Mike Rowe: The Most Normal Abnormal Person (Pt 2)

Published Aug 8, 2023, 4:00 AM

Mike kicks off our special series “Supporting Greatness” where we interview those who’ve achieved public greatness about the unsung heroes and normal folks who’ve supported them. He hilariously (and beautifully) pays tribute to his father, grandfather, scoutmaster, and high school music teacher. 

Hey, everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army of normal folks. And we continue with part two of our conversation with Mike Rowe. Right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors, we now return to Mike and yet another normal person who supported him, Fred King.

He is a big one man. This is you know, it's funny. I didn't know what we were going to talk about, but it's a And just to be clear, there are women in my life who have been transformatively influential. In fact, with the exception of my producer Chuck, I only hire women. My business partner is a woman. I'm I like women, Let's be clear, however, I like however. Growing up, my mom, of course was always there, but it was men. It was men who grabbed me periodically by the scruff of the neck and said no, not that way, this way, not there here. And Fred King was the one who did that in a most meaningful way. He was my high school music teacher. If you saw mister Holland's opus, you know that's the kind of guy he was.

He could he changed the uh, he.

Changed the barometric pressure in a room when he walked into it. He was just a force. You know, he looked like Don Rickles, He had false teeth. He lost all his teeth boxing and playing football when he was in the Navy. But he was also the most gifted musician, and I ever knew he was known as the King of the barber shoppers. He was, Oh, that's where that comes from in your world, the barber. That's where that whole thing that comes from. That's why I sing four part harmony on all the commercials on my podcast, because a I can be. It amuses me, sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, and it's an homage to Fred King. Fred he started teaching an overly senior high the same year I became a freshman there and I still had my stammer, but I knew I could sing thanks to mister Huntington, so I signed up for all the choruses, and my chorus teacher, my choir teacher, was this freak named Fred King, who would he would challenge students in ways that no teacher could do today, just like just like mister Huntington did in The Boy Scouts. Fred Fred King occupied that part of the map that says here be dragons. He did things very, very differently and he turned my high school inside out, right, I mean, you're a football guy, right, I am, so you'll appreciate this. In his first year, during the homecoming weekend at Overly, Fred King went into the band the giant band room and took a snare drum and put it around his neck, and with me and about a dozen other people following him, he started marching up and down the.

Halls playing.

I mean a real like a like a charge into battle cadence on the snare drum.

Yeah. Yeah, that's like, that's like a march beat. That's exactly what it was.

And of course Fred played in a marching band for years. He played every instrument. We didn't know any of this at the time. We just saw this pied piper marching up and down the normally sedate halls of Overly, and people would come out of the classrooms. He'd march into the classrooms, disrupted the class He got.

The whole school.

To follow him out to the football field where the Overly Falcons were preparing to get there. Kicked again. I think we didn't win a lot, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter. He got like the whole student body out there and taught us the overly Falcons school song. We didn't even know we had a school song, but he taught it to us, and he made us sing it like with great pride. And he was another one of those guys, very macho, very manly, and masculine in all the traditional ways. But he would he'd look you a square in the face and weep as he was singing God Bless America or some old song about sweethearts and mothers and wars and all these things. It was such a He was such an interesting dude, and over that first year I formed a relationship with him rooted in the kind of trust that really, I think can only be fostered through music and a certain level of sacrilege.

You know.

He was just so compelling that I was really I was just enamored of the guy. And one day I found an album in his office called the Oriel four, and that's when I learned that he was the baritone and a world champion barbershop quartet. And that's when I learned that he conducted this amazing group of men called the Course of the Chesapeake, who had won international gold medals singing. This was a world that I didn't know existed, right. I took the album home and I realized after listening to it that I could hear all of the part and I could sing them, and I could kind of make sense of them, like a puzzle. And when I told him about it, he found three other boys in my class, one of whom you know Chuck, the guy who produces my podcast, and he taught us how to sing four part harmony. And then he brought us into this chorus of the Chesapeake where an army of men, not all of whom were normal, but many of whom served in the army, many of whom fought in the Second World War in Korea. These old guys would take us out after rehearsals for a beard a place called Johnny Jones, and they would teach us old songs and we would They called it wood shedding, you know, the kind of singing you should probably do in a woodshed where nobody can hear you. But it's how you learn to harmonize and how you learn to figure out these parts. And so suddenly every Tuesday night I'm getting I'm getting a lesson in music in history from men with gold stars and all kinds of metals for meritorious service in the Marines and in the army. And through it all was Fred. You know, he was always there for that. But the thing he did Bill, honestly, that changed everything. Later that year, he made me audition for a play for the school play. And what part it was Curly in Oklahoma.

Wow.

And he made me audition for this thing. And my problem wasn't the music. I could sing, I could hit the notes. I was all right, but there's a lot of talking in that musical. And I really didn't want to do my porky pig routine in front of, you know, eleven hundred students.

But he made me audition.

He made me do a monologue and I got maybe twenty seconds into it. I was doing a monologue from a play called The rain Maker, a character called Starbuck, and I know it. I'm getting through it. So Burt Lancaster did that. Yeah, that's right, the movie Once upon a Time. So I'm stammering and making a hash of it. I'm about twenty seconds in and I look out and Fred sitting out there in the audience with maybe you know, four or five other teachers and twenty other kids who are going to be auditioning, and he held up his hand and he said, Mikey, hey, I like what you're doing with the character here, but the character you're auditioning for doesn't stutter.

So do me a favor.

Stutter on your own time, and just do it once without all that porky pig crap. Okay, that's how he talked to me.

He really said it that way. He said it just like that, just like that. Matter of fact, did you feel undressed standing up there in front of it like that?

Well, yes, I was nervous, but I wasn't. I didn't feel disrespected in spite of the way he talked to me, because.

I trusted him.

I'd get that and I knew that right, and so I didn't like without thinking, without questioning the glibness of what he had just suggested, I do.

Right.

I did it without the stammer, and twenty five thirty seconds into it, he looks at me from the audience and he makes this gesture. He goes this kind of shrugs his shoulders as if to say, was that so hard? And I remember, Bill, it was a sound like this. In my head, something clicked and I thought, well, I don't want to oversimplify it, but I think maybe I'm going to just try for a while to act like somebody who doesn't stutter. And that was that wow, you know, to answer your earlier question. As it turns out, I didn't. I didn't have a physiological and I don't want people to hear stories like this and think that it's all in their mind. There are people stutter and stammer for all sorts of different reasons. Mel Till has had a different problem than I did. I was just shy, and I was just trapped in a version of myself that had limitations, and guys like my granddad and my dad and mister Huntingdon and mister King, they they weren't having any of that.

You know.

My pop told me the truth about my limitations. Get a different toolbox, right. Mister Huntington told me the truth about this comfort. Don't just endure it, embrace it. And Fred King told me the truth. Showed me the truth about what's possible in the world. If you act like somebody who has a temperament different than the one you were born.

With, we'll be right back. Two things. I lettered in six sports in high school, so that's what I did, and my freshman year, I tore up my shoulder during football season, and my favorite teacher was Deel Flickinger, who was the math teacher. He also did the great name Flickinger from North Dakota. He also did the stats for the football team, and I later learned that he was the starting center on a football team who hadn't lost, who didn't lose a single game from his freshman senior year four state championships, which doesn't really yeah, you know, And then I found out that he's a amazing musician and he also happened to be the chess team coach. Four years later, I found myself at the national championships in high school wearing my letter jacket with all my stripes all over it, playing chess against a bunch of kids that don't look anything like me. Because Dale Flickinger taught me to think about myself in different ways than I had before, and Mike, one of the reasons I thought about myself the way I had before is because my father left home when I was four, and my mother was married and divorced five times, so I had five fathers in my life by the time I was eighteen years old, none of which were worth assault. And it was my coaches and men like Dale Flickinger who largely defined who I am today. So when I hear your stories, despite the fact that we grew up much different ways from our family standpoint, I really do identify with how great people do support greatness, and that I don't think i'm anything. I'm not just like any of my coaches or any of my teachers or any of the men that I'm not exactly like any of them, but I'm one hundred percent like pieces of each of them. Absolutely, So in some I represent a piece of all these people. So the question then is from Fred, if the grandfather's humility, then the scout master taught you how to embrace the suck? What Fred teache? What's that word? Let's go with.

Let's go with the reverse commute, because really, when I got out of high school and then went into a commun unity college to really try and apply all of these lessons, you know, the road into my industry is just paved with IEDs and landmarks.

It's a very, very diffic brutal, for sure, it's horrible.

Yeah, but there's always another path, there's always another way to skin the cat and when I learned that I could get my union card, my Screen Actors Guild card, which is something I really wanted to get in my mid twenties because without that, you can't audition for union work. And if you can't audition for union work, you can't get an agent, and no agent will represent you unless you have your union card. But you can't get your union card unless you do union work, and so it was a closed system. Well, the loophole was it's totally miserable. So the loophole was, wait, if you really need to get into the Screen Actors Guild, you could get into the sister union, one of the sister unions, and this one was called AGMA. It was the American Guild of Musical Artists, and it oversaw the opera and the opera, the National Opera and the Baltimore Opera and all these other opera houses around the country. Held zero interest for me. The last thing in the world I ever imagined I would do for money was singing the opera. But if you could get in and get your AGMA card, you could then buy your Screen Actors Guild card because they're sister unions.

And so that was my way in.

I thought, if I can somehow fake my way into the Baltimore Opera, I will be able to buy my membership into this Green Actors Guild and then go about the business of becoming a famous television personality.

I mean, how hard can it be? Right? So I.

Went to the library, armed with all the lessons that Fred and Glendon and Carl Noble had taught me, and I got a recording of La Bom and I memorized the shortest aria ever written by Jiacomo Puccini, called the Coat Aria. It's less than three minutes long. It's an Italian And I walked around the streets of Baltimore for weeks with a sony walkman on, listening to Samuel Raimi make these sounds, these Italian sounds, over and over and over. And then I went to an open call and I auditioned, and somehow, somehow I got in. They were looking for young men with low voices. I checked both of those boxes in nineteen eighty four, and suddenly, just like that, I'm in the American Guild of Musical Artist and I'm able to buy my union card for the Screen Actors Guild. But then, you know, proving once again that just when you think you have a plan figured out or a commute mapped out, it's the reverse commute that winds up being interesting. Because the opera turned out to be a hell of a lot more fun than I thought it would be. The music was amazing. It was a whole new world to me, right, just like barbershop was, just like the boy scout. I'd never heard of such a thing, but suddenly I'm dressed as a Viking, standing in a repertory company with seventy other people, singing right, singing along in a production of Wagner's De Ring des nibel Lungeon, and and just having the time of my life. I mean, it was just such a kick. Pavati was on the stage, Domingo came through that stage. You know, James Morris, some of the greatest singers of the twentieth century were standing five feet from me.

And I'm a twenty two year old kid.

Dressed as a pirate, singing in a language he doesn't even understand. Because Fred King said, hey, do me a favor, try it once without the stutter stutter on your own time. Because Glendon Huntington said, no, dude, it's not enough just to endure it. Figure out a way to love it, right, So yeah, I mean, I hadn't really thought about it. But when you start looking back at those I mean, isn't it funny how the moments in your life that turn out to be the most pivotal you don't recognize when you're in the middle of it. It's only when you look back and you can start to get that thirty thousand foot view that you realize, for instance, that you never really did have a dad. You had five dads, but none of them were really the guy that you were supposed to have. Until the universe gets together and says, Okay, we're gonna send him a Fleckinger. We'll send him at del Fleckencher, We'll send him this, We'll send him that. It's yeah, it's a hell of a thing, Mike.

It's It's true. And the irony of irony is, you know, we're we're producing a show called an Army of Normal Folks to highlight normal folks in our communities that do amazing things despite the difficulties to overcome, and inside that occasionally we're talking to people like you who've reached really great levels but we're talking about the people that supported how you've reached that level. And the irony of ironys is you've told me that you revere your grandfather and he taught you humility. You revered your scout master and he taught you to embrace the suck, and you're vered a music teacher who taught you how to reverse commute. And the most valuable supportive lessons in your life that make up the essence of what you are came from the very most normal people on earth. A carpenter and a hard working grandfather, and a scout master who is a former military guy, and a music teacher in a high school, normal people that people would walk past every day and not give two thoughts about them as something special, who are in fact the most special people in the life of a man who's done amazing things, which to me speaks to every interaction and every opportunity we have in our communities can matter. If we make them count, We'll be right back.

You know. It occurs to me too listening to you talk that one of one of the things that Dell Fleckinger and Fred King and my pop and all these people had in common, that is, in short, supply today is a generalist approach to living like a general practitioner as opposed to a specialist. I think maybe we've we've entered the realm of speciality where we give such great deference to people who have mastered one thing. But life right, well lived anyway, requires lots of different competencies. And this was a big lesson in Dirty Jobs. Again, I didn't know it when I was learning it, but looking back, especially farmers, you know what is a farmer really like?

What's the skill?

Well, he's got to be a weatherman, and he's got to be geologist, and he's got to be oh, he's he's got to be a businessman for sure. You know, he has to be able to lay pipe and run electricity.

Many of them have to bevet areas. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I saw the show on the artificial insemination with the cow. That was crazy? Sure was that fun? Did you enjoy that?

That cow still calls me, I'll tell you that hilarious. I think the bull had a pretty good time too, to be honestly, yeah, are you kidding?

Man?

Dirty Jobs showed people the truth of work.

You know.

The first season was a rumination on feces, from every species. Right, We just we just showed you the reality of cleaning up all the crap the world makes. And season two was artificial insemination and the miracle of modern agriculture. And you know, we put things on TV that nobody had ever done before, and we did it with humor and honesty. You know that show, And this goes to humility too. We never did a second take. Everything you saw on Dirty Jobs was happening in real time. And so if you're not humble and you're making a TV show that doesn't do a second take, you're going to be because you are not going to be at your best ever, but you'll always be at your most actual.

And that's what we tried to do. I was going to say, you'll be the most real, You'll be the most authentic, for better or worse. Yeah, I get that. I get that because Undefeated. When those guys left Memphis with five hundred and fifty hours of film to make Undefeated, you know, the first time I saw the hour and fifty minute movie that came a result of those five hundred and fifty hours of film, it dawned on me. I was never asked to say anything or repeat anything. Or stand in anyone place or anything, and they crop together an hour and fifty minute movie out of five hundred and fifty hours of film. And I will tell you something, when you see yourself in the most authentic space on film for everybody to see, you better have some humility because it's a it's an eye opening thing to see yourself in those type of positions when you sound and act and react and look and feel differently than you think, you present yourself to the world, and it is an eye opener and you will get the humility from it. That's a fact.

Yeah, you know what I mean. It's funny. Every time you think you've really learned learned that lesson, you relearn it in a new way. At least I do. And I spent three years after the opera selling things in the middle of the night on the QBC cable shopping channel, and it was it was another world. It was a strange world. It was another experience that came about as the result of a last minute audition. But it was probably the best training I ever got for the industry I'm in today. And the funny thing was they fired me three times from that gig. All justifiably the third time it stuck in nineteen ninety three, and so when I left Bill, I didn't talk about my time at QVC. It wasn't a thing I even put on my resume. But years later, like I'd say, nineteen ninety nine, two thousand, maybe eight years later, to my horror, when the Internet first became a thing, I found this thing called YouTube, and on YouTube, somebody had started posting clips of me selling things in the middle of the night on QBC right when I was like twenty seven, twenty eight years old, like the Health Team infrared pain reliever and the Amcore negative ion generator and collectible dulls and diamondique and all this stuff. And the sensation of watching yourself on a computer screen just like this one doing something years before that you have absolutely no recollection of doing, but nevertheless can't deny having done because you're watching yourself do it. That's chilling and very instructive and very humbling.

It is. It is chilling. Mike. I want to tell you how much I really appreciate you joining me and taking the time and most importantly, you know, tell us a little bit about what did support the things you've done great. I know that Dirty Jobs is just completed. I think season ten. I guess you're back for season eleven, right, I don't know.

Honestly, thing's been on twenty years. Deadly's catch has been on twenty years, hitting no, no joke, unbelievable.

And you know you got your whiskey, you got everything going on. But ultimately what defines you is none of that. Ultimately what defines you is your grandfather's humility, your scout master's toughness, and your music teachers challenge of challenge of you to think of yourself in a different way. And I think that can't be a better example and illustration of what it takes to support greatness is take the best of all the people that have a positive impact on your life and culminate them into who you are. And you sharing that story with us is really cool.

Well, thanks, with your permission, I'd like to share one more thing.

It's real quick.

I don't know who in your audience that this might pertain too, But I run a foundation today and we award work ethic scholarships every year.

In fact, we do it twice a year.

We'll be giving away a million bucks in a couple of months for people who want to pursue a skill that doesn't require a four year degree. This was the real legacy of dirty jobs and the real legacy of my granddad. It's the foundations called microworks. We started it on Labor Day in two thousand and eight and we've helped about two thousand people so far get meaningful careers in the skilled trades. So it's something I'm passionate about, and it's something that's actually moving the needle. If you or anybody listening wants to pursue a career that's actually in demand, that won't require you to sign on to a mountain of debt, then think about a career in the trades. If that's for you, we can help at microworks dot org.

Microworks dot org. Do they just go on that thing and apply or tell you about themselves or raise their hands on virtually.

Yeah, you got to jump through some hoops, right, Yeah, look, full disclosure, and this ultimately is the best tribute I can pay to all the men we've discussed. Our scholarship program is called work Ethic Scholarships, right, so yeah, I need to see some references. I ask you to write an essay, I ask you to make a videotape and make a persuasive case for yourself and tell us why we should spend the money that we raise on you. But I'll tell you something, Bill, the success stories are amazing so many people now, because we've been doing it a while, I circle back now and I see how people are doing, and I hear from welders and steamfitters and pipe fitters and electricians and plumbers and so forth, and they're all making six figures. They're all leading balanced lives. So look, I mean, if you really want to land the plane back with noble, that's where it was for me. My pop went to the seventh grade, wound up being one of the smartest people I ever met, one of the most competent people you'd ever want to know. And so my foundation today is you know, that evolved from him, just as surely as dirty jobs did. And it's nice for you to bring it up and let me talk about it. I appreciate it. If your listeners can benefit from it, that's why it's there.

Well, I'll tell you what I hope one day you and I can meet up and toast a couple of noble Manhattans to your grandfather.

That would be a very, very civilized way to us spend a warm afternoon in Memphis.

Well, the invitation always stands, my friend. Thank you so much for joining us, and we will continue to watch what you do and continue to listen to and appreciate who supported your greatness. Mike appreciate it. Thanks and thanks to all of you for joining us this week. If Mike grow, Mike's music teacher, his grandfather is scout Master, or any other guest we've had on has inspired you in general or better yet to take action, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. You can write me anytime at Bill at normalfolks dot us. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and on social subscribe to the podcast, rate and review it all of the things that will help grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'll see you ex week. Do mhm