, in my freshman year, I was walking to my general-ed speech class when I strolled by the studios of KFSR — the campus radio station. Hey, RADIO! Remember, I was a radio “nerd.”
So I volunteered to become a DJ, and the KFSR powers-that-be gave me a Thursday afternoon 4 to 6 p.m. shift. I really liked being “on air,” but I pretty quickly found out that DJ-ing wasn’t my “thing.” I didn’t have much to say about the records I played, and what I said bored even me.
But I was so intrigued by broadcasting that I signed up, in the fall semester of ’69, to take Bill Monson’s audio production class.
Bill was a fine teacher. He’d had years of broadcasting experience, working in Armed Forces Radio — and he was hosting a Sunday night talk show on KYNO — yes, the KYNO.
So he had the chops. He also was widely disliked by most of his students because Bill was, to say the least, a tough teacher. You never “got” a grade from Bill — you earned it, no matter how high or low.
So there I was, in his class — and I adored it. We had a variety of increasingly difficult assignments as the semester wore on — culminating in a major “final” project the week before Christmas.
We could do anything we wanted to do — but it had to be complex — it had to be done live — and it had to sound much like a network radio program. In other words, it had to be perfectly written and timed out — and it had to involve two other people who would help me produce my masterpiece in the Main Radio studios of our Speech Arts Building.
For my project, I re-wrote — as a comedy take-off — the legendary Clement Clarke Moore’s “Night Before Christmas.” One of my friends was the announcer — this all had to be done live, remember — and another was my technical director-audio person. I was the writer and producer and director. My show had it all — Christmas music, strange sound effects — even the NBC Radio chimes at the end.
We rehearsed and rehearsed. Timed it down to the second. We knew we could do this. And when the time came to produce this in Main Radio’s master control — while Bill and the other students in our class were down below in the classroom, looking up at us and listening — it went absolutely superbly — just as we’d planned.
When the three of us walked out of that control room into the classroom, my fellow students seemed stunned at how good it had all sounded. And all Bill said was, “Well, there’s not much to say about that, is there?” And that was a high compliment, indeed.
But then came the gift that I promised to tell you about. At the end of class, Bill asked me to come to his office, just across the hallway from Main Radio. And when I sat down, he looked at me and said, simply, “You could do this.”
I asked what I thought was a logical follow-up: “Do what?”
“Broadcasting,” Bill said. He said I could do broadcasting. He said I was smart enough, quick enough, a fine writer and producer — all of it. And he said he’d be willing to help me get into the biz.
And that, dear readers, was the first time — the very first time — anyone had ever told me I might have a career in radio or TV. I was, in a word, thunderstruck.
And from that moment forward — from that Tuesday the week before Christmas — I put everything I had into becoming a broadcaster. I took all the broadcasting classes. All the journalism classes.
Bill taught some of them. He was the toughest instructor I ever had at Fresno State. In fact, the only two “B’s” I got from any Fresno State teacher were from Bill — and I had to work hard to earn those “B’s.”
And along the way — he became more than a mentor. Much more. We became friends. Close friends. As I started getting part-time jobs at Channel 30 in Fresno — first as a floor director, then as a film editor, then as an announcer-director — all while I was still going to school full-time — Bill was always encouraging me. Challenging me. Making me better. Making me want to get better.
When I graduated, I started my broadcasting journey for real. First, as news director of a teapot radio station in northeastern California — $500 a month for a 70-hour work week, six hours of which I got to spend — on Saturdays — as a DJ. I lasted five months before I ran out of money and went back to Fresno State for a masters degree.
And then — by a bit of incredible luck — because I had worked at Channel 30 during those earlier summers — and because they knew me — I got hired as the youngest TV reporter in the city. I was supposed to be there only a few months while another reporter ran for public office (federal law prevented him from being on TV as long as he was a candidate). I would stay there five years.
I went on the air at Channel 30 exactly 50 years ago this coming January. And it was a month later — on Valentine’s Day, 1974 — that I covered a story involving the young editor of a rural high school newspaper who had gotten into “trouble” because she had published a story about drug use on her campus. I got to interview that editor — an attractive young woman who showed me, during the course of our talk, that she was incredibly bright. I mean — really smart.
When I got back to my Channel 30 newsroom, I told my co-workers, “I think I’ve met the woman I could marry.” They all laughed.
Next July 5, Sharon and I will have been married 49 years.
After she attended (and graduated from) Fresno State — with a degree in journalism, of course — Sharon and I started our around-the-country trek — working in Buffalo, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We even lived in Ames, Iowa, for a time — where we had a wonderful time. I taught broadcast journalism at Iowa State University, and Sharon was a talk-show producer at WOI Radio. We had two wonderful kids during our long, winding journey across the nation.
And Bill Monson remained my friend — our friend — all those decades. Over those years, we wrote dozens of letters to each other. I’ve kept his, and they’re in a binder that our kids will, of course, toss out when they inherit it. But I cherish those memories. 
Among them: Bill and I went to all four World Series games the Oakland A’s played against the Mets in 1973.
The four of us — Sharon and I, and Bill and his wife Polly — went to two Fiesta Bowl football games in Phoenix on New Year’s in ’80 and ’81. When Sharon and I moved to the Bay Area, the Monsons and the Harts attended numerous A’s games — and took tours around the area. When Sharon and I would come back to Fresno for a visit, the four of us would play golf.
You get the idea. Friends. Forever.
Except that Bill passed away at a ridiculous young age in 2005 — ridiculous, because he was, after all, only about 10 years older than I was. When I attended his funeral services at Pismo Beach on the Central Coast of California — where he and Polly had gone to retire — I got up to speak about the amazing impact he had on my life. Of course, I broke down and cried.
I said — choked out, really — that I had gone into broadcasting because of Bill. That I had met Sharon because I had gone into broadcasting. That I had covered some of the most major stories in our nation — presidential races, political conventions, the big San Francisco earthquake, floods, tornadoes — all of it — because I’d gone into broadcasting.
And I said that Bill had given me the encouragement, the confidence, the courage, the assurance — and, of course, the skills from his classes — to do all of it.
Yes, it was William Neil Monson who gave me, when I was 19 years old and clueless about what I wanted to do, the direction I needed to take control of my life and make a career.
I miss him to this very day — never more so than this time of year, when memories of that Tuesday at Fresno State at Christmastime 1969 come flooding back.
Because that was the day, you see, when he gave me the greatest gift I’d ever received.