Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and Me
The tables are starting to turn and maybe, just maybe, the public is ready for my style of broadcasting again.
At age 63, I’ve had lots of different jobs in my life, starting at age 14 as a gas station bathroom cleaner, and moving on, to name just a few, to pizza maker, drug store clerk, office assistant, news reporter, columnist, college trustee, more recently, presidential appointee, to currently, senior scholar. Some of those jobs could be exhilarating at times, others sometimes frustrating and, on occasion, even humiliating. I’ll let you figure out which was which (hint: the answers are not always obvious).
But looking back, some of my favorite jobs were those I held in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when I had the chance to host several public affairs oriented radio and T.V. programs, including a weekly radio show (“Feedback with Hal Plotkin!”) on KPEN (97.7FM back then) in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a TV talk show that aired on a local UHF-TV channel (“CrossPoint with Hal Plotkin!”) and later, as a founding on-air editor of Marketplace, public radio’s now long-running business and economic news program.
There was something very special about those media jobs that reliably lifted my spirits. I think it was the chance to talk with people I’d…
