An Army of Normal Folks - Mike Rowe: The Most Normal Abnormal Person (Pt 2)

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

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. Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an Army of Normal folks, and we continue with part 2 of our conversation with Mike Rowe right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. We now return to Mike on 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 gonna talk about, but it's, 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. I have my business partners in woman. I like women, let's be clear. However. I like women. let's be clear. However, I like women. I'll have a man.

I'll have a man. 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 Mr. Holland's opus, you know, that's the kind of guy he was, he could, he changed the, 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 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 guy, that's where that whole thing that you do comes from. That's why I sing for part harmony on all the commercials on my podcast because I, I can be, it amuses me. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable and it's an homage to Fred King. Fred, he started teaching

it 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 uh, 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, 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 crazy 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 their kicked again. They didn't win a lot, but it didn't matter. It 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 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, I formed a relationship with him rooted in the kind of trust that really I think can only be fostered through music and 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 Oreo 4, 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 parts 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 for 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 beer at a place called Johnny Jones, and they would teach us old songs, and they called it woodshedding. You know, the kind of singing you should probably do in a wood shed 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 a lesson in music and history from men with gold stars and all kinds of medals for a maritourious service in the Marines and in the Army, and through what 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, 1100 students. But he made me audition, he made me do a monologue and I got maybe 20 seconds into it. I was doing a monologue from a play called The Rainmaker, a character called Starbuck and I know I'm getting through it. So yeah, Bert Lancaster did that. That's right. Moving on at time. So I'm I So I'm stammering and making a hash of it about 20 seconds in and I look out and Fred sitting out there in the audience with maybe four or five other teachers

and 20 other kids who are gonna 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. Did you see the matter of fact? Did you feel undressed? Standing up there in front of you. Well, yes, I was nervous, but I wasn't. I I didn't feel disrespected in spite of the way he talked to me.

Because I trusted him. I get that. And I knew that, right? I trusted him. I 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 25, 30 seconds into it, he looks at me from the audience and he makes this gesture. He goes, it kind of shrugs his shoulders as if to say, I 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. To answer your earlier question, as it turns out, I didn't have a physiological problem. 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 stam that it's all in their mind. There are people stutter and stammer for all sorts of different reasons. Mel Tillus 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 Mr. Huntington and Mr. King, they weren't having any of that. You know, my pop told me the truth about my limitations. Get a different toolbox, right? Mr. Huntington told me the truth about discomfort. 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. I'm two things. I let her in six sports in high school.

So that's what I did. And my freshman year, I taught my shoulder during football season, and my favorite teacher was Dale Flickinger, who was the math teacher. He also did the great name. Yeah, 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 didn't lose

a single game from his freshman senior year for state championships, which is done really yeah. And then I found out that he's an amazing musician. And he also happened to be the chest 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. you're 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 in divorced five times. So I had five fathers in my life by the time I was 18 years old, none of which were worth a salt. And it was my coaches and then like Del 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 100% like pieces of each of them.

Absolutely. So in sum, I represent a piece of all these people. So the question then is from Fred, if the grandfather's humility, when the scout master taught you how to embrace the suck, what Fred teaches you? What's that word? Let's go with the reverse commute. Because really, when I got out of high school, and then went into a community college to really try and apply all of these lessons. You know, the road into my industry is just paved with IEDs and landmines.

It's brutal. It's brutal for sure. It's horrible. 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 totally miserable. So the loophole was, wait, if you really need to get into the screen actor's guild, 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 you know, 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 actor's guild card because there's sister unions. And so that was my way and I thought if I can somehow fake my way into the Baltimore Opera, I will be able to buy my membership into the screen actor's 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 Lobo M and I memorized the shortest Arya ever written by Jacamo Puccini, it's called the Cote Arya, it's less than three minutes long, it's an Italian. And I walked around the streets a ball to more 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 1984. 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, 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's, I was like, I'd never heard of such a thing. But suddenly I'm dressed as a Viking, standing in a Reptory Company with 70 other people singing, right? Singing along in a production of Wagner's

Daringed a Snibble Lunge, and just having the time of my life. I mean, it was just such a kick. Poverty was on the stage. Domingo came through that stage. You know, James Morris, some of the greatest singers of the 20th century were standing five feet from me. And I'm a 22 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 Glanton 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 30,000-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 going to send him a fleckinger. We'll send him a Del Fleckinger. We'll send him this. We'll send him that. It's

a hell of a thing. Mike, it's true. And the irony of irony is, you know, 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 that overcome. And inside that, occasionally we're talking to people like you have reached really great levels, but we're talking about the people that supported how you've reached that level. levels, but we're talking about the people that supported how you've reached that level. And the irony of ironies is, you've told me that you were a very your grandfather and he taught you humility. You've heard your scout master and he taught you to embrace the sock and you're a

very to 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 hardworking grandfather, and a scout master who was 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 cattle. We'll be right back. You know, it occurs to me too, listening to you talk, that one of the things that Del Fleckenjure and Fred King and my pop and all these people had in common that 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 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 a geologist, and he's got to be, oh, he's got to be a business man for sure. You know, he has to be able to lay pipe and run electricity. Many of them have to be that area. 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. Oh, hilarious. I think the bull had a pretty good time too to be honest with you.

Yeah, are you kidding, man? Dirty jobs showed people the truth of work. The first season was a rumination on feces from every species, right? 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 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 550 hours of film to

make undefeated. The, you know, the first time I saw the hour and 50 minute movie that came as all to those 550 hours of film, it dawned on me. I was never asked to say anything or repeat anything or stand in any one place or anything. And they cropped together and hour and 50 minute movie and a 550 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 high 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 learn 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 QVC cable shopping channel.

And it was another world, it was a strange world. It was another experience that came about as the result of a last minute audition. 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 1993. 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 1999, 2000, maybe eight years later, to my harbor 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 QVC, right, when I was like 27, 28 years old, like the health team infrared pain reliever and the Amcorp negative eye on generator and collectible dolls and diamond eek 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 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 10, I guess you're back first season 11, right? I don't know, honestly, the thing's been on 20 years. Deadly sketch has been on 20 years. Yeah, kidding. No, no joke. Unbelievable.

And, and you know, you got your whiskey, you got everything going on, but ultimately what defines you as 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 this might pertain to, 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 foundation's called MicroWorks. We started it on Labor Day in 2008. And we've helped about 2,000 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. So if you or anybody listening wants to pursue a career that's actually in demand that won't require you to you know, 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.org. Microworks.org, do they just go on that thing and apply or tell you about themselves or raise their hands. Just go 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 video tape 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 steam fitters 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. And my pot 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 of 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 beat up and toast a couple of noble manhattens to your grandfather. That would be a 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 Rowe, Mike's music teacher, his grandfather, his 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 billatnormalfogs.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 and army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'll see you next week.