It's been a rough week. My hometown lost a living legend. Hank Booth was radio in Lawrence. He was the voice of Lawrence High football. To be in the press box for a Lawrence High game was a life changing experience. The passion, the joy, the bombast, he could literally shake the entire press box with his play by play on KLWN radio.
Hank was my first boss in the business. As I was working my way through journalism school at the University of Kansas, I constantly applied for work at KLWN radio. Finally, after three years of trying going into my senior year I was hired. I had no business being behind the microphone of a commercial radio station. But Hank and station manager Bob Newton took a chance.
What followed was a comedy of errors. The first memorable gaffe should have gotten me fired but it went undiscovered. I had been tasked with taking a sound system out to the Douglas County Free Fair for the weekend. I was also tasked with picking it up after the event. I forgot to do that. Suddenly on Monday I realized my error and rushed out to the rodeo arena to find the equipment still there. I schlepped it back to the station, management being none the wiser.
The second boner came during my awful morning shift that required me to run the AM and FM stations simultaneously. This particular Sunday the headset was broken. Normally I could hear AM in one ear and FM in the other. Unfortunately the AM side wasn't working. We aired church broadcasts during the late morning part of my unbearable six hour shift which required a lot of patching of cables to bring those broadcasts to air. This Sunday I unknowingly had left my microphone open after having given the station ID on the AM side and patched in the Plymouth Congregational Church service. I couldn't hear it. I repatched and still couldn't hear it. I began to steam and cuss and on the other side of the glass the newsman, Craig Martens, started pounding on the glass pointing to the red light. My microphone had been on and the expeletives had been broadcast live right over the church service. I realized my error and figured I was just a few hours away from getting fired. Craig saw the humor in my mistake but I certainly didn't.
Days and weeks went by and I heard nothing about my terrible mistake. Finally about two months after the fact, Hank called me into his office and asked if I had sworn on the air during the church broadcast. I said yes. I figured he was going to fire me right there. He looked me over and simply said, don't do it again. And that was that.
I went back to work for KLWN almost 15 years later while I went to graduate school. I had a lot of television news experience under my belt. My first Sunday back on the board we had a tornado and I walked the listeners through the storm in a way that I could have never done in my first tour of duty at KLWN. Later that day Bob Newton called me and simply said, you got good. After that I was invited back to man the studio board during storm coverage. Hank liked nothing better than chasing tornadoes through Douglas County. It was a staple of storm coverage for the Lawrence community. Hank Booth was better to me than I ever deserved.
And as for the title of this piece, the block off the old chip. It refers to what a friend mine, former Lawrence High teacher Tony Gauthier once said about Hank. If you knew Hank, he was a large man, his dad Arden, also a broadcast legend, was rather slight. Enough said. RIP Hank.
