A Life Wasted

CBN

When I sat in that open cafe in Mexico eating dog meat and pondering my future I was determined to turn my life around. When I decided to turn myself in and face the consequences I walked back across the U.S. border fully expecting to spend many years in prison. I'm an optimist by nature, but I had no thoughts of an immediate future that involved anything other than high walls and prison bars. In my wildest fantasy I would not have imagined the rapid change that would occur in my life. The reversal of my life between November 1975 and the first of January 1976 is difficult to imagine. Even as I write this forty years later it is difficult to accept how fast things happened. Were it not for the dates thoroughly document in my criminal record, I would not believe how little time had passed. The documented fact is that two months and a week after deciding not to follow a dozen Mexicans through a hole in the wall of the Brownsville jail I was living in Virginia, a free man with a pretty girlfriend and a job in Christian broadcasting. It was a miracle. I knew it to be the truth when Sherry said it. God was performing a miracle in my life and He was doing it for a reason. He had a purpose for my life. All I had to do was figure out what it was.

Using my final paycheck from the Coast Guard I rented a run down house in a poor neighborhood three blocks from CBN. The contract was month to month because I expected to go to prison in the future. Lacking a car I walked to work. The house was a dump. I had no furniture. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and cooked simple meals on an electric stove. I had pending charges in three jurisdictions, any or all of them could put me in prison with a long sentence. But none of that mattered. Jesus had given me purpose and He had given me peace. I was content. I didn't worry about the next day, only the moment I was experiencing. I celebrated that moment.

As a side note I no longer had a physical drivers license for identity and my Florida license had been suspended, so I went to the Virginia DMV to see how long it would be before I could get my license back. When they looked up my Florida DMV record they informed me that my Florida license was still valid. They issued me a Virginia Driver's License that day. I wasn't even surprised. I was thankful, but had come to expect stuff like this to happen.

I need to tell a little back story about CBN. It was founded by Pat Robertson, a Yale Law School graduate, ordained Baptist preacher, and the son of a United States Senator from Virginia. I don't think Pat ever practiced law, but went straight into ministry, beginning in the worst areas of New York City. In the late 1950's he managed to purchase a run down UHF television station in Portsmouth Virginia. So the youngsters understand I will explain: before cable you received television signals from local stations. In most rural areas you got one or two stations at best, but in the cities you would usually have access to the three big networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS. The big three were broadcast usually on VHF stations, which were channels 2 thru 12 on the dial. (Yes, the dinosaur days before digital buttons and remote control.)

The station Pat Robertson purchased was an underpowered (signal transmission power) UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia. I don't know the station's original call sign, but as soon as he could Pat changed it to WYAH. Because it was a small market UHF station with an FCC license for a low grade transmission, the station itself wasn't worth much so Pat bought it cheap. This was before cable, and the Internet, so all television stations were local, and even then limited by the power of it's transmitter, whose power was tightly controlled by the FCC. Some stations had FCC licenses for more powerful transmitters, which meant they could reach households at a greater distance. A station with a weak signal was rarely given licenses for a stronger one by the FCC. Regardless of the transmission power, a television station could only reach a home within the range of their transmitter. If you compared a TV of the pre-cable era with a local radio station today you'll have an idea of how it worked. Just as you can drive out of range of your local FM radio station, you could live out of range of a local TV station.