This Is Larry Morrow . . .

Excerpt from Chapter 1

You Will Never Make It

It's been forty years since I graduated from the prestigious Detroit School of Announcing and Speech, and I still vividly remember the day my broadcast teachers Pierre Paulin and Jim Garrett, for whom I had the utmost respect, called me into their office for what I hoped to be a departing message of wisdom, encouragement, and final advice on how to succeed in radio. I wasn't prepared for what would follow.

It was Pierre who led the discussion.

“Larry, first of all, congratulations; you have graduated from the most esteemed and influential radio and television broadcast school in America. But I must tell you, Jim Garrett and I personally believe you are not going to make it as a broadcaster. You've coasted through this year when you should have been working hard on your voice. You have a very nice voice and an obvious talent, but you have not learned how to use it or express it properly. In this business, if you want to be a success, you have to dedicate yourself to this process—and you have not.”

I felt crushed. What Pierre said to me and what I had just heard were two different things. To me, “You will not make it as a broadcaster” meant “You will not make anything of your life.” After all, my future as a broadcaster was riding on his evaluation. I was staring down at a life-changing moment. I had just spent a full year trying to hone my craft as a broadcaster in an industry where I thought I had talent.

It's very difficult to measure success against failure when you're twenty-three years old. But this judgment placed me near the edge of self-rejection, nearly shattering my dream. Radio is a high-performance business; one has to be able to maneuver through periods of skepticism and emerge stronger and more compelling. I had been so certain I was on the right career path. Yet now my future had never seemed less clear.

Excerpt from Chapter 8

Radio Juggernaut

WIXY 1260 was now unstoppable. We had all embraced George Brewer's encouraging opinion that we were the newest and the best. Judging from the ratings, the Greater Cleveland marketplace clearly agreed.

The Eclectic WIXY Supermen

The core group of the WIXY Supermen did not represent the majesty of speech like our predecessors, Bill Randle and Phil McLean, who were both intellectuals and had been in the Cleveland market for a long time. While we were not academically vacuous, we were out to have fun and were marching to a beat of a different drummer.

George made sure the WIXY Supermen were always a unified team. Even though we were all as different as a dog from a cat, George coached, taught, and guided us in our on-air deliveries and assured us the response from our listeners would ultimately crush our competition. George also kept us within ourselves and our individual personalities. If we caused uncharacteristic mistakes on the air, like talking over the vocal of a song, he immediately called us on it and helped us through it. George always reminded us of who we now were: simply the best. Our current successes left us confident, and we knew we could beat our competition by following his plan.

Because of our enormously different broadcast styles, there was very little competition between the WIXY Supermen. You would think that with all these uniquely different ego-driven personalities there would be chaos, but the opposite was true. In retrospect, it was surprising to me that there was never a power struggle for fame among us. We all threw in our lots for the betterment of WIXY 1260, maintaining a delicate balance among one another.

There was also the unswerving loyalty to George. In the early development stage of WIXY, we partied often at George's home near the radio station in Seven Hills, with his wife, Cathy, who made sure we were all well fed. When we were together, we referred to each other by our nicknames. We called Dick Kemp, Childe; Lou Kirby, My King; Jerry Brooke, Brookeberger; Bobby Magic, Magic Man; and I was simply, Duker. Oddly, we did not have a nickname for Mike Reineri.

The Impish Mike Reineri

I can distinctively remember two of Mike Reineri's very funny Duker put-downs. While driving into the studio to replace Mike at 10 a.m., I heard him say, “The Duker has just arrived. By that I mean his nose is here; the rest of his body will be here in ten minutes.” Another memorable Duker put-down happened during one of our daily changeovers at 10 a.m. It was the first day of spring, and I was fashionably dressed in light green pants with a dark green shirt, a green and white striped tie, a green and white seersucker sport coat, and white, patent-leather shoes. When Mike introduced me he said, “You look like the president of a lizard factory.” I still laugh whenever I think about Mike's quick-witted humor.

Lou “King” Kirby

Lou Kirby, our King, bought a long Cadillac limousine, painted it black, and had a kingly looking WIXY crest painted on the sides in gold. He wore a red velvet cape and a king's crown. He always made sure he had a beautiful female chauffer him around town and to his record hops while he sat in the back seat. This was before the days of cell phones, so he carried a fake phone in his limo. I can remember riding with him; whenever we stopped at a red light, people couldn't help but stare at this unusual site. Lou would then make the phone ring and say to the person looking on, “It's for you.”

Dick “Wilde Childe” Kemp

I thought Dick Kemp the most extraordinary and entertaining nighttime personality I had ever heard—definitely one of a kind both on and off the air. He owned nighttime radio in Cleveland. One of his favorite lines was: “I'm the Wilde Childe. I live in the woods; I know all the trees by their first name.” The Wilde Childe was paradoxically different. He was both disarmingly charming and dangerously playful. One night when I dropped by the radio station to pick up my mail, I thought I'd peek in the studio just to say hi to the Childe. There he was with his headphones on, singing to the music, stark naked!

Another memorable episode with Childe occurred when Norm Wain called a WIXY staff meeting to meet our national sales reps from New York. Attendance was mandatory, which not only meant that we all had to be there, but we had to be dressed for the occasion. When the meeting began, the only one missing was Childe. Halfway through the meeting, you could hear and see in the distance the Childe riding his motorcycle down our 100-yard dirt driveway, wearing just his Bermudas and no shirt. When he arrived, Norm said, “Childe, you're late. Why didn't you call?” Dick Kemp responded, “I didn't have a dime,” which drew a burst of laughter from all of us, including Norm. Dick Kemp was, by all admissions, our most unique entertainer and the most talked-about WIXY personality by teenagers. And the ratings reflected it. Dick was the Wilde Childe in every sense of the word.

There was a radical on-air distinction between our different approaches to the audience. For example, I was known around the radio station as “Mother Morrow” because of the time of my shift, when most women were home during the day. Remember, this was the mid-'60s, just before women's liberation gained momentum and women began leaving home for the workplace.

We also had phrases that our audience knew and loved. I've given you some of Dick Kemp's. Mine were:

I'm here to get your heart to quivil and your liver to bivil.

Ain't nothin' cookin' but the peas in the pot, and they wouldn't be cookin' if the water wasn't hot.

Ain't nothing shakin' but the leaves on the trees, and they wouldn't shakin' if it wasn't for the breeze.

I'm here to put a little glide in your stride and some slip in your hip.

I'm jam up, jelly tight, and peanut butter right.

I knew these catch-phrases had caught on when people would come up to me and repeat one of them, or every once in awhile, all of them with the same funk and rock style that they were delivered.

Childe Goes Platinum?

At this time, I was married to Pam Conn, and we wrote a song for the Wilde Childe on the new CLE-Town label called “Wilde Childe Freakout.” The hook was from Tommy Roe's 1970 hit, “Jam Up Jelly Tight.” I'm still not sure who added the phrase “peanut butter right.” The song immediately sold 10,000 copies, with all the profits going to charity. After Dick Kemp left for our McKeesport, Pennsylvania, station, the phrase was so popular at WIXY that I began using it from time-to-time. To this day, many WIXY 1260 listeners give me credit for that phrase. Although we wrote part of it for him, the Childe made it quite popular.

Ramping It Up

During my first two years at WIXY, we were building our station unlike anything the market had ever seen and has not seen since. All of us were appearing at three to five record hops a week. I can vividly remember asking Norm if I could have one hundred pictures made of myself. I told him my plan was to visit shopping centers on the weekends and introduce myself to as many people as possible. I gave a picture to each person I met and asked them to listen to me on WIXY 1260. I wouldn't leave the plaza until all the pictures were gone. Just eighteen months later, due to WIXY's explosive growth, the appearance of a WIXY DJ at a shopping center would draw a crowd of two thousand.

Norm encouraged me to begin calling people from the White Pages every day before my air shift. As I made each call, I would cross off the name of the person I spoke to so I would never make a duplicate call. In the early days of WIXY, when we weren't that popular, I would spend an entire hour trying to get ten people to agree to listen to me. During my first two years of making those calls at 9 a.m., I called between fifty and sixty people because so many hung up on me. When they picked up the phone, I would say, “Hi, Mrs. Williams, I'm Larry Morrow, and I work at this new radio station called WIXY 1260. If you'll listen to me today I will mention your name.”

Starting year three, when the station finally caught on, almost every person I called listened to WIXY. In my sixth year at WIXY, I would begin calling at 9 a.m., and by 9:15, I had spoken to ten people and they all said they would listen for their names. The one souvenir of my six years at WIXY was the phone book; it had the names of over 17,000 people whom I had spoken to and had crossed off when they told me they listened to the station.

Excerpt from Chapter 21

Tune in to Morrow Tomorrow

Walt and Tony indicated that their plan was to spend more than $250,000 on television, billboards, and bus boards in our first year, and much of that would be on the new morning show. They kept their word. On New Year's Day, 1985, the day before I went on the air, WQAL ran a full-page ad in The Plain Dealer that featured my picture and the line: Tune in To-Morrow Tomorrow, on the all new WQAL 104.1 FM.

That phrase, along with my picture, appeared on almost every bus billboard throughout the Greater Cleveland area. It was also strategically placed on billboards on the heavily traveled expressways: I-480, I-77, I-271, I-71, and I-90. You couldn't miss the announcements proclaiming that Larry Morrow was now on WQAL.

My first day on WQAL was the first Monday of the New Year, 1985. When you opened your morning Plain Dealer that day, there was another full-page ad: Tune in Today, To-Morrow on the all new WQAL 104.1 FM. My shift began at 5:30 a.m. Just as I opened the microphone and began to speak, to my surprise, Walt Tiburski greeted me with a hot, steaming cup of coffee and said, on air, “Larry, here I am, all these years removed from WIXY 1260; I was your intern then and brought you coffee every morning just as you hit the air. And now, here I am, the owner of WQAL, still bringing you coffee just before you go on the air.” He had also bet me that I would not make it through the first hour without mentioning the call letters of my last radio station, WERE.

Much to my dismay, Walt won the bet. Five minutes into my show, I said, “Good morning Cleveland; I'm Larry Morrow on the all new WQAL. I'll be with you here on WERE until 10 a.m.” When you're nervous, and I sure was, you tend to remember your last radio station more than the present one. I owed Walt breakfast, which I bought later that morning as we celebrated our new life together.

Upholding Legacies

Had we not known better, we would have thought Joe Zingale was sitting at his table that morning at the Marriott peering into the future.

I have never believed in crystal balls, but in this case Joe was right. His comment to Walt and Tony during our breakfast meeting that morning would be a harbinger of things to come. We started getting ratings that not only supported our vision but brought new energy and idealism. Together we would validate the original design for WQAL.

Within a relatively short span of eighteen months, supported by over a quarter of a million dollars in advertising and very long days and nights, WQAL's morning show had come from relative obscurity to the number two–rated morning show in Cleveland and just three-tenths of a point behind the very popular Jeff and Flash at number one–rated WMMS.

We struck quickly. Beating WDOK's morning show appeared to be an insurmountable hurdle, but thanks to a prolonged advertising blitz and sticking to our game plan, we pulled it off. Rising to the top so quickly had enlarged my thinking and it sparked new excitement at WQAL far beyond anyone's expectations. In response to our ratings, WDOK was forced to make a change in its morning drive.

At this point in my life, I was unsure what was ahead.

Most of my workdays started with relative calm—up at 2:45 a.m., arrive at our beautiful studios on the eighteenth floor of the legendary Keith Building on 17th and Euclid Avenue by 4:30 a.m., read five newspapers, and hit the air at 5:30 a.m. Following my air shift at 10 a.m., the frenzy began: meetings with Walt and Tony about what needed to be done with programming and personal appearances, and special meetings with leaders in the community.

Walt was emphatic about building the identity of WQAL and my association with it. He protected my reputation like a treasure and wanted to use it to WQAL's advantage. It was critical that people no longer associate me with WIXY, 3WE, or WERE radio. When it came time for me to make appearances, Walt wanted to be assured that whenever my name appeared anywhere, WQAL would be right next to it: WQAL's Larry Morrow or Larry Morrow/WQAL. At any and all of my appearances, the two were never to be separated.

I distinctly remember a popular real estate company using my name to promote my appearance at one of its large functions. Walt caught one of the promotional pieces for the event with my name as master of ceremonies without the WQAL call letters. Walt called them immediately and said, “Correct it now or Larry will not be there.” They corrected the flyer and I appeared at the event. To ensure that his policy was enforced, Walt designed a contract for every appearance.

Because of the popularity of WQAL, I found myself in demand for commercials, speaking engagements promoting Cleveland as Moses Cleaveland, and charitable events. Occasionally, Mayor Voinovich or one of the leaders in our community would ask me to wear my Moses Cleaveland period costume to special events where they had invited a small group of visiting business people or mayors from around America. Sometimes the dinners were on a small yacht near Shooters night club. Following dinner, I would give the history of our great city while dressed as Moses Cleaveland.

WQAL's Split Personality

WQAL was an easy listening (“elevator music”) format going nose-to-nose with the rating bell-ringers in Cleveland radio. Soon after we had made our initial impact, WQAL made national headlines in radio publications as a result of its swift rise to the top. From our original meeting, Walt, Tony, and I designed a carefully balanced blend of talk and music in the morning and intuitively knew it would work. We knew we were going against the grain, ignoring some easy-listing rules that had made the format a national success.

Owners, general mangers, and program directors around America marveled at what WQAL had accomplished so quickly. Walt was invited to national easy listening seminars, radio group meetings, and roundtable discussions to speak about our success. He brought me along to talk about our ground-breaking morning show. We spoke about how we had carefully infiltrated our market with our newly designed morning drive template. We also knew we had carefully sculpted something exciting and radically different for our market. In our seminars with major-market radio stations across America, Walt Tiburski issued a warning, “It would be dangerous for other stations to use the WQAL template. What made us different were talented radio people who knew and understood the marketplace.”

He also cautioned them that Cleveland was experiencing a turnaround, and that I had been in the center of numerous community activities and popular civic affairs that brought tremendous attention to WQAL: from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to heads of entertainment venues, to interviews with the president of the United States. That's what we felt Clevelanders wanted to hear, and we were able to bring it to them. Walt concluded, “Unless you can pull off that kind of community entertainment and commitment, you had better think twice about changing.”

We were setting an explosive pace for our new morning format and rest-of-the-day-programming. To the easy listening national formats, although dangerous, Walt and Tony had not only defeated a contemporary foe in a major market, they climbed the ratings ladder quickly and had championed a new art form.

Dr. Digit Paves the Way

We were also blessed with men and women from sales, promotions, and programming who would dramatically change the way WQAL was viewed in our community. First and foremost Walt and Tony went after Mark Biviano, who had a fierce reputation as a tough task master and a tremendous sales record. He was currently working for WGAR. The hiring of Mark would guarantee a prolonged shelf life for WQAL. Mark had an unusual approach to sales and programming. He was also an intellectual whose thought patterns paralleled those of people who understood quantum physics, rather than radio. Mark had a solid grasp on the behaviors of salespeople and radio performers. Even more important was his ability to understand how the buyer made decisions and to persuade them to put their faith in commercials on his radio station.

By May 1986, Walt had surrendered his GM title to Mark, whom the entire WQAL staff referred to “The Biv.” I grew close to Mark and to this day refer to him as “Brother Biv.” We all benefited from Mark's wisdom. He had sayings that to this day I remember and quote from time-to-time:

Trying to make this happen is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

We have only three ways to look at a problem: It's fixable, worth fixing. It's fixable, not worth fixing. It's not fixable. Get it fixed!

You can't un-ring a bell.

I will decipher the Arbitron ratings, then Dr. Digit will make his report to the staff.

This last Biv-ism was a reference to Mark's ability to dissect the possible gains, losses, and flaws in the Arbitron ratings book. If there were any noticeable shortcomings in any day-part of WQAL, he knew the strategy to right the ship. To my knowledge, Mark was seldom wrong. He was also a wordsmith and lexicon expert. If he ever heard an announcer or a salesperson make any kind of grammatical error, he would correct them on the spot. I was his favorite target because he listened on his way in to work in the morning. I was an English major, so I believed I knew as much about the presentation of words and phrases as anyone.

One day Mark walked into my studio and said, “Duker, 10:03 in my office.” That phrase, 10:03, was a reference to the two of us getting together immediately following my air shift. We met almost daily. We would then thrash out anything he thought needed discussion. It could be anything from an interview he liked to a discussion with a listener that he didn't like. We rarely disagreed.

There was one occasion when Mark said, “Duker, I'd like to talk about your interview with the owner of the Cleveland Browns, Art Modell, this morning at 7:20 a.m. I'm sure you know a prepositional phrase consists of either a noun or a pronoun and any modifiers of the object.” “Yes, I do,” I responded. “Well, this morning, you used a noun instead of a pronoun.”

I began laughing uncontrollably and said, “Biv, you need to get a life.” Even today, some twenty-five years later, when Mark and I get together, we both laugh at those little nuances that made him unique and all of the announcers better. Mark's standards may have appeared overly rigid, but he strongly condemned certain behaviors, and incorrect grammar was one of them.

Mark imposed discipline on all of us as if we were his children, and he made us take responsibility for all of our actions. Additionally, Mark would not stand for any division within its ranks. He respectfully demanded that all departments within the radio station work in sync with each other, like a finely tuned Swiss watch.

During one of our management meetings, which consisted of the sales manager, promotions director, and me, Mark noted something rather serious had fallen through the cracks.

“Look team,” he said, “we have more to fear from inside inefficiency than we do from outside competition. Get it fixed.” His brand of wisdom kept WQAL razor sharp. Coming from the Marines, the one thing I learned was to trust your leader. So when you were told to do something, you just did it because you knew at one time or another, your leader had experienced it.

Mark made sacrifices many of the staff did not see, but I did. His transparency elevated people's expectations. It was obvious to all that he was driven to excellence and was absorbed in his work. Tony and Walt brought him in for that very reason. For me, it was leadership to be admired. Mark's greatest asset was his influence as a coach to all of us. Moving the ball forward was not good enough. Getting the ball in the end zone was the key. Nothing less, nothing more, nothing else.

Mark's toughest job was acting as intermediary for Walt and Tony, who consistently listened to their radio station. If they ever heard anything they didn't like, Mark got the call, many times on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon while he was home with friends or family. Mark was also a carbon copy of Walt and Tony. For the most part, and for me, working for them and with them on the management team was living a fairy tale. There was no room for anything but brilliance from the entire WQAL management staff. We all demanded that from ourselves and, ultimately, from each other.

Walt Tiburski Flexes His Promotional Muscles

It was 1985, and Walt knew he needed to dramatically change the culture in every area of the radio station, from sales, programming, and promotion, to the on-air staff. For the new culture to take hold in the same way as it had at WIXY, 3WE, and WMMS, Walt believed the station needed to own most, if not all, of the community and entertainment venues in Cleveland. Up to this point, there was an existing mindset at WQAL that as long as you could own one or two important venues in town, that was fine. But not according to Walt.

Over lunch one day, Walt explained his theory about owning the radio market. “Look, Larry, most radio stations in town believe that as long as they get their share of these important events, then that's okay. Well, it's not okay! Remember, here at WQAL, we run the table.” The term “running the table” is used in the game of eight-ball billiards when a player knocks all the balls in the pockets before his or her opponent ever has a chance to shoot.

Walt explained that it would be critical to form close and trusted relationships with those who controlled the Home and Flower Show, the Front Row Theater, the Boat Show, the Air Show, and the popular Cleveland Grand Prix. Once the ownership of these events was secured, it would mean tremendous exposure for the radio station, and at the same time, be a revenue generator.

After close scrutiny of those who could help us, it became apparent that Walt, Tony, Mark, and I knew most of the decision-makers. We focused on a strategy to bring every one of these events home to WQAL. At the conclusion of my morning show at 10 a.m., Mark and I would hop in the car and head to see another community leader; it was almost a daily occurrence. If we needed Tony or Walt, we called on them. I would get the biggest thrill from Mark after we left a client and brought home the order. Once we were seated in the car, Mark would clinch his fist, alluding to victory, and say, “Cha-ching,” referring to having taken an account away from another radio station. To me it was a game of chess. You maneuver your opponent's king into a check from which it cannot escape, thus bringing the game to a victorious conclusion. Checkmate, game over. It was a great feeling when this happened, and it happened often.

WQAL's First Major Promotion: A Chilly Beginning

In January 1985, our first month in business, WQAL had been playing an album by Richard Clayderman, a handsome, twenty-two-year-old French-born pianist. Richard had acquired musical acclaim at only twelve years old when he was accepted into the prestigious Paris Conservatoire de Music. At eighteen he had an international reputation as one of best-known and most successful pianists in the world, and by age twenty, he had six hit albums under his belt. His most recent album, The Classic Touch, and an earlier album, The Music of Richard Clayderman, had WQAL's audience humming. Walt decided to explore the possibility of bringing Clayderman to Cleveland. He contacted Clayderman's record company and struck a deal to bring him to Cleveland to perform at Larry Dolan's Front Row Theater on January 20, 1985.

Walt and Tony had only owned WQAL for a few weeks when this decision was made. This promotion would be WQAL's debut event, giving exposure to all of its personalities and setting the stage for what you could expect from Walt's and Tony's new radio station. We heavily promoted his appearance and, within a few weeks, half of the three thousand tickets had been sold.

On the day of the concert, Cleveland would experience the coldest day ever recorded. The high that day was -5, and the low reached -17 degrees. I borrowed this expression from Dick Goddard and mentioned on the air that day: “It was colder than the bottom of a beaver's belly.”

Because of the weather, both the Front Row and all of us at WQAL had reason to worry. We were understandably afraid that when the concert began that only a handful of people would show up. Wow, were we surprised. When I drove into the Front Row Theater parking lot, only a few spaces were available. The concert was a sell-out. As master of ceremonies, I had the pleasure of introducing our entire WQAL broadcast staff, all smartly dressed in handsome black tuxedos. The evening was framed in such a way that the message sent to the Greater Cleveland market was that WQAL's first public appearance was a harbinger of greater things to come. It was not only our new look but our new attitude. From that moment on we became broadcast and entertainment partners with Larry Dolan and his popular Front Row Theater.

Owning It All

Within the first two years of working together, we owned every important entertainment and community venue in Greater Cleveland; 104.1 was a promotional machine. WQAL's call letters were everywhere: on billboards, bus boards, and television. All of our WQAL personalities were on stage representing our radio station at almost every venue. Some of the events drew enormous crowds. The annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony drew more than 100,000, as did the Cleveland Orchestra's annual fourth of July free concert at Public Square. WQAL did not sponsor these events, but I was honored to host them for many years, which brought additional acclaim to WQAL.

In the mid-eighties, Channel 3 began to carry the Annual Cleveland Christmas Tree-Lighting Ceremony on television. Up to that point, I had acted alone as master of ceremonies. Now I would share the responsibilities with Jim Donovan, sports director of Channel 3. The ceremony is always held at dusk on the Friday evening following Thanksgiving. Santa Claus shared the stage with the mayor and, together, they would pull a lever and magically illuminate the 100,000 lights decorating the trees on Public Square, down Euclid Avenue, and all the way to East 9th Street.

Snow can be very pretty, especially around that time of year. It can also be a curse. On Thanksgiving Day, a countywide winter storm of gargantuan proportions draped a thick blanket of snow throughout Greater Cleveland. The temperature had also dipped into the teens. Public Square looked just like the setting of the 1983 holiday hit movie, A Christmas Story, for which several scenes had been filmed at Higbee's department store on Public Square, in addition to the now-historic Ralphie's house in Tremont.

As the evening began, Jim Donovan hosted WKYC's segment on television and asked me to join him on stage at the southwest quadrant of Public Square. Following an on-stage interview with Jim, I had a ten-minute break before joining the weather forecaster, Shane Hollett, for a weather broadcast on the Moses Cleaveland quadrant where the ice rink was located. My young daughter Donna had accompanied me to the event. Since it was so cold, we decided to pass the next ten minutes by joining Shane in the Channel 3 trailer to warm up. We thought this was a perfect choice because the trailer was just outside the skating rink where the weather broadcast would be. When we arrived at the trailer, producers, cameramen, writers, and talent were running around in chaos as though it were rush hour in Hong Kong.

Although there was a security guard positioned outside the door of the trailer, the policy was last person out, make sure the trailer door is locked. At some point while the three of us were inside, the last person out locked the door and inadvertently took the key. In other words, we were now locked in but didn't know it . . . yet. “Shane and Larry, you're on in three minutes,” the producer called out for our segment. Shane and I tried to go out the door. It was then that we discovered we were locked in. We pounded on the window and got the attention of the police officer who was guarding the door. We frantically motioned to him that the door was locked. He then tried to open the door and, with a puzzled look on his face, threw his hands up in the air and yelled to us, “It's locked!” Not only could we not get out, he couldn't get in to help us get out.

The only option was to exit through a small window, similar to the size you would find on a school bus. At this point we had no choice, so this was how we made our quick exit. Shane climbed out first so he could help my daughter with her landing. I climbed out last. The three of us were laughing as we stood in four inches of slush.

Shane was smart; he had galoshes on. Donna was more fashion-conscious and had opted for designer heels. As for me, I was plain stupid. I was wearing Gucci loafers, which meant that on landing, the force created a “slush tsunami” that not only covered my shoes but soaked my pants up above my ankles. My daughter is diminutive and slender, so her feet not only became soaking wet, they were brutally cold. She could barely walk. Shane and I put smiles on our faces, did the weather, and no one knew of my sopping wet, dirty, and very cold feet. Once my part of the program was over, my daughter and I headed for Stouffer's Inn on the Square.

I asked Pete Dangerfield, Stouffer's general manager, if we could use a spare room to thaw out. Seeing the pathetic looks on our faces and our obviously wet feet was all Pete needed to offer a helping hand. He immediately made arrangements where we could thaw out and get warm. We took the elevator to the seventh floor, where Pete had sent up two cups of hot chocolate. As soon as we arrived in our room, we rushed to the tub and filled it with warm water. We rolled up our dripping pant legs and soaked our feet. At this point, our feet were so numb that the warm water created a painful stinging sensation. So there we were, father and daughter, sitting on the edge of the tub, ankle-deep in warm water, sipping hot chocolate, as we waited for the circulation to return to our nearly frost-bitten feet. If we had closed our eyes for a moment, we could have imagined ourselves in a warm palace spa.