The Way I Heard It

by Mike Rowe

  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, popped something into his mouth, and walked back to the piano, glaring at those who had dared to 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 a rictus of rotten enamel. Tiny teeth—baby teeth—were crowded up against giant incisors. Molars 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, we did. We talked. We laughed. We learned. We marveled at all the false teeth: a grotesque 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 in 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 inspiring his students. “Instructing” is too weak a word: He pushed us as no other teacher had dared. He’d give us Vaughan Williams’s Hodie and Bach’s Mass in B Minor to sing—works so far beyond our ability that we didn’t know any better than not 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 saw me forget it, a couple of pages ago, up on the Mackinac Bridge—but a valuable one, nonetheless.

  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 audition for the school play. By “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, 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 on. New possibilities opened before me. I started to act like a nonstuttering person. A more confident person. A person who might, with a little luck, one day explain How the Universe Works, or sing arias from Puccini, or sell tchotchkes on live TV, or pickups for Ford, or become marginally famous for gathering sperm from racehorses on prime-time 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.”

  A simple thing, really, that turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded.

  KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN!

  Bob had a voice like a jackhammer, and when he raised it, recruits in the barracks at Eielson Air Force Base awakened as though a shotgun had been fired over their heads.

  “Rise and shine, dirtbags! Everybody up! Everybody out! Let’s MOVE IT!!!”

  As the young men sprang from their bunks, it occurred to Bob that he’d been yelling at recruits for as long as he’d been getting crew cuts. The work of a master sergeant in the air force—Bob’s job description—basically came down to yelling.

  “Come on, ladies, we’re not on vacation. Let’s GET THE LEAD OUT!!!”

  As the airmen prepared for yet another five-mile run, Bob looked through the frosted windowpanes of the drafty barracks and watched yet another sunrise light up the snowcapped mountains behind Moose Creek, the early-morning rays illuminating the distant clouds… the mighty fir trees standing along the riverbank like emerald sentinels… the massive boulder in the middle of the rushing stream where the grizzly bears perched, waiting for the salmon on their way to spawn.

  As always, Bob paused to let the image burn itself into his mind’s eye. Then he did something rather unusual: he quit. At thirty-eight years of age, the master sergeant vowed right then and there to leave the air force, stop yelling, and get out of the cold. And that is how Bob became a famous TV star.

  Actually, it wasn’t as easy as all that. It never is. Bob had no experience in front of the camera, and his road to stardom was paved—as such roads often are—with rejection and frustration. But Bob also caught one lucky break—a very lucky break—in the form of Annette Kowalski, who first saw him perform in a workshop in Clearwater, Florida. Years later, she recalled their first meeting.

  “I was in a deep depression,” she said, “grieving the tragic loss of my oldest son. Watching Bob perform changed everything. It wasn’t just his talent. It was the way he made me feel. He just lifted my spirits and radiated a quality that I knew America was starving for.”

  Annette wasn’t an agent or a manager, but she knew what talent was when she saw it. So she proposed a business relationship. Bob agreed, and in less than a year, not only did the retired master sergeant have a hit show, he had the number one program on the channel. Eventually he had a body of work that all but eclipsed anyone else’s, with four hundred episodes under his belt. And that was how Bob became a famous TV star.

  Actually, it wasn’t as easy as all that. It never is. Annette had no experience managing talent or selling TV shows. She waded through countless “nos” before finding a station manager in Virginia who was willing to put Bob on the air. Once that happened, it really was as easy as that—because Annette had been right all along: Bob had a certain quality Americans seemed to be starving for.

  Funny thing, though: in an NPR interview in 2016—twenty years after Bob’s untimely death at the age of fifty-two—Annette described Bob in a way that shocked listeners. She called him a “tyrant.”

  “You don’t believe that?” she asked. “Do you really think this company would be as successful as it is, if he didn’t insist that everything be done a certain way?”

  The interviewer was speechless.

  “I don’t want to leave the impression that he was rude or nasty,” Annette added. “He wasn’t. But he was very disciplined. Very strict. Believe me, it was Bob’s way or no way at all.”

  NPR’s audience might have been surprised by Annette’s frank assessment: that wasn’t how they’d pictured Bob being at all! But if any of Bob’s old recruits had been listening, they wouldn’t have batted an eye. Oh, no: “tyrant” would have summed up their former master sergeant nicely. Then again, imagine the shock they had gotten years earlier, when the man with the crew cut who’d screamed at them around the clock had suddenly popped up on their TV screens with an afro the size of a beach ball—and started whispering, in a voice so soft you could call it soporific, about “fluffy little clouds,” “happy little trees,” and “friendly little boulders to help Mr. Grizzly catch his lunch in our busy little stream.”

  They would have found it… confusing. Yet their sergeant was the very same man Annette Kowalski had discovered in Clearwater, Florida, giving painting lessons to strangers in a hotel conference room. The
soft-spoken art teacher who communicated primarily with dashes of titanium white, smidges of cadmium yellow, and touches of Van Dyke brown.

  Such was the color palette of the man who pulled Annette Kowalski from the depths of her crippling depression… the man who lulled millions of viewers into a hypnotic stupor every week on PBS… the master sergeant who’d let his hair grow out and vowed to never again raise his voice.

  You might not know him by name, but I bet you’ve seen The Joy of Painting—a little program that lives on forever in reruns, thanks to a man who spent the first part of his life screaming at thousands of recruits in the air force and the rest of it whispering ever so gently to millions of mesmerized viewers. A beloved artist named… Bob Ross.

  * * *

  Bob Ross wasn’t just an artist, he was a magician—a magician who could turn a blank canvas into a primeval forest or an angry ocean right before our eyes. His secret? There was no secret. Bob Ross worked without a net. He showed us exactly what he was doing and, in the process, gave me and millions of his other viewers the opportunity to follow along, step by step. Odd thing, though: whenever I tried to paint my own “happy little bushes,” the results were neither happy nor bushy.

  Odd, because the artistic gene runs in my family. My grandmother’s sister, Betty, was a terrific painter. So, too, is my cousin, Nancy. She didn’t start till she was in her fifties, but once she discovered her talent she never put down the brush. Several of her paintings hang in my home today. To my eye they’re every bit as good as anything I’ve ever seen on The Joy of Painting. But, without question, the most skilled artist in my family was an industrial artist—my grandfather Carl Knobel.

  An electrician by trade, Pop could repair anything. Didn’t matter what the “it” was—a broken watch, a faulty furnace, a busted engine—he would either fix it or build a new one from scratch. Pop never made it past the seventh grade, but he was plenty smart. He was also patient, though I never once saw him read the instructions to anything. He just seemed to know how things worked.

  When I was still a small boy, my father showed me a bronze plaque in the church we attended; the same church whose basement would become a permanent home for Troop 16. Pop had built much of that church, and that plaque inside it reads:

  IN HONOR OF

  CARL M. KNOBEL

  HUMBLE SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST

  WHO THROUGH THE YEARS HAS GIVEN

  HIMSELF TO THE PROGRAM

  OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AT THE

  KENWOOD PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

  “Look at that, son. Your grandfather has a plaque in his honor! Who else do you know with a plaque?”

  My grandparents were our next-door neighbors. We had the only two homes at the top of a hill tucked away in a corner of Baltimore County, Mom and Dad and my brothers and me, living no more than a hundred yards away from Nana and Pop. There was room for a cornfield, a pasture where Mom kept her horses, and a big garden up by the woodpile. Off to one side, at the foot of a very steep hill thick with pine trees, you could just hear the traffic flowing off an exit ramp from I-95. My mother told us that the sound was the ocean, and for a while there, we believed her—until a truck hopped the guardrail one day and came halfway up the hill.

  Pop built the stable where Mom housed her horses. He’d built the family room in his own home—we gathered there for every holiday; every birthday; every other occasion worth celebrating. In the summer of ’75, when my mother started to feel claustrophobic in our modest farmhouse, my grandfather built her a family room, too, along with a patio. His addition to our house was nearly as big as the house itself had been.

  Every day that summer, Pop woke up clean and came home dirty. That was his way on any project: he started clean, ended dirty, and somewhere along the way a thing was built or a problem was solved. But this project was different. This work was magical, because it unfolded in front of my wondering eyes. Where there had been grass, there was suddenly a foundation. Where there had been empty air, there were now walls and a roof. Then there were windows and a fireplace—and then, in a twinkling, the summer was over and Mom had a family room of her own.

  I studied Pop’s every move on the construction site, determined to follow in his footsteps. I became his apprentice that summer and loved it. Odd thing, though: none of the work we were doing made sense to me, and things were no easier in school. In woodshop, I made a sconce that looked more like an amoeba. Pop nodded when I showed it to him and applauded my “creative” design. In metal shop, I made a steel safe that didn’t quite close. (I had also put the hinges on the wrong side.) I got an F, and this time I asked Pop if he thought the “handy gene” might be recessive. He laughed.

  “There’s nothing magical about what I do, Mike. I’m just using the tools I was given. You can be a tradesman, too, if that’s what you want to be. Heck, we’re all tradesmen. The trick is to get the right toolbox.”

  Was that the best advice Pop ever gave me? That’s hard to say. But without question, it was the best advice I ever took.

  THE BIGGEST NAME IN TOWN

  High in the hills of a town without pity, a stubborn sun slowly set on a warm September evening, even as a young starlet walked up the shoulder of some canyon road and out onto the property of the biggest name in town. She was apprehensive, understandably so. Partly because it was getting dark… partly because she was trespassing… partly because she was about to murder someone.

  For the record, the starlet was not violent by nature. But desperate times called for desperate measures. The studio head, a big man in town, was also a feckless fool without taste or common sense. He had all but cut her out of the film that would have made her famous. Just like that, in the blink of an eye, her long-anticipated debut on the silver screen had been reduced to a pile of celluloid on the cutting room floor.

  Could she have called HR? Could she have lodged a formal complaint with the studio? No. This betrayal would not be remedied with a hashtag and a me-too. This was personal. The starlet steeled herself for the task at hand, double-checked the contents of her purse, and approached the sprawling property of the biggest name in town.

  Five stories above her, the legendary icon looked down as the starlet approached. Her appearance was not exactly a surprise. Beautiful girls often came to this very spot. Usually they came around sunset. This girl, however, was a real looker. She was twenty-four, flaxen hair, alabaster skin, eyes that were bluer than a Montana sky. Oh yes, girls like her were always welcome here. Pretty young things with stars in their eyes, happy to barter everything they had for the one thing they didn’t.

  Five stories below, the starlet was smiling—smiling, in spite of her dark purpose. It felt good to fight back. She recalled the role that launched her career—a small but essential part in a Broadway production of Hamlet. At the king’s command, in a pivotal scene in Act V, her uncredited character introduced an all-important poisoned cup—one intended for Hamlet but consumed accidentally by the king’s wife and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. The starlet recalled that performance so clearly. It was more than worthy of an encore, of that she was sure.

  But enough with the memories: back to the task at hand. She knew the way in. She knew that her target was on the top floor. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself ascending each step carefully, one at a time. Up at the top, the view was sure to be breathtaking. The sun was now beneath the horizon. The lights of Tinseltown would be twinkling all the way out to the Pacific. But she would not be distracted. The role she was playing tonight was that of a cold-blooded killer—and she would play it to the best of her ability. She would betray nothing of her true intentions. She would simply wait till the moment was right—and then she would show the biggest name in town what real power looked like.

  The starlet checked the contents of her purse one last time. She made sure that everything was exactly where it should be. Then she began her careful climb up to the fifth story, where she delivered a truly Oscar-worthy performance.

  A hiker found t
he corpse three days later. A mangled body in a nearby ravine.

  Detectives were called, but you didn’t have to be a hard-boiled gumshoe or a Sunset Boulevard shamus to figure out who done it. The cops knew all about the starlet’s abrupt removal from Thirteen Women—her first and last major motion picture. They knew all about the financial difficulties that followed, along with the nude photographs for which she had been paid to pose. But it was the contents of her purse that closed the case just moments after it had been opened—specifically, a short note that read, “I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.”

  And that’s how the curtain fell on the final act of Peg Entwistle, a gifted actress who left a promising career on the stage to try her luck in Los Angeles. Alas, the only performance for which she’s remembered today is the one she delivered on that warm September evening back in 1932, at a famous address on the rocky slopes of Mount Lee, high in the hills of the town without pity. It was there, at the end of a canyon road called Beachwood, that poor Peg—her spirit broken by empty promises and shattered dreams—made good on her promise to kill someone by climbing the rungs of a rickety ladder, scrambling onto the top of a giant “H,” and throwing herself off the Hollywood sign.

  It was, after all… the biggest name in town.

  * * *

  You want to hear a host story?

  I don’t blame you. As the host of cultural touchstones like Worst-Case Scenario and How Booze Built America, I’m partial to them myself. But my favorite host story is the one I experienced firsthand at a production company in Burbank, back in 1997.

  Like Peg Entwistle’s tale, mine is full of hope and ambition. It, too, involves one of the biggest names in town. Unlike Peg’s story, mine has a happy ending, thanks to an excellent piece of advice that I still try to follow whenever I’m in front of a camera. I want to share that advice with you, because writing about Peg made me wonder where I’d be without the many words of wisdom I’ve received over the years. Maybe, if someone had pulled Peg aside at just the right time and said just the right thing, she would have gone on to her own, long career. Maybe she’d have a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Maybe she’d have written her own book about it.