Each year, I go home to Ohio at Christmas to spend time with the family. And each year, my mom sends me back to Texas with a bunch of stuff from my childhood she wants out of her house.
This year, she wandered up with another box, but this one was just filled with stacks and stacks of paper. At first, I wasn’t terribly interested in sifting through it.
“I didn’t go to Ball State so I could do a bunch of readin’,” I explained.
But once I started, I was taken through a wonderful retrospective of my time in Muncie.
Buried among the cornucopia of paperwork was my acceptance letter. The dean congratulates me on my PSAT score. While I was a National Merit scholar, I notice now he never mentions being impressed with my grades in high school. I don’t understand why. I did graduate in the elite top 75% of my class.
“Your grades aren’t great, but if you wind up going into radio, I can’t imagine success in school matters,” he might have written.
The summer before my freshman year, I took a weeklong class on baseball history and the rules and science of the game. We got a credit hour for taking it, and it was set up to help us get acquainted with campus and meet some of your fellow college punks. I now realize getting a schedule with “meet at the naked lady” printed on it several times may seem strange.
The Naked Lady, of course, is a popular meeting place in the campus library. At some colleges, students gather in majestic halls or galleries. At Ball State, we keep it real. Not into naked ladies? Frog Baby‘s right outside.
The box also contained print-outs of my biography from each station I’ve worked. At each stop, I included delightful bon mots to develop a closer connection with the folks in each town. In Portland, the KEX website closed with, “Ask about my spotted owl egg omelet recipe!”
My bio in Houston ended with, “Scaia says his goal is to someday ‘really stick it to the man.'”
I don’t understand why, but KRLD just has my picture but no description. Perhaps my authoritative posture combined with a reassuring smile says all you need to know. Perhaps they got word ahead of time I’m a bit of an instigator. We just can’t know for sure.
Speaking of sticking it to the man, I also had a bunch of unpaid parking tickets. Parking Services held me accountable, though, banning me from registering for classes two years after I graduated.
But at a time we may seem divided, this story is an uplifting one. Despite my unpaid parking tickets and bad grades in high school, I made the Dean’s List my first semester and ultimately graduated with honors.
For today’s high school students starting to look at colleges, let me pass along that same wisdom the dean of the Ball State communications college gave me: If you’re thinking about a career in radio, let me tell you, you might want to rethink that strategy.
