Vicevich

Matt Buckler of the Journal Inquirer wrote a fine piece on Jim Vicevich’s last day on the job with WTIC AM 1080, “Vicevich never lost his skill to relate.” He touched all the bases. “Vicevich had battled Lupus for 27 years and suffered a stroke,” Buckler wrote. “Despite those brutal setbacks, there is one quality that he never lost — his ability to relate with an audience. It didn’t matter if it was TV or radio — Vicevich had the rare ability to turn viewers or listeners into friends.”

Lupus is an inflammatory disease caused when the immune system attacks its own tissues. It affects the joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, brain, heart, and lungs. Many years ago, my wife’s sister-in-law died of Lupus. She was a beautiful woman and left behind a young girl with a sparkling personality. During that time, Lupus was a killer and a stranger to medicine. When Vicevich suffered a stroke, he left the station hoping to return when he was well. Lupus is a thief; it steals the body’s energy and vital functions.

Many of Vicevich’s longtime friends listened to his last broadcast. Perhaps the most poignant call was from a young lady who slid into Vicevich’s pew sometime before but had forgotten the title of a book on economics Vicevich had recommended for those who did not wish to spend the rest of their lives studying the dismal science. She wanted to read the book.  Vicevich fiddled around in his capacious memory and fetched it, a book by one of his favorite economic conservatives, Thomas Sowell, “Basic Economics,” and he rattled off a little précis.

The lady thanked him and, with a quaver in her voice, tried to tell him in as few words as possible – the callers were lined up around the block – what he meant to her over the years.

She was not alone.

Radio provides an intimacy lacking in other forms of communication, such as column writing for instance, which masks the personality. Great writers such as Shakespeare and Balzac are present in their writings. Presence – not charisma – is the key to all personal connections, most especially in radio, which addresses the listener through the ear, that bodily organ most welcoming to the imagination. The caller is seeking a live connection in the moment, and not everyone can provide that connection. Vicevich is an artist in presence and connecting. With a single word, a vocal gesture, an invitation to polite controversy, a flowering of heart and mind, the door swings open and you find yourself in a vault of riches. This is the key to Vicevich’s success on the radio.

“The hardest thing is missing the people,” Vicevich said on his last WTIC broadcast. “I miss the callers. The callers became friends. When I started here, I had a producer who said ‘First of all, don’t let your callers become your friends.’ But that’s what happened. I let them into my heart. And I miss them terribly. While I’m sad to be leaving due to my Lupus, I am happy I had the opportunity to entertain and interact with our audience for the past 15 years.”

Vicevich has often called himself a conservatarian, a combination of a conservative and a libertarian. The breed, especially in deep blue Connecticut, is necessarily contrarian as well. In today’s highly partisan political theater, contrarians arouse concealed antipathies. Vicevich – gentlemanly, somewhat like Bill Buckley and Patrick Moynihan who bracketed the political antipodes of the silly sixties and the sillier seventies – was well furnished with talent and experience. During his television years, Vicevich was known as “the money man.”  And he brought his brain with him into radio, along with some stunningly brilliant guests, one of whom was his sister, “the sound-off sister,” a former U.S. District Attorney whose power of concision is a marvel to behold.

We all can learn from Vicevich that suffering is not a nullity. Christ was not hoisted on a cross for nothing. And Pascal’s saying applies to all of us: “In the end, they throw a little dirt on you, and everyone walks away. But there is One who will not walk away.” We all struggle with our infirmities.

Shortly after Lou Gehrig, “The Iron Horse,” left baseball, he was invited to address his fans in Yankee Stadium.  Gehrig had benched himself after, traveling alone to the Mayo Clinic, he had been diagnosed with ALS. He was introduced by Yankees Manager Joe McCarthy who, struggling with his emotions, said Gehrig was “the finest example of a ballplayer, sportsman, and citizen that baseball has ever known. Lou, what else can I say except that it was a sad day in the life of everybody who knew you when you came into my hotel room that day in Detroit and told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team. My God, man, you were never that.”

Then Gehrig took the field and addressed the crowd directly: “Fans, for the past two weeks, you've been reading about a bad break [pause]. Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth…”

In Vicevich’s case, the fat lady will not sing her Aria. With loving assistance from Jane Kandalora, a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia -- and for that reason a fellow sufferer – the finest and bravest political voice in Connecticut has begun a podcast that may be found here:  https://www.facebook.com/RadioViceOnline/photos/p.2615119208603135/2615119208603135/?type=1&theater