A chance one-on-one with a former president reveals a common bond
The day George H.W. Bush and I oddly found ourselves alone together
Yesterday, while writing about a childhood memory of the time President Harry S. Truman came to Davis on a whistle-stop train tour in 1952, I remembered a time, much later in life, when I again had a chance encounter with another American president, George H.W. Bush.
At the time, I had been hired as the nighttime talk host at 50,000-watt KFBK in Sacramento, a station I lovingly and dramatically referred to as the Flamethrower of the Central Valley.
My on-air hours, Monday through Friday, were 9 p.m. to midnight. I'd start to close every show around 11:58 p.m. by playing "Mr. Sandman, Bring Me a Dream," assuming that most of my listeners at that point were tucked snugly in their beds and were using my voice to lull themselves to sleep. That may explain why the volume of callers to the show took a sharp dip during the 11 o'clock hour.
Yes, this is the same station that gave birth to Rush Limbaugh and another now-national talk host named Tom Sullivan.
When they added me to that duo in the evening, a talented ad agency director suggested they put up massive billboards all over Sacramento proclaiming "Get High On LSD: Limbaugh, Sullivan, Dunning" along with the station logo and our mug shots. I thought it was a great idea.
Management, however, rejected the proposal out of hand, probably because nobody knew who Limbaugh and Sullivan were.
Like all radio stations, KFBK was big on self-promotion, usually with some sort of charitable or public service connection. As such, it became a co-sponsor of an annual event called "Perspectives," where well-known national figures from around the country, mostly from the political world, would be part of an all-day seminar that included a fancy lunch and several meet-and-greet opportunities.
Ticket prices were hefty, as were a number of folks in the mostly male audience.
The speakers were mostly of a conservative bent, with a token liberal thrown into the mix to make the whole thing look fair and balanced. No one, however, was fooled. This thing was as Republican as your average Monday afternoon charity golf tournament.
Of course, this was 1995, when the terms "conservative" and "Republican" conjured up names like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and Pete Wilson, not Donald Trump, Kari Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Among the half-dozen speakers were U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, former President George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr. to some) and token liberal Mario Cuomo, the three-time Governor of New York.
Because I resided in the People's Republic of Davis, KFBK management assumed I was a flaming liberal, thus I was selected to be the one to introduce Cuomo to the thousand or so attendees gathered in one of the massive agricultural exhibit halls at Cal Expo.
When my turn on the stage came, I masterfully told a joke about the Pope driving the deeply Catholic Cuomo around New York City that brought down the house. Because he was the butt of the joke, Cuomo was not particularly amused, but hey, I was just doing my job.
Because all KFBK personnel working the event were expected to be there from start to finish, I retreated behind the curtain to a hastily put together "Green Room" outfitted with couches and chairs and snacks. And there at the end of one particularly long couch sat former President George H.W. Bush.
Alone.