Is the Universe Trying To Tell Me Something?

How a fateful finding has me pondering the meaning of life, the universe and everything, all while reflecting on a lost friend.

Send lawyers, guns and money, dad. To get me out of this. HA!

Do you believe in cosmic messages, ghosts, God or a universal meaning? At the very least do you believe in coincidences? Or are you a stalwart that says that there any connection is made up and meaningless? 

Over the past year I’ve really started to believe in listening to the universe. Maybe it’s some hippy nonsense I’ve picked up in therapy. Maybe it’s a desperate cry for meaning from a cold and meaningless world. I truly don’t know. I do know that the more I’ve listen to what I believe is the universe, I’ve never been disappointed. 

I ask this now because a week from today my documentary on Tommy Mischke and his radio show “The Mischke Broadcast” will launch. It was a labor of love. A lasting look at the time and place that put me on the path that brought me here today. 

As I prepared to send in my final deliverables yesterday, I went looking for a picture of Mischke that I could use. In the pre-cell phone era of AM radio, there are not a lot of great photos, especially of a man known for obscuring his face. 

What I did find though, was an interview Mischke did with former KSTP host Ron Rosenbaum back in 2016 on Ron’s podcast “Holding Court.” It was fun to go back and listen to my old friend, and I meant no disrespect to him when I started to complain to my friend that the totality of all of my work at WCCO radio was lost following the ransomware attack a few years back. It is just one of those crazy things that all of that CBS radio history is lost forever, yest these 100 random hours of talk radio from 2016 will live on because iHeart probably has them backed up on 15 different servers. 

All of that is to say, I wasn’t giving Ron much more though when I went looking for something in the basement yesterday. I was banging around looking through piles of boardgames when suddenly a handful of books fell from my bookshelf behind me.

Now I’m not so crazy to believe that they fell on their own. Or that there is a breeze in my basement. I must have brushed against this pile and not realized it, though why it would fall off the shelf is behind me.

As I picked them up, I was instantly transported to working overnights at AM 1500 back in 2003. I knew exactly when and where I read these books, but there is one I didn’t recognize. It was one I remember buying, it wasn’t an author I was into. Jetting out of it was a bookmark or paper of some sort, not very interesting. So I picked it up, stacked the books back up and suddenly wondered “what was stuck in that book?” 

I opened it up. And there was Ron

This book has survived a move, a couple of book purgings and two decades of apathy on my bookshelf. Literally didn’t know it existed. And yet today, the day I’m flummoxed by the wonders of what lasts and what is lost forever, out of nowhere, Ron drops into my life the exact day I’m thinking about him.

Ron was born for talk radio. I also can’t get past the fact that KSTP was so successful still into the 00’s that they made post cards for guys who had 1 hour shows on Sunday. Or that they still paid live talent on the weekend! 

I worked with Ron and Mark O’Connell for a time after “The Eel” Ethan Macintosh. The thing I will remember most about working with Ron and Mark was that it was my first life lesson that one of your main responsibilities will be eating shit as a producer. 

Ron and Mark were working morning drive at KSTP after Barbara Carlson had been let go. They’d had a successful run post-911 with Dan Conry and so Mark and Ron were tapped as KSTP’s next foray into morning drive. 

They would come in every morning and pour over the newspapers while deciding what to discuss on the show. Then they’d decide who they might want to interview and it was up to the producer to call and wake this poor sap up at 5am to ask if they want to come on the radio. 

I’ll always remember calling Governor Tim Pawlenty to wake him up one morning. Believe it or not, just two decades ago you could actually call the Governor yourself and wake him up. No handlers, no prep. Just a wake up call from the local talk radio station asking if you’ll come defend the latest thing at 7:15

But the thing Mark and Ron would do that was infuriating, is that by the time the interview actually rolled around two hours later, they’d moved on to something else and wouldn’t want to actually talk to the guest. It was a little game they played and it was highly annoying.

“No I understand Governor. I appreciate that you got up and changed your morning. Yes I agree that this is a silly topic they are talking about now. Yea, I don’t know. I just work here. I’d be happy to tell them afterwards.”

It’s a skill I quickly adopted. I’ve never had a problem being the bad guy. I’ve taken the fall for talent over the smallest and least important of things. But that’s the job. Make the star shine.

And Ron shined. He was beloved by listeners and made friends wherever he went. Sadly he passed away eight years ago. His funeral was a who’s who of lawyers and broadcasters. You can still find those episodes of Holding Court online. I highly recommend the three episode he did with Mischke and Tom Barnard.   

So what do you think? Do you believe in message from the other side? Do you think the universe tries to tell us things, and are you listening? Or is this all in my head? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

As for me, I like to think that Ron was telling me he’s excited to hear my doc next week and that he’s still listening.