Radio Show: Summertime Blues

It’s really mostly good news, for sure, but it’s also more of a business proposition than I’d originally thought. Just another challenge and, truly, a great opportunity. Plus, I wanted an excuse to post the great Theme from the movie, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. First Details.

Here’s how it works, nowadays, with local radio. The stations can no longer afford to pay for and provide programming on a regular basis. They just don’t get the advertising anymore! So, the model is changing in the following manner.

They essentially sell the whole time slot to a host/program. That person or entity then pays for the studio time, engineering, and does their own promotion AND owns the show. That, of course, is “the good news.” There’s much more good news than bad, btw, but “the bad news” is I have to work to sell the show via my various social media outlets, my own salesmanship, and friends and colleagues that can help. So, with all the web-sites and newspapers that carry my “A Dad’s Point-of-View” column, all my readers, my Facebook page, Twitter “followers,” and former showbiz contacts, I do have a good “rollodex” of people to mine. BUT, that is not why I went into this new career of mine (to be a salesman), but I have those chops and the end-game is worth it. Listen Now

Friends, Dads, and Quality Time from Australia by Bruce Sallan and Darren Lewis

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Bruce Sallan

One of the wonders of the Internet and my writing has been the reach it’s had globally. Not long ago, I received an email that began with “G’Day” from a man named Darren who had come across one of my columns. He wrote a wonderfully complimentary note and also told me about his fathering website and business. Clearly, though we live literally on opposite sides of the globe, our values united us instantly.

I asked him to send me something that expressed his views and what his site offers which is centered on adventures with fathers and their children, boys or girls. He also included some very relevant data that I totally agree with and that also makes me sad to read. How so many parents can spend so little time with their offspring is a mystery to me. The lasting damage is incalculable. I’m often struck by the clearly documented fact that human beings tend to recreate behavior they’ve learned whether it’s good or bad. That’s why abused children often become abusing parents. It defies logic, to me, but the evidence is overwhelming.

Memories Are Made of This (My Father’s Day Column)

Posted on June 11, 2009 by Bruce Sallan

I am quite happy to write this column from the vantage point of some distance from the pain of my own father’s death and the time I was alone, separated, and then divorced, and raising my boys 24/7. But, it only seems appropriate to reflect on those times, the positive memories of my dad, and the contrasting struggle of teaching my boys, much younger then, to remember their own father.

My father was a unique man: stoic, hard working, resistant to complaints, and whining, and completely in love with my mother. David Sallan died where he was happiest, right next to my mom, holding her hand, at 90 years of age. They met when he was 17 and she was 14, by a lake in Michigan; he was the sun-tanned water-worshipper, she was the shy, pale, redhead with a brain. He was brawn; she was class. And, he worshipped her from the day he laid eyes on her.