It's funny how you remember some people who dropped along your path in life, people who played a small but important role in shaping the kind of person you hope you became.
One such person was Larry, the guy who taught me how to run an audio board at a small rural radio station back in the mid 1970s.
With one semester under my belt at a community college, the station manager from WBRV in Boonville, N.Y., hired me as a weekend disc jockey. It was for minimum wage, but I saw it as an opportunity I'd dreamed of getting as I pursued my degree in broadcasting.
Larry was only a few years older than me, but he had been with the station about a year since completing a technical school course in radio broadcasting advertised in a magazine.
He showed me everything he knew: how to run the audio board (the machine that controlled all the sources of the audio being broadcast), how to take meter readings on the station transmitter (required by the Federal Communications Commission), and how to be a disc jockey.
He also taught me how to make coffee and showed me where the snow shovels were located; these two skills were necessary for surviving most of those cold and snowy upstate New York winter mornings.
Larry's on-air shift was the afternoon drive, or 3:00 p.m. until the station signed off the air. At that time, most small daytime AM stations had limited hours of operation, unlike today's always on, 24-7 stations. His program was known as "All Request Radio" and listeners were encouraged to call in to request a particular song.
He'd read a long list of dedications following many of the top 40 hits in that era. It was a real lesson watching Larry handle three phone lines that seemed to always be lit up with callers, while at the same time being able to operate the audio board and communicate with his listeners.
The "All Request Radio" format at the station ended when new ownership took over in another year. Larry moved on and would eventually enjoy success in larger radio markets including Utica, Rochester and Albany.
He would later give all that up for a job in marketing and advertising sales at a newspaper in Albany.
I lost track of Larry after he left that small station. We got together once a couple of years later when we both worked in Rochester.
About 30 years later, he called me one day at my Central California home and we picked up where we left off.
From that day forward, we'd exchange e-mail almost weekly, and we would get on the phone about once every three months to talk about everything going on in our lives.
He was a Yankees fan, while I was embracing the world champion San Francisco Giants. He spoke lovingly of his wife Lynn and would tell me about his two stepdaughters, while I'd update him on my wife Vaune and our two daughters.
Both of us had come so far from that small AM radio station where our professional lives began decades ago. Our conversations were carefree, positive and humorous.
Unfortunately, he would soon learn of a cancer diagnosis and embark on a courageous battle to fight the disease.
Our calls took on a tone of fear masked with optimism; he would detail household projects that he was trying to get accomplished in what I now realize was an effort to get his affairs in order.
He would ask for prayers as he explained what his latest round of treatment would require from him and his family. But he never gave up.
Cancer would eventually take him from his family and friends. His condition worsened during the holiday season and he passed away in mid-January. He was 57.
When I spoke to his wife this week, she directed me to a radio station website that included the obituary and contained dozens of tributes from co-workers, former listeners from his radio career, and neighbors.
It was a great comfort for me to see so many people moved by the news of his passing. I reached out to some former colleagues from that small upstate New York radio station to share the news with them.
I remain grateful that he took the initiative two years ago to reconnect with me. He dropped into my professional life at the very beginning of my working career and then dropped in again a few decades later.
If you made a resolution this year to reconnect with an old friend, let Larry's story be a source of inspiration. It was for me.
Steve Newvine lives in Merced and worked for WBRV radio in Boonville, N.Y., from 1976 to 1980.
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