Ronald McDonald wrote:
> Ronald P. McDonald
> "All that spam also needs to be elimintaerd for, making google easier to
> search in the future. "
> -Jerry Sauk
http://www.kcconfidential.com/2013/0...t-walt-bodine/
But when the Kansas City Star‘s Darryl Levings cocked back and exalted
Bodine for hosting a talk show on KCUR “for almost 30 years,” he
disingenuously mislead readers by not making any mention whatsoever that
for the better part of the last 16 of those years Bodine had no business
being on the air.
And everybody who listened to Walt’s show – including Levings likely –
knew that.
Take this Star headline in July of 1996:
Now you hear him; now you don’t…. KCUR-FM calls a quick ending for the
dean of KC broadcasting’s radio show
cahill“It is in the best interest of the future direction of KCUR
radio,” general manager Patricia Cahill told the newspaper.
What followed the next week was ugly. Very ugly.
Lead by the Star, practically the entire Kansas City news media piled on
Cahill, turning her into a one-woman scapegoat and all but causing her
to have a nervous breakdown.
“The venom that I hear on the answering machine from the messages that
we’ve got at the station – it scares me, it’s so mean,” Cahill told me
at the time. “And people are so quick to judge without knowing all of
the details. And that scares me in a way, too. ”
Yet buried in writer Brian McTavish‘s front page story covering Bodine’s
axing was this all-important money graph:
“Several sources close to Bodine and the station, who declined to be
identified, said the quality of his show had declined in recent years.
He was often ill-prepared to interview high-profile guests, one said,
and another added that his light style was incompatible with the
hard-hitting, topical news programs the station wants to develop.”
Get that?
Several sources. Quality of the show had declined. Ill-prepared to
interview guests.
How out of control did it get for Cahill? More than almost imaginable.
Thanks in no small part to the Star.
“When I saw the editorial in the paper where it said I could get
sensitivity training from Marge Schott, I tried to call a good friend of
mine who manages the (NPR) station in Cleveland who’s gone through
difficulties,” Cahill told me. “But I tried to use the TV remote control
to call her.
“Once I realized that I wasn’t even in control of myself enough to
figure out there wasn’t any place to talk into it, I decided that I was
in shock and it was like major surgery and I couldn’t make any
decisions. So the biggest decision I made that day was to wear a slip
underneath my dress because you could see through it otherwise…
“Frankly, when people ask me how I am right now, I say, ‘I’m not dead. ‘
And I’m not. That’s how I am – I’m not dead. ”
As of Saturday Walt Bodine is dead, and thanks to the Star his show on
KCUR died a pathetic death last year rather than a dignified one in 1996.
If Cahill and other KCUR staffers thought Bodine was out of it 16 years
ago, they hadn’t seen anything yet. The final years of Bodine’s show
were equal parts sad and ridiculous.
People need to know when to hang it up – just like athletes and rock
stars – but few seem to. That is, until management or the general public
give them a shove.
In the case of Bodine, no way was Cahill about to pull the plug on his
broadcasting career again, no matter how bad the show had become.
So to this day – on the record – you won’t hear anything out of Cahill’s
mouth about Walt other than that he was like everybody’s uncle,
comfortable, familiar, etc. etc.
Cahill knew Bodine had no biz being on the air.
Everybody in broadcasting did.
I remember talking back then to KCFX FM main man Bill Newman about
Cahill’s public lynching.
And he told me he’d been speaking with then Channel 9 head Dino Dinovitz
about the situation at KCUR.
Bodine was doing commentaries and restaurant reviews on KMBC at the
time, but no effing way would Dinovitz ever dare risk canning him. Not
after seeing what happened to Cahill.
Mercifully, Walt agreed to cut the cord with KMBC five years later.
Making Bodine how old then?
“I’m not saying,” Bodine chuckled at the time. “I’m over 40. You can say
that. I wouldn’t if I were you, but you can say it.”
Look, let’s not take anything away from Bodine’s career and the good
that he accomplished. But let’s also not pretend that a career that
might have ended on a high note long ago, instead ended on a low one
last April.
Unfortunately.