I was eight-and-three-quarters years old in 1985 when my family moved from West Palm Beach, FL to Kansas City, MO. My Dad had accepted a job with Bott Broadcasting. All I knew was that my grandparents lived in Kansas City. So, I packed up my GI Joes, Star Wars figures, my brown Fisher Price tape player, my Thriller cassette, and said good-bye to my childhood best friend, Tommy Hahn. Two months to the day that my Dad started Dick Bott, himself, fired my Dad. He gave him no severance and told him he didn’t have what it took to be in radio.

We had left behind a brand new house in Florida that wasn’t selling. The mortgage was quickly depleting what savings my Mom and Dad had. For the next year Dad did odd jobs to make ends meet. I remember delivering phone books with him one weekend for what I assume earned less than $25. Pretty soon, boxes of food and clothes started appearing on our front stoop every Saturday morning. I put it all together. We had nothing.

We rented a duplex from a Hindu family. Early one evening they showed up at our door with their children who were my age. I heard them tell my parents they had decided we should stay in their duplex for as long as we needed because they knew we were “good and Christian people.” That moment constantly challenges my faith and learned belief that Heaven is reserved for Christians. It was in that duplex that I remember my Dad bounding up the stairs after a day of job hunting laughing and exclaiming in relief and disbelief, “I got the job! I got the job!”

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