The Pretender
There all all kind of PRETENDERS. I’d like to pretend this does not hurt me. But it does. John Eldridge defines the POSER another word for Pretender as: “The Poser in each of us as men, that brilliant disguise, that “fig leaf,” is always in the way of the authentic masculinity that God hardwired into each of us.”
At 60 I’m no longer in Broadcasting or even finding a job in some related field such as a Church, Nonprofit Organization, Corporation, or Broadcast Station. I’m not sure why life has been so hard over the past two decades now. My last station was KZIA UPN 48 in 1996 to 1997. It was one of the lowest rated and powered stations in the El Paso market and nowhere close to a network affiliate. My last network affiliate was KTPX NBC 9 in 1986, 1987 and 1988. We had a potential audience of over 500,000 in the region but were considered a ‘small market’ station. Despite my efforts in the 1990s of El Paso and the addition of a Bachelors degree in 1994 and Masters in 2001 I never found gainful employment in an El Paso network affiliated station. The same in the top 10 market of Dallas Fort Worth from 2002 to the present.
I last interviewed with KDAF then WB 33 in about 2008. Tribune owned that station that had hired all of the news department of KDBC CBS 4 in El Paso when it went bankrupt. Even so I could not get the News Director to give me the time of day in an interview. Why not? If I knew the answer I would move heaven and earth to do whatever it took to become what he or they wanted.
The Poser or the Pretender pretends the hurts we suffer in life don’t bother us. Sort of a F-them attitude or we project an image that it doesn’t hurt. Now I know in 2007 the country was in an economic slump. Even Tribune was in bankruptcy. And that news director and staff did not last long more than a year at Channel 33 before it rebranded news in an entertainment style. I persevered applying with Fox 4 KDFW, Nbc 5 KXAS, Abc 8 WFAA, Cbs 11 KTVT, Pbs 13 KERA, the Daystar Network, Trinity Broadcast Network, even then a News Station KTXA Independent 21. No bites. Not in 2002 to my last application in 2012.
True, broadcasting changed and downsized radically after the switch to HDTV. Stations lost viewers, which meant downsized ratings, staffs, and advertising revenue. The same happened in Radio post 2000 as well. iPhones, smartphones, competition from streaming, apps, at one time cable, the satellite services and finally applications. Stations went through different owners, networks, divisions, and once powerful local owners sold to networks who streamlined operations and cut staffing and salaries significantly. Those changes happened all too fast and across the board in many markets. Smaller markets still needed people to make them work but they paid little more than a livable wage. Most paid minimum wages. Some hired only part timers and others eliminated jobs. Just like the recording industry went mothballed in an age of anyone able to record music and sell direct on the internet the one time gatekeepers no longer had gates to keep. Viewers, Listeners, all had other options for their news, weather, sports and entertainment.
Advertising agencies also scrambled as did independent production companies. Mine equaled my highest salary in 1999 thru 2000 of about $50,000 a year with my small independent video production studio in El Paso but post the Presidential contested elections that November and in a post 9 11 2001 world everything fell apart. Too Big To Fail if one remembers of the Wall Street Investment Firms and Banks; The Automotive Industry of GM, the Real Estate Boom to Bust and Credit Card companies as debtors could not pay their debts. Those were difficult and scary years. I weaved my production studio to other clients often with less than what I needed to stay solvent and keep the books balanced. I supplemented my income as a Substitute Teacher in the school year, working Holidays in part time jobs, then Six Flags over Texas for two summers in managing food stands and big box stores like The Great Indoors into 2004. When it closed I refocused my company to join a chamber of commerce in a nearby smaller community where I further starved. I picked up clients but they didn’t always pay their bills.
Then there was the good intentions of wanting to serve God. That has come up at several points of my lifetime. In the mid 1970s I helped a small broadcaster in El Paso put a cable station on the air as he purchased an old church and brought Cable 8 to the subscribers of El Paso. It turned later into KCIK Channel 14 before I left for college. In the 1980s with the rise of Satellite and Cable Networks I applied with Trinity Broadcasting in LA, CBN in Virginia Beach Virginia, PTL in Charlotte North Carolina and other churches from Los Angeles to Atlanta who were among the first larger to almost mega church world. Those were also the years of terrible scandals of financial, sexual and con artistry issues. I managed to rise in Radio instead in the late 1970s to 1980s of El Paso and Odessa/Midland. Through Oil Industry boom and bust I survived and broke even. And had the time of my life in the process both in high and low times.
I kept seeing the handwriting on the wall locally in Midland Odessa as friends and colleagues went back to college to retool for the coming 1990s decade. My brother went to law school and I returned to El Paso to seek a BA and Masters to better compete in broadcast communications. I did so after several near hires in 1990 at both NBC KXAS 5 with LIN Communications Fort Worth and its sister station KXAN NBC 36 in Austin. In both stations I applied from newspaper advertising for Creative Services Producer Positions and made all the cuts to the final 2 in each station. Both jobs were awarded based on everything being equal in experience but the other two candidates had College Degrees and I did not. So after two near hits I trusted God and went back to college.
El Paso in 1990 and the 1990s was no cakewalk either. The country was challenged after the Regan to Bush presidency years and several wars. I went to college on Pell Grants since the last years in Midland were in the oil bust economy. Low wages with Tax returns meant eligibility for Pell Grants and my academic achievements meant scholarships. I also worked hard in those years from work study jobs on campus in the Sports Information Department of Media Relations to the Fox Fine Arts Theaters as a Public Relations Marketing grant funded position. I also worked on KFNA AM when it was a daytime station in News Talk.
I worked at KFNA with one of the legends I had known in the 1970s of my youth in Bill Blair who was on KROD AM and KDBC CBS 4 when I interned on both Saturday’s in the mid 1970s. By the 1990s his career had hit the skids as well. “Old broadcasters never die… they just fade away.” Sad but true. No parachutes or retirement pensions for most of the broadcasters I knew. Even my mentor Steve Crosno faced a downward spiral in the mid 1990s to where he passed broke in 2007. A sad end to a really talented, kind and benevolent patron of Southern New Mexico and West Texas. So I knew in the 1990s I needed to retool academically to advance my career and stay competitive for the 1990s into the 2000s and beyond.
I reached that goal briefly in 1996 working for General Manager Ray Depa as his Creative Services Director and Production Manager at KZIA UPN 48 television. That brief success promoted Ray to the CBS in Hawaii with Lee Enterprises KGMB. But our station stalled as Lee out of Davenport Iowa with its 12 TV Stations in the face of FCC mandates to go HDTV by 2000 decided to sell all its stations rather than spend the millions per station to change technology. God though seemed to be with me as the Defense Contractor next door to us, MEE Mechanical Energy & Engineering Incorporated wanted to create a Corporate Video Production arm to that company and the CEO/VPs Quarter Horse Ranch in the Lower Valley. I went from $24k a year at KZIA to $30k for MEE and had state of the art digital video equipment in desktop video on Apple Macs and Media 100 nonlinear editing equipment. By the time I left in 1999 I was making $45k a year. But it too failed. Its CEO embezzled from his own company robbing the employees health insurance and 401k plans. He was also cheating the government. The US Justice Department in court cases took it down and stripped him of work for the government including all his personal assets. I was wise enough a year earlier noticing the issues to start my own company and get into the Desktop Video industry myself.
During those years there were our share of challenges. Both of my retired parents faced terrible health crisis. My mother first in 1994 had an unexplained jaundice liver failure. Evaluated by Baylor she was on a liver transplant list while I was producing a radio call in show for a Naturopath in partnership with an Internist in the city. His protocols and suggestions actually saved my mother’s life. She did not need a transplant in the end by 1995 but made a full recovery. It was quite the miracle. By 1996 though and after a normal great Christmas with my brother in Arlington Texas my father developed a sinus infection that had other symptoms. I was shooting my Masters Thesis on a pioneer of FM radio in Odessa when I was notified of his decline. I raced the 300 miles home to El Paso on New Year’s Eve and got him admitted to the hospital for test and evaluation. In the midst of a Pneumonia Outbreak he coded the next day and was on a respirator in ICU for three long months. He had pneumonia and organ failure but due to a Neuromuscular Disease called Myasthenia Gravis. It struck him in odds of 1 in 100,000 persons. And changed our world significantly. Dad was hospitalized most of 1997 with peaks and valleys as I took care of my mother and our household, our dogs, her to the Hospital every morning at 7 am, and I to work by 9 am, off at 5, back to the hospital and with them both until the 11 pm shift change of nurses. We had that routine for over six months and it was tough.
Arranging with the Muscular Dystrophy Association in Dallas my brother and I coordinated diagnosis confirmations and treatment plans that would be carried out in El Paso. The Irony was not left out on me from my pre teens of Jerry Lewis backyard carnivals for MDA to telethons as a teenager volunteering on cameras and production to radio years doing fundraisers such as our KQIP Van Lifts in both Midland and Odessa and then serving as telephone operators at the ABC Affiliate KMID Big 2 presenting checks for our part of the fund drives. A decade later I’m calling on MDA to evaluate and treat my father. It was not lost on me.
My father ate his first meal on Thanksgiving Day in the hospital as treatments continued and was home by Christmas. But a radically changed father and mother dependent on their eldest son to live new lives.
So I continued my degree plans, worked at MEE Incorporate until starting Stephen Myers Creative Services in August of 1999 and working hard with a dozen clients producing based out of our home in editing and shooting on location all over the El Paso Borderland region. One of my first clients was through a Media 100 global internet users group when I landed a contract for Ampersand Television, an arm of actor Robert Stack then famous for his NBC show UNSOLVED MYSTERIES as he produced a 7 part series for PBS Television in LORDS OF THE MAFIA. I was subcontracted by Ed Marsh in LA to shoot safely B roll shots of Juarez Mexico. Their former contractor with the BBC had ill advisedly taken his crew and equipment to Mexico where he was arrested, thrown in jail and lost all his equipment. They needed someone local to get the footage and save the shows in production. I used my contacts with the El Paso Border Patrol and former TV station colleagues to shoot all the footage from the safety of the United States but from the Custom Bridges into Mexico and supporting video from El Paso. When the shows aired a year later I had the pleasure of sitting with my parents and marveling with how much of that first documentary contained so much of my video footage.
Not a decade earlier in the late 1980s when I was working in Radio and in Community Theater of Midland Texas with the Summer Mummers had I impressed my parents and extended families so much as a big fish in the small ponds of West Texas Broadcasting and in theater. Proud moments of accomplishment and financial success. Credits on the screen at the end of the documentary and two more in production. Those were validation highlights trusting God that I would yet have a broadcast career and financial success despite the odds in a changing broadcast and technological world.
So I completed my degree program and thesis defense in May of 2001 but chose not to walk the commencement exercises. The added cost was partly a factor but it would have been to nobody really in attendance to see my achievement. I had the degree nestled next to my Bachelors Degree and thought the world was my oyster to find gainful business and employment.
My parents were facing hard truths about continuing to live in El Paso. Part of that problem was the exodus of medical specialists from the impoverished borderland region. Crime was on the rise out of Mexico as it had been throughout the 1990s and gunfire was spilling over into the city at the college, downtown and in gangland violence in Juarez. But economically through one time twin plants in conjunction with the US were now only residing in Mexico as the garment industry unraveled and the area was suffering. Meanwhile, my brother’s career as an attorney was flourishing in Fort Worth living in Arlington and his lobbying for us all to relocate so he could participate in our parents care could be more readily accessible.
I welcomed the suggestion. I also welcomed his pledge to use whatever contacts his firm had to gain access for interviews in local DFW TV or Radio Stations to further my career. We were on track to do so when two tragedies occurred: 1. My mother developed a brief scare with breast cancer and had to find follow up medical diagnostics in Fort Worth and 2. September 11th, 2001. Both were threats to our lives and livelihoods.
9 11 2001 came first. Air Traffic and Economic ramifications were heavy at the time. I remember walking my dog a few miles each morning in the stillness of almost no sounds of traffic by air or ground and seeking God what was to become of my life and career. Business had been in a slump since the Presidential Elections of 2000 as hanging chads and the court case of Bush vs Gore caused a lack of confidence in financial markets. It was the beginning of a recession that spiraled further after 9 11. I had three offers on the table for positions I applied for in Dallas Fort Worth before that fateful day. Positive response from CBS 11 KTVT for a promotions position with that station; Interest of Alcon Laboratories a global company based in Fort Worth for a campus wide AV/Media specialist; and a Media position with the new campus of Pantego Bible Church on the line with Fort Worth and Arlington. By the time our house sold in El Paso in November and we arrived the first day of December two of those jobs were frozen with KTVT and Alcon. Only the Church interviewed me that first week of December but admitted with offerings down 80% they not only froze hiring but started cutbacks and layoffs in their church. They suggested several other potential churches to visit in Arlington from Crossroads Christian to High Point, a start up of the brother in law to Joel Osteen then with Lakewood in Houston.
I had produced for the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1999 of El Paso and met contacts with First Baptist Dallas and First Baptist Arlington who in contacts left business cards to check with them if I were ever relocating to DFW but in calls I learned their churches and revenues were in similar declines to churches throughout the DFW Region. The Pastor of Crossroads was kind to offer a meeting but his church was fully staffed and planning to move a few miles east to a new campus. They had no openings either.
It was a dilemma.
I had some savings so it carried my bills into the first year of Arlington but I quickly opted to interview with High Point and start substitute teaching in the Mansfield and Arlington School Districts as soon as possible. And did.
What’s wrong with this picture? 30 years in broadcast radio, television, corporate communications, nonprofit organizations, church media. Freelance producer, photographer, writer. Best job I can get age 48 to 60? Part time manual labor at Costco. It kills me each day to return and do it all over again.
I NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD END LIKE THIS Jackson Brown wrote:
“Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender.”
I’m not sure if I’m not the pretender. I never in my worst nightmares ever thought that after 33 years of a progressive broadcast and business career I would have ever wound up working 12 years in a Costco.
I never imagined after 11 years of going back to college in my 30s of the 1990s earning a Bachelor’s of Journalism and Masters of Communication the best I could do in 2007 was go to work for Costco and spend the next dozen years applying hundreds of times a year in broadcast media, advertising, education, for corporations, universities, colleges, to serve churches or non profit organizations — and that it would be still be this way at the age of 60 in 2019.
Truth is I have never surrendered.
But this is eating at my heart the way rust eats at steel left out in the elements to rust and loose its purpose or luster.
Not a day has gone by I have not prayed to be where God can use me the most and where I can earn a decent living in life.
In the book A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT by Norman Mclean writes:
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world’s great flood
and runs over rocks from the basement of time.
On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops.
Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
I (Stephen) write:
“I still long to finish my last decades in whatever it was God planed for me before the foundations of the world were lain. Whatever it was prior to taking care of both parents though end of life challenges and threats. For both to live as much as possible in their own home and with the issues they fought against.
I honestly thought and heard it from some prophets that “God had a blessing on me for honoring my father and mother.” I can’t imagine God ever intended for me to wind up so belittled and beguiled, forgotten and forsaken waiting on God to lift me where I should belong. Not a selfish prayer but one of fulfillment.
To the love of a good woman,
the place of a fulfilling job,
enough income to live well,
and to finish well the race set out before me.
Its a perplexing series of continued challenged not to be the one picked and needed, loved, utilized and encouraged, strengthened and relieved its not all for naught.
In my time I worked on air for 6 am stations and 7 FM radio stations. I worked for three television production groups, two television stations and interned with two more. The culmination of two advanced degrees and over four decades of experience.
Tell me there’s a place I’m supposed to be where I don’t steer a janitors cart and clean up the mess of an ungrateful public, a broken system, where I’m a line item expense on a piece of paper instead of a valuable asset to a company, church, nonprofit organization, university, school, production company, advertising agency, television station, radio station or in the gifts God bestowed upon me.
Where is God when it hurts?
*Top Credits in Steve’s career include work in three episodes of the 7-part Documentary series Lords of the Mafia produced by Robert Stack (1999-2000) and a Paramount-Viacom Feature Film credit in The Latin Kings of Comedy (2001).
But closest to his heart are over 300 short to long form credits in local Advertising, Industrial, Corporate, Sales, Training, Instructional, Church and Nonprofit Organization projects. “Desktop Media became no longer just relegated to Broadcasters. “That made a difference in so many individual lives.”
In Christian Media Ministries and Non-Profit work throughout four decades Steve has produced for the Baptist General Convention of Texas, El Paso Baptist Association, Hospice of El Paso, First United Methodist Church Odessa, First Presbyterian Midland, First Baptist El Paso, High Point Arlington, First Baptist Arlington, Mission Arlington, Bethlehem Baptist Mansfield, Nations Church Arlington, The Church at Arlington, The Fielder House and Knapp Heritage Parks.
To become a published Novelist writing Christian Historical and Romance Fiction. After 2011 joining the ACFW and attending the national conferences of the American Christian Fiction Writers organization. Meeting and became colleagues with some of his favorite authors including: Colleen Coble, Charles Martin, Frank Peretti, and James Scott Bell.
Decades of influence from the collectives classic works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Jane Austin, and Mark Twain.
Steve has several Historical series that are presently Works In Progress. THE STARS AT NIGHT series is set in the 1920s, 30s and 40s of West Texas and Culver City California. THE SHADOWS series set in the 1970s and 1980s of radio in the wild days of Oil Booms in Odessa with Friday Night Lights and the American Graffiti like lives of those living in the plains of West Texas. And HEIRS TO THE THRONE culminating of the competition of pastors in what has become a mega church and televangelist world.
HEIRS TO THE THRONE based on the rise of the mega church pastors vs smaller churches who accomplish so much more in the lives of their friends and neighbors. “The best fiction is often inspired by real life.”
In his personal life Steve has taken care of both parents through end of life issues loosing his Artist-father in 2007 and his retired teacher mother in 2018. He’s dealt with the cruelty of Hypospadias, dozens of reconstructive surgeries accomplishing little and now the isolation without purpose, place or value.
A long time supporter of animal rescue and adoption, community service organizations, charities and ministry missions organizations. Steve supports a Missionary and Orphanage in Telegana of Southern India and O.U.R. Operation Underground Railroad effort part of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation. The rescue and rehabilitation of children and teens from the sex industry globally.
A longtime Christian, Stephen admires and follows the Counseling Men’s and Women’s ministries of John and Stasi Eldredge of RansomedHeart.com in Colorado. “I’m also WILD AT HEART though with my feet on the ground. It was the trade mark sign off of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 that inspired me to dream big.”
“Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”
Casey Kasem.
Stephen Myers lives like he writes;
“Creatively through the characters and stories of good people who persevere through adversities to a life worth living.”
He can be contacted at tvproducersm@gmail.com
