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Re: Now that my kids are raised and I've retired from paid jobs,
Amen.
posted by
BigV
on June 27, 2019 at 11:22 AM
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Re:
How do I say this without it coming out wrong? For decades, I lived a very public life. I was a paramedic, I worked for then Congressman Gerald Ford in one of his home offices, I taught thousands of Red Cross First Aid and CPR courses, and then I started doing live racing coverage and interviews, and did three, occasionally four different newspaper columns that ran in up to 40+ newspapers.
When Tony Stewart of NASCAR fame came to race at our local dirt track back in July of 2014, he knew me from meeting me from the National Promoters meetings in Daytona Florida every year for six years. Tony had made it clear that he was only there to race and wasn't doing any interviews or signing autographs. Tony was experiencing the same thing that I just described above. He happened to go by me on a quad bike, stopped, and circled back to where I was talking to some friends. He pulled up to me and asked, "Why do I know you?" I explained it and he remembered. We talked about something that had been at the last promoters meeting and then took off. By the time that he pulled away, there were at least 300 people circled around us. Naturally, everyone was asking me, "YOU know Tony Stewart?" As Ray Stephens would have said, 'Yeah, I do...'
NASCAR fans will remember that two weeks later, Tony was involved in an accident where he hit and killed a young man who had ran out onto the track and Stewart hit him with his sprint car. A few days later, I got a call from WJR-760 AM, the Detroit powerhouse AM station that wanted to interview me for 'three or four minutes.' That interview lasted 48 minutes. Without bragging, when they asked me if I had insight to what Stewart might do. I told that Tony wouldn't race the rest of the 2014 season. I told them that I thought that Tony would try to come back in 2015, but wouldn't be able to do it, and that he would retire in 2016. Oddly enough, that is exactly what happened.
The WJR interview brought me thirty more times attention than I had ever wanted. My wife had just had her first major major stroke and had lost her job. I was struggling to keep her home vs going into a nursing home. All of a sudden, I had 'gig' opportunities popping up left and right. Had those opportunities come before Judy's health issues, I'd have grabbed them in a heart beat. NASCAR fans might have heard me on NASCAR Radio instead of my own radio program. That is Life, plain and simple.
I couldn't go anywhere without someone stopping me to ask me something, just talk with me, or yell at me for writing an opinion piece that ran contrary to their opinion. You spend almost forty years of doing that, and then yes, you begin to wish that you were more of a recluse! LOL It was both fun and interesting when it happened, but it gets old.
posted by
BigV
on June 27, 2019 at 11:19 AM
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Now that my kids are raised and I've retired from paid jobs,
writing is no longer something done in stolen minutes. Like you, when I'm doing that it's the time I don't think I should be doing something else.
posted by
Pat_B
on June 27, 2019 at 11:17 AM
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Having an urge to become a recluse, are we?
posted by
Corbin_Dallas
on June 27, 2019 at 10:23 AM
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