We talk a lot in my space each week about leadership.
Sometimes it’s about leading better, and sometimes it’s about following better.
I want to share with you the story of someone who was a leader in my younger life who meant a lot to me. Most of you will remember him. A few of you knew him well and experienced what I am about to share with you.
His name: Harvey Miller. Some of us, to this day, refer to him as “Harvey J”.
When I arrived at WRSW in June of 1991 to do my internship, Harvey was the station manager for our two stations—WRSW-AM and WRSW-FM. That internship was all that stood between me and a degree from one of the most respected broadcast schools in the Midwest.
As a 23-year-old kid looking to find a radio home, he was the perfect person for me to start working with.
I want to mention two reasons why, although there are many more than that.
First, he showed me what it means to have a servant’s heart.
Back in those days, the only way to originate a remote broadcast like a football or basketball game was to have the phone company install a phone line in the gym at or very near where our broadcast location would be.
Harvey was the one who ordered those lines.
Understand, our broadcast schedule then was pretty similar to what it is now—three or four nights a week and tournaments. And also consider that the process of ordering that phone line took a lot longer back then than it does today—45 minutes to an hour for each line.
Harvey spent, and I am not exaggerating on this, whole days doing nothing but going through our sports schedules and ordering phone lines for games.
He certainly had a lot more and a lot better things to do as the general manager of two radio stations, but that was part of his job, and he did it…willingly…with his smile.
The other thing that I need to tell you about Harvey is how he handled a young kid like me.
I came from Butler, and I wanted to be good. I wanted people to turn on their radios with anticipation that their first level of excitement is about the big game they have been waiting to listen to and, to a lesser extent, that it would be my voice who would bring them to that game as Vince Lloyd, Lou Boudreau, Harray Caray, Milo Hamilton, Pat Foley and so many others had for me growing up.
I expressed that to Harvey when we were talking about the internship and beyond, and he said there might be a chance for me to do that here.
Like so many young broadcasters, and young people trying to make it in other fields too, I came to WRSW trying to set myself apart. I was trying to prove that all of the people who had stood up for me were right in my journey were right, and that the speech impediments that haunted me as a child were no longer obstacles.
Harvey put me on with Brad Ellis as a color commentator for Tiger Football, assigned me to be the play-by-play announcer for Lady Tiger Basketball, and then told me I would be sitting in with Rita Price any night I was not with the Lady Tigers.
I know my eyes got big in that moment, because I was about to learn from the people who were doing what I wanted to do, and I would be putting what I learned into practice while I was learning from Brad and Rita!
It was the perfect scenario, but I wasn’t always perfect.
But that’s where the beauty of Harvey Miller as a leader kicked in.
He could’ve clamped down hard on the new, young guy.
He never did.
He could have raised his voice.
He never did.
He just sat me down and we talked it out.
Some people call that “giving a guy enough rope to hang himself”, but that’s a cop-out when it comes to being a leader. To say that would be to say that he knew I would probably fail, and he was going to sit back and let me mess up so badly that cutting ties with me would be easy and the reason would be obvious.
I will always believe that he saw something in me that was worth investing in. I will always believe that he was handing me more rope so that I could figure out how to get it right and climb back up it.
I hope 33 years and over 2,800 game broadcasts have proved him right.
The last time I saw him was several years ago, but that day he put his hand on my shoulder and told me how proud he was of me, and how glad he was that I stayed in Warsaw.
He’ll never fully understand how much that meant, and still means.
And this story could be told by dozens and dozens of people—I certainly am not the only one he treated that way.
The radio stations you listen to today are beacons of power and strength because of the man who moved here from Minnesota half-a-century ago.
We are blessed to have heard him, to have known him and to have had him put his hand on our community’s collective shoulder.
Farewell, Harvey J. Miller…and thank you.