Thursday November 10th, 2011 - Sault Ste. Marie, MI I can’t turn on a radio or TV without hearing more sordid details oozing out about Penn State’s football program and the dark situation there. I thought I had seen and heard it all, but this took everything to a new level of shock and disgust. What a repulsive cesspool. It’s the same feeling I had when I heard of Jeffrey Dahmer and his exploits. That one hit a little closer to home, literally, as I was living in Milwaukee at the time. I was working at 93QFM on the morning show, and our news person Debbie Dalton informed us a national news story was breaking about finding body parts in an apartment a few blocks from us. My partner Mike Baxendale, Debbie and I just stared at each other, not knowing how to react. It was beyond anything we could comprehend, and we weren’t sure what to do with it as a topic. We were supposed to be funny, but that was something WAY over the line. We ended up letting the story unfold, and as it did nationally we let it run its course like is going to happen with the Penn State situation. Every day something new would unfold in the Dahmer drama, and as sick and twisted as it was it was also fascinating to follow. We had a newspaper reporter come in and give daily reports for a while, and one day he happened to leave a copy of the Dahmer police report in the studio. Apparently things like that are public record, but they’d stopped giving it out because it was so controversial and ghoulish. I knew human nature, so I took out ads to see if people would buy it. They did. I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry for the victims and their families. It was insensitive to do that, and I doubt I‘d do it again, but it was a lesson in human nature to observe such a level of interest in something so dark and heinous. I know I still have a copy of it in one of my boxes, and I bet if I offered it again people would want a copy ‘for a friend’. Right. All that aside, I’m very sorry for the kids who were abused. Nobody thought about them through the whole thing, and I can’t imagine the horrors they endured. I was listening to a radio talk show on my way to the U.P. yesterday and a guy who said he was molested as a child called to offer his thoughts on the situation. It was chilling to hear his vivid recount. I felt his anguish jump through my radio. He was in a lot of pain, and I’m sure all those other kids from Penn State are too. I had a less than fairy tale childhood, but this goes far beyond anything I ever had to endure. I need to stop whining and know they had it worse. I can’t believe this insanity was allowed to continue as long as it did with absolutely no intervention from anyone who knew about it. Couldn’t anyone call the police? I must say I like football too, but this trumps it. It should have been handled, and heads need to roll. I’m to the point now I don’t want to hear any more about it, but like with the ugliness of the Dahmer situation, there’s something darkly fascinating about it all. We all have a little bit of ghoul in us, and that’s just how we’re wired. Still, my heart goes out to those kids.
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