by Dave Williams
I heard a guy on the radio this morning waxing nostalgic about the time he met his childhood hero, Bart Starr. At that point he employed a clever trick we radio talkers carry in our toolbox, asking rhetorically, “Did you ever have a chance to talk with your idol?”
It’s what we call a hook. It engages the listener. We get you personally involved in a topic. This is called active rather than passive listening. It works every time, even on me.
I’ve told these stories here before but hell, I’ve been telling one of them for about 60 years, the other for 32. Why stop now? They still haunt me.
I met Willie Mays when I was ten or twelve years old. For reasons I still don’t understand a security guard protecting the San Francisco Giants players’ parking lot from a rowdy crowd of kids waving pens and gloves opened his gate just wide enough to admit me, and me alone, into the autograph promised land. The other several dozen kids were left clamoring at the chainlink barrier like starving waifs in a Dickens novel.
This was my golden ticket, even before Willie Wonka was created.
When my hero emerged from the locker room door my heart started pounding and my mouth went dry. I walked toward him calmly, on rubber legs; I politely raised my baseball glove and pen to his world-famous face and muscular shoulders, forcing my thick, parched tongue to stammer, “Mr. Mays, can I have your autograph?”
Willie kept walking. He didn’t slow down, look at me, smile, or shoo me away.
He made me doubt my own existence.
Willie got in his car, I went back to my dad and we started the sad two-plus hours drive home.
Willie Nelson was much nicer. He smiled and nodded as I looked at him dumbly. I mean that in the literal definition of the word, I was struck dumb, so enamored by his presence that I was unable to utter a word.
I was no kid at this point. I was 38, host of the highest-rated morning radio show in Sacramento history, but at that moment I was dumb as a fencepost.
CarolAnn bailed me out, as she often still does in social settings. She smiled sweetly at Willie, fluttered those gorgeous eyes, and asked him to sign our ticket stubs. He did so with a charmed (and may I suggest, slightly lecherous) smile.
As I chewed on my tongue to reduce it to a usable size, my wife turned radio producer, asking Willie if he could find a few minutes to talk with me on the air the following morning by phone. He kindly explained that he’d love to but he would be sleeping in his bus hundreds of miles away on the road to Utah. He might not even have a cell phone connection.
Then the Red-Headed Stranger smiled again and tipped his hat to the love of my life, giving me a quick, curious glance as he left.
“Radio show?” he thought, “The guy can’t even talk.”