Where did your interest in broadcasting come from?  
 

I was a TV kid from the very beginning. I watched the local hosts, I watched the kid’s shows, I watched Ghoulardi, and I watched Big Chuck (Schodowski). I always liked that stuff. 
 

About 1970, I was going with my dad to the mall. He had to go to JC Penny’s to pay on their charge bill. And as we was walking up to the mall, there was this guy in front of Mr Ted’s Leather Store or Mr Ted’s Tux Shop, I think it was called. Here’s a guy with belt length long hair doing an AM radio remote. He had two turn tables and a phone, and he was talking back to the station. I told my dad, I said, “I’m going to watch this guy do this. I’ll be right here”. He says alright and went in to pay the bill. I kind of strolled over…I was just fascinated by this guy’s technique. His name is Charlie Cooper. His on-air name was “Super Duper Charlie Cooper”. I was just a little kid, and he was much older. I was teenager at that time. And that was my first influence in broadcasting. I thought man, this guy’s got it made. I used to actually go to other radio remotes that he did, and we used to do this ventriloquist and the dummy bit. I just stand there like this and he’s put his arm up my back and I’d move my mouth. It was all an attempt to hustle women.  
 

For you or for him? 
 

Both. At the same time, 1970…1971, Ron Sweed came on the air as The Ghoul. And that was as close to Ghoulardi as you could get. He was wild, man. It wasn’t Chuck and Hoolihan! Here’s a guy who looked like Ghoulardi and said the things Ghoulardi said. And you either liked him or you didn’t like him. There was never an in-between. People either hated him or they liked him. I was one the guys who thought he was great.  
 

In that period, the early ‘70s, he had more of a hippie appeal. Same sort of radical Ghoulardi spirit, but for a new generation.  
 

Absolutely. He had long hair and was kind of hip to what was going on. He loved the Beatles. He played a lot of Beatles on his show. I was always a Beatles nut, so that was a great tie-in.  
 

He smoked on the show… 
 

Everyone thought smoking cigarettes was cool. Ron was wild. And his first few years, his first run, was probably his best run. He was fresh and had good ideas. And he had a good crew who was helping him write skits and stuff.  
 

He was making personal appearances and I decided I was going to go to Hudson Haunted House to meet him. My ex-wife and I drove up and there he was. I stood in the line, and when I got up to get my autograph, I had an eight millimeter camera with me. I was shooting and he grabbed the camera out of my hands and filmed me. And I told him. “Hey, I got a costume just like yours!” He says, “Yeah? I wanna see it!” So I drove back to Massillon, got the costume, and drove back up to Hudson again for the night time appearance. He says, “Where’s your stuff?” I go, “I got it in the suitcase.” “Well, get in here!” So I climbed over this fence, got into the little building his was set up in and start putting this stuff on in the dark. I remember he stuck his head in the curtain to look at me and he says, “You oughta get yourself a gorilla costume!” I didn’t know what that meant till years later when I realized that he had a gorilla costume back in the 60s, and he met Ernie that way. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I jumped out with my stuff on, and that was actually the first appearance.. 
 

How did you get involved with The Ghoul Show? How long were you on the crew? 
 

I was never officially on his crew at all. ‘Cause it was a tight circle of people. I didn’t even try at that time. I think it was that same night though that he said, “Hey, in a week or two I’m going to be at Geauga Lake. Why don’t you bring your costume and come up there?” Yeah, wow, great, sure! So up to Geauga Lake we went. He said two o’clock. Okay. So we get there about one. By the time we park the car and get into the park it’s about a quarter to two. We get to the place he’s supposed to be and the guy’s already on stage. I sat there for a while and finally got his attention. He goes, “Where’s your stuff?” I hold up my little suitcase and he says, “Put it on!” Okay, so I ran behind the stage and his wife, Barbara, watched me put the stuff on. I jumped up on stage and within a minute, he was wrapping up his show to leave. He told the people goodbye, I’m going to leave this guy with you.  
 

He took off. And I’m talking to the people until they shut the mic off. Then I got “detained” at the guard station, ‘cause they said I ran up on stage and they had guns pointed at me. I could of gotten shot. That’s what they told me. Hey, if you’re guarding Ron Sweed with guns, then something’s definitely got to be wrong here. Anyway, they hassled me for about an hour. I demanded my money back. They said no and kindly told me to leave the place. Sweed never come to bail me out, nothing. He just took off. Right after he left the stage, they walked him down the steps and off he drove. That’s the truth, really. So at that point, I went home, pissed off, bummed out, and the costume went into the closet, the door was shut and I forgot about it. Soon after that he left the air, the show was over. By that time we probably had Chuck and John and Super Host left on the air. And I went on to have a baby, have a family, work and pay bills. And I started playing music.  
 

Had you set aside any thoughts of broadcast by then?  
 

I didn’t even think about broadcasting. When I was younger, I thought it would be a great job. But I didn’t think it would be a reality to me. In about 1981, Sweed landed a job at a local Cleveland radio station, WDMT. They basically played black music. And they gave him a shift between midnight and six in the morning. That’s a long stretch. Then he would play obscure Ghoulardi songs and take phone calls over the music. At that time Channel 61, Sweed’s old station, had left the air. But now a new 61 had come back. So immediately he was saying, “I’m going to Channel 61, my old stomping grounds. I’m getting back on the air.” And he literally started bugging their offices to get a new show.  
 

Within a year, they finally gave him a show. But WCLQ (Channel 61) at the time shared a broadcast band with – almost a pay-per-view movie channel at night. At 7pm, they would switch over to this pay-per-view. ‘ON DEMAND TV’ or ‘ON TV’, I don’t know what it was called. So they would have regular broadcasting during the day and switch to this thing at night. When Sweed first came back, they put him on at noon on Saturdays. And I thought, cool, the guys’ back on the air. But it just didn’t have the punch that it did back in the 70s. But it was still cool, it was alright. If you was a Ghoul fan at the time, you accepted it. It was okay.  
 

That version of the show had more of a regular cast of characters: Blanche, Spike Who Rides a Bike… 
 

A bunch of other people. His wife, Barbara, was a big part of the decision making at that time.  At that point, he went to Hudson Haunted House again. I called him up on the radio first to see if his remembered me, and he did. “Hudson Haunted House? Yeah, I’ll be there. Still got your costume? Yeah? Bring it. Ok, fine” I did. Shortly after that, he went on the air, and right around the same time he decided to have a look-a-like contest, and I won it. And even when I won that…when it was over, it was over. It was all fun. And when it was done, that was the end of it.  
 

You did an appearance on his show, right? 
 

Yeah. The winner got to win a segment on his show. That was the big, big prize.  
 

That was your first on-air horror host experience. 
 

Exactly. He let me decide want I wanted to do. I said, “I wanna sit on the stool.” I remember he said, “You’ve got two minutes.” That was it.  
 

That was unscripted? You just ran with it? 
 

Totally. It was totally unscripted. I had no idea…Well, I had kind of an idea what I was going to say. If you listen to it, I even squeeze my son’s name into it. But when that was over, again, that was it. The costume went into the closet and it was forgotten. It was just a moment of fun. Then about a year later, off the air he went again. You know, booted off, gone.  
 

This was about ’82, ’83? 
 

Gone in ’83. In ’82 a local television station in Canton, WOAC Channel 67, signed on. They were an independent. And they brought on a character called The Cool Ghoul. He was originally on another local station down here, Channel 17, back in ’71. The Cool Ghoul, George Cavender, actually beat Ron Sweed’s first run on the air by three weeks. Not that it mattered. I don’t think many people got to see the Channel 17 show. Their viewing range was kinda small.  
 

How did you get onto Channel 67?  
 

Labor Day weekend, they announced on the air that they were going to show Three Stooges movies on the side of the building at the television station during the evening hours of the (Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy) Telethon. And they was inviting everybody to “Come on out, see the Stooges, throw some money in the fish bowl for Jerry’s Kids, meet George Cavender…meet the Cool Ghoul, he’ll be out here hosting”. I’m coming home from a gig and I’m wide awake, and it’s two o’clock in the morning. So I pulled in, there’s a lot of cars in the driveway, and maybe forty people maybe out there watching. So I dropped my money in the tank, a whole dollar of it…yeah, big spender…I don’t know how much I put in…it wasn’t very much. Next thing I see Cavender come out of the studio and I watch him do a live cut away for the break.  
 

So at that point, I kind of like moseyed over. And he was just standing there, and I introduced myself, told him what I did with Ron’s (Sweed) show and local like stuff and he seemed real interested in all that. And he invited me, he said, “Well, next week you know, we’re doing our regular taping. Why don’t you stop in, check it out. And I said, “Oh great, I’d love to.” I showed up the next week and I watched them tape their show. He was real nice, and I thought it was kind of fun and interesting and everything…out the door I went. So, the very next wee, I don’t know why, must have grown big balls or something. “Cause I just showed up at the TV station unannounced. I can remember them all looking up at the door like, “What’s he doing here?”  
 

I said, “Hi, I had so much fun, I thought I’d just come and watch you guys again”. He said, “Ah, come on in.” Things were so loose at the time and he would need different people to do things. Like he’d do a skit, and he’d need some one to hold a prop off at the side or something. I would start to do that. Then I started appearing in the skits. I did a number of things. I did one Christmas show. I think I also appeared in that show dressed as one the ZZ Top people. We played the Three Wise Guys. And I was in the Thanksgiving show, I played a pilgrim. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 
 

I’d hanging around for about four months at this point. I could walk into the backdoor of the TV station during the day, and nobody would ask me what I was doing. So that was kind of cool. George was taping skits one Sunday night, and I was in to help. They had been training a board operator, and I found out that night was supposed to be his first solo on the board by himself. What they did is, they’d bring somebody in to run the commercials and all that stuff and they’d train you for two or three weeks. It was all manual at the time, it was really a task. And I guess the board op sat down, and when it came to the first commercial break, he rolled count-downs over the air on the commercials. One jammed, he couldn’t get back into the movie right. He went to the slide for awhile, he went back and he finally went back in the movie. The guy just stood up, said “Gee I am sure glad I’m not perfect” and walked right out, got in his car and left.  
 

At that point I think, “Oh man, board op just quit?” There’s a position open right now even before it’s announced. I know it’s open. So the next morning’s Monday, at nine o’clock I walk in the back door of the station. And right at that point down the hall comes the operations manager. I says, ‘Lee, I want to talk to you about possibly becoming a board op.” He just got back from the general manager’s office, telling him the guy quit. And he looked at me and said, “Then you’re the man I need to talk to. Follow me.”  
 

I followed him back to his office and he set me down and asked me what my experience was. And I said, “Well, I own a VCR, and I know sixteen millimeter” And basically I just told him this is what I feel I need to do. This is the work I need to do. This is what I’m cut out to do, this is what I want to do. And obviously he liked my attitude. I was just wanting to do it. And he was so frustrated after three weeks of training some guy, that he said, “Okay, I’ll think it over.” 
 

So I drove home, and about forty five minutes later the phone rang. He said, “You got the gig.” So I went in for training on Christmas Eve of ’85. I was in Master Control with training that night, all night. And it was like trying to learn to run the deck of the Enterprise, it was really tough. And in two weeks of training I couldn’t get it. My timing was just horrible. I knew if I couldn’t do this, I was out. And…I did it. I don’t know how.  
 

And about six months later, George came at odds with his personal life and at the station. He went and announced that he was leaving. His director, Mark Williams, wanted the time slot, ‘cause he had been helping George for the whole length of his show there. So Mark wanted the show. George Cavender’s ex-wife wanted the show as well, along with his comedy troupe. They wanted the show too.  So I went into the office and asked the general manager, “What are you gonna do with the time slot? You’ve got an audience here, and you don’t have a host now. What are you gonna do?” He told me a few people were up for it, had expressed interest. So I expressed interest too, and I said, “Here’s a VHS tape” we shot, like, a year before that, as just a goof off, in the garage. I gave it to him, they looked at it, and he said, “Well, we’d like to see how you look on our equipment.” 
 

When you taped the “goof off” thing, what costume were you in? Was it the hat and cape?

 

No, I was in the Ghoulardi/Ghoul costume. I didn’t really have no idea, I just thought it would be kinda cool. Sweed was gone from the air, nobody knew where he was and nobody heard a thing. So, I thought it would be kinda cool to bring the old feel of Ghoulardi back again, you know? I wanted to do that. I told them, though, that I wouldn’t be looking like that. I told them I wanted to change the costume to be different. And he (the General Manager) agrees. He says, “Yeah, you’d almost have to.” So Mark Williams put this “In Search of...” show together (In Search of the Cool Ghoul), where he dressed up as Mr. Spock and searched the station for The Cool Ghoul all through the night and never found him. Part of George’s set was still sitting in the studio in pieces.  
 

Was the In Search of… program done as a half hour special, or was there a film? 
 

Yeah, he hosted that night’s Thriller Theater.  
 

So there was a film attached to it. Do you remember what it was offhand? 
 

It was The Dead Don’t Die.  
 

The TV movie with George Hamilton, directed by Curtis Harrington?  
 

Yeah. And he went into the general manager and said, “I can put together a show. I’ve got all these bits I did with George, and I can do this character.” But they didn’t know what they was going to do. They actually considered rerunning Cool Ghoul shows. I guess George Cavender asked, “What are you going to do with my old shows?”. Because they owned them, they said we might rerun them. George said, “Well, I’ll have to give you an address, so you can send me my checks.” And they said, “No, we’ve already paid for these once.” And at that point, George Cavender flipped out! He was only able to walk away from there with VHS copies of most of his shows. He was not allowed to keep the ¾” inch tapes.  
 

But, George was out. And that weekend, since I was an employee, and off during the weekends, I just went in and constructed my set-up in the corner. They said they wanted to see a demo, so I thought I can’t do a demo without a set. So, I built the set, Monday morning we shot the demo. 
 

By that point, you had the finalized look for the Son of Ghoul?  
 

No. I had the hat, the coat, no glasses. I originally thought I was going to go on kinda like Ernie did, just with a beard and moustache and no hat and no glasses or nothing. Just go on. But I realized I was too gruesome looking for that, so I decided to do glasses. And the first show, I think I didn’t have a cape. Anyways, I give them the demo show. They take it in the office Monday. The operations manager and general manager both watch it. They took about fifteen minutes. They called me into the office and told me I had thirteen weeks. They whipped up a contract, I signed it. They told me, “You can tape on Thursday evenings, like George did. And, yes, we’ll allow you to bring some of your own crew in.” They gave me a paid director. But they said for the first three shows, they wanted me to film during the day and use all station personnel as crew members, to make it go smooth. And they wanted me to tape the next morning at ten o’clock.  
 

So, I started preparing that night, and I was up all night long. I fell asleep about 5:30 am. About ten till ten I get a phone call from my one of my friends who was doing audio for me. He was the only non-station employee that was allowed to be there the first time. Vince called me and says, “Kev, it’s ten till ten!” I was still laying in bed, totally out. I jumped up in a panic - no shower, greasy hair, got to the station late. We didn’t get started till about eleven. I remember the operations manager saying, “Keven, you’re not getting off to a very good start.” But I taped the first show. As I’m cleaning up, the general manager comes in and calls all the station employees into the studio. They premiered it right then, and made me stand there while they all watched it. They all applauded and that was the beginning of the whole thing.  
 

The first film you hosted was The Gong Show Movie. 
 

The Gong Show Movie…just because that’s what happened to be scheduled. I started using the cape by the second show, and just kept it then. I think we taped two shows in the morning. By the third week we bumped it to Thursday night. I got my own crew to come in at that point, which was all my close friends at the time.  
 

I still got the paid director, which happened to be Mark Williams, who did the In Search of… show. We never got along. He wanted to do it his way, I wanted to do it my way. Then Mark decided he didn’t want to be part of it anymore, and I’m pretty sure I went into the office and told them I refused to tape if I had Mark Williams as a director anymore. They gave me John Case then, which was a very cool thing. We started rolling at that point. John was a good guy, he did a lot of pre-production work. He’d have everything ready.  
 

Were you consciously trying to do something different than Ghoulardi or The Ghoul after those first couple of weeks? Were already establishing your own character at that point?  
 

No, not at all. I think I had it in my mind that, to wear this little beard in the tradition of Ghoulardi, that you had to act a certain way and say certain things. Maybe I thought that because that’s what Sweed did. I thought what Sweed did was what Ghoulardi did, but I realized that it wasn’t really what Ghoulardi did. Sweed added a few things of his own to it. But I thought in my mind that was the only way anybody would accept this character. I didn’t think anybody would accept a third person trying to do it at all. I thought this isn’t going to work. I thought I wouldn’t go past thirteen weeks. It took me a good couple of years to really start developing, and really start to break out. It wasn’t probably till the lawsuit actually happened that I really made a change, though I really didn’t have to change anything. According to the lawsuit decision, I could continue to do whatever I wanted to do.  
 

Could we get a little background on the lawsuit?  
 

Yeah. Like I say, Sweed had been off the air, nobody’s heard or seen him. I had no idea. About two years into the show, I was in an edit room at the station. I worked there in the film department for forty hours a week, aside from doing the show. I always got phone calls - station’s business and stuff. So it wasn’t out of the normal when the secretary buzzes me. ’Keven, you got a call on line three.” Okay, thanks. It was a reporter from the Akron Beacon-Journal, and he said would I like to comment on the lawsuit that was filed against me by Ron Sweed? I said, “What, what are you talking about? Could you hold on for one minute? Somebody’s gotta here this.” I ran up to the general manager’s office and I had him take the call. My comment was that I won’t comment, ‘cause I didn’t know anything about it prior to this. I mean, Sweed never attempted to get a hold of me and say, “What are you doing? I disagree with this.” He just went after the dollar. So he tried to sue me for half a million dollars.  
 

Based on what?  
 

That’s what the business is worth to him.  
 

Was this tied-in to another comeback attempt on Cleveland TV for him? Or was it just completely out of the blue? 
 

Naw. He was completely off at the time, no show. He was bitter. I was on, he was off. I was wearing that beard. He thought he was the only person with rights to wear that beard, because Ernie said he could do it. Right before the lawsuit was filed, my coordinator, Vince Scarpetti, called Ernie Anderson’s secretary. Ernie was still very much healthy and doing voice-overs at ABC. He was still actively on the air. She told us Tuesdays and Thursdays he was out at this one studio doing voice-overs. Call this number at this time, he’ll answer the phone. She let us have that little bit of information ‘cause from Cleveland, and we doing a spin-off of his old character. She was hip to that, so that’s why she was friendly enough to us to give us the number.  
 

So Vince Scarpetti called and actually talked to Ernie. It was Vince who called. He explained to him who I was and what I did. Once Vince told him I was doing the show, he said, “If you’re doing it, do it. Go with it. Just leave me out of it.”  That’s exactly what he said. He did not care. We wanted to interview him, that’s what we had originally called for. Ernie’s answer was, “Look, I spend twelve hours a day in front of a microphone. I don’t have time to do any of this shit. But what I will do is: you send me what you want me to say, I’ll record it and send it to you.” Three days after that phone conversation, before we had a chance to send that request to him, Sweed filed the lawsuit. At that point, the general manager of the station told me not to do anything with anybody. Don’t contact, no letters, don’t bother them. I missed my opportunity to get voice-overs from him. Just think, I could have Ernie going, “Carrying on a Cleveland tradition.”  
 

How did the lawsuit finally wrap up?  
 

I think the court case went on for about a year and a half. At one point, Sweed and his attorney showed up at the TV station there in Canton. I was in the Master Control, and I remember the operation manager walking in. He told me Sweed and his attorney was out front and they were going to hold me in the back.They (Sweed and his attorney) came in and demanded to see video tape. They wanted to search through our tapes. They wouldn’t let him see any tapes and they sent him home. 
 

Were they trying to deliver a cease and desist or something? 
 

No, they just wanted to gather up as much evidence as they could gather. And now I realize why. ‘Cause he didn’t have anything. The video of me that he showed in the court room was very minimal. I mean…he hardly had anything.  
 

He probably didn’t have anything from Ernie in writing either, did he?  
 

No, nothing in writing. And then I got a few threats from his wife. His wife threatened me at Nautica (a music venue). I walked in for a concert and she walked up to me and said, “Do you know who I am?” “Barbara Sweed, right?” “Yeah! Well, you’re going to get what’s coming to you, you son of a bitch!” And I said, “Don’t threaten me, Barbara.” I just walked away. At that point, my attorney told me not to say anything, no matter what it was. So I did. I shut my mouth. 
 

She ultimately ended up marrying Ron’s attorney, right? 
 

Well, here’s the thing. When we went to court, rumor had it that Ron and her was already split up. But he got Big Chuck to come down in Ron’s behalf, just to go into court and say, “Well yeah, I guess Ernie told Ron that he could do this.” And Chuck didn’t want to be there, but he was there anyways. I remember Chuck commenting afterwards. “Man”, he said, “they split up.” Yet, in the court room, they acted like they were man and wife - to the point of even holding hands.  
 

But they were split up. Was she seeing the attorney at the time? 
 

I think she was. It was a big masquerade the whole time. I never knew what the whole thing about that was about. I don’t know if she ended up marrying the guy. She lives with him, I think.  
 

But ultimately the court decided in your favor. 
 

Ultimately, the only thing Ron owned was the name “The Ghoul”. He had a service mark for it. That’s the only thing he owned. He tried to say that I stole his camera angles, the music, the feel. And he owned nothing. Now, my attorney brought in a big blackboard. And he wrote down nine or ten things that Sweed said he owned, and that I was copying. And the only thing out of those of the “ghoul”, and I wasn’t using that name. Just “Son of Ghoul”, not “The Ghoul”. So my attorney just kept on saying, “Do you own this music?” No. Scratch a line through it. “Do you own the idea of putting cameras in a certain position in the room?” No. Scratch a line through it. Sweed owns nothing.  
 

He was trying to say I was ruining his business. But in fact I wasn’t. My attorneys called different TV stations, all the Cleveland television stations, and asked them if I was the reason they wouldn’t hire Ron Sweed. And they said no, I had nothing to do with it. So they proved I wasn’t the reason he couldn’t get a job.  
 

But by that point, you were starting to develop an individual personality anyway.  
 

Yeah, I started developing my own kinds of characters, just as things grew and people come up with ideas. I dropped all the “ove day”s, kept the “Hey group!” and very occasionally would say something Ghoulardi-ish, you know? But my vocabulary wasn’t made up of “purple knif” and “ove day” and “turn blue”. I started growing as my own character at that point.

When did you first discover you had a fan base? Was it pretty much right off the top, or did it take a while? 
 

Well, I knew that The Cool Ghoul had an audience. That’s what the general manager said to me. He told me I was a hell of a salesman, ‘cause I went in and sold him on the idea that they had an audience and they should continue this. He said, “You’re a hell of a salesman.” I wish that was true. But I knew, ‘cause I started getting letters right away. I got mail right away.  
 

When did you begin folding in the more rock and roll elements into the show? You were playing in bands at the time, and started bringing local bands in. But then the character, the Son of Ghoul himself started to develop that musical identity.  
 

Well, I was a player. For the first two years of the show I didn’t play at all. I quit playing, cause I was a board op, and I was doing the show. Then I became a film director, and I was doing that. So I didn’t play music for about two years. Right around that time we had a salesman come in who knew some people in the record business. and (he told us) Chubby Checker was going to be at Jackie Lee’s, which was a club. They were running commercials on the show, and he got me to go up there and do a little promo for him. I got to meet this guy called Joe Savage through that. So I interviewed Chubby Checker and Joe Savage, and that kind of started it.  
 

The next thing we heard, The Monkees were on tour. And we thought, well wouldn’t that be kind of cool? So my coordinator got on the phone, went through tons of phone calls, and landed interviews. They treated us really nice. We had to go to Michigan to do The Monkees. And when we got there we said, “This is a television crew from Ohio.” Okay great, come on in. But I’d go up to Cleveland to interview somebody and they’d treat us like garbage.    
 

So…WOAC. Things start to wrap up at the station.  
 

Well, the station was always for sale from day one. 
 

Really?  
 

Yeah. It was for sale before I worked there. And we were told that. Finally they came in and said the station was sold and there’d be new owners. They’d drop money into the station, and everybody’s jobs would be secure…Well, the new owners showed up that day. They walked into the office and told the general manager to leave. Then they went into the conference room, and called in every employee one after the other and fired everybody. The original owners had told our general manager to get rid of everybody. He just let them work, because I think he was afraid to tell everybody. Plus they gave him…he’s still very comfortable to this day. That’s all he was concerned about. The reason I didn’t get fired, I had a contract that said they had to give me three weeks in writing. So they said, “Okay, we’re giving you three weeks in writing. You’ve got three weeks. Go for it.” They still had programming up on the station, it hadn’t changed over to home shopping. The station still had contracts to run some stuff. So, the news department got fired, local sports got dropped. Everything ended, except me. When I went in to tape those last three week’s shows, it was virtually an empty television station, with all the equipment sitting there.  John Stone and I was in there for three days, putting that thing together.   
 

The Farewell WOAC special? 
 

Yeah. And there was no management to say anything. You could go there any time of day. The doors were unlocked, the cameras laying in there. Walk right in…In the meantime, I had this guy who was working for me named Cowboy Bob. He acted like he was a manager or executive or something, but he was just a con man. He was involved in some promotions and stuff. He was an alright guy. He went up to the CAT (Channel 35 & 29 in Akron, Ohio) and he talked to them about me coming up there. Right away they were interested in the show because they were interested in a local identity. I was losing the station and the production facilities, so I went to a local place called Talon Media. A couple of guys had gotten some equipment, and were working out of a building in Massillon. They were trying to set up a little makeshift studio there, and they came to me and said, “Don’t worry, everything would be smooth. We know what you need for your production, we have it all covered.” 
 

So, they built me the set I’m still using now. They designed all that, I didn’t do anything. I walked in the first day and they had it standing. And it was one big clusterfuck at that point. Everything they’d promised me, they weren’t able to deliver. I almost threw in the towel right then. It was just too overwhelming. Everything I’d taken for granted, all the luxuries of the station…It didn’t feel like luxury at the time…I bitched then. The difference there was, something broke down, you wrote out a work order and the engineer fixed it. But now, we don’t have a tripod that can stay still, you bump a cord and everything goes out, the lighting was bad, the cameras were cheap…you can’t do this, you can only do this, you can’t dissolve here, you can only do it there. There was no talent at the controls. Like I said, I’m surprised I didn’t quit. But we kept on with it because, hell, it was still a paycheck. But when I moved to Talon Media, I gave up half my money to production costs. Well, that wasn’t working out. I was originally taping every week. Then I started taping every two weeks. I did two shows. Then I started taping three shows at once, trying to save time…and money.  
 

Would this be in a similar amount time that you had been taping single shows?  
 

Well, I go in and tape three opens, three closes. Then we would do a bunch of mail breaks, and I’d just split those out over three weeks of shows. We might do a couple bits. And I’d stick them in anywhere. I’d make three weeks of shows out of that, because I just couldn’t afford to tape every week.  Eventually, that came to an end. The two partners split up. One guy took all the editing equipment, set up his own computer system and got a building across town in Canton. There was nothing left at Talon. The other partner couldn’t edit. There was nothing he could do. He could shoot stuff, but he couldn’t edit it. I needed stuff edited, so I had to go with the equipment. I stopped working at Talon and went over to Digital Illusions. And it was an illusion. I did that for about a year. It was a completely different building. I liked the studio. I liked how the set was staged. But workable it wasn’t. Everything was wrong. They had ten tons of cable going from the studio to the console, creating a lot of audio noise.   
 

So again, I’m taping three shows a week and not coming back for a month. And the owner was expecting me to be paying his rent by coming in every week. And when that didn’t happen, he said, “That’s it. I’m closing the studio.” At that point, I had no choice but to buy the editing equipment off of him – for a phenomenal amount of money. Way more than what it was worth. But I had no choice. That’s when I took over all the editing myself…and I prefer it that way.  
 

Did you find you began to shape the show differently? 
 

Well, I thought it saved the show. By that time, we were going into twelve years of the show. All the tricks we’d been able to do the first nine years, we weren’t able to do anymore. I was working with guys who weren’t getting paid, and believe me, it was showing up on screen. So at that point, I was just tired of dealing with people. And I’m sure they were tired of dealing with me. My attitude was really bad too. I had no patience. Everything was a pain in the ass. You couldn’t move, ‘cause a cord would jiggle and the picture would go out, and it would take them twenty minutes to figure out which cord had jiggled. I’d ask if we could have the cord replaced and we’d come back in a month and it wasn’t fixed. I bought the editing equipment, but I couldn’t shoot because I didn’t have a camera. So, I had to take the set back over to Talon, put it back up again and keep shooting. We were there another two and a half years. Eventually the owner let the place go. So that was the end of that.   
 

Once you took over the editing yourself, how much time did you start spending on a show? 
 

It all depends. The way we used to do it, John Stone and I, he would load the sound carts and I would cue them in and out. We did it together. Sometimes we would go in and sound effect the movie maybe two and half hours before we started taping. Sometimes we would tape and try to sound effect the movie afterwards. You can really tell with some of the old shows. Those are the ones where the audio drops out, the soundtrack abruptly cuts out. We didn’t even think about mixing it or anything, ‘cause that’s all the technology we had there. When I moved the editing here, to my home, I figured I could do a better job with the sound effects. So then I started taking my time with it. I can work on a movie for two weeks, I can work on it for three days. I can’t really put a time on it. What I do now is work on it some night for two hours, get burned out and shut it down. And sometimes I won’t go back to it for a couple weeks. Then I’ll go back in and do a couple segments or something.  
 

Sometimes you load up the films pretty heavily with sound effects. How does that compare with the movies back on the Ghoulardi’s show? 
 

Chuck Schodowski did the audio drops on the movies. They didn’t put in a lot in there, ‘cause their idea was to catch you off guard with it. So the sound effect would be a surprise, rather than something you expected to happen. I didn’t sound effect all of my movies at Channel 67. When I went to the CAT, they wanted the sound effects. They said, “Oh yeah. Put ‘em in. Go for it.” So the first movie I did for them, Godzilla vs Megalon, I actually did on 67’s equipment. That was the first one. We did ourselves after that. I had more time to do it. Now, I’ll be watching the movie, and I’ll see something and think, “Wow, this one little sound drop from this one old movie or cartoon would be great right in here. “ So I hit the stop button…and it may take me two hours of digging through all my stuff to find that one cut.  
 

It seems to me your love of cartoons and Three Stooges films make your choices particularly creative. You turn the films into live action cartoons.  
 

Well, sure. There were so many sound effects in those old cartoons, and so much of it keyed off action. I loved all that. And all that stuff has became more available. You’ve got CDs of cartoon music and cartoon sound effects, Little Rascals music. You can get anything you want to. But if I had to do it all over again, I would have started in 1986 and never used one piece of recorded music by anybody. I would have done it all myself, all original. If I had any brains, I would have done it that way, because if someone decided to syndicate my show in a large market, they might run into problems. I sent a demo tape once to a big company in California that sold shows here and overseas. The first skit had me cleaning Fidge at the carwash, with the song Car Wash on the soundtrack, and the first thing they said was, “Do you own the rights to the song Car Wash?”  “No.” “How can you use that then?” At the time, it fell under the blanket rights of the station. They paid a yearly fee to ASCAP, BMI, whatever, and I never worried about it. But when you’re producing it yourself…then you’re going to run into the problems.  
 

What were your favorite shows, the films you felt you’d done a particularly good job on?  
 

I think the best sound effect job I’ve ever done might be on The Most Dangerous Game. I probably spent the most time with that one, mixed it really nice. It was really well-mixed. I always thought Hal Roach would be proud of me. I started to take more pains with it, two-tracking the audio and keeping as much of the original as possible. It was much smoother that way. That’s the way I like to do it now.  
 

Another major change from the Channel 67 days was the character Fidge, played by Ron Huffman, a little person.  
 

When I moved to the studio in Massillon, Fidge, a local guy who knew the owner of the studio, would come and hang out at Talon. Once word got out I was working there, he asked if he could come down to a taping. He showed up the next Tuesday, just as a spectator. And what the hell, you’re there and there’s one midget in the room? Please! Right away it was, “You, come here!” The word “fidge” came from the Little Rascals. There was this one episode where two of the kids shrink. There’s this old grouchy guy from the kids’ home who takes them to this high-class party where there are a couple of midgets. And one of the kids goes, “Them fidgets can talk!” So when Ronnie showed up, I think I said, “C’mere, ya fidge!” And the name stuck. When I had a batch of t-shirts printed up, just for a joke, I had ‘Fidge’ printed on the back of his shirt. I gave him that shirt, and I swear to god, he must have had that one every day for, like, two years. Everywhere he went he wore it. And the more I had the guy on the show, the more popular he became. He actually started to get a little bit more mail than me. I don’t know what it I about midgets. I guess it was just he was honest about it, you know? He couldn’t hear real well. So half the time he didn’t know what was going on. But if you asked him to do something, he’d do it. He didn’t question stuff very much. But the more he was on the show, and the more he became, the more I used him.  
 

Around 2000, Regis Philbin comes on with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and suddenly games shows are all popular again. The Klaus’, thought immediately, “Let’s get on the game show band wagon.” Some years before they’d had a game show on, I think it was called The Bingo Movie or something. People would play bingo during the breaks and some deejays would come on and call numbers…”B-12”…They actually called bingo over the air. But I think something came down that claimed it was gambling on the air and they couldn’t do it. So they had to stop it.  
 

Now my movie show didn’t really create a lot of revenue for the station. But they continued to pay me even with very little coming in. I don’t think their salesmen really went out and tried to sell it, the commission was too small. This is a problem for most of the horror hosts. I think that’s what happened with Sweed at WB55. He created no business. If his show had created business and had steady sales, he’d still be on right now. With the Klaus’ on the other hand, I’m dealing with the smallest fish in the pond, they’re looking for any recognition they can get.  And they know I have viewers. As a matter of fact, the Klaus’ have a viewership map that shows N.E. Ohio with all these red pins stuck in for all these little cities. They said, “These are areas we’ve received mail from that view the CAT.” And it was based on the mail that I got. Sometimes someone would write me from the other side of the state, and they would put a pin there, like the signal got there or something. The signal would never get there. You couldn’t get the signal at the end of the driveway at the TV station, let alone there. And to prove that fact, I took a portable TV with an antenna on it in my van and drove to the end of the driveway. I could not pick up the station.  
 

Anyway, with Regis coming on the air, they called me in. “Keven, come on up. We want to have a meeting.” So I went up and they said, “Look, the movie show has been steadily losing money. We have an idea. We want to produce a live game show to cash in on the popularity of this Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It’ll be a call-in show with contestants on the phone, and we want to do this two hours a night, five nights a week.” And I said, “Well…what do you mean?” “We want to do this two hours a night, five nights a week, live.” Five nights a week. Immediately the calculator starts going off in my head. Oh man, what a pay day this is going to be! But they turned around and said, “We’ll continue to give you your regular pay.” I said, “Wait a minute. You’re paying me for a two hour slot, but you want me to do five nights for two hours for the same money? Can’t do it” 

Fortunately for me, within about a week or two of talking about this, they came to their senses and realized five nights a week was completely nuts. See, their perspective was, they had live deejays on their talk radio station who was doing four hour shifts six days a week. Why couldn’t some guy go TV two hours, five nights a week? That was their idea. In reality, that would have been the biggest burn out that ever happened.  
 

But they still wanted to produce the show. What they said at that point was, “Why don’t you drop the movie show? Because we feel it’s a little past-tense now, not as important as it used to be. We want you to focus all your attention on the game show. In between games, you can still show your little skits and stuff.” My answer was, “Without the movie show, why do you need me then? Why not get some guy in a suit and tie? The whole point of me is the movie show.” So they said, “We’re not going to pay you for two shows.” So instead of five nights a week, they decided on one night a week. They were unsure whether they wanted to make it an hour show or a two hour show, but it was going to be called The Son of Ghoul’s House of Fun and Games. 
 

So we tried three trial nights. The first night (08/30/00), I did an hour. The second night, I did an hour and a half. The third night we did two hours, and I took Fidge with me just for the hell of it, just to break up the monotony. Having him there turned into the biggest goof, because only could he not hear the answers, he had absolutely no idea what to write on the scoreboard. Now we were live, so we had contestants on the phone. And once I started goofing on him, you could hear these people laughing over the air. So I thought to myself, “This is kind of working. In some odd way, this is working.” So we did the three shows, and they said, “We think you should have the midget all the time. He was a scream.” And compared to the first two shows, he was a scream. It was different, ‘cause now I had somebody to play off of. It wasn’t just a straight-forward game. It was better for me. But sometimes Fidge was just worthless during the games. Many weeks he had nothing funny to say, didn’t really do anything. He was just there. People loved that little guy though, man. They loved him. And once he got comfortable with it, he really started to develop his act. It got to the point where I didn’t have to explain things to him. There were times where I’d have to say, “Now Fidge, when I grab your neck, I’m not going to choke you. I’m going to grit my teeth and go like this (pretending to strangle). Don’t fight it, just go with it. It won’t hurt, and you’ll see how funny it looks to the audience. Once that happened, he realized it was working and just go with the motions and make noises. And that would be it, you know? Sometimes, we did get carried away. I did beat the guy a bit too much, I suppose. That’s the kind of thing where you didn’t realize what you had till it was gone. That was my Abbott and Costello thing. I never really wanted to have a co-host, and I didn’t consider him a co-host. I considered him a crew member. But we got locked in on the game show and it made us seem like a team.  
 

A sidekick… 
 

Exactly. But I referred to him as a kick stand, rather than a sidekick. Boy, I used get so annoyed picking him up to go to the game show. There was many weeks on that the forty-five minute ride up to the station where I wouldn’t speak to him the whole time. I was so annoyed that he didn’t have a license. I had to go pick him up and take him everywhere he went. Anyway, once they wanted him on the game show, then I negotiated for him to get paid. They said, “We’re not going to pay him what we pay you.” I said, “Well, I hope not. But you’ve got to give the guy something. Give him fifty bucks a week, anything.” Which they did. At that point, I started to charge him for gas money to go up to the station. I had to. I mean, it was only five bucks. But I’d say, “Fidge, I’ll split it with you. You’re not putting oil in my car, you’re not putting tires on my car. You’re just going along for the ride, you little midget.” Let alone taking a forty-five minute ride with midget fumes coming from the back seat. Sometimes it was pretty tart. Or some nights, he’d have on so much cologne, I’d have to roll down the windows, ‘cause it was gagging me.  
 

There were a number of people who called in regularly to the show who became characters themselves, and they would keep you up to date on their lives, almost like a local television diary.  
 

Yeah. And the funny thing about it was, I’d get people coming up to me saying, “I’ve been trying to call in for two months and I can’t get a line to ring.” And other people would call and get in every damn week. Every week! And yeah, we had regulars who called in for this dumb old game show. And for as crappy as it actually was there was something about it…. 
 

A community feel. 
 

Yeah. 
 

People did get to know each other on the air. 
 

Exactly. So much TV is just mechanical now. Even with news crews. You’ve got these news crews come on who are so far removed from the public. You would never get a chance to talk to them. And they’re so plastic with their presentation. We scripted nothing. I probably made more mistakes and flub-ups, and mispronounced words, than any other host in the country…on a continuous basis. The game show was on Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday night, the station played my movie show. So that was a total of six hours every week. My face probably had more screen time than all these people. It was a two hour game show. And I would say all but maybe 15 minutes of those two hours was stuck on my mug.  
 

And that was for three, three and a half years? 
 

Yeah, yeah.  
 

You did the game show as long as Ernie Anderson/Ghoulardi did his show back in the 60s.  
 

Exactly. Now, the game show was fun. But again, it was lack of revenue. The station, being a small, low-watt outfit, had a home shopping network that bought time on the weekends. And they had three different infomercial companies that bought big chunks of air time – a lot of time and a year at a time. What I later found out was, the revenue from those infomercials, and the home shopping on the weekends, was actually paying my salary. That’s how they could keep it afloat. All at once, all three of those of those accounts decided not to renew their contracts for the following year. They lost all that revenue. At that point, they put the brakes on everything! We had to stop the game show.  
 

But in the meantime, the game show had really raised your profile. You were invited to produce a stage show at Six Flags for their October 2002 Halloween season.  
 

We had a local amusement park in Aurora, Ohio called Geauga Lake Sea World, and they sold out to Six Flags, who closed down half the park and revamped the other half. I had a website up by that time, and I got an email from the general manager of the park. Aurora cable carried our show, and he watched. Loved Fidge, loved him. He emailed me, about some possible Halloween appearances at the park. Would I be interested? So I drove up for a meeting. When I went into the office, I see the guy there in charge of the park had this green blackboard in the hallway that went right back to his office. I glanced up, and right there in white chalk he had wrote on his blackboard ‘FIDGE RULES’. So I thought, “Oh I got this gig.”  I didn’t really know, but I went in and asked what he wanted. They wanted me to put on three stage shows a day – Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the entire month of October, including Halloween night, a total of seventeen nights.  
 

I had never really done a stage show at that point. But I figured this couldn’t really be that hard, could it? They loved the idea of Fidge, they loved Fidge. So I came up with a price that would allow me to bring in my crew – and Fidge. And it really ended up being a good payday. We all got paid. Fidge made money, the crew made money, everybody made money…made good money. We signed the contracts, and they bought $3,000 worth of commercials on the show. They had me come up and do a spot, which ran on my show. When I got to Six Flags, I had to park in the back of the complex. And I had a hand truck, a two-wheeler, that I used for all my stuff: my costume, my bass guitar, all the things I used for my show. And I had to wheel it all through the park to the theater we were at, they had us in a theater with a big stage and everything. And they had built me a set. They re-created my TV set up on the stage there and everything. They built me a wall, and I brought some of the props from the ozone set. The first show was on a Thursday night, and was open only to the park employee’s families. It was a real thin crowd that first night and it was real stiff. We didn’t have it down yet. That whole first weekend, it was kind of weird, real half-assed crowds. The second weekend, the weather was warming up, and the park’s just packed, lots of people. And I’m wheeling through, I’m not in make-up or anything. I’m just wheeling through. And when I rounded that corner to where the theater was, it just stopped me in my tracks. ‘Cause there was at least three hundred and fifty people standing in line for at least half an hour, waiting to get into this thing. And I was just, “Oh my god!” We were all kind of shocked. It was standing room only for all three shows. They cheered and it was just great. We started working out the bugs then and got into a routine. By the third week of October though, the weather started turning, and the crowds started diminishing. Who’s going to come to an amusement park and walk around in thirty degrees? By Halloween night it was like a ghost town in there, man. Nobody was in the park. 
 

So we had two weeks of standing room only. We did eighteen shows to standing room only. It went great. Unfortunately, the park was in financial trouble, which started that year. By the next year, Fidge had died. The manager of the park loved Fidge so much, he just didn’t feel there was a show without him. He didn’t give me a chance to explain what new ideas I had. We could have come up with something else that was just as fun. Fidge wasn’t really that big a part of the stage show. He came out and did a couple of things. He might have been on the stage for ten minutes. He did Fidge’s Fables and he sang Monster Mash. That was about it. When we’d decided for him to do Monster Mash, we realized there would be no way he could do it live on stage. So we decided to record it, and just let him lip (synch) it. It took him seventy takes to get through the song, seventy takes. And believe me, I was ripping the rest of my hair out of my head over that. The Six Flags shows were really nice for Fidge. Down here in Massillon, we couldn’t see my TV show. Nobody carried the station. So he had no idea of the viewer response. But people up north seen it. And it was really cool when he finally got to go to Six Flags. People would stick around to get autographs, whole families. One guy brought his kid in. He had a speech impediment. And Fidge talked a little funny. The guy said, “We brought him to meet you because he can relate to you.” It was big thing for that kid to meet Fidge. I was so glad the little guy got to see the love from the people, and got a feel for the effect he had on them. He had no clue up until then. So he did get to see that, and that was good.  
 

When he died, I at first had no idea. We didn’t hang out socially. It was a Monday afternoon when the phone rang. It was some guy from town here. “Keven, did you hear about Ronnie?” I said, “What? What did he do now?” “Well, he passed, man. He passed away.” “What! He’s dead? What happened?!” “He was at the bar, and some people were feeding him alcohol. It’s all cloudy, we’re still not sure.” This is Monday afternoon at four o’clock. We’ve got to hit the air Wednesday night with the game show. What am I going to do? I immediately called the Klaus’. I said, “Hey, man. Fidge died.” “What are you going to do?” “Well, obviously I’ve got to put together some kind of tribute for him.” I mean, I’ve got to do something. We can’t just go on with, “Here’s the game! Here we go!” So I got virtually no sleep from that point on. I went downstairs and started pulling out tapes. And I was amazed at how much shit he had did in the time he was here. It was quite overwhelming. I can remember getting all done with the editing, and I was just kind of numb from it all. It was Tuesday afternoon, and the show was going on the air Wednesday night. I had a moment there where it all caught up with me. I kind of broke down a little bit. Goddamn! I felt really pissed because after all that time and effort, feeding him lines, getting his little act together…everything was in vain. It was all flushed down the toilet. How do you start over now? How do you turn around and make it different? Then I had to sit back and think how I’d done nine and half years without the guy, before he was there. So this can’t be that impossible. Let’s just go back to the roots, you know? At that point, I had to become the buffoon again. I had to do Bud Abbott and Lou Costello at the same time.   
 

I can see that. When you were partnered with Fidge, you assumed the role of the straight man – or the adult.  
 

When Fidge passed away, we did the tribute show. At that point the Klaus’ announced that they was going to get a replacement for Fidge. They said it was open to anybody. Send us your tape, call us up, we’ll line you up for an appearance. What do you do? We’re looking for a score keeper.  
 

They were originally interested in a woman, weren’t they?  
 

They thought that a pair of big jugs on the screen would lift…something. I wasn’t against that. I said okay. But everybody who came in…they didn’t fit. This one chick who came in, she was good looking. But she comes in and says, “I just came from this wine tasting party. I think I maybe had one too many. I’m alright though.” I said alright. We clip the mic on her, and just before we go on she says, “Oh, by the way. I don’t want you to mention anything about me drinking wine, ‘cause my son will be watching.” And I went, “Eh…this isn’t going to work.”  
 

They put the show on hiatus, that’s what they said. They had wanted me to stop the movie show once they started the game show. But I told them the only way I’d do the game show is if they kept the movie show on. So I agreed to forfeit the movie show money in return for the game show money. I didn’t care, as long as I was getting paid. At that point, the movie was easy, ‘cause I had years and years of reruns I could tap into. So there wasn’t much work that had to be done. They wanted me to put more effort into the game show, which I probably should have. But I didn’t. But then when they decided to stop the game show, they assumed I would take the movie off. Because when the game show stopped, the money stopped. That’s what they said. But at that point, I was so close to twenty years on the air. And my goal was the twenty years. I was doing a lot of appearances, a lot of conventions, and I was actually making a pretty good business selling DVDs. And they knew the viewers were still there. So the station managed to devalue the show, but they kept it on.  
 

They still scheduled the movie show two nights a week. It’s surprising they didn’t at least cut it back to once a week. Clearly, they must have been thinking there was still an audience interested in the show.  
 

They realized there were viewers. I’m probably getting more mail than all of their other local programs combined. Still, to this day. The Klaus’ know that. They like to hire people who have a history.  
 

What do you feel is going to happen once the last connection to the Ghoulardi legacy disappears from the air? And how do you feel about your place in that legacy?  
 

I think once it all comes to an end, in this day and age, and the way television is today, it’s all going to be down to dollars and cents. When the new management came into FOX 8, the first thing they wanted to do was “get rid of the old guy.” The “old guy” was Dick Goddard, who was a staple around here for years, doing the weather. They had no idea of the impact he had in the area, no idea. They were ready to shuck Chuck and John, too. I think that’s another reason Chuck’s kind of thinking about retiring. I don’t really understand, but Chuck’s my buddy now. It’s like all of a sudden. It took twenty years. It was a hard thing, man. I grew up watching my favorite local television idols, people you feel like you know’ cause you seen them so long, Not being accepted by them was really a kick in the groin.  
 

Chuck has over forty years on the air, he’s worked with Ernie [Anderson] Lil’ John. If there’s anyone who’s going to have an appreciation for the Cleveland host legacy, it’s going to be him. I’m sure he sees the fondness you have for all of this.  
 

You know, when Chuck say’s he’s close to Ernie, I don’t think they fully understand it. Chuck really loved Ernie as a person. I have to tell you, I once sat next to Chuck in a theater during a screening of some of the old Ghoulardi footage. A clip came on, and when Ernie laughed on screen, Chuck literally wiped a tear out of his eye. It really meant something to Chuck, you know what I mean? I’ve always been very respectful around him. And we’ve done enough appearances together now, that I don’t think there’s going to be any problem now. Maybe it’s good it took this long, ‘cause it made the 20^th something that much more special. Maybe if we’d all been a happy family ten years ago, it wouldn’t have had the same impact. The twenty years for me has been an intense roller coaster ride. You climb that hill, you get to the top, and suddenly you’re down in that dip – and you might be down in that dip for quite a while. And right when it seems like nothing’s happening, and things are just stale and it’s not fun anymore, and my energy’s draining, I suddenly get a phone call saying, “Hey, would you like to come out to San Francisco for three days? We’re going to fly you out, and put you up in a room, and pay you, and do appearances, we’ll film some stuff.” And you think, “God, life’s pretty cool!”