I was blacklisted from the circus in 1980, so I went to vocational school for a third-class FCC engineer's license. You had to have one back then to work in radio, which I thought would be a pleasant change of pace from the rigors of the hippodrome. I was awarded such a license through Brown Institute of Broadcasting after nine months of mainly rote memorization.
During part of my exile I worked as the news director for KIWA Radio in Sheldon, Iowa. This is a pinprick of a town in the northwestern part of the state near the South Dakota border. The town shelters many members of the Dutch Reformed Church, who have last names like Vander Ploeg, Tjeerd, and Veldhuisen. The trauma resulting from pronouncing these convoluted monikers on the air without a stumble eventually gave me a lingering case of tic douloureux. On occasion I still twitch in Morse code.
I quickly learned that as an outlier I was not privy to the community's news simply by asking for it. In that conservative and religious enclave, the news media is anathema. It was suspected that I would embellish any story I got my mitts on, until it resembled a farcical fairy tale and not the plain unvarnished truth. And that included time and temperature, mijn vriend.
The daily dispatch logs from the police department and the sheriff's department, which contained many a juicy tidbit about the shenanigans of the demimonde, and which by law were open to the public, were always being 'updated' or otherwise made unavailable to me. The State Patrol never called me with an accident report, and when I called them I was fobbed off onto a superannuated secretary who could only repeat, parrot-like, "Nothing of interest today; call back tomorrow."
I asked the station manager for help in prying open the floodgates of information, but he was worse than useless. He kept a model train set in the basement of the station, where he and the town council spent innumerable hours putzing around with O gauge rolling stock. "Just give them time to warm up to you" was his constant refrain. Another Ice Age would come and go before THAT would happen.
I was worried about how to keep my job if I couldn't wheedle the news out of such deadwood. Losing another job would not sweeten my wife Amy's disposition in the least.
I had to crib items from local newspapers. I seized every single person who walked into the station on business, dragged them back into my studio, and taped interviews with them about anything I could think of. This led to some decidedly off-kilter stories. Such as "Overdue library book fines are a racket", and "Do you know how hard it is to find a public restroom in downtown Sheldon?"
I had started out on the job with dreams of becoming the Voice You Can Trust for the good people of O'Brien County; but I was quickly becoming instead That Man Who Don't Know Nothin'. Even the school board meetings were off-limits to me; the station manager's wife was a teacher at the high school, so she covered the school board meetings for the station (as well as announced the daily lunch menu for the grade school, the middle school, and the high school -- I never knew Tater Tots were so essential to the educational process).
One morning while I was on the air reading some yard sale announcements I noticed that several of them were to be held in the vicinity of Elephant Hill. Why is it called Elephant Hill, I wondered out loud on the air; is it shaped like an elephant or something? As soon as I was off the air I got a mysterious phone call; the speaker would not identify himself except to say he knew the real story of elephant hill. A mastodon skull had been found there by a farmer back in the 1940's. The farmer sold it to the Bell Museum up in Minneapolis. That's why it's called elephant hill, the man said. Then he hung up.
I placed a call to the Bell Museum to ask if they still had a mastodon skull, or had ever had one. The receptionist didn't think they ever had such a thing, but she would check and call me back. She called back an hour later to say their records did not show such a fossil in their catalog.
Oh boy, at long last a real scoop!
That evening I opened my 6 O'clock News by intoning: "The mystery of Elephant Hill continues to deepen. Reports that the hill's name comes from a fossil mastodon skull discovered there over seventy years ago and sold to a Minneapolis museum have proven to be incorrect. The Bell Museum of Natural History has no record of ever receiving or displaying a mastodon skull. I'll have the closing pork belly futures right after this important message from The Anhydrous Ammonia Association."
My story stirred things up in Sheldon and surrounding O'Brien County. It seemed like everyone had their own story or theory about Elephant Hill. One faction claimed a circus had played near the hill in question back in the 1930's and that their elephant had sickened and died there -- so it had been interred in the hillside and the place was called Elephant Hill ever since. Anyone who thought different, this group implied, would have difficulty distinguishing feces from shoe polish. Another group insisted there once had been a barn on the property that had an elephant painted on it -- that's how the name came about. A little old lady, clearly as dotty as they come, came to the station to insist I record her memories of the terrible elephantitis epidemic that had swept through the community in 1929; the victims had been buried in a mass grave on that hillside. And if you went up on Elephant Hill in the moonlight you could still hear their ghostly moans. Since she was the grandmother of the Chief of Police I decided to give that recording the Rose Mary Woods treatment and conveniently 'misplaced' it.
I milked that mystery for nearly two weeks, without ever announcing a reasonable explanation (there wasn't any), until the O'Brien County Fair started up and I got an exclusive on a farm wife who did seed portraits of religious figures like Martin Luther and Billy Sunday.
Hot diggity; I was finally on a roll!
And then, mirabile dictu, my circus ban was lifted. I was offered a gig at Disneyland, where they were gathering a "Grand Comedy Cavalcade of Clowns" for the Easter season to boost attendance. The money was good. Certain I could find a permanent position there, I handed my two-week notice to the station manager while he was fiddling with some wye tracks. It all happened in the space of one day. I didn't bother consulting my wife Amy, because I was sure that as a loyal spouse she would want me to follow the dictates of my restless jester's heart.
I never knew a woman could heave a two quart slow cooker so far, and with such accuracy.
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