This is partly personal and totally cool. As some of you may know, I am on Facebook. (The blog isn't but I am.) More on Facebook, but first, when I was in the service I was stationed at the American Forces Radio Network, headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. I did many things at AFN, one of the coolest was hosting a daily one hour network radio show at 1 AM. This was 1974-75. I had absolute freedom in choosing the music for the show. The show was called Nightbeat. I had several loyal listeners who would send letters with musical requests. Letters came in from as far away as Ireland to the north and northern Africa to the south. Within reason, I always fulfilled every request. There was one particular listener from East Germany who used to listen to the broadcast on AFN Berlin. I won't mention his name, to preserve his privacy, he was a consistent writer. Near the end of the show's run, in 1975 as I was getting ready to be discharged from the Army, the military newspaper, Stars & Stripes did a small article on me and what I did at AFN Europe. I mentioned this, on the air, and my friend from East Germany asked if I would send him the article. Sure! Why not? I sent the entire newspaper edition with the article. I was not aware that he would not receive it...in East Germany. The mail was monitored and the package containing the newspaper was held.
Fast forward from 1975 to November 1989 when the Berlin Wall was torn down. My listener finally received the newspaper article that I had sent him 14 years earlier. It was a few years later when Internet technology caught up with me and my listener/friend in East Germany.In 1995, he sent me an e-mail telling me that he received the newspaper article!
This is where Facebook comes into play. Tonight, 35 years after my gig at AFN, I get a Facebook Friend Request from my friend in East Germany!
In the end, I have a warm feeling, knowing that the crap that I did on the radio meant something to at least one person in the world. After all these years.
