Poison oak and Pledge Drive

L took off for Houston tonight; she’s got an ASG (American Sewing Guild) meeting to go to tomorrow, but she’ll be home tomorrow night.  She’s spending tonight with E, her SO of many years’ standing (and he’s almost a third parent to T, but I doubt they’ll be able to have much play time together because L managed to land herself with a case of poison oak this week, from helping me in the garden last Sunday, and is broken out on her face, arms, legs, under one boob, and . . . ummmm . . . other places, too.  She’s been plain miserable all week, but only today did it occur to her to change the bed linens because they probably have the poison oil on her side, and she’s been re-inoculating herself all week long.  Last night she tried the folk remedy of doctoring her affected places with bleach water which, she said, helped.  Maybe she’ll have it under control by sometime next week.  Still, the rash and blisters definitely discourage play time.

(I didn’t get the poison oak, because I put on disposable latex gloves before I handled the stuff, and washed very thoroughly afterward.  Also, I’m not sure I react to it; T swears blind that she doesn’t react to it and I know I’ve brushed or rubbed against it before in the yard without result.)

KUT’s spring Pledge Drive began today, and for the twenty-eighth year running, I’ll be down there on the phones, taking membership calls or acting as phone-team Pledge Captain.  Pledge captains are station staff members, almost without exception; that I’m admitted to that group says a fair amount about how far they’re willing to trust my experience and judgement.  T, M and I are going to go answer phones (or try to) during Folkways tomorrow, because Folkways has always been this family’s show of choice.  Besides, my cousin Dan Foster used to be one of the show’s co-hosts, so family loyalty keeps me coming back too.  (He’s my fourth cousin once removed on my mother’s side, if you’re counting.)  Then I’ll have a pledge captain shift on Sunday morning for Weekend Edition Sunday and This American Life.

I made a statement in the previous paragraph which may have got by people who were skimming, so I’ll say this again:  this pledge drive marks twenty-eight years straight I’ve been working KUT pledge drives, and in all that time I’ve missed exactly one drive.  I’ve worked every single one (save one) from the very first pre-pledge drive fund-raising event in October, 1975, when I’d been living in Austin for maybe two months and responded to an on-air plea for someone to come answer the in-studio phone during a special fundraising event:  program host Kirby McDaniel somehow managed to snag Huey P. Meaux, the guy who discovered and promoted The Big Bopper, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Johnny Winter (among others), down to do a guest shot on-air.  They needed someone, they asked, and I answered.  I took down peoples’ pledge information from a phone in a tape library next door to the control studio, while in the studio Kirby, Huey, Doug Sahm, Joe Nick Patoski, and others played music and reminisced and got stoned (this was the mid-’70s, when pot smoking was far more common in certain parts of the University than it is today).  I still have an LP of very, very early Johnny Winter recordings on Huey’s Crazy Cajun label which dates from that time.  I left my name with management as someone who’d like to help with a formal pledge drive, which I did in the spring of 1976, the first formal drive that KUT ever put on.  They called it the “Radio Rodeo” then, ghods help us.  I’ve been at it ever since, and by now the only staff members who have been around KUT longer than I have are John Aielli, host of Eklektikos, and John Hanson, host of In Black America.  Everyone else who was there in 1975-76 is gone.

The one drive I missed was the spring of ’82, when L and I had just gotten engaged, she was trying to get divorced from her first husband, and she had to have an unexpected and unwanted surgical procedure.  Life was too hectic, and I couldn’t spare the time and attention to go answer phones.  But since that time, I’ve not missed a one, and L and T (once she got old enough) have been right in there too.  We have pictures of L sitting in the conference room where we used to set up the pledge phone bank, helping T sit up on the conference table.  T was all of three months old at the time, and has this giggly-cute mohawk in the picture.  She began helping out at drives when she was about five, because she was the only one small enough to duck under musicians’ legs in the second control studio, which was dreadfully cramped, and get names to the DJ to be read and thanked for joining.  L claims this is the way that T first met Tom Pittman of the Austin Lounge Lizards, ducking underneath him to deliver names to Cousin Dan at the control board.  So she’s known Tom forever, well enough to greet him by name, whenever we meet (usually three or four times a year).  Now she’s older and doesn’t “sound like a kid” on the phone (the criterion of a previous staff member for letting her work the phones), she dives right in with the rest of us.  M is following in T’s footsteps now by wandering around the pledge phone bank room, being entertained by volunteers, and crashing out underneath the phone table when she gets tired.  She’s harder to get to lie down for a nap than T was, though.  When T was tired, she lay down and that was it.  You didn’t hear from her again for an hour or two.

Over the years, KUT staff have been kind to us at one time and another, inviting us to events without our having to pay, comping T-shirts or other premiums to us, and what have you, but I still haven’t had the one thing that I’ve wished for most:  public recognition from the station for continuity and length of service.  I halfway hoped it might happen when I hit twenty-five years, back in 2000 or 2001 (depending on how you counted it), but it didn’t.  I hoped I might earn one of the “Volunteer of the Year” awards the station’s been handing out for the last few years, but that hasn’t happened either.  Those awards have mostly been given to people who helped the station raise a lot of money, and I haven’t done that.  I’ve just always been there.

And I’ll continue being there, recognition or not, because I believe in KUT and in NPR and in what they represent.  I’ll just feel sad and disappointed when recognition continues not to happen.  Because I don’t have a lot of hope that it will.  If it did, it’d probably come in 2005-06 at thirty years, but I just don’t believe it’ll happen.  I expect I’ll continue referring to myself as “The Oldest Living Volunteer” (points to those who recognize the literary reference) and leave it at that.  Because by talking about it here, it’s as if I’d asked to be recognized.  So if an award came along, knowing that I’d talked about it here, I’d feel as though I’d tainted it.  It won’t be the same as if they did it on their own and because.  But while one part of my brain thinks that, another part can’t stop secretly hoping that somehow, some way, recognition will happen.  That’s some catch, that Catch-22.

It’s getting on for two now, and if I’m gonna be any use at all in the morning, I need to stop grizzling here and go to bed.  Answering phones hung-over is no fun either.

An asphalt kimono dynamically redesigned the bacterial endocarditis.  Fnord.