At the radio station where I work, there has been a man here who hosted his own big-band music show for twenty years. He and I have become good friends over the years I've worked here. Then he had a stroke in December of 2008. It didn't affect his ability to speak, but his memory is broken. He has forgotten how to operate his own studio equipment, and he is a broadcast technical engineer. He owned his own station until his doctor made him sell it because the stress was going to kill him one day. He could assemble a transmitter, and repair any piece of electronic equipment, and build custom equipment of his own design. He has a fully operational radio studio in his house, which now goes unused, because he can't remember how it works.
Another way his stroke affected him is in conversational speech. He knows what he wants to say, but he'll get lost in the middle of a sentence because the next word will just not come to him. I can only grasp in a small way how frustrating it must be, and how angry it must make him. Well, after his stroke, we just put a bunch of his music in our computer, which plays back songs at random for two hours every Saturday night. It got real old, real fast. But we didn't really have a choice, because he was in no condition to do a radio show.
It's been a little over a year since his stroke, in which he has made some improvement. The general manager was going to have another announcer come in and record announcements of the song titles, which we would insert into the program. But I asked to work with him to see if we could get his voice back on the radio, before they decided to get somebody else. So after a delay because he had to go to the hospital in January, he came in last week to record the voice part for his first show in over a year. He picked the music, and I wrote a script for him to read. He had only slight difficulty in reading the text, where he would say something that wasn't on the paper, or miss words. But we did enough for one hour of his show, to see how it went. I edited his voice recording to sound as natural as possible, and the show went on the air on Saturday night.
I just received a call from him. He was practically beside himself with happiness at how good he sounded on the radio. He wants to come in tomorrow and record the program for next Saturday. He's all excited about it, and he thanked me profusely. This is a man in his 70s, who has forgotten more about broadcasting than I will ever know, who thought his career, and much of his life, was over. Well, I'm helping him get it back.
It's not every day you get to make a difference in someone's life. It's a humbling experience. I'm glad it could be me, instead of someone less supportive of his mission - which is practically everybody else who works here. I mean, they were going to get somebody else! I know talent when I see it, and I will coax it out of him, one way or another, and give him a reason to be happy with himself, before he gets too old and/or ill to continue.
15 Feb 2010, 2:07 pm
