The passing of Prince and the strong feeling of loss among his fans reminds of the day Elvis Presley died. I was working morning drive at a 1000-watter in Auburn, New York, about 25 miles west of Syracuse. Each morning our newsman, Rich Stewart, picked me up in his little Datsun pickup truck and we stopped at Mister Donut for fortification before our shift. On that day, August 17, 1977, as I climbed into the truck, Rich didn’t say “good morning.” He said, “did you hear, the King is dead.” Hmm..King Who? King Kong? Sky King? I had no idea. Incredulously he implored me, “the KING! Elvis Presley! He died yesterday!” Oh. While a normal human being might feel sad, all I could think about was what a lousy collection of Elvis records the station had and how I would be inundated with requests.

Sure enough, my phone didn’t stop ringing with Elvis requests. Sure enough, we had only 2 Elvis albums, one of them a Christmas LP. I was told by the program director to play nothing but Elvis. It was gonna be a long 4-hour shift. After the fourth time I played “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” and the seventh time I played “Blue Christmas” the audience rebelled. “Please, for the love of everything sacred in this world, could you play something else?” one caller pleaded. Auburn being a small-ish town of about 40-thousand people, the stores weren’t open yet, which thwarted my idea of sending someone to buy any and all Elvis records they find.  So I was stuck with those two albums and in August, Christmas songs just don’t go over very well, even if they were sung by the now-dead King.

To kill time and avoid repeating the same 20 Elvis songs over and over again I decided to take calls on the air where fans could express their feelings about their idol who died on the toilet seat. I ended up with mostly blubbering spinsters who claimed their lives couldn’t go on without Elvis and they didn’t appreciate me informing them their lives and Elvis’s really never crossed paths, so take a moment to mourn then go bowling .

Those in the business know that DJ’s are very competitive so as my shift mercifully wound to a close I thought it might be helpful to promote the announcer who followed me, and one whom I despised because he and his girlfriend with her very large lips would eat greasy subs then French kiss in the studio. So I dutifully told the audience that Roger K would play nothing but Elvis for the next four hours. Not much French kissing that day for Roger and Big Lips. He was taking it on his double chin from his audience.

Since it’s a sunny day and there’s no snow in Michigan my seasonal alarm clock rang, rousted me out of bed and sent me directly to Home Depot to buy substances in big plastic bags that I must fling to the ground around my house, soak them in then wear a complacent smirk because I am sure the premises surrounding my house will warrant a cover photo in Architectural Digest.

This is a tougher task than it sounds. First on my shopping list is a bag of dirt. Oh, the store calls it “soil” but honestly, it’s just dirt. There’s planting soil, garden soil, organic soil, organic planting soil for the garden, topsoil, potting soil and….soil. I desire dirt with which to plant plants in my garden. What’s the difference between planting soil and garden soil? Oh, about 3 bucks a bag. I saw one bag of organic soil that cost $7.98 for about 25 pounds, and another of planting soil for about 4 bucks.  That $7.98 stuff must be like steroids for stems. The last thing I’d want is to be busted for juicing my geraniums. The 3 buck bag is either half-strength or they’ve mixed in crushed Cheerios like filler in a meatloaf.

I was drawn to one pallet that was almost empty.  Maybe 4 bags remained. Consumers aren’t dumb. That pallet held 25 pound bags of…..soil, at a rock bottom $1.79 per. Score. I loaded my cart with dirt cheap dirt.

Regardless of how much I chose to spend for dirt, soil, planting medium, whatever you prefer to call it, my expectations for success would be minimal anyway. Being brought up in the concrete jungle of New York City, the only way you end up with a green thumb is if you stuck it in a jar of pickles in the Carnegie Deli.

When the kids were small, we converted a dog run the previous owners of our house had erected, and turned it into a vegetable garden. I don’t remember what kind of soil we used but it didn’t matter, the radishes, squash and peas we grew all smelled like sheepdog shit.

Right now I’m just hoping that sack of soil I bought for $1.79 will yield a few blades of grass to fill in some bare spots on my lawn. If it works, I may just slap some on my emerging scalp…then they can charge $125 for it and call the dirt, “Hairline Humus.”

It was 2010. Fox Sports Detroit ran a contest to write and record an original song to celebrate “April in the D”..the time when the Pistons, Wings and Tigers seasons all intersected. My wife and I cobbled a tune. My colleagues Betty Newman and Holly Hyslop were brave enough to record the song and a quickie videoThe original recording and video were quickly produced and pretty rough in order for us to make the contest deadline and we didn’t win. It was just the 3 of us and my old Fender Stratocaster. But six years later I decided to edit, remix and add a new instrumental open with a new Fender Telecaster, a bass line and drums. Today the Tigers play their first game..in Miami…but now it’s April and all three teams are in the game. Here we go…”April in the D 2016.”

I was transferred from Atlanta to Detroit in April, 1989 by CNN to take over its Detroit Bureau. That made me the face of the network in the Motor City and there was someone extremely anxious to make me face the music about how the city was portrayed in the national media.

Within a few weeks after my arrival I found myself walking one block south of the building where the CNN Detroit Bureau was located at the time to the art deco Fisher Building, home of the Great Voice of the Great Lakes, WJR– 50-thousand watts of clear channel broadcasting pumping its programming to more than 20 states east of the Mississippi. I wasn’t just on a stroll. I had been summoned to sit across the desk from legendary morning man…Broadcast Hall of Fame announcer, J.P. McCarthy. Fiercely loyal to his hometown he was not pleased with CNN’s coverage of Detroit after a series of reports related to the upcoming 1990 U.S. Census that would reveal the city’s precipitous population losses, dropping it below the one-million mark.

He tossed his verbal daggers at me so adeptly I barely felt them pierce my flesh, but yet I suddenly empathized with a bull weakened by a picador. Attempting to rally I reeled off references to the vast number of positive stories the network had produced about Detroit, the auto industry and uplifting personality profiles. J.P. didn’t appear impressed but he was ready to move on.

Believing he had adequately put me on the defensive and made his point, the brilliant broadcaster suddenly smiled, relaxed his face and changed the subject, asking me oh, so conspiratorially, “got any good stories about Ted Turner?”

As still an employee of Mr. Turner’s and hoping to remain that way for some time to come I managed to toss off a couple of quick, innocuous anecdotes. Nothing scandalous, but stories Mr. McCarthy had never previously heard. That greatly pleased him.

I was honored by being invited back a few more times over the years, and we enjoyed both serious and lighthearted discussions. But by far, the biggest honor was being asked to appear on his “Focus” program during his final week on the air. This was a broadcast giant to whom captains of industry, showbiz celebrities and political power brokers never refused being summoned to his studio, or to speak “on the other end of my line.” Then there was me. I never understood, and I never will understand, how I made the cut, when the great J.P. McCarthy had the choice of virtually anyone he desired, to share the mic during his precious last moments of a legendary career. It remains one of the moments in my mostly mediocre career for which I’m most grateful.

One word can tell a complete story. I found one that tells the story of this election cycle. The word is “inured.” Its definition? “Able to withstand hardship; to become accustomed to something unpleasant by prolonged exposure.”

By my reckoning the nation’s prolonged exposure to this unpleasantness began when when Ted Cruz became the first to toss his dogma and Eddie Munster face into the ring on March 23, 2015. Hillary Clinton and her emails made the inevitable entry a few weeks later on April 12, 18 days before Bernie Sanders, who seemed at the time, like a gnat the Clinton machine would zap, but didn’t realize Sanders and his followers had already bathed themselves in bullshit repellant.

For the sake of brevity, and to get to the point, it was another two months before Donald Trump sized up the field and took the race for the nation’s highest office to its current depths by riding the down escalator at the gaudy Trump Tower and announcing his intentions to Make America Great again by eventually revealing he has studly equipment, presumably to screw us all. 

Other candidates have come and gone and some, like Marco Rubio, are hanging in because, in his case, campaigning is apparently more fun than suffering through those onerous debates and votes in the Senate chambers. In other words, looking for a new job instead of doing the job for which he’s already been elected. Plus, at campaign events they have free food and often some children, making him feel, temporarily, like a tall person and who, incidentally, have small hands.

As a nation we have indeed inured, suffering through this traveling circus featuring a shrinking cast of clowns where both the donkeys and elephants are acting like asses. I look forward to the nominating conventions which will be each party’s Big Top in their race to the bottom. If they were held today, given the delegate totals, it would be Trump vs. Hillary for the big prize. That’s almost as depressing as binge-watching episodes of “Duck Dynasty.”

But we’re strong. We will endure, as we continue to inure, becoming all too accustomed to this prolonged unpleasantness, which, incidentally, we would never give up, as it’s merely the downside of democracy.