"Somewhere the sun is shining bright,
Somewhere the hearts of men are light,
And somewhere heroes do things right,
And somewhere else is Mischke." -Michael Crouser

The first time I heard him, it was a sticky summer night, the type no one thinks we have in Minnesota, but we do - God, we do - with humidity you can smell like rotting corn, temperatures more fit for the Gulf Coast than the Upper Midwest, and mosquitoes big enough and mean enough to drive you indoors to spend the evening huddled in front of your econo-sized A/C unit, the type no one thinks we have in Minnesota, but we do. I had heard a bit about the Broadcast Outcast, without anyone being able to tell me much more than his name, and the frequency I could find him on, and that I'd never heard anything like him before. I doubted that last part very strongly. I would be very much mistaken.

I've been a radio freak since I was old enough to spin the dial on my parents' old Sony receiver. As a kid, I was a huge public radio geek, addicted to the grumbling bass monotone of something called Robert J. Lurtsema, a doddering old man who hosted five hours of classical music, lovingly programmed and meticulously referenced, seven days a week on Boston's WGBH. Later, I would be taken with the soft-spoken throwback of Saturday mornings, Scott Simon, whose Weekend Edition was, and is, with apologies to Ira Glass and Kurt Anderson, the shining example of all that public radio can be. There was an extended Garrison Keillor phase, brought on by my childhood visits to my grandparents' home in Minnesota, and countless flirtations with mediocre programs hosted by intelligent-sounding people, from Car Talk to Marketplace to the late, lamented MonitorRadio.

After our family moved to rural Pennsylvania, to a town seemingly created at the exact spot one would put a town if one wished to be able to receive quality radio signals from both New York and Philadelphia, my listening branched out to include the AM dial, previously assumed by me to be a wasteland of old torch songs, amateur country, and boring 'You-Give-Us-22-Minutes-We'll-Give-You-The-World" all-news stations. Certainly, there was all that to be found on AM (and I spent many an hour listening incredulously to the unbelievably annoying Jerry "The Geator With the Heater" Blavat and wondering why anyone would intentionally tune to such schlock, even as I held on for one more set of old '50s tunes just to hear him race through another of his often-rhyming, often-rapping speed-freak-style monologues) but there was much more as well. Harry Kalas's drawling descriptions of action-packed plays made me a baseball fan, and SportsRadio610WIP (you have to say it like that, all the words running together with no breath in between) gave me a place to talk about it. WABC introduced me to the unmistakable New York accent, and the insufferable attitude that comes with it. And a DJ named Michael Tearson, who worked at as many as three Philly stations at a time, following the official format and playlist of none of them while he was on the air, taught me about the profound sadness that runs through so many radio people, the underlying current of self-doubt and fear which can cause a man to spend his life hunched over a microphone in a badly lit studio spinning out tunes and talking gently to thousands of people he cannot see, will never see, and wouldn't really want to see, anyway. I loved Michael Tearson, and I cried the night he told us he was leaving his gig at WXPN for something called "my real life, if it's still out there."

Later, in high school, I became addicted to Rush Limbaugh, for reasons I will never completely understand. I have always been an unapologetic liberal, and Rush's screeds infuriated me as they did so many others on the left, and yet, I couldn't turn him off. Not only that, I couldn't stop calling him. I didn't call to argue - although that's what we ended up doing most of the times I made it past the call screener - but to ask him questions about himself, to try and understand why he was the way he was. To him, I was Simon (I knew better than to give my real name while cultivating a reputation as a regular antagonist on a right-wing call-in show,) the loudmouthed gay kid from Philadelphia who made him laugh and occasionally even conceded a point or two of political theory, and to me, he was a reason to keep traversing the increasingly homogenous and uninteresting radio landscape. My Rush Period didn't last long - he quickly became intoxicated with his own power after the '94 midterm elections, and his sense of humor and interest in hearing from callers with opposing points of view went right out the window once he was made an Honorary Member of the 104th Congress by the man he called 'Mr. Newt' - but it was intense, and fun, and I will never regret a minute of it.

I never thought of talk radio as being dangerous or unhealthy, as so many on the left loved to describe it at the time. Certainly, it was somewhat irresponsible and lacking in journalistic credibility, but that was exactly the point. People who listened to talk radio, who called up Rush to offer their own special 'megadittoes,' did so because they had spent their whole lives trying to be responsible and getting whacked upside the head with journalistic credibility, and they were sick to death of it! Rush represented (and still represents) a great big Fuck You to a world which his listeners feel has been flipping them off for decades. Conservatives don't do marches and love-ins and casual sex so much, so talk radio has become their catharsis, their chance to let off steam. And for the life of me, I don't see what's so dangerous and unhealthy about that. I have been shocked by a few select loudmouths from time to time (notably Jaz McKay, late of Cleveland's WWWE and about 10 other stations, and Michael Savage, currently syndicated around the country,) but I just can't bring myself to consider them a threat to society. Because when you come right down to it, talk is just talk, even when it's violent and abrasive and wrong, and the right to say stupid things in public is the most important one we have. Dennis Miller put it best: "No first amendment leads to Adolf Hitler, and first amendment leads to David Duke, and there's a big difference!"

By the time I hit the Twin Cities, two years removed from college, my interest in the talkers had faded quite a bit, although my interest in the medium hadn't. I tried every radio fad that came my way, from Don Imus to Jim Rome to the WCCO Farm Reports, and I loved them all in their own way. But even in the supposed Promised Land of Public Radio, I was becoming ever more convinced that radio was dying, and that it was time to admit that I had about outgrown my old obsession.

And then came Mischke. The Broadcast Outcast. The Radio Road Hazard. The founder and chief executive of the Black Sheep Broadcasters' Association. Transmitting live from the last 90 feet of Saint Paul, from the bleak, barren, inner city tarmac of University Avenue. The people I'd talked to were right. I'd never heard anything like him.

That first night, I was pulling my car into the garage as his music started at 8.06pm Central Time. I cut the motor, but left the radio on, figuring I'd listen to a minute or two just to assure myself that this show wasn't anything I hadn't heard a thousand times before from countless desperate hosts trying to snare some attention for their crappy evening time slot. (Radio's prime-time, as any commuter knows, is morning and afternoon drive. Midday is okay. Overnight has a cult appeal. Nighttime is a wasteland, a ratings deathtrap from which few escape with their careers intact.) The theme music was not promising - a low, out-of-date, synthesized, Blues-Brothers style grind, and the announcer doing his prerecorded shtick over the top sounded like he was trying to make his voice low and menacing, but failing miserably. Eventually, the music stopped, and I beheld... nothing. Silence. Well, not silence. In the background, I could distinctly hear the sounds of a baseball game being played, which I incorrectly assumed to be bleed-over from another station. Soon, I could also hear breathing. And more baseball. And more breathing, closer now. And then, after at least twenty seconds of this, just as I was ready to snap the radio off and head inside, this:

 

I never did turn off the car all the way that night. For two hours, I put the seat back, cranked up the air (he was right about the heat) and entered the world of one T.D. "Tommy" Mischke. It took him ten minutes just to get past that opening topic, and he really didn't say much beyond what I've reprinted above. But it was genius, aural brilliance in a form that I could never put down on paper, but that you would never forget if you heard it. Moving on through the evening, he casually informed us that the St. Paul Saints were getting the stuffing knocked out of them by Duluth (I would later find out that, on nice summer evenings, Tommy broadcasts not from the studio, but from the dilapidated but always-charming Midway Stadium, home of Saint Paul's beloved minor league baseball team); mentioned that there was a recall on Black & Decker Spacemaker T-1000 Toasters; sang a song about the destructive power of said toasters which left me bent double with laughter; and fielded calls from an alcoholic in a halfway house, a Native American healer, and a powerfully gentle septuagenarian named Undertaker Fred. This last caller is enough of a regular to have his own theme music, with a chorus of voices morosely chanting "Now calling in, it is Undertaker Fred," as an organ plays underneath, an introduction made even more endearing by the fact that the world may never have known a soul as quiet and lovable as Fred, who really is a retired funeral director with a voice to match, and who calls in mainly to tell Tommy when his Greek literature club is meeting next, and to sing songs like "Skip to My Lou" and "Camptown Races" in his tuneless bass as Mischke scats along over the top, alternately trying to harmonize and pretending not to know the words. (Fred is frequently the last caller of the evening, simply because that way, the show is guaranteed to end on a positive note.)

Stories abound about the things Mischke has done on our local airwaves. A few years before I arrived in town, according to James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly, "he paused to consider what to say at the beginning of a program -- and decided just to keep quiet. For the next two hours he said nothing at all, until his usual 'Sleep well!' sign-off at 10:00 p.m. When callers rang the station in confusion, he pressed a button to put them on the air without telling them he was doing so. Soon a spontaneous callers' show was in progress." Interviewing a shipwreck expert on the eve of the anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald's famous disaster, he sang every question to the tune of Gordon Lightfoot's omnipresent song, leaving his guest flustered and eventually speechless. He frequently takes calls straight off the line, without waiting for his producer to screen them first, and then pretends to be whomever the caller was trying to reach, whether it be the KSTP newsroom, the front desk, or, in one particularly hilarious instance, an expert on curtain rods. He has faked heart attacks, muggings, and his own resignation on the air many times, each time so convincingly that I almost believe him. Fallows again: "The night the final Seinfeld episode aired, Mischke 'took himself hostage,' yelling quite convincingly that he had a gun and would shoot if anyone stopped listening to watch TV."

There is a joy to the Mischke Broadcast, a love of the medium of radio and an incredulity that the host is getting to make his living by it, that sucks you in, and makes you love this bizarre man with the voice of an old codger and the mind of a 12-year-old, circa 1945. Tommy is actually only 40 years old, though most listeners assume he's much older, and is happily married with children, though you rarely hear him discuss his family. (One wonderful exception was the winter night when Mischke the Father lost track of time while on an excursion to the library with his son and several classmates, and found himself with less than 15 minutes to ferry all the kids to their respective homes and make it to the station for an 8.06 start time. Realizing at the last house that he wasn't going to make it, he dashed up to the classmate's mother and begged to borrow her cell phone, an item of technological excess which outspoken Luddite Tommy would ordinarily not be caught dead with. After the indulgent parent taught him how to use the phone, he hooked up with his producer 10 seconds before the music ended, and conducted the first quarter-hour of the show as a driving tour of Saint Paul, followed by a walking tour of the KSTP broadcast facilities.) At his core, Tommy is pure, 100% Saint Paul: unpretentious yet indecently proud of his hometown, and disdainful of the larger burg on the other side of the Mississippi which he refers to as "big-time Minneapolis." He falls into no known political pigeonhole, and almost never discusses politics, yet he campaigned tirelessly on-air for fellow KSTP host Jesse Ventura back in 1998 because he profoundly believed that the political establishment needed shaking up. (It was one of the most difficult decisions he had made since starting the show. One of Ventura's opponents was the mayor of Saint Paul, Norm Coleman, also a KSTP host and a longtime friend of Mischke's.) Occasionally, he has embraced other serious causes as well, most recently the alternative medicine movement, particularly as it relates to cancer treatment. But for the most part, the broadcast is designed to be fun, with a decidedly off-the-cuff feel masking what is clearly a meticulously prepared program.

But it's more than that. The antics, the silly songs, and the free association are the meat of the Mischke Broadcast, but not the heart. What truly makes Mischke's audience love him is that he has never once attempted to hide his humanity on the air. If the host is having a bad night, you can bet that you'll be able to tell in the first five minutes, and chances are, a caller will phone in to ask if everything is all right. It is not an idle question: in 2000, Tommy disappeared from the air for several months, with little to no explanation from the station beyond assurances that the program had not been cancelled, and that Mischke would return on his own timetable. When he finally did, he made no excuses, and offered no phony heartiness about what a fine vacation he had just returned from. Instead, he solemnly told his listeners just 'what the flaming hooty-hoo' (one of his favorite phrases) he had been up to for the last 12 weeks. It was depression, you see, deep, crippling, depression, and he was sorry about it, he truly was, but these are things that happen in a man's life, and well, it's a disease, and he wasn't over it yet. And he might never be. And for that whole week, T.D. Mischke, the wise-cracking self-proclaimed graduate of the Eddie Murrow School of Big-Time Broadcasting, sat in front of his microphone, and talked to us about what he had gone through, and why. He fielded calls from countless fellow sufferers, offered counsel and gentle advice to teens who were relieved to hear there was a name for what they were going through, and accepted all the 'welcome backs' and 'please don't leave us agains' that flooded into the phone bank. Undertaker Fred was right there to congratulate Tommy on his courage, and to sing a few songs about life being worth living, and though the whole thing could have taken on a funereal air (and I realize that the way I'm describing it sounds unbelievably depressing,) it never did. Not once. This was not an airing of dirty laundry, not the plaintive cry of a man desperate for attention. It was a homecoming. Tommy had been gone from us, he was back, and we were glad.

It didn't take long for the show to get back to its old, softly chuckling self, and Tommy threw himself back into the work. But the depression incident had elevated the program to a new level, adding the same bittersweet uncertainty that I had detected in Michael Tearson so many years before, and made it somehow even more special to those of us who tuned in every night. Because now we knew that it could end, that someday, Mischke could leave us, and it made everyone all the more determined to make the most of his presence while we still had it. Tommy seemed to sense the newfound closeness, too, and began to be more willing to take the show down a notch if the situation dictated. Nothing had changed, exactly, and the stunts were as ludicrous as ever, but there seemed to be a renewed sense of purpose to the show on many nights. Still, Tommy refused to allow anyone to be too serious for too long: in the midst of the confusion over the vote count in the 2000 presidential election, he spent the first hour of the broadcast one night continually reporting that there was "breaking news" and that the station would be switching over to the ABCNews feed, only to play a tape of a pig squealing, or a man shouting gibberish, or some other nonsense. As luck would have it, this turned out to be the night that news of the cancelled recount did break, thus deciding the election, and it broke at the top of the nine o'clock hour, and of course, no one listening to Mischke believed a word of it for the first several minutes. (Following the extended news break, Mischke categorically refused to discuss the election for the rest of the night, declaring that he had a damn fine show prepared, and wasn't going to just junk it based on someone else's idea of what's important.)

The Mischke Broadcast probably wouldn't work anywhere but the Upper Midwest. (In fact, it likely would never have lasted this long even in the Twin Cities, but for the fact that KSTP is still owned and operated by the kindly old Hubbard family, which continues to be willing to take chances where the corporate conglomerates that dominate broadcasting in the 21st century would slap a show like Tommy's down faster than you can say "Telecommunications Act of 1996.") But isn't that supposed to be the charm of radio? What works in City X might not work in Town Y, but who cares, as long as the listeners in X are happy, and as long as the listeners in Y have something else to listen to? When there was talk of syndicating Mischke nationally, there was near-universal apprehension among the fan base: Tommy is ours, went the argument, and if you want to share him, that's fine, but you're going to have to move here and become one of us to do it. The local feel of the show is the best part, creating the illusion that we really are just one big group of folks gathered around an old Crosley to catch a bit of the evening broadcast.

Eric Bogosian, channeling murdered radio talker Alan Berg, once described talk radio as 'the last neighborhood in town.' I never used to buy it. The world that Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Don Imus, and even Alan Berg created is nothing like a real interaction of neighbors and friends - in fact, it's nothing so much as an escape from it. But in T.D. Mischke, I have found my neighborhood, and though it exists principally over invisible air, it is real. I can point to it on a map of Saint Paul, I can tell you who lives there, and who gets along with who. I can show you the library where Tommy once lost track of time, and point out the brewery where they whip up his beloved Summit. This neighborhood is no Lake Wobegon, no idealistic creation of a writer who remembers how things never were in a place that only half-existed. This is my neighborhood, brought to life by a man with the simple ability to go on the air every night and be the same silly son-of-a-bitch that he is when the mike is off. Thanks, Tommy. You sleep well.

The Mischke Broadcast can be heard weeknights from 10pm-midnight Central Time on KSTP-AM 1500 in the Twin Cities, and online here. KSTP is a 50,000 watt clear channel station, and should be audible after dark throughout much of the central part of the U.S., so even if you're out of state, give it a shot.