My career in public broadcasting

When I was 20 and halfway through my B.S. degree in Radio-TV-Film from the Univ. of Texas, I wandered into the public TV station in Anchorage, AK and said I wanted to volunteer. The first day, they had me do voice-overs, right on! That night, you could hear my voice during the closing credits of each show, telling what was coming up next. I showed up the next day ready for more; I showed up every day for the next three weeks, but they never gave me a single substantial thing to do after that. I said what about the voice-overs; they hemmed and hawed, but never let me do them again. I don't know why they couldn't have said they just didn't like the way I did them. After three weeks I gave up and went away and spent the rest of the summer working at McDonald's.

This incident, which except for a few stints answering phones during pledge drives, comprises my entire career in public broadcasting, despite the fact that when I was a teenager my career dream was to be an announcer at a Pacifica radio station. This abortive attempt to break into radio, with everyone basically looking the other way when I came into the room, was one of the things that convinced me that other people just know how to make their lives happen, and the rest of us don't.

Now comes Ira Glass, host of the fabulous NPR show This American Life, explaining how his first steps to NPR stardom were to intern at a public radio station. He must have been smarter at it than I was.

More Glass links: A 1998 interview in Mother Jones. A 1999 profile on Salon. A 1999 interview in Horizon magazine. A 2001 interview in the magazine On the Page. A 2003 interview by Teen Ink.