The worn path between my cube and the bathroom and the kitchen, a trail I passed countless times in an endless blur, my coworkers’ bathroom habits and kitchen smells and weekend chatter as much a part of my reality as my own inner monologue. They were like an old sock, or a piece of furniture, something you see and use so much it doesn’t even have meaning anymore. No one outside of my work ever new what this intimate space looked like – not my husband, or my boyfriend before he was my husband, not my mom, or my closest friends.
I think about this a lot now because I work from home, and my daughter, born during the pandemic, will likely never have the relationship I had with my parents’ workplaces. For a lot of my childhood, I hung around my parents’ jobs.
For 30 years, my dad worked at Talk 102.3, a local talk radio station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I grew up. Talk shared a building with KZ 106, a classic rock station, and GT 108, that played Oldies. We called the building that housed the stations The Radio Ranch, a rundown, warm, wood-paneled old building in the middle of a swamp on the edge of North Chattanooga. I would call it a distinctly male space – the smoking area on the side of the building was the backseat ripped out of a mini-van, and the offices upstairs were filled with bobble heads, foam fingers and yellowed curling calendars. It smelled like burnt coffee, dust and warm wood.
On school half days or summer weeks between day camps, my dad would park me in the conference room with M&Ms and a coloring book, or, sometimes, in the news room outside the studios, where I could see hosts gesticulating soundless behind the sound proof glass, their voices blasting through speakers with just a couple seconds’ delay. The desks outside the studios were strewn with the day’s newspapers, the studios lined with black foam squares and stacked with cassettes – prerecorded jingles, ads and news and weather segments, so that the audio producer in the next box was in constant motion moving tapes around (that’s what I saw from my perspective). When I was very little, I thought that every time the jingle came on (“WGOW…Chattanooga!”), a live quartet would have to scramble and assemble to sing it live. My dad loves to say how at the age of 6, I already knew the most important rule of the Radio Ranch: absolute silence when the red “On Air” sign in the hallway blinked on.
I was on the radio a couple of times. Once I read the weather report for Take Your Daughter To Work Day when I was around 8 – there is a photo from the local paper of me in my Brownie Girl Scout hat typing on a word processor. Later, when I was a teenage aspiring hippie, my dad urged me to call into the morning show to talk about how Bonnaroo had become more commercial after the first few years.
Filling air space, the talk hosts often talked about their weekends on air or what their kids were up to, and because of that, a lot of people in town knew who I was, too. The Radio Ranch kids and I grew up together, playing at the annual Christmas party and the rowdy summer lake barbecue, tacitly understanding the weirdness of having quasi-celebrity dads in a pretty small city (For example: the particular embarrassment of when my dad lost an on-air bet and had to dye his hair raven black and yellow, the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers, or when he’d pick me up from middle school in The Fire Ball, the Talk 102.3 PT Cruiser with a custom wrap engulfing it in garish bright yellow flames.)
Most of all, at the Radio Ranch I learned about stories, telling and listening to them. Everyone on air was a character, in their names alone: Cowboy Joe, Kevin West, Scott Chase (whose real name was Kim Chamberlain, much clunkier), Kelly McKoy, Big Al (I heard it as Big Owl), Dr. Basketball, Jammer, and Jeff Styles. Anyone who works in radio fears the phenomenon of silence called Dead Air, but this crew filled the air with color and Southern twang, cuss words and exaggerations, provocations, jokes and tangents. I can hear Scott Chase saying “man, oh, man” over the final guitar licks of a Lynard Skynard song, Kelly McKoy’s honey smooth voice, Jeff Styles’ arguing with country callers about politics and the Chattanooga Parking Authority. Their voices carried beyond the studio, too, to hallways, backyards and bars. There was always drama and trouble, big personalities butting heads, arguments big and small. It all seems like part of a grand drama I was lucky to witness.
My mom stayed home until I was around 8, when she started work as a title examiner and as the Sunday School director at our church, St. Paul’s Episcopal. I hung around the courthouse and the church a lot too. When her pager went off, she’d have to quickly get to the Hamilton County Courthouse downtown. If I came along, I’d wander the polished marble hallways and gaze at the skylights, spy on people waiting for court or in line for their marriage certificates. I’d stare at everyone in the elevator wondering if they thought I was a run-away of some sort, escaped from the jail across the street (I’m sure they didn’t). Or I’d watch my mom file through microfiche scanners or giant record books. Sometimes I would travel with her to rural courthouses and watch the people there too – my favorite was the Rhea County courthouse where the Scopes Monkey Trials were held, and where there was a creepy diorama about creationism in the basement, complete with stooped ape mannequins.
It was fun to see St. Paul’s “off duty” during the week, when the Flower Guild was busy adorning the altar according to the season, the sextons dusted the pews and kneelers and the organist, Mr. Reynolds, tooted and riffed to the empty sanctuary. I knew what room the wine and wafers were kept and where the priest’s cassocks hung like ghosts. It was like seeing the backstage of a play. There was so much life and chaos on Sundays that I hardly saw my mom, spent the morning roaming the Sunday School wing halls looking for her. But during the week the church was a place for life too, quilting bee and AA meetings, people on hard times seeking counsel, Southern ladies chatting and gossiping in the church office. These people were my family too.
My dad is retiring this year, and I never got the chance to take my own daughter to the Radio Ranch. I know part of the reason my parents’ work was so tangible was because it didn’t just happen in an office. But I do wonder whether the notion of a work family, at least for office workers like me, might become a sort of relic, like microfiche, pagers, or word processors. Maybe my daughter will have reflections about summer days spent overhearing Zoom calls. Maybe she’ll remember I always came down for lunch. No matter what, I hope she finds places to poke around, day dream and eavesdrop like I did, somewhere along the way.
