Declare Victory and Depart the Field

About three o’clock in the morning, I would get hungry. Denny’s lit up the night right across the street, comfort food calling my name.

At 21, I found myself spinning the Adult Contemporary hits overnight on the top-rated radio station in Wichita. Barbra Streisand lamenting that Neil Diamond no longer brings her flowers.

A year earlier, I dropped everything to follow a girl to the Twin Cities. While there, I enrolled in a broadcasting technical school. Nine months later, she threw me over for a Stallone wannabe, I quizzed out of the final quarter of tech school and returned home to Wichita, tail between my legs. I would launch my career in the middle of the night with Manilow, Ronstadt and the Johns (Elton and Olivia Newton-).   

From there, I talked my way into radio and TV news in Hays and spent a few years moving up the broadcast journalism ladder. Back to Wichita, on to Topeka, I always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.

Somebody once told me you get the career you deserve. As mine progressed, I interpreted that as taking responsibility for my own professional fulfillment and not waiting for The Man to hand it to me.

In covering those who practiced politics, I watched closely and came to believe I could do that. Better, in fact. When offered a job managing the message for a candidate running for Kansas governor, I rolled the dice. Walk away from arguably the best political reporting job in Kansas broadcast journalism for something as “iffy” as a political campaign? The risk paid off. Bill Graves won the election and asked me to serve as his communications director.

Early on, what I told myself was ambition, turned out to be mostly ego, a discernment that came only with hindsight. Look at my early career path: Radio deejay, radio news, television news, press secretary to a governor. It’s almost as though there was a line on my business card, right below my name, that read, “Look at me.”

Then came re-election and overnight we’re lame ducks. The two-term limit calendar was coming in hot, the private sector beckoned and the senior staff began to bail.

First stop, Kansas Farm Bureau, here in Manhattan, at the exact moment the 2000 census revealed that rural Kansans were now outnumbered by their city and suburban brethren. My job was to upend a decades-long tradition of preaching only to the choir. It took a few years. 

Throughout the career, I saw HR fads come and go, but the Peter Principle remained constant. Not that your columnist is without his shortcomings. Why, some might read this and interpret arrogance. They would not be the first. A friend once pulled me aside and whispered conspiratorially, “…but what if you ARE… the smartest guy in the room?” I still think about that.   

I worked for a bureau and a chamber. I hid behind cars in a parking garage with a TV camera to ambush a politician trying to escape accountability. I grew to read a governor’s mind and speak for him. I wrote speeches, news releases, talking points, propaganda, statewide organizational strategic plans, bylines, datelines, cutlines.

Along the way, I mentored younger versions of me and developed Matson-isms that stuck and live on through them.

“Declare victory and depart the field,” “structure and process,” “stream of consciousness,” “keep talking,” and as I grew older and wiser, “I trust your judgment.”  

In professions notorious for getting shown the door, I was never fired or laid off. Though in that first political campaign, I came dangerously close to being thrown under the bus, the ostensible answer to the crisis du jour. Saved by a staff superior, another valuable lesson learned: When the scapegoat search begins, be elsewhere.        

I managed to succeed in a multi-faceted white-collar management career, completely unencumbered by a college degree. 

It could not have been done without Richard Harris, whose MacArthur Park, at 7 minutes and 19 seconds in duration was twice as long as any other record. I made an entry-level decision to dash to Denny’s, dodge nocturnal traffic and fetch my pre-ordered cheeseburger and fries. I got back just in time to key the mic, ad lib the forecast, pimp the “Jim Frey show at 7:10…” and introduce the next song.  

Harris crooned about leaving his cake out in the rain and never having that recipe again. He would never know it, but he also allowed a kid at the very beginning of his career not to go hungry at 3 a.m.

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN.