A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

Texas Showdown

T E X A S S H O W D O W N Sharon joined us for the North Carolina part of the tour. Her mother, a North Carolina native, still lived in Mocksville. Sharon brought Sam with her. Sam, named for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was the Border collie that Sharon added to the family when I got fired and told her she could have a dog. I did my last Morning Edition show on April 30, and Sam took up residence on May Day. After I revealed Sam’s identity on Fresh Air, listeners started bringing dog treats and chew toys to my book events. During our road show at Fearrington near Chapel Hill, someone in the audience asked about Sam. “Well,” I said, “it just so happens that Sam is with us here tonight.” When my presentation ended, people filed outside and saw Sharon walking Sam. A buzz went through the crowd. “There he is. There’s Bob Edwards’s dog.” Sam was mobbed like a rock star and absolutely loved the attention. In Durham, Sam, Sharon, Andy, and I joined a bunch of Andy’s old pals for a spirited game of Wiffle Ball fueled by cans of Schlitz and a rainy night at the Durham Bulls’ ballpark. Then it was on to Greensboro , an important stop because this was the birthplace of my hero, Edward R. Murrow, the subject of the book I was promoting. The Murrow place wasn’t hard to find, close by Polecat Creek east of Greensboro and at the bottom of a hill. Atop the hill is a Quaker meetinghouse, but certainly not the one where Murrow did his first 156 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X public speaking. The modern building there undoubtedly replaced the one where Murrow’s mother met with other Friends. The old Murrow farmhouse and some of the outbuildings were in ruins and overgrown with weeds. Someone told me the state of North Carolina used to have a roadside marker there but had removed it out of embarrassment over the looks of the property. I was driving a rental car and caught up with Sharon, who’d pulled to thesideoftheroadtoletSamoutforsomeexercise.Whenshereturned to her car, it wouldn’t start. She called AAA on her cell phone, and the guy on the other end was trying to pin down her location. Here’s Sharon ’s end of the conversation as she was looking at a map: “What’s the next town on this road? Let’s see—it’s Climax. . . . No, I’m not at Climax, I’m near Climax.” The public interviews at these tour stops were almost always fun. In Asheville, North Carolina, I was interviewed by Cleve Mathews, the man who hired me at NPR thirty years earlier. In the Twin Cities, my Minnesota Public Radio interviewer was another ex-boss, Bill Buzenberg , who did not have to ask me how it felt to lose a job at NPR. Scott Jagow was my interrogator in Charlotte. Backstage before the event, Scott asked me about the tour, and I told him what had happened in the car in Boston. That was a mistake. When the public interview began onstage, the first words out of his mouth were, “So, tell us about the dead guy.” Classy. WKNO in Memphis assigned Geoffrey Redick to interview me, and he was a bit miffed about it because it was dumped on him at the last minute. Geoffrey performed a lot better than I did, however. In Memphis , as in other places, a cocktail party preceded the interview. Andy always believed I was more animated in the interviews when I’d had a couple of bourbons beforehand. On this night, Geoffrey had completed the interview and was recognizing audience members for questions. Normally I loved this part of the presentation because I liked interacting with my listeners, but I think Geoffrey noticed that I was increasingly uncomfortable. I couldn’t tell him about it in a stage whisper because each of us was wearing a lapel mic and this was something I didn’t care to broadcast. Growing desperate, I reached for a cocktail napkin on the little coffee table in front of us. While continuing to an- 157 T E X A S S H O W D O W N swer a question from the audience, I wrote on the...