Good to be King
By King Harris ~
People used to ask me, “Now that you’re out of college, what are you going to do?” The answer was quite simple really.
Since I was in the Navy Reserves at the time, I knew I was going to spend a couple of years on a ship somewhere on the open seas. Or at least I thought I was, until the government pulled a fast one on me and sent me to Vietnam as an English language instructor.
After spending a year in that God-forsaken country, I was sent home in the summer. Now what are you going to do? I really had no idea (actually, I should say I didn’t know, because my grandfather once told me if you answer with ‘I don’t have any idea,’ it makes you look and sound like an idiot).
So while I was savoring the few days I had left in the summer sun, just glad to have made it back in one piece, I started looking at where I was going to go with my life.
The English degree that I received at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., wasn’t going to lead anywhere, as I learned overseas. I didn’t want to teach.
But along the way I had immersed myself in radio because I had an affinity for rock ‘n’ roll music, and I had also formed a band, which drove my parents crazy because they felt, and rightly so, that some of their heard-earned money saved for my higher education shouldn’t be spent on trying to learn to sing like Mick Jagger.
So what I decided to do that fall was head back to Oregon in a van, and go to a radio broadcasting school to obtain a first-class license, which was needed at the time for one to go on the airwaves.
I ended up living on this dairy farm in Hillsborough, about 30 miles from Portland, with not a soul around save for about 500 cows, who would gather and approach my house every time I put Little Richard on the stereo. Upon going outside, I felt like Gandhi greeting his many followers.
While I was attending broadcasting school, I needed to find a job, and that came in the form of working at Woolworths in the record department, which wasn’t bad really, except during lunch, when I also had to hop over to the candy counter to dispense helium balloons.
During this time I met a guy who ran a gas station, who said he’d pay me more to work for him, so I did for several grueling months until I finally found a gig at an automated radio station across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Wash.
The station was operated by a guy who needed a traffic manager and sales assistant. Having found my first radio job, although I wanted to be a disc jockey and not a salesman, I felt it would open to door to the future world of FMs and AMs.
However my radio career got sidetracked for a while when this singer-guitarist asked me to drum for his band, which was headed, he said, to Hollywood to record.
My radio boss, upon hearing of the possibility, shook his head and said, “Don’t do it, boy, you ain’t gonna make it.”
That was music to my ears and reason enough, even though deep in my heart I knew he was right. But I joined anyway, and spent a year recording in San Francisco, and the next few years doing the same in Los Angeles, where the rock ‘n’ roll scene was drug crazed at the time.
The band eventually broke up, and I was left to fend for myself joining other groups playing in bars all over the Southland.
It was not a great way to make a living, so I joined another broadcasting school, put a tape together, and left L.A., looking for a radio gig northward, which I eventually found in Monterey.
I stayed there for 18 months until I got a position as a sports director at a television station in the same building. After spending more than half my life in TV, I find myself back in radio, where it all started.
None of it was overtly planned. So a little rock ‘n’ roll got in the way. That was worth it, just to see the cows.
