I don't occupy Gordon Hinkley's chair. I'm only borrowing it.
The legendary host was a part of WTMJ Radio since 1950 and the star of the morning show I now do for decades. He died in 2013 at the age of 88, but each a.m. I look at the studio door at 4:59, waiting to see if Gordy's going to push it open and tell me to get out of his chair before the top-of-the-hour sounder airs at 5.
Part of the Hinkley legacy is “Ask Your Neighbor,” a call-in talk show he created in 1961. The premise was simple: folks called in for advice about everyday household issues at a time when phone numbers began with exchanges like Edgewood, Concord and Uptown, perhaps still attached to party lines. There was no web. A mouse was something you'd find in the kitchen, then call the station to ask Gordy about exterminators on “Ask Your Neighbor.”
The show is gone but the concept is alive and well on social media, as I came to find out over the weekend when I damaged a favorite garment: a St, Norbert t-shirt bought my daughter's freshman year there in 2005. As the old bromide goes, “My kid went to college and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” It was like my parental receipt.
And now, it's gone, lost in a splash of melted butter that lept from a pan Sunday morning as I fried eggs for breakfast. No, the offending dollop of cholesterol didn't land on what I affectionately call my “ass pants”–grey, past-prime sweats that could probably walk on their own. Instead, it fell right on the front of the shirt.
I immediately took it off, applied Oxy-Clean and washed it. Seeing no evidence of said stain after the cycle was done, I pitched it in the drier, thinking I'd won the day.
Wrong. The marks remained, now baked into the fabric.
I sent the shirt to its buttery grave in the garbage but my wife plucked it out and gave it another try, unaware I'd already doomed it to the landfill with my misguided laundry ways. Her efforts failed, too, and the reality sunk in.
All along the way, though, I'd posted updates on social media because, well, that's what we do, isn't it? Doesn't the most mundane event of the most ordinary of lives warrant not just tweets and Facebook updates but PICTURES as well?!?
Oh, and do I have pictures!
Enter my “neighbors,” offering up all manner of advice all along the way. Use this. Wash it with that. Dry it like this. Seriously. I've opened up an emotional vein many a time on social media, offering up links to some of these here blogs where I get into some fairly deep, personal sh…um stuff. The response? A smattering of clicks, enough to let me know the web was still plugged in but nothing that threatened its continued existence by over-use.
No, the t-shirt postings didn't go viral but they gained far more response than expected. I'm expecting condolence replies, now that I put up the obit officially declaring said garment dead as a mackerel.
The point is, people still want to help each other, even if it's Facebook or Twitter in the place of a guy behind the mike of a big city, major-market radio station taking phone calls from folks at home. As one of Gordy's former bosses said in an OnMilwaukee.com piece about his passing, “He was social media before social media existed.”
Indeed. “Ask Your Neighbor” was ahead ot its time. Could it exist today? Perhaps. Radio is what Marshall McLuhan called a hot medium–even today, that would be the case for Mr. Hinkely's show. Especially if the topic were a t-shirt soiled by melted butter, doncha think?
Then again, probably not. The same keyboard I used to Google the McLuhan link above could also be used to discover my digital neighbors who've already posted videos and other social media treatises on stains, butter and otherwise.
“Ask Your Neighbor” is as Milwaukee as local radio got back in the day, a sonic touchstone for a generation that thought black and white TV with an antenna on the roof was as high-tech as we'd ever get. Span the ages, though, and our problems remain the same. The way we fix them–and the technology used to find the answer–that's another story.
I have a new issue to fix: the hole I now sport in my t-shirt drawer, the one where a certain green garment used to rest when it wasn't living on my back, hidden under a sweater or a Packers jersey. If it were another time, I maybe could've asked a radio neighbor if there was a store in town that sold a replacement. Now, it's a question for Google, perhaps answered by Amazon.
While I'm there, I should pick up a kitchen apron. Don't wanna wreck another shirt when I'm making breakfast again Sunday morning.