Here’s a nice photo from yesterday morning of my friend and
former business partner and broadcast colleague Glen Gardner hard at work in
his office. Glen’s wife Lauren took the photo
and posted it to Facebook with some good-natured comments about how her hubby
was slaving away at the office. It’s their back yard in suburban Boston. Glen probably has enough frequent-flyer miles
for several free trips around the world, since he also “lives” in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa.
It’s been five and a half years since Glen and I, who had
been doing the morning news/talk show on a local radio station, were summarily
dismissed in a poorly-executed palace coup which resulted in litigation and
sealed settlements including repurchase of the shares of stock Glen and I owned
in the company. I used to joke that Glen’s stock ownership represented
significant chunks of several radio stations and mine represented a few pieces
of office furniture, a hallway bathroom, and the old WTDY transmitter building
off Syene Road.
One of our friends, WIBA-AM talk show host Mitch Henck, had
been kicked to the curb Monday by Clear Channel radio. I wrote a piece about it
yesterday, telling Mitch that life was better on “the other side”, which
engendered a string of comments, including one from a fellow former broadcaster,
who affirmed that “Virtually everyone I know, including me, who left broadcast
news is happy. Almost everyone I know who is still in the business hates it.” Not exactly a universal truth, but you get
the idea.
After our “backstabbing by former business partners”, as
Glen put it back then, we both set out in new directions, with absolutely no
desire to go back to work for anyone except ourselves.
Glen formed a consulting partnership and was featured in a local
magazine (In Business Magazine – that’s their photo above). The article was
about what we then called “the gig economy” back in 2009. The world was full of
former broadcasters and print reporters like Glen and me, downsized by their
employer, putting together several part-time gigs as independent contractors to
keep the money machine oiled.
One of Glen’s next projects back in ’09 was to put together
a group of former local news folks to contribute to an online news site,
YourNews.
If you’ve been around town a while, you’ll recognize a lot
of faces in the picture above. All but one of us (Brian D’Ambrosio) were former
broadcast employees or print journalism employees. We had a lot of fun
meetings, wrote a lot of good stories,
even made a few bucks doing it.
One of Glen’s next projects was helping expand Public NewsService, a pretty-good-sized online news service headquartered in
Boulder, CO, reaching an audience of 30 million people a week. Glen brought me
on board several years ago, and I still write two or three stories a week for
PNS, in addition to other independent contractor projects.
In 2011, Glen moved back east to his original stomping grounds
near Boston, after he’d reconnected with his childhood sweetheart.
On November 18th, 2012, Glen and Lauren got
married, four years to the day since we were tossed under the bus at the
Madison radio company – giving us all a new way to observe that date! Glen and Lauren are both active in a new
concert promotion company they set up with another of Glen’s childhood friends,
bringing big-name entertainers to a beautiful venue in suburban Boston.
And, Glen still can wail on that big Gibson guitar, with a
band he and several other colleagues formed when they worked together at a
Cedar Rapids legendary rock radio station – Jif and Choosy Mothers. In the photo above, they’re putting on an
outdoor concert in Cedar Rapids. Gotta
love the horns.
As the local radio business sinks into the morass of debt
it’s created for itself, and more talented and high-rated personalities like Mitch Henck are fired by an industry that can't pay its debts, life goes on abundantly for those who worked hard at
reinventing themselves.
As George
Herbert said centuries ago, living well is the best revenge.
