The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 205: A King and a Crouch and Me on a Couch

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

The true story of two great teachers, two stuttering students, and two happy endings. Followed by a conversation about the beauty of "what," the danger of "how," and the timeless challenge of "trying not to try."

Hey guys, it's Mike Rowe here with episode number 205 of the way I heard it. It's called A King and a Crouch and Me on a Couch. I just realized that rhymes. A king and a crouch and me on a couch. I didn't set out to go all Dr. Seuss on you with the title. Sometimes rhymes are serendipitous. A serendipitous rhyme is always sublime or divine if you prefer. Either way, today's chapter is one of my favorites in the book.

and when I've looked forward to unpacking for some time now. It tells the true story of Donald Crouch, a gifted school teacher you've probably never heard of, who had a transformational impact on a student that you've absolutely heard of. When I stumbled across the story of Mr. Crouch and his most famous pupil, I couldn't help but recall the impact that Fred King had on me.

Fred was the high school music teacher, mentioned previously in the book. He's the guy who cured my stutter. introduced me to music. Put me on a path, really, that led to dirty jobs, and somebody's got to do it, and returning the favor, and microworks. And, of course, this podcast,

which continues to surprise me with a large and engaged audience that keeps growing week after week. But that's all beside the point. This chapter is really an homage to teachers and mentors everywhere. As for the couch referenced in the title, well, that's there. in much the same way a couch might be found in a psychiatrist's office, a place for you to sit while you spill your guts to a licensed professional,

which is pretty much how I felt during the conversation that follows the chapter. As many of you know, Chuck Klausmeyer is not a licensed psychiatrist, far from it. Really the opposite of it, in fact. But he is the producer of this podcast, and he's a guy I've known for a very long time. Chuck also had the great good fortune of being. taught by the aforementioned Fred King once upon a time. And he has therefore taken it upon himself to dig deep into our shared past, to better understand how this extraordinary teacher continues to influence both of us

and so many other former students, 13 years after his death. It's a king and a crouch and me on a couch. And that all starts right now. Do do do do do do do do do. Dumb. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments

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in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Chapter 27. Breaking the silence. When Donald Crouch first encountered Jim in his English class in rural Michigan, the aging teacher saw a sullen 14-year-old boy, a boy who'd gone deep into a cocoon of self-imposed silence. Donald might have assumed that Jim was bored or uninterested or even backward. Certainly, he appeared to be all of those things. But there was something in the young boy that lit up whenever the subject turned to poetry. It was subtle, but Donald could see a ship

in the boy's posture, a quiet but unmistakable enthusiasm that accompanied any discussion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Tennyson. One day, Donald kept Jim after school and tried to get through to the stony-faced boy. Before long, he understood the problem. Jim stuttered. Not a little, a lot. Donald listened patiently as Jim stammered and sputtered and told him about the humiliation he'd lived with for all his life. Donald understood that Jim had embraced the written word because the spoken word had eluded him. The next day, Donald told the pupils in his English class to write a poem. The topic didn't matter, as long as it concerned something the pupils were passionate about. That is where fate stepped in, as fate often does, this time in the form of a

a ruby red grapefruit. During the Great Depression, rickets and scurvy had become a public health issue in Michigan. The government sent tons of fruit up from Florida to help combat the problem. That very week, a welfare worker had delivered a crate full of grapefruit to Jim's home, and Jim had nearly swallowed his tongue with delight. It was the most incredible, delectable, mouth-watering food he'd ever tasted. That night, Jim wrote his ode to a grapefruit, a flowery homage to Epicurean bliss brought to life by the full,

juicy luxury of eating citrus in the dead of a Michigan winter. Jim turned his poem in the next day, and Donald was stunned by how good it was. Then he did something most teachers would never consider doing today. He put Jim on the spot. Donald had noticed earlier that Jim's stutter vanished whenever he quoted his favorite poets out loud. And so, as he returned the students' assignments with grades and comments attached, Donald addressed the class.

"'I've read your poems, and for the most part I am pleased,' he said. Some are quite good. Several are excellent. One is extraordinary. Jim, would you kind of come to the front of the class and read us what you've written? Jim froze in his seat. The blood rushed to his face. He felt the other students staring at him. Why would his teacher ask him to do such a thing? Jim had trusted, Mr. Crouch. Now, he felt betrayed, doubly betrayed because of what Donald said next. Jim, I think your poem is too good to be true. Frankly, I don't think you wrote it. Practically speaking, Jim may have been mute,

but his hearing was excellent. He couldn't believe his ears. Mr. Crouch was accusing him of plagiarism? If the words really are yours, Jim, then prove it. Stand and recite them right now, or admit you stole them. Jim sprung to his feet and recited ode to a grapefruit, just as he had written it. There was anger,

in his voice, but what a voice it turned out to be, big and booming and clear as a bell. That was the day Donald Crouch unlocked one of the most powerful and familiar voices in the world, the voice of a boy who stuttered whenever he read aloud, but not when he recited from memory. As Robert Frost put it, Way leads on to Way, and Jim's Way was suddenly clear. He became a master of memorization. Reciting poetry led to the debate club. Debate Club led to the theater. In time, Jim's newfound vocal prowess took him all the way to Broadway,

where he was cast as the lead in Shakespeare's Othello, a big part, but one that he memorized in no time at all. A Tony Award followed, then an Emmy, then an honorary Oscar. The world, it seemed, was too soon. small to contain a voice as big as Jim's. And so Jim took on the galaxy, a galaxy far, far away. That's how the villainous voice of Darth Vader was created, coaxed from the body of a tremendous performer who might have remained a more silent observer, if not for the extraordinary teacher who understood the power of the spoken word and the unexpected.

a rival of a ruby red grapefruit that tasted too good to be true, the unmistakable voice of James Earl Jones. Like James Earl Jones, I was a painfully shy kid with a deep voice and a weird stammer. My mother still likes to tell stories of how, as a boy, I dive under the dining room table when the doorbell rang. Sometimes, according to her, I would vomit at the mere prospect of meeting new people. Happily, the Boy Scouts were on hand to help me out of my shell, along with a teacher, no less remarkable than Donald Crouch, my favorite teacher, Fred King.

I was a tall, skinny freshman when we first met, with an encroaching hairline and a larynx the size of a fist. He was Mr. King, the new music teacher, who inherited a choir filled with students like me, students who'd never sung before and thought that they'd never sung before and thought they were getting a free period. From the start, we got much more than we bargained for. Remember George C. Scott's opening speech in Patton? Well, Patton was a wimp compared to Fred King. He walked into our classroom that very first day and greeted us with two words that bled into each other. Shut up! His voice was stunningly loud. The classroom was instantly quiet. In the silence, He passed out a piece of sheet music far beyond anyone's ability to sight read.

It was a six-part a cappella arrangement in Latin. There was no way for us to get our bearings. We didn't know how to cite read, and what's more, there was no time. Mr. King had already blown a pitchpipe, raised his hands, and started to conduct. I don't know what he was expecting, but the silence that followed seemed to confuse him. Mr. King looked around curiously. He looked at his hands as if they were causing the problem. Then he frowned, gave us the pitch one more time, and started conducting again.

Silence. This is the overly high school concert choir, is it not? Once again, silence. Mr. King closed his eyes. He took several deep breaths, as though trying to calm him. Then he came unhinged. Smashinged one hand on the piano, he launched into a tirade peppered with expressions most often heard in pool halls and saloons. He foamed, he raved.

He cursed like the sailor he had once been as the veins bulged in his neck and forehead. He tore the sheet music to shreds, threw the pieces into the air and started to rant about cruel twists of fate, clueless mutes, and a few other things. Kicking a music stand across the classroom, he bellowed. If you're not willing to sing, then get the hell out. A phenomenal exodus followed. Half the class bolted and never looked back. I might have joined them, but I had become paralyzed.

Who was this lunatic? I was still sitting, dumbfounded, when Mr. King slammed the door shut, pops something into his mouth and walk back to the piano, glaring at those who had dared remain. For a long while, he stood there, breathing deeply to get himself under control. Then, his face cracked in half. Technically, one might describe what we saw as a smile. I would describe it as more of a gash, a cruel opening between nose and chin, revealing arictus of rotten enamel. Tiny teeth, baby teeth, were crowded up against giant incisors. Mollers

sprouted from spots normally reserved for canines. His front teeth, though properly placed, were the size of small thumbs. They jutted past his ever-widening lips, as if they were trying to escape the diseased gums from which they hung. Beth Johnson gasped. Cindy Stone screamed, We all recoiled from the dental disaster, and only when we had collected ourselves. Did Mr. King remove the hideous choppers from his mouth and replace them with human-looking dentures? Ladies and gentlemen, he said, the cowards have all departed. Let's have some fun. For the next three years, that's exactly what we did.

We talked, we laughed, we learned. We marveled at all the false teeth, a grotesque. a collection designed by a dentist whose sense of humor was no less twisted than Mr. King's own. We learned that our teacher's real teeth had been knocked out years earlier on the gridiron, yet we continued to marvel. You never knew what Mr. King had at his mouth, and you never knew what would come out of it. With no regard for the standard curriculum, without a shred of political correctness, Mr. King went about the business of spurring, exhorting, and inspired.

hiring his students. Instructing is too weak a word. He pushed us as no other teacher had dared. He'd give us von Williams Hodye and Bach's Mass and B minor to sing, works so far beyond our ability we didn't know any better than to try them. And so we sang those works and many others. What, not how. That's what he'd say. Always concentrate on what you're doing. Never how. It was a valuable lesson, a lesson that I would forget more than once. Hell, you just heard me forget it a couple of pages ago, up on the McAnall Bridge, but a valuable one, nevertheless. Anyway, as I was saying, I confessed to Mr. King early on,

I've never sung before. In response, he assigned me a solo, one that was several notes out of my range. He kept me after class for private voice lessons, and when he saw that, I stuttered, he suggested that I auditioned for the school play. By I suggested, I mean to say, he demanded, and the results were disastrous. Alone on the stage of our school's auditorium, I was stammering my way through a monologue memorized the night before when Mr. King interrupted me. Mikey, he said, I like what you're doing, but this character doesn't stutter. You understand? Get into the character. What, not how? You can stutter on your own time. I didn't think or resist. I didn't argue.

I just started over, and this time, I didn't stutter. A light bulb went off. New possibilities open before me. I started to act like a non-stuttering person, a more confident person, a person who might, with a little luck one day explain how the universe was. works, or sing arias from Puccini, or sell Chochkes on live TV, or pickups for Ford, or become marginally famous for gathering sperm from racehorses on primetime TV. For the moment, I'd settle for the lead in one of our school plays, and a new place in Fred King's mighty chorus of the Chesapeake. From there, I'd play things as they lay, and try to remember the virtues of what, not how.

simple thing, really, that turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid.

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Slash Mike. Good God, I missed that guy. Yeah, indeed. I mean, what a gaping, smoldering hole. His exit from planet Earth left. It's incredible how many people he touched. Well, how many people do you think were at his funeral? It's hard to estimate because the church, not a square inch was left in the pews.

Everybody was jammed inside standing because a hurricane had blown up the coast. This was 2008. And there were probably 300 people standing outside. They had set up speakers. Right. And so I just remember sitting there looking around taking stock and, you know, seeing so many former students. I'd wager the vast majority of people there were former students. But for the fact that there were so many older men and women there, you know, remember, he conducted not just the course of the Chesapeake, but the Sweet Adelines and he had all these other side projects.

And he was just, he was just a force of nature. And the funny thing, Chuck, when I really think about it, he had a way. way of making you think that you were the only one that really mattered and that the two of you had this secret connection and this special bond and some kind of code, you know, shared secrets and heightened ways of communicating. I read once that the real key to Sinatra's success was the fact that when people were interviewed after a concert, no matter where they were sitting, so many people said the same thing. It was like he was singing just to me. Right. And many times, they said it was like he was talking only to me. Because of course, Sinatra, when he sang,

it was a lot like talking. You know, it was so intimate. And I just remember feeling somewhat silly at his funeral because I looked around and I realized everybody there had that some relative level of cherished interaction with this guy. I mean, obviously his family, you know, but everybody else. And it was the strangest thing, you know, when they took him off, put him in the ground, nobody knew what to do. We all just kind of stood around and students who had never met from different schools started swapping stories and all these barbershoppers started teaching tags to younger kids

and there was singing in the rain. I mean, we're literally singing in the rain in the parking lot when the hearse went away. Just a, it's just a hell of a thing. He did have that amazing ability to connect with you. He connected with everybody. And you're right. It was like that one-on-one feeling similar to people who've spent time with Bill Clinton say that. Yeah.

I walk out of the room after talking to Bill Clinton, and I feel like we agree on everything. Both Republicans and Democrats felt that way because he just made it feel like he was on your side. Bob Dylan, they said the same thing about Bob Dylan, he could walk into a room and change the air pressure, like change the barometric pressure, change the temperature of the room. Some people described it as sucking out all of the energy, and other people described it as filling it with even more energy. People struggle, I think, to describe people like Fred King. I certainly struggled trying to articulate the impact that he had on me. And we should say, I'm just going to say it now because I don't want to forget, but I wrote his eulogy really as an exercise just for myself. And that turned into a podcast.

I forget what number it is. It's called it's number 64. 64. All right. So it's good to be the king. And if you want to hear more about the impact he had on me anyway, that's an episode you can listen to. But he had to be in the book, Chuck. he had to be because when I stumbled across the James Earl Jones story and read in his words,

his relationship with Donald Crouch, obviously it rhymed perfectly with my relationship with Fred. But then I started thinking about, you know, my mom and dad who both taught public schools and the impact of teaching in general. And the fact that there's so many different ways you can teach and so many different ways you can inspire and so many different ways you can challenge and mentor. And I don't think there's a playbook for any of it. God knows the teachers unions try. But boy, the best teachers I know are far afield from what's expected and what's correct. What's really interesting to me about this chapter is that, you know, I mean, I've known you for a very long time. But this whole stuttering thing, this is what I like to call

BC before Chuck. So I had no idea until I'm trying to I was thinking earlier today. When did I become aware that you had a stutter? When did I find that out? And I don't think it was until you were writing the book. Yeah. I was cured overstating it a bit. But my my stutter went away a few months before you and I met courtesy of Fred King. And I should be really clear too about something from a physiological standpoint, I didn't stutter the way lots of other people do. Mel Tillis, you know, the stutterer of all stutterers. Right. Porky pig. They're big stutterers out there. I had more of a stammer and it was exacerbated not by a physical problem, but mentally. I was painfully, breathtakingly shy as a kid, just almost non-functional. I say it in the book and

it's true. The doorbell rang. I used to dive under. under the table. My parents were horrified that I was just backward to the point that I was so deep in my shell I'd never come out. I used to hide in the closet when people came over. The whole notion of meeting someone knew when that doorbell rang, it was, it filled me with dread. Who's on the other side of the door? And when I got into that state of mind, I stammered. Can you, can you recall like the inciting incident? What happened? How old were you? you when first you stammered? No. I don't remember. I remember my dad saying to me at one point, just relax and take a breath. Because I was, I think I was at the dinner table and I was trying to

tell the story. And interestingly, I wasn't nervous or feeling shy at all. I was excited. And I was so excited I couldn't get the story out. I had trouble with teas. And I'll tell you how bad it got. It got so bad in the sixth grade, my teacher asked the class if anybody knew what the capital of Kansas was. Now, I knew it was Topeka, and I raised my hand. But what came out was T, T, T, T, T, and then I flushed, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to get this out, and everybody was looking at me. And the waves of anxiety, man, they just washed over me.

And you know what I did? No. I said, Salinas. No teasing Salinas. Nope. But Salinas is in Kansas and I didn't have a problem with S's. And I remember thinking in that moment, oh, crap, this is bad because you would rather be seen as wrong slash ignorant than nervous slash deficient in some way. So I hid the fact that I was stammering with a T behind the madness of giving an answer I knew was wrong. That's when I knew this is probably not tenable. It's so interesting to me because I guess that first year that you spent with Fred before I met you really did cure you because I don't ever remember you not being a confident guy.

A little quiet at times. I mean, in the conversations that we would have conversations that went on for hours and hours and hours that were both funny and deep and, you know, we talked about a lot of different things. And I never noticed a stammer in you. And I always felt like you were pretty confident in your own skin. You were the first guy I ever saw wear a flannel shirt, believe it or not. I mean, it was the 70s, dude. It was 1978. I was wearing polyester and bell bottle bottoms. You look like somebody that behind the velvet rope at Studio 54 that really thought they were going to get in but never did. Yep, that was me.

That was me. And somehow or other, you know, the dude in jeans and suspenders and a flannel shirt became my best friend. Well, look, I mean, part of it was being on the outside of cool, but not knowing it. Like, the Boy Scouts were a big help for me. I went into the Boy Scouts very shy, very backward, and they were pulling me out of that in a big way. And in terms of telling stories and standing in front of people, you know, singing songs, all of that stuff happened around the campfire. Unfortunately, for me, it kind of stayed there.

I grew a big pair around the campfire and in that little weird ecosystem. And I came out of my shell in a very specific way. But for me, I was a big kid. I was always the tallest kid in my class in elementary school. My voice changed early on. And so by the time I was in the seventh grade, I didn't quite sound the way I do now. But by the time I was in the ninth grade, 10th grade, my voice had completely changed. So I was bigger than the average kid.

And I sounded manly. Consequently, I think people expected more of me in various. ways. And that made me nervous. And so physically, I just kind of retreated. I never raised my voice. I didn't want to talk too loud. I felt like I took up more than my fair share of space when I was in a room, you know, and and and and and I didn't lean into any of those things. Those attributes conspired to make me inward. And so by the time I got into the 10th grade, Well, that all changed because I went from the biggest kid in junior high school to just another kid in the 10th grade. And now they're juniors and seniors all around.

And now I feel really small and uncertain. And I sign up for a choral class because I think it's just going to be an easy thing. And everything else you need to know is really in the chapter. Fred King comes in. He's a force of nature. He completely redefines every experience I'd ever had in a classroom. room. When he learned that I stammered, he insisted that I sing a solo, kept me after school. And then he made me audition for the play that year, which was South and stuff. This sounds just like

the story that we just heard. Well, I'm just telling you said you were surprised to know that I struggled with any of this. Yeah, I never, I never knew it until fairly recently. Well, had you been in my class, you would have seen me auditioned for South Pacific. I auditioned for the role ridiculously of Emil DeBeck, the lead. I could see you play in that. I learned some enchanted evening. You may see us. Fred taught me that.

I auditioned with that, sang it as well as I could, you know, for a 16-year-old. But then I had a monologue. And it was funny, Beth Sands was the teacher. Sure. Oh, she was great, man. She was beloved in the same way Fred was. Oh, yeah. And they had me do a monologue from The Rainmaker.

And so, yeah, I stammered and stuttered through that whole thing. And I said, rain, damn it. Please rain. And Fred's like, yeah, Mikey, yeah, that's, yeah, this Starbuck is the character. He doesn't stutter. Maybe try it without so much stuttering. Stutter on your own time. So good.

So good. I mean, what a great thing to say to you, you know, because it's really, it has nothing to do with you. You know, he's pointing you towards the what, not the how. Yeah. He's pointing you towards it. There's nothing more annoying and pretentious than a book full of lessons written by a guy not qualified to dispense advice or wisdom. And yet, there are a couple in here that matter to me. And this is the part of the book where they start to stack up. The submissive posture comes back around, big lesson from QVC. But prior to that, it's this one. And this is the big one, what, not how.

That stuck with me to this day. Did he ever tell you the story of the peak experience that he had? He used to talk a lot about Abraham Maslow. This sounds familiar. I need a little more. Maslow wrote in 1964 about these things he called peak experiences, where essentially the PFC or the prefrontal cortex in your brain, shuts down. Not shuts down entirely, but when people say, look, you're in your head, you've got to get

out of your head. It's because your PFC is attached to your ego and it's constantly forcing you to evaluate how you're doing. Right. So getting your prefrontal cortex out of the way is the goal of saying what, not how. If you start to focus on what you're doing and not how you're doing, everything changes. And of course, I didn't know any of this at the time. I didn't know about Maslow, but I remember Fred telling a story about he was in a church on Christmas Eve and he was conducting what he called the finest choir of all time. And of course, they weren't really the finest choir. They were a church choir. Right.

And they were good. And he had been working with them for a few years. And then he was directing them. And for whatever reason on that Christmas Eve, all the stars lined up. The intonation was perfect. The execution was perfect. The music was perfect. the setting was perfect.

All of these environmental things got together and essentially led him to what we would call an out-of-body experience. He said, as he was conducting, he was so completely focused on the music and on the what that he suddenly saw himself from a height of about 12 feet. He left his body, watched himself, watched the choir. He's still fully in his body, of course. He's seeing himself move his arms. But Fred was, he told that story a lot in a lot of different settings.

He had two or three other moments in his life. And he always talked about those moments by way of example of what could happen if you completely got the how out of your life. And years later, I remember reading a book about, it was a book about Chinese philosophy. and in the book was something called Uwe. And Uwe goes back thousands of years, and it's essentially a paradox. And the heart of Uwee loosely translated means try not to try. You must try not to try.

But of course, it's impossible because the moment you affirmatively attempt to try, you're trying. And if the goal is to not try, right? So it becomes this great paradox. How can you get to a place, whether you're a stand-up comic or a singer or an artist, where your performance is a perfect reflection of the spontaneity that comes from not trying? How do you get to that place? Well, that sounds to me kind of like the idea of there is no try. You know, I've heard this concept said before. for where someone will drop a pencil and say, try and pick that up. And it's impossible. Well, it's not that it's impossible. It's just that you either pick it up or you don't. And so what that sounds to me is sort of the precursor to don't try, do. Well, it's the matrix. There is no spoon. Remember? Right. Right. Right. No, it's not about bending the spoon. There is no spoon. They call it the white bear problem.

I'm going to tell you right now not to think about a white bear. Go. Well, the only thing you can think about is a white bear. It's the only thing you can see. So when you try not to try, you're doomed. What he's saying, I've heard in so many different people in so many different ways have tried to articulate the same result. It's like when you see a great singer,

on stage doing their best. What you're seeing in many cases is a master of technique, but you're not seeing the technique. Right. Right. So I think, you know, Mike Gellert, who was on the podcast a couple months ago, his inspiration, his hero musically is a, is a bass baritone, famous classical singer called Dietrich Fisher Descal.

And to hear Mike talk about Dietrich, it's the absolute mastery of vocal technique. It's perfect. He's a perfect technician. But what makes him great is that you can't see any of the technique when he's performing. It's all effortless. You don't see him trying. So many singers, you see them sweat and strain. You see the veins bulging, you know, especially pop singers.

They're out there and it's all, it's in their throats. And it's all just, it's work. You know, it's just work. Not Descal, like the great singers, just like a great judo artist, a great master of karate, a great comedian, any of them. The last thing you want to see when you're in the audience is somebody's technique. You just want to be blown away by the artistry or the beauty of the art, the perfection of the thing. And so everything is Uwe.

Everything is an attempt, at least if you're an artist. But I think it goes broader than that. When you're in trouble from a safety standpoint, it's probably because you're focused maybe more on compliance than actual safety, more on how, less than on what, right? That's what I was trying to articulate on the McAnall Bridge. I got too comfortable. You know, some jobs you want your prefrontal cortex highly involved. Some you don't. If you're trying to have a peak experience, if you're trying to get to some sort of place

of expression, then you've got to get out of your own way. And I just say all of that because sooner or later, anybody who fancies themselves an artist, look, for me, writing this book is a perfect example. When I sit down to write, when I sat down, it's like, okay, Got a deadline, got to do this. You know, that's when it became work. When I was sitting on a plane, really with nothing better to do, even though I was in a very strange environment, I sat down and the words came really easily because I wasn't trying to write. I was trying to pass the time.

So sometimes to see a thing, you have to not look at the thing. You have to look at something near the thing. And then the thing comes into kind of a weird focus. the fact that I was having these kinds of conversations in the 10th grade with my music. Right. A man who would from time to time, apropos of nothing, pull his teeth out of his head and set them on a piano just because sometimes he didn't like his teeth in. Or you could walk into his office and he would pop up from behind his desk, you know, having been crouched there for multiple minutes waiting. Waiting to scare you.

Yeah. Yeah. So Fred King is in this book because he's one of those people who came along in my life at just the right time. He fixed a stammer. He made it entirely rational for me to say to myself, well, why not? Why not act like a guy who doesn't stutter? If you can do it in the course of an audition, then why not do it in the course of a meal? Why not do it in the course of your life? of your life. So I know, I'm always careful to tell the story because it sounds terribly glib. If you have a kid who's suffering from some sort of, you know, chemical imbalance or some sort of physiological problem, that's probably not the way to cure his or her problem. But for me, it's exactly what I needed to hear, exactly when I needed to hear it. It literally was like flicking a light switch. And to this day, I will stammer a little bit here and there, but I'll catch myself very quickly and just take a breath and it goes.

It rarely happens, but it still happens from time to time. I've never noticed it. That's the thing that made me go hurt. My guest today, Tom Albanyse, is an American giant. And I'll tell you why. Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things. American Giant knows this, which is why they committed themselves 16 years ago to make

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hoodies, teas, denim, built to be worn year after year at American-giant.com slash Mike. It's quality you can feel and a true American success story that you can be proud to support. Use code Mike. Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant American Made. American Giant American Made. No. It sounds to me, you know, if I could bring it back to the first story, breaking the silence,

which was one of the first episodes of the podcast, I believe, in the first six that we did, something like that. It sounds to me like Donald Crouch was James Earl Jones's Fred King. Oh, of course. Do you know how old James Earl Jones is right now? God, he's got to be closer to 80 than 70. He's closer to 90 than 80. Than 80.

In fact, he's exactly 90. Wow. Isn't that amazing? I was amazed to learn that. Yeah. I was amazed by the parallels for me personally, not just between Donald Crouch and Fred King, but, you know, owed to a grapefruit, right? He writes a poem and then he's forced to recite it by a teacher who put him in a very, very uncomfortable position. Fred King put me in a very uncomfortable position. Fred King was very suspicious of, you. of that which is comfortable. Very suspicious. He was always putting people in uncomfortable positions

to challenge them to widen their world. What better thing for a teacher to do than to make the students uncomfortable but still feel like they could come back to some baseline and be safe? His class was not a safe space. No. And he was far, far, far from anything remotely. politically correct. I doubt he'd be allowed to teach today. You know, I really do. But, man, hey, do you hear that sound, by the way? I do not. Oh, good, because that's a sander. I'm having some work done here today. And I didn't think I'd hear it, but I'd do. It's like the leaf blower from two weeks ago. If you hear it, we'll keep it in. I do not hear it. Good. Good. I'm glad. You Anyway, if Fred were here right now, he'd say, you know, there is no Sander, you know, you listen to that Sander, you think about how you're doing. You think about how you're doing, you're going to lose your train of thought. You lose your train of thought. What goes out the window and your podcast craps the bed. Nobody wants to hear that.

Nobody wants a podcast crapping in the bed? No, they don't. Go ahead. You were going to say something. No, I wasn't. I was going to take a sip of my coffee out of my ember mug. Have I showed you this thing before? This warms, keeps stuff warm. right? Yeah, the Discovery Channel sent me an ember mug for some reason. I don't know. And yeah, you charge it and then it'll keep your coffee hot for an hour and a half at 145 degrees. That seems really hot to keep your coffee. It's good. I mean, coffee usually comes out about 175, you know, which is almost too hot to drink. And you get it down to 145 and it stays there for an hour and a half and it's great. They make thermoses, they make mugs. It's a little precious. You know, I'm not recommending it necessarily because they're not a sponsor of this podcast. And as you know, in our shameless pursuit of filthy lucre, I now only recommend things in exchange for some Yeltafroiken, little dachshund jingawa. Wow.

Yes. In the end, this is pretty indulgent. This is two guys in their mid-late 50s talking about a high school teacher who affirmatively changed the trajectory. of their lives. And the only reason, honestly, I think it's worth doing is because I feel bad for teachers today. You know, and I was thinking the other day, what would Fred King have been doing during the lockdowns, you know, knowing him as we did? Yeah. You know, he's not going to, he's not going to stay out of the classroom. If the school says, no, you can't, you can't come to school, I know exactly what he would have done. He would have started holding classes at home. He would have invited people over to

his house. He just wouldn't have stopped. I'm not saying this is a compliment. I'm just saying that that's what he would have done. There's just no way he would have sat on his hands and not used this entire insane year as some kind of giant teachable moment. It's tough to say, though, because, you know, he had a wife, he had a family at home who also could be concerned about these things. I mean, look, we were fed a steady diet this last year of just how dangerous this thing was and how it could kill us at any moment. And it was everywhere and unavoidable. And we're trying to keep it at bay. And that would have been difficult for Fred. What was his wife's name? Pat? Pat. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that would have been difficult for Pat. Pat would have to make the decision. It's like,

I know you love your kids and everything, but this is my house too, you know? Yeah. And here's what I worry about. We just opened up a few days ago here in California for things back to normal. No masks, whatever. But I went to the bank. They still made me wear a mask. I went to the grocery store. They still made me wear a mask. I think this fear is going to be around for a while.

And it's going to, I don't know how you recover from a year of isolation and being afraid to laugh or sing in front of someone, you know, who is in the same room with you, how you get back to a place of normalcy when you've trained yourself for so long to fear everything. Fits and starts, like all progress, you know, it's not going to be a straight line. It's going to be jagged. It'll trend in a certain direction. And then I think it'll tip. Look, something just, I just posted something on my Facebook page just doesn't have anything

to do with Fred King or mentors or anything else. But maybe it does. In fact, you brought it to my attention. Just the other night, John. Stuart showed up on the Colbert show and dropped a truth bomb, unlike anything I've seen in the last 15 months. That was really one of the greatest videos I've seen in over a year. Because if you haven't seen it, John Stewart basically just goes on to say, look, this virus,

this coronavirus that came out of Wuhan, it's not unreasonable to assume that it might have come out of the Wuhan coronavirus lab. When the disease is named in the same name that the lab has, you got to at least look at it. It was funny. It was irreverent. It was ironic. And it was the first time in 15 months that I heard someone in his position say a truly funny thing at a time.

I mean, no one quite knew how to react. People laughed because it was funny. But all of a sudden, this is a beloved icon of the left. Yeah. Coming right out of the closet and saying, look, it seems pretty clear now that this thing started in a lab. So, you know, what will that mean for the mainstream media? What will that mean for social media? That video that I shared on Facebook, which has since been shared over 20,000 times

and reached like 4 million people in three days, that would have been banned on Facebook three weeks ago. Right. So, you know, when do the masks go away in the banks, in the airports, on the planes, in hospitals? I don't know. But there's definitely going to be a line of dominoes and certain dominoes are going to fall first. And certain dominoes are going to be more instrumental than others. And when they fall, influentially speaking, then the others will fall faster. But who, I don't know when. All I know is we've been out in the world. I mean, you and I were shooting in Georgia last July. Yeah. And in my mind, that's when it ended. But think about what that looked like, because it still was not normal at all. We were tested

every couple of days before we walked into the studio, you know, when we left our hotel room, before we even made it to the lobby, we had masks on, you know, our driver had a mask on. You know, our driver had a mask on. We didn't eat. We went to a restaurant one time in that whole week we were there. The rest of the time, we ate in Mary's room. Yeah. But you know what, man?

Listen to how I bring this back to the subject of hand. I can't wait. When we were in Atlanta shooting six degrees nearly a year ago, I felt brave, smart. and ahead of the curve. I felt like a leader. Hmm. Right? I felt like, look, somebody has to go first.

We can't spend the rest of our lives hunkered down and frightened. That doesn't mean we should be irresponsible. We need to play by the rules. But life has to somehow go on. And we have to figure out a way to do what we do. So we wound up with 40 people in a soundstage. all adhering to coronavirus protocols, everybody being as safe as we reasonably could. But we got the job done.

Not a single infection. Nothing went wrong. But everybody in my life, they raised their eyebrows. I was like, you're going to get on a plane. You're going to fly to Atlanta. You're going to shoot a show. And remember, a month and a half before that, we did the Dirty Jobs Road Trip. Right.

So during the lockdown, there were a couple of months where I felt like a victim. them and I had to play the cards I got and I just had to go along to get along. And then I remember thinking, no, no, we have to figure out a way. MicroWorks has to figure out a way to work. Dirty Jobs has to figure out a way to come back. Returning the favor. I sat in this chair. We did 20 episodes of returning the favor long distance.

Yeah. We figured all kinds of stuff out. And modesty aside, I'm really proud of that. And doing so made me feel vaguely superior. to a lot of people who just looked at it and said, no, no, you're being reckless. No, I'm not being reckless. I'm living my life. Fred King is in this book because he made me feel that way in the 10th grade.

He made me feel that way in the 11th grade and the 12th grade as well. And he did it by bringing me into areas and worlds and subcultures that I didn't know existed. Dude, I mean, let's be honest. If we look back, we were on the outside of cool. It's not cool to be in a school play. It's not cool to really get into music when you're in the 10th and 11th grade. It's not cool to sing barbershop with a bunch of old men every Tuesday night. To be in a barbershop quartet, he put us, you, me, and two of our friends into it.

None of that was cool. But we thought it was. We loved it. And really, when I look back at the most fortunate moments of my life, it was a drill instructor who made the Boy Scouts feel cool. It was my parents who made me feel sorry for people who were wealthier than us. There was no envy. They made me feel smug and righteous because I got to wear secondhand clothes that had already been broken in. But my poor friends at school, they were forced to wear those ridiculous new fashions.

So many people did so many things for me in my youth to allow me to feel like I was in the know, like I was having my own little peak experience in my own little bubble. And I guess maybe in a way, that's another way of saying that I had a safe space. I never thought of it that way. But because my parents were able to enjonder in me feelings of pity instead of envy, and because my scoutmaster was able to create this world of hyper-masculinity where the toughest people I knew were Boy Scouts, I didn't know that the rest of the world looked at scouting as this weird sort of uniform-driven, goofy,

code-driven, strange subset of freaks. I didn't know that. And in the end, the amount of confidence that Fred King gave me by challenging me and pushing me out of my comfort zone again and again in a thousand different ways, the fact that he treated me like an adult, Chuck. Right. I've told you this story. When he had to go down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to direct or to coach a big Sweet Adeline's chorus, he had been up a couple nights straight. because his quartet had been singing somewhere. He came into school on a Friday,

invited me to go with him, tossed me the keys to his Lincoln Continental, and gave me a map. I'm 17 years old. He gets in the backseat and goes to sleep and trusts me to get him to a location about six and a half hours away. He treated me like an adult before I was one,

and that made me one or helped get me there. Yeah, he taught you. He taught you how to be. how to act like an adult by treating you like one. He was my music teacher, but music was the last thing. That was secondary to all the other lessons. Secondary, hell, tertiary. Right.

You know, music was always there. It was always in the room. Yeah. But it was almost never the point. It was always a thing to heighten the point. And, dude, he did that. He did it in front of the old men with the course of the Chesapeed. Do you remember the stories he would tell the way he would make them cry?

Yes. It was really extraordinary. Anyway, to sort of land the plane on all of this, the decision to not stop working during the lockdown, the formation of a safety third philosophy, which still gets me in a certain amount of trouble today, the willingness to try, whether it's a dirty jobs road trip or returning the favor special. You know, we did the first Zoom show in the country. It was after the catch. Right. We literally did that in April. We were the first to do that. And I don't say that because I'm looking for praise or congratulations. I'm saying it because try not to try. Uwe. Get out of your own way.

get out of your head. Don't be afraid. Whatever it is you do for money, go do it. Don't wait for the all clear. Don't wait for the caution flag. I'm not saying be ridiculous, be risky. Don't take unnecessary risk. But if everybody sits home on their hands waiting for somebody else to give the all clear, the all clear is never going to come. John Stewart had to get out there and say a thing that a lot of people believe but are afraid to say. Fred King was always out there first. He was always out there trying a thing. He did not care if a joke fell flat. And they almost never did. He didn't care. He truly didn't give a damn what people thought, but he cared deeply about everything he did. A weird mix of apathy and passion. When he told a story, it didn't need to be funny

because he made you know that it was funny, whether you understood it fully or not. The way he told the story, the way he landed a punchline, you knew it was time to laugh. I mean, I think there were times where there were jokes that I didn't quite get, but his delivery was so good, it inspired me to react straight away. That's completely true. But what makes him completely unique is right next to that quality was another quality. and that was an unpredictable, dangerous quality. Yes. Fred King on a funny role was Don Rickles.

Right. Fred King Unleashed was truly one of the funniest things you could ever want to see. Fred King angry was freaking terrifying. Terrifying, yeah. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble. daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work

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I remember the first confrontation he had with you. The day you met him. Yeah. I kind of think that was the day I met you as well. Tell me. Well, it was mixed chorus, I believe, because there were boys and girls in the room. and Fred was taking roll call. And we were both in that classroom.

And I had been in an automobile accident recently and had whiplash. So I was wearing one of those stupid collars, you know, that keeps your head from moving. And, you know, I don't know if you remember this or not, Mike, but I used to be a bit of a wise ass. Dude, you were such a douche. God. No governor. You had no governor. I had zero governor.

And this, I'm meeting Fred for the first time and he's very quietly taking role and calling names. And he says, Chuck Klausweir and I say, here. And he looks up and he sees the collar around my neck. And he says, what happened to you? I said, nothing. What happened to you? And that was, I don't even remember what he said. I just remember that the way he said it made me shut up and be, yes, sir, no.

sir straight away. But I mean, he laid into me for, I don't know how long in front of the whole class at a very high volume. And then he went back to the quiet nature as he said, well, I hope you, I hope you get better. Or I hope that he'll, you know, sorry, sorry, you're in that situation or whatever. But it was something nice. And then he was back to quiet. And then it was just yes or no, sir. Well, he was a man of consequence. Yes. You know, every action demands some kind of response. And he was also an unpredictable man.

So he didn't always know what that response would be. But he demanded and commanded respect. And if you were disrespectful, openly disrespectful, he'd let you know about it. But again, what made him a paradox was that the reverence he had for, respect and the irreverence he had for everything else were really two sides of the same coin. And that is why what not how matters. That's why the duality of Uwe is interesting. Try not to try. I wasn't really thinking about that when I wrote about him, but when I listened to it just now, that that's the thing that hit me the most. In the end, there are so many lessons to

take from him, but that was the big one. Courage. Get out of your own way. If you're going to try to do a thing, master it, and then forget everything you learned. Think about the best moments we had with him, like the intimacy of the way he would sing sometimes. He would get frustrated sometimes with conversations and just come close to you and sing a song straight into your face to make a point. That is such an alarmingly strange way to communicate. It's so borderline inappropriate and strangely intimate. And yet when he did it, it was also equally masculine. And he was unique.

I miss him. But I shuddered to think where I would be had I not randomly signed up for that choir. But by the time I met you. the following year, I was still in the concert choir. I was also in the madrigal group. I was also in the boys' chorus. I was in the mixed chorus. Right.

If there was lunch or recess, I was in Fred King's classroom. I typically ate my lunch there. Do you remember, man, I don't know if I should use his name or not, but I don't think he'd mind, but you remember Larry? Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. You know who I'm talking about. Yeah, I know who you mean.

Yeah. This kid was right on the knife's edge of dropping out of high school and going straight down the drain. And Fred King took him outside and they squared off. He was so angry at Larry. And Larry was such a hothead. And Fred King slapped him around for real. Slapped him around. Physically got his attention.

I do not know this story. Oh, yeah. It was just a very, very, very different time. But that combination of physical violence, constantly challenging you mentally, constantly challenging you artistically, constantly being inappropriate with the jokes, it all conspired to make him both incredibly consistent and impossible to predict. Again, you know, the paradox. The Uway, the duality of Fred Kemp. and the weirdness. Where would you be without him? Would you be here? I mean, we certainly wouldn't be talking about this. No, I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, this is terrible. But I mean, I have

the memory of the last time I spoke with Fred. I was visiting Baltimore. I went to his house along with a couple of other people that we both know. And, you know, he held court in his living room. and he wanted to know everything about what we were all doing. And when he got to me, I told him what I was doing. And he said, are you doing anything with music? And I said, you know, not really. Not since I, you know, not since I left New York. And the disappointment in his voice was palpable.

He didn't, I think he tried to cover it. But I think he was, he was like, really? I just remember him saying like he was so surprised that I wasn't doing anything musically, and it broke my heart. You know, if you look at dirty jobs, it's, I didn't think about it at the time. Now, he died in 2008. He died the day you launched Microworks, as I recall. Labor Day. Labor Day, 2008. Yeah. I mean, talk about squaring the circle. Yeah. I didn't know it at the time, but I talked to him, oh, I guess it was a couple months before he died. And he just told me, he, he just told me, how tickled he was.

He followed my career closely. And he said, Mike, every time you burst in the song on dirty jobs, sometimes it makes me laugh. Sometimes it makes me cry. I'm just so proud of you. But to see you sing in a sewer,

you know, I wrote a couple of theme songs back in the early days. Yeah. And he was just like, oh, you know, I'll arrange that for you in four-part harmony if you want. And he was just, he loved that I would sprinkle some music into that show.

Yeah. And the thing I'm going to miss, well, I miss a lot, but if he were around, I would pay money to watch him watch an episode we just recorded. I think you just saw it. It hasn't aired yet. It'll come out probably in September. But we do a job in a little town called McGee, Mississippi. We clean a water tower tank.

Yeah. It takes forever to get up there. But once I get into the tank, I sing a little bit of Mendelsohn. And the thing I sing in the episode, here's a little Easter egg for you guys. We just circle back and watch this. But this is how Fred used to get the attention of like a hostess or not a concierge, but what do you call it? Like when you walk into a restaurant and you're waiting to be seated.

That's the host, yeah, the host or hostess. So we walked into a restaurant once, like five or six of us after a concert somewhere, and there was nobody there and the restaurant was crowded and there was no hostess. We'd been standing there for like a minute and Fred was getting impatient. So imagine a crowded dining room, maybe 150 people and the sound those people make, you know, collectively it's a muttering and it's fairly noisy but it's not deafening. we're standing there. Fred steps up on a stair, looks out over these people, still no host or hostess in sight. And he sings, he sings this passage from Elijah. I'll imitate it as best I can, but I can't come close to the size of his, size of his voice. But he goes, Behold, there shall be a day when the watchman upon the mountaintop shall cry aloud. Arise, ye. Now at this point, everybody has cracked their pants.

Everybody's heads snapped around. You can't imagine the sound filling this restaurant. And then he finishes, Get ye up onto Mount Zion, unto the Lord your God. It's so quiet. The host comes running from someplace. Everybody is staring at this little Don Rickles freak show

with a giant voice, me and half a dozen other students were immediately seated. And for the next hour and a half, no one can take their eyes off him. And he, of course, doesn't see any of them. He's just there with a couple students, totally focused on us, making us once again feel like we're the only people in the room. Yeah. While all of these civilians are just left with no choice, but to wonder, who is that guy? Is he an opera singer?

Who is he? He just flipped the switch and just like Bill Clinton or Bob Dylan could, in those moments, galvanized the room and left everyone confused, gobsmacked and curious about what might happen next. And of course, if you'll indulge me, what would happen next, oftentimes would be this ridiculous game. Sometimes Fred King could make a sound, make a fart sound that sounded so much like a fart. There was no doubt in your mind. It was a fart. And he could almost throw the sound across the room. It was like a ventriloquist with the fart noise.

Yeah. Yes. And sometimes in the middle of a meal, you know, somebody would sit down at a take. table next to us about eight feet away. And he'd go, and everybody would look at the person sitting down because it really sounded as if that person had farted. Even that person would check their own ass because they thought, what the hell? Fred King was obsessed with farts. He would throw these things at people and it would leave. I mean, I just never laughed harder in my life than I did at the embarrassment of somebody who was trying to have a meal who all of a sudden, everybody in the

restaurant thinks has soiled themselves. And of course, the rule was you can't laugh. Don't laugh, Mike. Yeah. Because that was part of the game. You never do the audience's job for them. And everybody else was the audience. You were in on it. I remember going to a restaurant before where, you know, you never knew which pair of teeth he was going to stick into his mouth. And this one time, he turned around and he had the three teeth, you know, there's one in the center and one on either side. And he's like, he's like, I'm wearing suspenders. You know, the hostess comes up and says, yeah, and of course they address, they address Fred because he's the adult, right? Hi, how many in your party? And he's like, I'm wearing suspenders. And he's got these three teeth sticking out.

And then immediately, I would just grab his hand. It's like, yeah, it's okay, Freddie. It's all right. It's good. Yeah, you've got suspenders on. There are four of us. Okay, come with me. Can we go now? Yes. And then he would play this character throughout the meal. Oh, God. Crazy. So inappropriate.

You can't do that. You can't do that today. No. And look, you can make a good argument that he probably shouldn't have. But what he did in those ridiculous moments of impossible awkwardness, he brought you into his world. He let you be in on it. You know, you became in on the joke. And it's probably a good place to live.

leave it because that that's the greatest gift he he gave to me he let me feel like I was in on the joke and the confidence that came from that impacted everything I did later RIP Fred yeah Fred King I hope gentle listener that you had a teacher like him somewhere in your past if you have kids I hope by some great act of fortune they wind up with a teacher like Fred King the country could use more of them to repeat my Episode 64 is the more comprehensive version of my tribute to Fred. If you haven't listened to it, check it out. There's some singing in there as well.

You might enjoy. This book does exist on an audio platform. I'm obligated to tell you you can have it if you want to download it over at Audible or wherever people do that. But come in here every week and listen to us unpack it for free. There's an option you might want to avail yourself of. What else, Chuck? Any other house cleaning things you think of?

Yeah. If you like what you hear, give us a review. Give us five stars and tell us. I read all the reviews. It's great fun. All right. That's fair. If originally I thought it would be a good way to attract more advertisers,

and I guess it does. But now I realize that the real value of leaving a five-star review is just to blow a little sunshine into Chuck Klaus Myers, otherwise dull and dismal life. He really does. You guys leave a five-star review, and then he'll send them to me. You literally send them to me an email. See? See?

People like us. I'm wearing suspenders. You know, there is some truth in what Mike has just said. Hey, you know what? There's one other thing. This is not really house cleaning, but people seem to respond to the idea of me asking you random questions. And so these, I want to just ask you two questions that are sort of deal with the

The tile, the story about Ode to a Grapefruit. Go ahead. Who's your favorite poet? Robert Frost. What's your favorite poem? That's harder, isn't it? It'd be weird if it wasn't a Robert Frost poem. That's what I'm sure.

It's not? No, it is. It varies. I know it's really hackneyed. I think The Road Not Taken was the most important poem for me because I was old enough to understand it when I read it. And then later, I was old enough to realize I hadn't understood it at all. So it meant a lot to me when I thought I knew what it meant. And then it meant more to me when I realized it can mean so many different things. Mending wall is a great frost poem. Good fences make good

neighbors in there. My most recent favorite is probably two tramps in mud time. Do you know that one? I don't know any of them. Oh, you idiot. I don't read any poetry. You know, speaking of poetry, Fred King, do you remember the limericks he used to tell? Oh, my gosh, yes, yes. I'm going to tell you a filthy limerick that he told.

No, you're not. I'm going to do it. And I need you to beep the bad word because I promise people. I would never use this word, all right? But Fred King, one of the hardest times he made me laugh. We were just telling the limericks back and forth, back and forth. And of course, there are very few clean limericks. But this was at the course of the Chesapeake is after rehearsed.

We were Johnny Jones. There are like 20 people. And he gathered everybody in. And he said, okay, here it is. There once was a man from St. Cloud who liked to say, No. No. I'm bleeping more than just the word, dude.

I'm believing this whole effing thing. This is... All right. You know what? You're right. You can't do it. It's too filthy. It's too filthy.

Oh, God. People are going to hate me for starting something I didn't finish, but you're right. I'm wearing suspenseful. enders. My God. What are we talking about? Oh, poetry. You answered my questions. I think we should go. I think we should end this. You don't want to ask me why Two Tramps in Mud Time is the greatest poem ever written. I already established that I don't read poetry. I don't. You ask you a question. I asked it for the people out there. I'm not even the least bit curious. Two Tramps and Mud Time is a great room. on what, not how.

Oh, no, I'm interested. The narrator is in the backyard. He's cutting wood. And out of the woods, two tramps emerge. There are lumberjacks. And they see him cutting wood. And they say to him, hey, we can do that for you for a small amount of money. And Frost, he doesn't want to pay them to do this because he loves cutting wood.

And so suddenly he's saddled with this moral dilemma. What is more important? The fact that I love cutting wood or the fact that these guys need to cut wood to make a living. So the poem is basically a rumination on the difference between a vocation and an avocation. So I can't believe you literally walked away. Now I can't even see. You're just gone? I'm right in the middle of explaining this poem and you're gone.

You're telling it to them, not me. I had to pee. All right. Look, I can take a hint. Chuck is taking a pee. If you're really interested in hearing my analysis on two tramps in mud time, join us next week. And I'll pick up right where we left off.

But I'm not going to sit here and imitate a literary critic while the producer of the podcast urinates off camera. That's where I draw. You got to draw the line somewhere, folks, and that's where I'm drawing the line. Thank you for listening. I'll be back next week. And the odds are pretty good at this point that Chuck won't be with me. Say goodbye, Chuck. Were you saying something? I'm back. Goodbye. See you. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast dependable delivery. so you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-Grangeer, click granger.com, or just stop by.

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