Alexander Zaitchik's Article in Salon Entitled: The Making of Glenn Beck

Part 2

Link: [link to www.salon.com]

When Glenn Beck assumed morning-show duties at KZFM in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1983, the zoo model was ascendant. It was the year Scott Shannon moved to New York to found Z100, where Shannon's "Z Morning Zoo" made the station No. 1 in the market within three months of its birth. Closer to Beck's new home, John Lander had just launched what would be a long-running and heavily syndicated morning zoo on Houston's KKBQ.

Like dozens of stations launching generic zoos around the country, Beck's first morning show was titled simply "The Morning Zoo." It wasn't a playbook zoo, as it lacked an ensemble, but it had a zoo spirit. It was fast-paced and featured skits and fake characters voiced by Beck. Beck's main cartoon character was named Clydie Clyde, a Muppet-voiced alter ego who sounds like the love child of Yoda and Kermit the Frog. Today the descendants of Clyde live on without names. Beck lapses into voices to imitate anyone he doesn't like, while going boggly-eyed and waving his hands around like he's slipping on a banana peel. (Clyde was based on the most widely imitated such character at the time, "Mr. Leonard" from Shannon's New York Zoo team.)

"Beck's Corpus show was just him, Clydie Clyde and the news reader," says Tod Tucker, who hosted the slot following Beck's at KZFM. "He was extremely talented and he knew it. At first we didn't get along because he was so arrogant, but we became friends. He always talked about going to New York City and making it big. That was his dream."

He didn't advertise it, but at 19 Beck was the youngest morning zoo host and program director in the country. "At the time I thought he was in his mid- to late 20s," says Barry Kaye, former program director at KITE, a rival station. "He was an incredible talent to be working at that level at that age."

"Glenn was a talented young preppy kid with a bit of an attitude," remembers Meryl Uranga, a program and music director at KZFM. "I had never smelled clove cigarettes before I met him. Hanging out with Beck was also the first time I ever saw certain drugs. He partied a lot."

Along with giving Beck the space to develop creatively, Corpus Christi offered a crash course in the business side of radio. As a manager and programmer, Beck was responsible for tailoring KZFM's appeal to Corpus Christi's complicated market, a diverse population split between Hispanics, whites, blacks and active military. And there was enormous pressure to get the formula right. At the time, KZFM was engaged in a heated ratings war with its rival, KITE.

In the studio, the early '80s were the age of the zoo. In the back office, they were the age of federal deregulation. In 1982, the FCC began removing constraints on radio ownership across a range of areas, from public-service content quotas to filing requirements. Among the most consequential changes was the revocation of an "anti-trafficking" rule that barred investors from quick flipping stations for profit. The result was a radio bubble fueled by a newly feverish market for properties. To pick just one example from Beck's career, his future employer WKCI in Connecticut sold for $6 million in 1983. Three years later it went for $30 million. Between 1982 and 1990, almost half of the country's stations would change hands at least once.

This new quick-sell culture affected radio pros in numerous ways. As owners came and went, experimenting with staff and formulas, turnover rates increased. The result was a caste of radio gypsies like Beck, who wore signs that declared, "Have mouth, will travel." Increasingly, DJs did not know where they'd be at the end of the next Arbitron ratings quarter.

The new economics of radio also ushered in a new golden age of ratings wars. As station values and salaries ballooned, so did pressure for top ratings and media attention. Because morning shows were the biggest and most personality-driven piece of Top 40 programming, rival morning teams in the 1980s fought wars with entertaining, and occasionally bloody, ferocity. "Some radio people remember the radio battles of the 1980s for the off-air ugliness in the station parking lot," says Sean Ross, who tracks the radio industry for Edison Research.

Beck landed in Corpus Christi in the middle of an old-style ratings war. He was hired by KZFM as part of a station-wide blood infusion to replenish a staff that was being picked apart by KITE. The owner of the station and Beck's new boss was Arnold Malkan, a conservative Republican and attorney known for his hot temper and litigiousness. As Malkan hurled legal threats across town, the two stations' morning teams did battle on the air and off. As often was the case, this war involved a heavy dose of camp. The military metaphor of a ratings war became literal when KITE's morning zoo team christened itself the "KITE Killers" and began attending promotional events dressed in Army surplus camo fatigues and berets. "They'd roll up to promotional gigs and jump out of the limo in uniform, waving plastic machine guns," remembers Barry Kaye, a programmer at the station.

Beck manned the KZFM war room in his civvies, but had a military bent of mind. His hard-nosed mentor and recruiter, Jim Sumpter, instructed Beck and his fellow DJs to fight to win. "Sumpter was one of the most vicious managers I ever competed against," remembers Chuck Dunaway, a KITE staffer who arrived in Corpus Christi around the same time as Beck. "Our two stations would have bombed each other if we could have done it legally."

"Jim Sumpter was a master at guerrilla war," says Tucker, Beck's fellow DJ at KZFM. "I like to say that God gave Beck his talent, and Sumpter taught him how to use it." (Sumpter is now a "Birther" and syndicated right-wing talk show host.)

The morning mischief between the rival stations escalated following Beck's arrival in Corpus. Dunaway recalls early in his tenure showing up to the KITE studio and finding each of the station's front doors -- the only exit in a converted storefront building -- glued shut. A demolition crew had to knock the front door down so that the "KITE Killers" could get inside in time to start their show. Then there were other pranks that posed less of a fire hazard. Throughout 1983, Dunaway and his staff were anonymously placed on dozens of mailing lists for magazines and books delivered cash-on-delivery. The soundtrack for it all was a Beck-written "Ghostbusters" spoof that became a local hit during Beck's morning show, called "KITE-busters."

"We were the 'good guys' and didn't do any vandalism," says Dunaway, Beck's now retired former rival. "In 50 years of broadcasting, I have never been in a market where those kinds of things were done. Who was behind the mischief I cannot identify, but it was during the time Beck was the morning competition."

In pursuing a career in Top 40, Beck opted out of a college education. At least, the academic part of a college education. In the "Animal House"-inspired world of 1980s morning radio, Beck had found a real-world corollary to fraternity high jinx.

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Beck's one-man zoo at KZFM held firm against KITE's "Killers." He had won his first ratings war. By 1985, he was a polished morning DJ in the zoo mold. He had programming experience and two years' worth of tapes demonstrating "wacky" morning chops to broadcasters across the nation newly hungry for them.

One station looking to modernize was Louisville, Ky.'s WRKA. In mid-1985, the station tapped Beck -- who at 21 now had eight years of radio experience -- to headline the station's morning-drive slot. Despite being No. 1 in morning drive four years running, Beck's new bosses thought it was only a matter of time before the cultural curve came around to clobber them. The station had reason to worry. At the time of Beck's arrival, the station's on-air personalities and playlists were staid bordering on geriatric, as captured in the WRKA slogan, "Between Rock and the Rocking Chair." Anticipating his future bosses at Clear Channel and CNN, WRKA saw Beck as the bright new thing capable of drawing younger listeners. A $70,000 salary made Beck the largest investment in the station's makeover. As a signing bonus, Beck received a gold Rolex.

Beck's first full-scale zoo show was known as "Captain Beck and the A-Team." For four hours every weekday morning, Beck sat in WRKA's small, dimly lighted studio across from his producer and sidekick Bob Dries. Dries was Beck's Ed McMahon and Artie Lange, who cackled like a hen every time Beck cracked wise. "It was Dries' job to punch buttons to launch sound effects, and laugh like he'd just won the lottery at every single limp Glenn Beck joke," remembers a former WRKA colleague.

With Dries across the console, Beck directed a rotating ensemble cast and wrote or co-wrote daily gags and skits. Among the show's regular characters was Beck's zoo alter ego, Clydie Clyde. But Clyde was just one of Beck's unseen radio ventriloquist dolls. "He was amazing to watch when he was doing his cast of voices," remembers Kathi Lincoln, Beck's former newsreader. "Sometimes he'd prerecord different voices and talk back to the tape, or turn his head side to side while speaking them live on the air. He used to do a funny 'black guy' character, really over-the-top."

"Black guy" impersonations were just one sign of the young Beck's racial hang-ups. Among the few recordings of "Captain Beck and the A-Team" archived online is a show from February 1986 in which Beck discusses that night's prime-time television schedule. When the subject turns to Peter Strauss, an actor known for starring in television's first miniseries, Beck wryly observes, "They say without [Strauss' early work] the miniseries 'Roots' would never have happened." Clydie Clyde then chimes in with an exaggerated and ironic, "Oh, darn." The throwaway dig at "Roots," which chronicled the life of a slave family, wins knowing chuckles from Beck's co-hosts.

Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show on WHAS, a local AM news-talk station. It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used "the big blonde" as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis' marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. "The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn," explains Beck's fictional spy.

Despite the constant goading, Curtis never responded. But being ignored only seemed to fuel Beck's hunger for a response. As his attacks escalated and grew more unhinged, a WHAS colleague of Curtis' named Terry Meiners decided to intervene. He appeared one morning unannounced at Beck's small office, which was filled with plaques, letters and news clippings -- "a shrine to all that is Glenn Beck," remembers Meiners. He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful."

Louisville is where Beck began experimenting with another streak that would become more pronounced in later years: militaristic patriotism and calls for the bombing of Muslims.

The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show -- and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been -- but even then his politics were anything but tie-dyed. After opening the show with a prayer and Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Beck played patriotic music through the morning. The only track receiving multiple plays was a New Wave-ish spoof titled "Qaddafi Sucks." The song was a huge hit with listeners, dozens of whom called Beck to tell him how inspired they were by his patriotism. Caller after caller applauded him for "standing up for America." When someone argued that Reagan should have dropped more bombs, Beck agreed. "I personally don't think we did enough," he says. "We should've went over there [sic] and bombed the hell out of 'em."

What's most notable about this early version of Glenn Beck as Super Patriot is his near listlessness. There are none of the fire-breathing, teary-eyed histrionics that would come to define Beck's future radio and TV persona. Even while offering up star-spangled red meat, Beck sounds as if he would rather be smacking Liz Curtis around. When a young male caller suggests kidnapping Libyan agents and then torturing them by sliding them down razor blades into waiting pools of alcohol, Beck simply replies, "Thanks for the call. Buh-bye."

Whether Beck was tired or stoned that day, he was almost certainly depressed. Despite his creative freedom, local star status and high salary, Beck's mental state was on a slide. By his own telling, he was drinking heavily, snorting coke and entertaining thoughts of suicide. "There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it," Beck later wrote. "Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I'm only alive today because (a) I'm too cowardly to kill myself ... and (b) I'm too stupid."

Beck left Louisville at the end of 1986 a defeated man. His signature mix of Gadhafi songs, fat jokes and racial impersonations had made waves, but failed to produce numbers. With Beck at the helm during morning drive, WRKA slipped to third in the market. He was fired and the station brought its youth experiment to an end. As Beck and his wife packed their bags for Phoenix in early 1987, WRKA switched to an oldies format.

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Beck was hired once again as a strategic youth injection. This time the channel in need of fresh energy was the Phoenix Top 40 powerhouse KOY FM, known as Y95. The station brought in Beck to fill the morning shoes of a middle-aged DJ named Bill Heywood, whose mellow persona and long career made him a Phoenix institution, but one out of step with the times. Heywood may have interviewed everyone from JFK to Sinatra, but he lacked the zany chops needed to keep up with Beck's old friend from D.C. Bruce Kelly, then hosting the market's leading morning show on rival station KZZP. As ever, Kelly was a flamboyant master of publicity stunts as well as a top-rated morning jock. Since parting ways with Beck in D.C., he had completed the Boston Marathon on a custom pogo stick and convinced John McCain to dive into a pool of chocolate. To compete with Kelly, Y95 needed someone who could make a lot of noise. Beck was their man.

At first, Kelly was happy to have his old friend in the same town. "My wife and I were excited when Glenn and Claire told us they were moving to Phoenix," says Kelly. But these warm feelings didn't last long. Something had changed in Beck. In Phoenix, Beck became known for an outsize and mischievous ego -- a reputation that would dog him for the rest of his Top 40 career. This new Beck was symbolized by the cars that stocked the garage of his Phoenix ranch house: a navy blue Cadillac, and that symbol of '80s excess, a DeLorean.

The station partnered Beck with a 26-year-old Arizona native named Tim Hattrick. More relaxed by nature than Beck, Hattrick expected that the two would share duties on the show as partners. But Beck had other ideas. His first day in the studio, Beck called Hattrick into his office and laid down the law. "I remember Beck sat me down and pulled out a notepad on which he had drawn a planet being orbited by satellites," says Hattrick. "On the big planet, Glenn wrote 'Me.' Then he pointed to the orbiting satellites and wrote names on them, such as 'Tim,' 'News,' and 'Clydie Clyde.' I'll never forget Beck telling me I was a satellite. He was younger than me but carried himself like he was 35 or 40."

Dispelling any doubts about the station's new direction, Y95 also rented a mascot monkey, named Zippy the Chimp. Station managers flew Beck and Hattrick to New York, where they watched Scott Shannon run his zoo at Z100. Back in Phoenix, the Beck-Hattrick show was announced in a local TV ad that marks the 23-year-old Beck's television debut. In the 30-second spot, Beck appears puffy-faced in a brown leather jacket. Next to him is the slimmer Hattrick in a satin Phoenix Suns warmer. The two young DJs are sitting in the studio stirring each other's coffee when an announcer's voice declares: "The new Y95 morning zookeepers -- Glenn Beck and Tim Hattrick!"

Beck: "We told our bosses right upfront, 'We don't need gimmicks to sell the new Y95."

Hattrick: "We've got a better mix of music, great DJs who don't yak too much -- "

Beck: "Plenty of easy contests for you to win lots of free money -- "

Hattrick: "Plus more continuous music, Y95 Airborne traffic report, and special guests!"

Beck: "With all that, who needs gimmicks?"

As Beck delivers this last line, balloons and cash fall from the ceiling, model airplanes zip by, and a loud cuckoo clock goes off, sight unseen. Zippy the Chimp jumps onto the table wearing a yellow "Y Morning Zoo" T-shirt. The ad summarizes in 30 seconds most of what you need to know about the first 15 years of Beck's radio career.

Beck never grew close to Hattrick, who thought his new partner was talented but full of himself and incapable of thinking of anything but radio and ratings. "Beck lived, ate, drank and breathed radio," says Hattrick, who still works as a DJ in Phoenix. "It was impossible to talk to him about anything without reference to how to bring it into the show. I never once saw any evidence that he could turn it off. In that sense he was a one-dimensional person. But he was great at being a grandstanding, pompous idiot and shaking the brushes for attention."

Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly's market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. "I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning," remembers Kelly. "When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks -- everything. But I refused to mention Beck's name on the air, which drove him nuts."

Beck kept trying. When KZZP's music director held his marriage at a Phoenix church, Beck loaded up Y95's two Jeeps with boxes of bumper stickers and drove to the ceremony. As the service was coming to a close, Beck and his team ran crouching from car to car, slapping bumper stickers on anything with a fender. The service ended while Beck was running amok, and the KZZP morning team appeared just in time to see Beck jump into his getaway car. "Beck saw me standing in the way of the exit and gunned right for me. I threw a landscaping rock on his windshield and blocked him," says Kelly. When his old friend demanded he roll down the window, Beck reluctantly obliged. Kelly then unloaded a mouthful of spit in his face.

"Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks," says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP's program director. "It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention."

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.

Their friendship soured, Beck continued with the stunts, some of which won the competition's begrudging admiration. The most elaborate and successful of these neatly throws a double-spotlight on both the juvenile nature of morning radio competition and the culture of pop cheese in which Beck marinated for 20 years.

Toward the end of Beck's time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck's rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert's glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP's Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck's voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium's sound system: "The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!" As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing "Y95 Zoo" T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.

"It was brilliant," remembers Kelly, who gave Beck his first lessons in the art of publicity. "Totally brilliant. He nailed us."

In the winter of 1987, downtown Phoenix went without holiday decorations because of budget problems. Y95 was asked by the mayor to lead a fundraising effort to replace them. Beck and Hattrick came up with this idea to "steal" decorations from the City of Scottsdale. In the process, the pair was arrested. "It didn't quite go as planned, but it resulted in a lot of news coverage and contributed to a successful fundraiser," says Mike Horne, the station's general manager.

The stunt was a textbook case of media marketing 101: Attention is good; controversy is better. Outrage is the gift that keeps on giving. By his mid-20s, Beck had become a canny and mature publicity hound. This is seen most clearly in Beck's first national publicity coup. In September 1988, Beck and Hattrick invited Jessica Hahn onto the show. That month Playboy was featuring a pictorial of the former church secretary, who had become famous when televangelist Jim Bakker admitted to his affair with her.

"That evening, we took Jessica out to dinner," remembers Mike Horne. "I got up to go to the men's room and quickly found myself surrounded at the urinal by Glenn and Tim, who began lobbying me to hire Jessica as a permanent fixture of the morning show. They negotiated the deal, which was a rental car, an apartment and $2,000 a month."

One is reminded of P.T. Barnum's famous arrangement with his longtime prize midget, Tom Thumb, who received $4 a week plus board. And indeed Beck's showman instincts were worthy of Barnum: The hiring of Hahn as the zoo team's "prize-and-weather bunny" became an international story. Johnny Carson and David Letterman joked about it, editorial writers debated it, and as a result Y95 received a much-needed ratings jolt. When People magazine visited the station looking for a quote, Beck described Hahn's radio debut as "awesome" and explained that she filled the void of a "prize bunny for our zoo." The trio was short-lived, however. After a few weeks on the job, Hahn asked to be transferred to a nighttime slot.

Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck's wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife's pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

"After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad," remembers Hattrick. "I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air."

Beck would later make his national name by turning that lesson on its head. But not yet. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Beck resigned from Y95 to accept a job in Houston. Another also-ran Top 40 station needed a buzz-generator. Beck and his young family headed east, back to Texas.

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Beck arrived in Houston early in 1989. After years of moving forward professionally, the oil city would prove to be his Waterloo. Fueled by booze and cocaine, Beck would produce some of the worst radio of his life and tarnish his reputation in what one former colleague calls an "epic meltdown."

In a reprise of Phoenix, a No. 2 Top 40 station had hired him to compete with the market's leading station. His new employer, KRBE, aka Power 104, brought him on board at a salary well above that usually paid by its parent company, Susquehanna.

"There was a lot expected of him," remembers his old program director Gary Wheeler. Beck's salary, said to be around $300,000, reflected the scale of his task, which was something like the morning radio equivalent of a kamikaze mission. Beck was put up against KKBQ's "Q-Zoo," hosted by nationally syndicated zoo superstar John Lander. The mismatch was so great that nobody expected Beck to cut deeply into Lander's royal ratings. It was enough that he generate buzz while going down in sacrificial flames.

"KRBE brought Beck in to make some noise and to create public awareness through promotions," says Ed Shane, a Houston-based radio consultant. "They just wanted Beck to be Beck, because John Lander had cornered the zoo market."

For the first time in four years, Beck was working without a supporting cast. He would succeed or fail on the strength of his own personality and his box of cartoon voices, especially Clydie Clyde. Alone in the studio, he struggled from the start. Defined by regular back-and-forth with Clydie Clyde, the show fell flat with listeners and industry pros. Guy Zapoleon, who as a program director competed with Beck in Phoenix and Houston, remembers marveling at how bad Beck sounded. "It was horrible," says Zapoleon. "It was just Beck and Clyde talking to each other. No one could believe it was the same guy as in Phoenix."

Beck doesn't argue with this assessment. "It was the worst time in my broadcasting career, and I wish people would stop bringing it up," Beck told the Houston Chronicle. "It's the most embarrassing thing I ever did on radio. If I could make everybody forget about my time in Houston, it would be good."

"Glenn took risks and was able to generate talk, but he never took off in ratings," says Wheeler, Beck's program director. "The thinking at the time was Glenn was misplaced as a Top 40 morning host. He was not very hip and tended to sway in content toward things that might appeal to an older or non-music listener."

Among the lame stunts that Beck would like everyone to forget is his "breakfast meat" moment. On his first show, Clydie Clyde asked listeners to compete for cash prizes by mailing a slab of breakfast meat and a raw egg to the studio in standard issue envelopes. As Beck explained at the time to a Houston Chronicle reporter: "See, Wednesday was our first day and before that we had been running around like chickens with our heads cut off around here. And I had mentioned at one point that I wanted to meet the listeners at local malls. But Clyde took it in a completely different direction."

It wasn't just Beck who spoke to Clydie Clyde as if he were real. His conversations with the Muppet-voiced creature were so seamless and regular that listeners showed up at promotional events asking to meet the character. "People would arrive and ask, 'Where's Clyde?'" remembers Mark Schecterle, KRBE's marketing director. "We'd always tell them Clyde just left the building, but would be at the next event. Beck was a creative, totally nonpolitical disc jockey back then."

That judgment depends on how you define "nonpolitical." It was in Houston, whose adopted son George H.W. Bush was about to become president, that something began stirring in Beck hinting of ambitions that could not be contained on the platform of local FM radio.

In Kentucky, Beck's idea of supporting the military had been looping the words "Gadhafi Sucks" over a Duran Duran beat. Three years later, just a month into his new solo gig, Beck was playing phone tag with A-list publicists in New York and Los Angeles, laying the groundwork for a military-themed patriotic extravaganza. There was nothing zoo about it. It was an ode to Bob Hope by way of Casey Kasem.

The idea was grand in scope and classical in inspiration. During one week in February of 1989, Beck broadcast his morning show from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier patrolling the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast. After receiving clearance from the 6th Fleet, Beck began lining up prerecorded celebrity greetings and scheduled phone-in interviews with a dozen celebrities, which he then wove into the morning show, along with interviews with the Roosevelt's crew. Beck's handpicked celebrity guest list presents a family snapshot of 1980s American pop culture. Beck's broadcasts from sea included voice cameos by musicians Jon Bon Jovi, Eddie Money, LaToya Jackson, Joan Jett and Cheap Trick; actors Martin Landau, Wil Wheaton, Kathleen Turner, Brooke Shields, Lesley Ann Warren and Tina Yothers; and icons Bob Hope, Mickey Mouse, Pat Sajak and Ronald Reagan.

Beck's presentation, which hinted at his 2003 "Rallies for America," didn't stop there. He also hand-delivered thousands of homemade cookies and a giant white sneaker signed by thousands of Houstonites at a local mall. As Beck described it to a local reporter, the event was meant as "a gift from the people of Houston to the 6th Fleet to say, 'thanks for being there.'"

No doubt the crew of the Roosevelt appreciated the free morning entertainment. The same could not be said for Houston's radio audience. Not even Ronald Reagan and Tina Yothers could generate enough excitement around Beck's show to justify his enormous salary. "Radio is about numbers, and Beck didn't produce them," says Schecterle, Beck's KRBE colleague. "So they fired him."

It was not an amicable split. Beck had been working under a multiyear contract and fought hard for the maximum severance. "He spent his last weeks in Houston battling on the payout with the corporate programmer," says Wheeler. The battle was so drawn out it caught the attention of potential employers in the clubby world of Top 40 radio. According to a veteran morning radio hand, word spread that Beck was hard to work with and prone to wild behavioral swings. In industry terms, he had become "damaged goods." He was still only 26.

Part 3

link: [link to www.salon.com]

It was 1990, the midpoint of Beck's career in FM morning radio. The morning zoo craze had peaked and the economy had stalled. Eight years after leaving Washington state with a suitcase full of skinny ties and dreams of working in Rockefeller Center, Beck was now a morning-drive journeyman with a family to feed and a reputation to save. Despite breaking quickly out of the gate at age 18, Beck did not enter the new decade within sight of the industry's front ranks. New York's Z100, the leading station in his world, was not calling him. Neither were program directors in L.A. or Chicago. There were no syndication offers to compete with national zookeepers like John Lander and Scott Shannon.

After his personal and professional meltdown in Houston, Beck found a new job in Baltimore at the city's leading Top 40 station, WBSB, AKA B104. This time, however, he wanted a partner.

On the recommendation of a friend, he settled on a 27-year-old morning jock named Pat Gray. Although Gray and Beck had worked in Houston at the same time, they had never met. But the new team clicked. As Beck likes to tell it, it was DJ love at first sight, with the two bonding within minutes of meeting at the airport. Beck and Gray were unlikely bosom buddies. Gray was a Mormon who home-schooled his kids; Beck was a bong-ripping nihilist who could barely remember his kids' names. But they shared a sense of humor and a love of morning-radio mischief. They also shared similar if inchoate politics. After their partnership ended in 1994, both men would go on to pursue careers in conservative talk radio. They now work together on Beck's nationally broadcast radio show, The Glenn Beck Program.

In 1990, the duo had a once-great Top 40 station to revive. For much of the 1980s, Baltimore's B104 had been among the best-regarded Top 40 stations in the country. But by end of the decade, a succession of program directors and overactive managers began running the station into the ground. Part of the wipeout included a self-destructive image makeover: from hard-driving and flame-throwing to a mellow adult-contemporary station that ran TV spots featuring former Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer.

When Beck and Gray were hired, some saw them as saviors.

"Glenn and Pat were brought in to restore the morning zoo feel to the station," says Sean Hall, who read news at B104 during the '80s and early '90s. "I vividly remember the program director coming in early the first day, something he never did, and saying, 'This place really needed this.'"

On Beck and Gray's first show together, they held a contest that rewarded the first listener to buy 104 Slurpies at a 7-11. "They had obvious chemistry from go," says Billie Brown, a DJ at the station.

Along with a new partner, Beck wanted a new mascot. He spent two weeks calling veterinarians and pet stores live on the air, getting advice on gerbils. After choosing one, he announced that he was going to train the world's first bank-tube astronaut. Every day Beck would announce an update, some new detail about the gerbil's first mission. One day, he made a little cape; the next, he named the animal "Gerry the Gerbil." Each development was accompanied by a press release. When all the pieces were in place, Beck and Gray visited a local bank and sent the animal to a teller with a known fear of rodents.

"The build-up was amazing, masterful," says a former director at the station. "PETA was flipping out, picketing the station every day. Beck's on the local news. He took a stupid stunt and turned it into weeks of compelling high-publicity radio. He always knew how to get attention, how to get people talking about him."

The undisputed high point of Beck's tenure in Baltimore was an elaborate prank built around a nonexistent theme park. The idea was to run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world's first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. According to Beck and Gray, it was being completed just outside Baltimore. During the build-up, the two created an intricate and convincing radio world of theme-park jingles and promotions, which were rolled out in a slow buildup to the nonexistent park's grand opening. They then went to Kings Island in Cincinnati to record their voices over the sounds of a real theme park. On the day Magicland was supposed to throw open its air-conditioned doors, Beck and Gray took calls from enraged listeners who tried to find the park and failed. Among the disappointed and enraged was a woman who had canceled a no-refund cruise to attend the event.

"They never told a soul what they were doing," says Sean Hall, the B104 newsreader. "I didn't know until the morning it aired. People just drove around in circles on the beltway for hours trying to find the place. And that was exactly what it was supposed to elicit."

* *

Beck was known at B104 as a pro's pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. "Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street," remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. "At first we thought he was going to get lunch." The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck's arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car's gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was "completely out of it" when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, "Real America," Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck's coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. "He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was 'under wet blankets,'" remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague.

Despite their on-air synergy, Beck and Gray were not a ratings smash. They had created Magicland out of thin air, but they couldn't summon enough ratings magic to revive B104. After a year of struggling personally and professionally, Beck found himself working alone when Gray's contract was cancelled. When Beck was fired also, the two men spent six months in Baltimore living off of their severance, unemployed and plotting their next move.

The Glenn and Pat Show found second life farther down the radio food chain at the New Haven Top 40 station KC101. Coming from Top 20 Markets like Houston and Baltimore, the southern Connecticut station -- barely flirting with the Top 100 -- was a sign of serious professional decline. Making matters worse, New Haven was the closest Beck had ever come in geographical terms to his boyhood dream of working in Rockefeller Center. But the Manhattan skyline had never been so far from his grasp as it was in New Haven. Now approaching 30, Beck was no longer a boy wonder destined for greatness. He was staring failure in the face.



"There's nothing like being 18 years old in the fifth largest market in America, and then spending the next dozen years dropping 97 spots," Beck later wrote. Even had he wanted to, Beck could not have ignored the daily reminders of failure represented by New Haven's morning commuter rail service to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan. A New York complex was even woven into KC101's public identity: A station promo mock-bragged about its outsized 50,000-watt signal, "Five states and the world's greatest cities -- from a dumpy little building in North Haven."

Beck and Gray arrived at KC101's dumpy little studio building in early 1992. They were morning-show bounty hunters, brought to town to capture the scalps of the dominant morning team in the market -- the "bad boy" duo of Brian Smith and Bruce Barber of WPLR, which had established a lock on the prized 18-to-34 demo. Beck and Gray were famished for the success that had eluded them in Baltimore. A profile for the New Haven Register quoted their new boss, Faith Zila, marveling that the two spent up to eight hours prepping for every show. "I haven't seen anyone spend that kind of time," Zila said. "These guys would kill for a ratings win and I'm the same way."

Shortly after Beck's arrival in Connecticut in the winter of 1992, KC101 was purchased by Clear Channel. Although it was not immediately obvious, this would prove a momentous development in Beck's career. At the time, Clear Channel was still a small player in radio, with just 16 radio stations nationally. This began to change the year after Beck's arrival, when Congress relaxed ownership rules regulating the radio industry. By the year 2000, thanks to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Clear Channel had become a behemoth of 1,200 stations.

In early 1992, Beck was practically in on the ground floor of Clear Channel's national growth. Clear Channel's appearance ensured a level of security that was new in Beck's career. Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays told the New Haven Register that February that he had entered the market as a long-term "broadcasting operator, as opposed to just an investor" and stressed that he had "never sold a station." As one of the company's most experienced morning DJs, Beck got to know Mark Mays, who was on his way to becoming the most powerful man in radio.

Along with the purchase of KC101, Clear Channel picked up New Haven's leading news and talk station, WELI. Having this sister station would prove crucial to Beck's early start in talk radio. Before the end of the decade, a melding of the two stations' content would also create what the country would come to know as The Glenn Beck Program.

* *

But if some of the elements that would later lead to the rebirth of Beck's career were coming into alignment, that professional resurrection was still in the future. And his personal life was a mess. During his first two years in Connecticut, Beck slid further toward the abyss.

He was drinking and mixing recreational and prescription drugs. Once again, he earned a rep among his coworkers for being erratic and moody. "When Beck was not taking certain drugs he was supposed to be taking he could act very bizarre," remembers Kelly Nash, who managed Beck in New Haven.

"He didn't want anyone questioning his authority. I remember he fired our consultant and brought in his old friend Jim Sumpter. The two of them created and launched an in-house research project that made absolutely no sense. When I confronted him on the absurdity of his approach, he said, 'This is above your head.' Then he locked the door to his office. I thought, 'This guy is out of control. He's insane.'"

By 1994, Beck was suicidal. He imagined putting a gun inside his mouth and squeezing the trigger to the music of his fellow Washingtonian, Kurt Cobain, recently killed by his own hand. Everywhere Beck turned, things were falling apart. His marriage was failing. Pat Gray, his best friend and creative partner, was sick of Beck's drama, and about to move his family to Salt Lake City. (He would later describe the station under Beck as "a pretty cancerous place to be.") Beck saw his daughters only through a pot haze and in-between blackouts. Twisting the multiple knives in Beck's gut was the regular humiliation of Top 40 promotional stunts. In a typical KC101 event, Beck dressed up as a banana and dove into a pool full of Styrofoam.

Whatever humiliations he suffered, Orson Welles never dressed up as a banana.

Alone and peering over the ledge, Beck pulled back. In November of 1994 he attended his first AA meeting. That month he became a dry drunk and stopped smoking weed. He chopped off his ponytail. As 1995 opened, a sober Beck began imagining a future outside of Top 40 radio.

After getting sober, Beck went on a spiritual quest. He sought out answers in churches and bookstores. Joe Amarante, a local New Haven reporter, remembers Beck wandering into his Catholic church during Mass looking "puzzled." A similar confusion is reflected in Beck's reading list from the period. As Beck has recounted it in his books and stage performances, his first attempt at self-education involved six writers that formed a strange sort of Great Books program. Beck's curriculum included books by Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Adolf Hitler, Billy Graham, Carl Sagan, and Friedrich Nietzsche. As he surrounded himself with this brain trust, his friend and former partner Pat Gray argued in favor of the comprehensive worldview offered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Beck rejected Gray's overtures, teasingly calling him "freak boy."

Concurrent with Beck's mid- and late-'90s spiritual journey was his self-education in talk radio. In early 1995, Time magazine published a cover story tackling one of the questions raised by the previous November's midterm elections, in which talk radio helped fuel New Gingrich's GOP insurgency. "Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?" asked the magazine. "Electronic populism threatens to short-circuit representative democracy. Talk radio is only the beginning." (Earlier this month, 15 years after the Limbaugh story, Time ran a feature entitled, "Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?")

By then, Beck was already paying attention. "Beck was a close student of talk radio for years," says Sue Treccase, later his first manager in talk radio. "Before he thought he was ready [to do it himself], Beck paid close attention to successful practitioners of the craft." After finishing his morning show in New Haven, Beck would often tune into 77 WABC AM broadcasting from Manhattan, the nation's biggest news and talk station. Along with Rush Limbaugh, Beck listened to Bob Grant, to whom he continues to pay daily homage by greeting listeners as "sick twisted freaks."

Even before he cleaned up, Beck had waded into local Connecticut politics. Among his and Gray's favorite early on-air targets was Connecticut's Independent governor, Lowell Weicker, who had left the Republican Party after losing his Senate seat. Beck went after the liberal Weicker whenever he got the chance. "Governor Weicker had three teeth pulled the other day," Beck said in a typical bit. "I'd hate to see him in pain. Really excruciating pain."

One local politician who appreciated Beck's regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the '90s, until they fell out over Lieberman's refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck's search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn't last long at Yale. He took one class, "Early Christology," and dropped out.



In the spring of 1997, a colleague of Beck's suggested he do some bits with a local music columnist named Vinnie Penn. A fast-talking future stand-up artist with a bit of a goombah shtick, Penn was Beck's first partner in radio who was more ethnic than Wonder Bread. Beck never clicked with Penn the way he had with Gray, but the two got on well enough to produce four hours of morning radio every day. The two would be on-air partners until Beck made the jump to talk radio in 1999. "When I showed up in '97 Beck was in a sort of wasteland, looking for a partner," says Penn.

Beck hadn't yet given up on making it big in Top 40 radio. Within a month of teaming up with Penn, he began musing about the chances of syndicating their show. "Beck saw the syndication trend coming a mile away, I gotta give it to him," says Penn. "But he came to realize that talk was the easier route for him and the better fit. When I got there he was already wondering how he was going to sustain a career in Top 40 radio when his heart wasn't in it. He was like, 'Where am I headed?' At one point I remember him talking about joining the ministry."

Beck wasn't the only one beginning to chafe under the limits of a morning show based around raffling boy-band concert tickets for teenagers. In 1998, Beck and Penn were getting memos from management urging them to talk more about reality TV and pop culture as a way to attract young listeners. Penn, whom a local paper had dubbed "The Connecticut King of All Media," wanted to do edgier stuff. As his partner began thinking about talk radio, Penn began exploring comedy, eventually landing some guest spots on the Howard Stern Show. Their morning show became a microcosm of these midcareer tensions, with both men straining against the format: Beck talking politics, Penn working blue.

The more Beck dragged politics into the morning show, the more station managers grew alarmed. They told Penn it was his job to stop Beck from getting too deep with callers. Chastened by orders, Beck and Penn plotted ways to try and make politics entertaining. The attempt failed. By 1998, Beck realized he'd never be able to do what he wanted to do on FM radio, limited to talking fluff in between Britney Spears songs. Out of this failed experiment with Penn was born Beck's idea of "fusing" morning radio wackiness and political debate.

His talk radio identity still larval, Beck was already displaying the skills that would make him a talk-radio lightning rod. "He always knew how to work people and situations for attention," says Penn. "He could pick the most pointless story in the news that day and find a way to approach it to get phones lit up. That was his strong point -- pissing people off. He was very shrewd on both the business and entertainment sides of radio. He's built his empire on very calculated button pushing."

Not that this empire was imaginable back then. Mostly people noticed the button-pushing and wanted nothing to do with it.

"Anyone in Connecticut who says they knew Beck was destined to run an entertainment empire is full of shit," says one of Beck's former coworkers in New Haven. "The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I'm like, 'But you fucking hated him!'"

* *

The longer Beck stayed sober, the more his work depressed him. The high-flying zoo days were over, and he had no desire to compete with the new breed of shock jocks inspired by Howard Stern. If there were flashes of comedic brilliance on his show, they were not daily occurrences. With four hours to fill a day, it was mostly the radio equivalent of babysitting.

Beck did what he had to do, but his growing interest in talk radio was no secret to his colleagues and listeners. He wasn't just talking about talk radio, he was trying to practice it on his morning show, despite Vinnie Penn's best efforts to reign him in. Among those to spot the problem was Scott Shannon, the legendary zoo DJ who in the late '90s consulted on morning programs for Clear Channel. Part of Shannon's beat was monitoring morning programming at Beck's station, KC101. Whenever he visited the studio, Shannon noticed Beck veering farther away from traditional Top 40 morning radio. By 1999, Beck's desire to talk politics was seriously impacting his performance as a morning DJ.

"He'd get into these long, opinionated conversations with callers," says Shannon. "I had to tell him to cut out the long raps, which were not at all appropriate to the format." Beck acknowledged the problem and on Shannon's advice cut a deal with Clear Channel. Beck would be allowed to host a weekday talk show on one of Clear Channel's AM stations. In exchange, Beck promised to get back to bubble-gum-flavored Top 40 morning radio. "We needed to find a way for him to scratch his talk radio itch and do FM mornings at the same time," says Shannon.

At first, the double-radio career strategy worked. But the more talk radio Beck did, the more he wanted to do. In 1998, he surprised colleagues by linking up with talk radio super-agent George Hiltzik, a Democrat and a heavy hitter with New York's N.S. Bienstock agency who also repped Matt Drudge. (And whose son, Matt, now handles P.R. for Beck.)

"We were all shocked when he landed this big agent," remembers Kelly Nash. "It was like, 'Why is this guy with you?'" With Hiltzik making the phone calls, Beck landed some guest slots on "The Weekend" at New York's WABC, home to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bob Grant.

Within a decade, Beck would be mentioned in the same breath as the WABC all-stars. But first he needed to take a few trips around the block. He wasn't going anywhere until he outgrew his talk radio training wheels.

* *

Beck's first test in real-time topical talk radio came on Aug. 22, 1998, his second show on WABC. The broadcast aired two days after the U.S. launched cruise missiles at suspected terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan. Beck has archived the show on his website, and it is the earliest extant recording in the public domain of Beck doing political "hot talk" radio.

It is not a pretty sound. From start to finish, Beck seems unpolished and green as he limps through an attempt to put current events into context. While the show is technically amateurish, Beck displays, even at this early stage in his crossover period, a surprisingly mature command of being both obstinate and uninformed. Over the course of the show's first hour, he manages to propagate dangerous myths about the Vietnam War and those who fought it, denigrate a major world religion, mock peace activists and call for displays of air-power against distant lands.

Beck begins with an ironic playing of Cat Steven's "Peace Train." With the song playing softly in the background, he moves into a trope made famous by Bob Grant: loudly flipping through that morning's edition of the New York Post, the Bible of New York conservative talk radio.



But without his booming Top 40 voice, Beck seems lost. His first sentence is inaudible, followed by a mumbling dismissal of what he calls "hate rallies" taking place across the country in protest of Bill Clinton's cruise missile attacks. Beck recovers from his opening stumble with a long pause. He then riffs on the contents of the Post:

The good news is, partial birth abortion is still legal ... Sexual harassment is behind us. As long as they want it. I'm glad to know it's okay for the most powerful man in the world to prey on a lowly intern ... Best news in the Post today: 53 percent of us have come together to support our military tactics ... Quotes Arab press claiming bombings were a diversion ... Protests all around the United States ... Seventy-five losers in San Francisco. Lo-sers.

A story about the missile attacks catches Beck's attention. He stops to read the dispatch about the terrorist organization targeted by the recent missile strikes. Obviously encountering it for the first time, Beck attempts and fails to pronounce "Osama bin Laden." Embarrassed, he launches into a kind of loopy scat:

A paper in Pakistan received a letter from the spokesperson from, uh ... Asma ... Asma Bin-Lay-deen? Is that his name? Bin Lay-deen? Bin Jelly Bean Green Bean? Mr. Clean? I love him. He's hot. He says he's ready for war with the U.S. Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Baked Bean. Loosen the turban! Mr. Clean, Dig-my-scene. Oh, yes! Look at the latrine ...

That settled, Beck introduces himself to his listeners. "I don't really consider myself a conservative," he says, echoing Bob Grant's self-description almost word for word. "I know I don't consider myself a liberal. I have a brain and I like to use it sometimes."

With that, Beck is ready to take some calls.

Someone says, "The only message these people in the Middle East get is brute force." Beck agrees, likening that summer's African embassy attacks to Pearl Harbor.

Another caller says he doubts Clinton would launch strikes just to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal, considering that action might cost lives. This confuses Beck, who asks, "Lives? We used cruise missiles." It doesn't occur to Beck that the caller is referring to the Sudanese working inside the medicine factory destroyed by U.S. missiles.

The next caller supports the military action, adding that he "respects Jews, Catholics and Muslims -- everybody the same." To which Beck responds, "I can't go with you that far, Alan, but thanks for calling."

The next caller thinks America needs to "take the fight to the enemy." Beck agrees. "War has changed, it's the way we have to fight it." To drive home the point that "war has changed" and that America has entered a new and dangerous period in its history, Beck then segues to a commercial break with the chorus to "Danger Zone," the 1986 Kenny Loggins hit and "Top Gun" theme song. Further proving you can take the man out of the 1980s, but not the 1980s out of the man, Beck returns from the break with Toto's "Hold the Line."

Back on air, Beck dives back into the subject of dastardly peace protestors. He raises what would become one of his favorite subjects in the coming years: the lessons of Vietnam. "The problem with Vietnam is we didn't fight to win," explains Beck. "When you declare a war, there are no rules. Have you learned the lesson of Vietnam that we can't fight it half-assed? We need to fight it to the last body."

Beck then goes for the emotional jugular for the first time. The move comes in the form of a story about an unnamed "friend" of Beck's. This friend returned from Vietnam only to endure the abuse of protesting peaceniks. "He got off the plane from Vietnam and a woman spat in his face and called him 'baby killer,'" explains Beck. "Then he left his medal of honor in a trash can."

Whether Beck was aware that he was quoting almost verbatim from Sylvester Stallone's closing monologue in "First Blood," it is impossible to say. But whatever its source, the story is dubious. As documented by Jerry Lembcke in his book "The Spitting Image," stories of Vietnam vets being spit upon didn't gain currency until the 1980s. So many of those stories dissolved upon closer inspection that even after serious research efforts, not a single case of a Vietnam veteran being spat upon has ever been documented.

Beck's story about his veteran buddy sounds so pat that even his conservative listeners have to wonder. Within minutes, a caller asks, "About your friend who threw away his medal -- did that really happen?" Beck mutters, "Yes, but he regrets it now," then changes the subject.

A few minutes later, toward the end of the first hour, Beck shifts gears. After expounding on war and peace with the certainty of someone who has spent a life thinking about these things -- and not imitating Muppets between Bon Jovi songs -- he swivels into a disarming Socratic stance of admitted ignorance. It is a move that would play a large role in his future appeal: the average guy who tells you the way it is, then shrugs innocently and says, "But what do I know?" The transition is obviously unpracticed, and it jars, but for the first time in the show, Beck's words ring true.

"I don't have a stinking answer to save my life," he admits. "I don't know what's going on."

* *

At the end of 1998, Kelly Nash called Beck into his office and informed him that his contract would not be renewed when it expired at the end of the following year. "He just couldn't function as a Top 40 DJ anymore," says Nash now. "I told him we'd try and help him get his talk career going, but he was no longer cutting it as a Top 40 morning guy."

But as he honed his talk radio chops alongside his final year of morning radio work, a new Beck had been coming into focus. In 1998, he started dating Tania, the woman who would become his second wife. After they went on a church tour together, looking for a faith, they settled on Mormonism. In 1999, Pat Gray baptized his old friend a Mormon in an emotional ceremony. That same year, Tania and Beck were married. Toward the end of 1999, Clear Channel's Atlanta-based director for talk radio programming, Gabe Hobbs, received a phone call from the company's V.P. for programming in the Northeast. "He told me they had this morning guy in New Haven who wanted to get into talk," recalls Hobbs. "They asked me to go up there and speak with him."

Hobbs, who was also a longtime friend of Beck's agent, George Hiltzik, agreed. During their first conversation, Beck impressed Hobbs with his intelligence and determination. "He told me he had simply outgrown the juvenile nature of Top 40 radio. He said he'd go wherever he had to for a talk show," he says.

Hobbs immediately thought of Tampa, where liberal talk-radio legend Bob Lassiter was likely approaching the end of his career at 970 WFLA, Tampa Bay's leading news-talk station. Hobbs passed Beck's tapes to managers at WFLA, who were impressed enough to fly Beck down for an interview. Beck was torn over the possibility of leaving his young daughters back in Connecticut with his ex-wife Claire, but the chance was too good to pass up. Beck flew down. When the 35-year-old returned from sunny Tampa to a snowy New Haven, he was holding a two-year contract to host an afternoon talk show on WFLA.

"To switch formats like Beck did, and take it immediately to a top 20 market like Tampa, is almost unheard of," notes Kelly Nash, Beck's last boss in FM radio.

Not for the last time in talk radio, Beck beat the odds. At 3 p.m. on January 3, 2000, "The Glenn Beck Program" debuted in Tampa Bay.