A Yankee in Boise, Idaho

by The Cranky Media Guy

Man, I've got mixed emotions right now. I'm sitting in a motel room in Boise, Idaho where I'm just starting yet another chapter in this weird ass merry-go-round called my life.

I'm going to go to sleep soon and in a few hours I'll wake up to start the third day of my new job as part of a morning drive radio show. That's my future (at least until I screw something up and I get canned).

On the TV, the Yankees have just won their 37th American League pennant. From 1971 to 1979, I was a security guard for the Yankees (also the Mets and Madison Square Garden). Most of that time I spent next to the Yankee dugout.

I'm watching the players shower each other with champagne; I've been there when that's happened in the past. One year I was standing in one of the players' locker area, trying to stay out of the way of the commotion all around me. A man to my right said to me, "This is really something, isn't it?" I turned toward him to answer and realized that I was talking to Cary Grant.

There's probably a hundred stories I could tell you about the time I spent working for the Yankees (and maybe sometime I will). If things had gone differently, I might have been a Yankee "lifer" like my grandfather who was a security guard for them for fifty years. For a variety of reasons, that didn't happen.

I always tell people that the last time I knew what was going to happen next in my life was the day before my high school graduation and that's literally true. Right now I'm sitting in a motel room in Boise, Idaho, perhaps the last place in American I would ever have predicted that I would end up.

Back in he 70's, if you had told me that I would someday be doing radio in Idaho, I would have said you were crazy. Here I am, though. My future--at least my immediate future--is within the walls of a grubby-looking building on a residential street in Boise, Idaho. My past is under the lights of the big ballpark in the South Bronx.

I'm not complaining about how things have turned out in my life, but can you blame me if at least part of my heart is sitting on a stool next to the home plate end of the Yankee dugout?

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