Alright, my audio interface is making noises, and I'm not sure I like that or not. Let's see if we can hear the noises as we go through this show. Who knows? I don't know.
Ehhh. Oh, I see what's happening here. There. Green technical work along the way.
Hi everybody. Welcome to The Daily Grateful. I am Michael Gross, your amiable affable host, your washed up former member of the National Broadcast Media, and somebody texted me, oh it was my son Tyler. Okay, I'm not supposed to get texts when I'm recording, and my audio interface is still looking weird.
It's just looking weird, and I don't know why. I think there's a reset that I can do on the whole thing and make it factory ready. I don't know. I'm going to look into this.
But anyway, do you ever think about the things that didn't go your way and say, oh thank God, thank God, thank God. Yes, yes, yes. I can think of a bunch of those. I can think of many of those, alright?
I remember when I lived outside of Battle Creek, Michigan, and we moved, I went to St. Rose of Lima, Catholic school, and we moved to Florida to this tiny little town called Turnando, Florida. And man, talk about something that didn't go my way. I did not want to move.
My mother did not want to move. My brother did not want to move. My sister did not want to move. My dad wanted to move.
You know why? My dad wanted to move because his sister lived in this God-forsaken little town, and we'd made a trip down there right after Christmas the year before, or that year, we'd made it. By the way, and this is a fun story, I love my dad, made an unannounced visit. We drove in our 1962 Ford Falcon station wagon, where I sat in the way back.
Didn't have a seat. I was behind the luggage in a little place, they had a blanket there, and I sat there looking out the back window while everybody in the family smoked cigarettes and understand it's winter, and the smoke's coming back to me. Now my brother didn't smoke, although I think he was sneaking them. Well, my sister smoked, my dad smoked, my mom, so they were all coming right back to me.
I remember that so well, I remember that so well, and you know, I did not want to move. I wanted to stay at Mill Lake, this little hamlet that we lived in between Battle Creek and Hastings, and that didn't go my way. Thank you, God. You know, because had I not moved to Florida, what would I have done with my life?
These were the options because this is what everybody did. You go to work for Kellogg's, or you go to work for John Deere, or these are the factory, you go to work for post, you know, or you go to work for General Mills, that you work in a factory. That's what you had to look forward to. You could go and work in a factory, or if we went to Hastings, you could work for Hastings, Pittston rings, and manufacture piston bouts, what did all my, you know, and all my cousins lived up there.
That's kind of what they all did, except for Cousin Steve, Cousin Steve didn't do that. He'd worked somewhere else. I don't know what did. But that is what you had to look forward to, and thank God I didn't have that to look forward to because you see my father took us kicking and screaming to this God forsaken little town.
Now, understand when we got here, none of us liked it. We all hated it, except my dad. My dad was real big in the VFW, and then my sister got a boyfriend, and what was his name? Well, she had two boyfriends.
She had one that I liked and one that I didn't like. Dudley Dale Todd was the one that I liked. He was a good guy. I wonder if he's still alive.
And then the other one, I'm not going to say his name because if he hears me trashing him somehow, some way, if he's still alive, he might come and want to kill me because as it turns out, after she started dating him, she found out that he just got out of prison and that he did five years extra in prison or escaping prison. Ah, yeah, so she liked it there, but she dumped him and went with Dudley Dale Todd. Oh, in the middle of all that, she dated a guy that was an undertaker in Inverness, but that didn't last long. And the guy that was the undertaker in Inverness trying to impress me, the little brother, so that, you know, she dumped him like right away, told me all the great details about what they did at the funeral home, which how old was I 12?
I needed to hear that. So, but to my father's credit, and I don't give him much, I must admit, well, it wasn't to his credit. He knew that if he didn't do this, my mother was going to move us back to Michigan and he could keep his happy ass in Florida. And he moved us to Dunedin, Florida, the heart of rock and roll.
Yes, the heart of rock and roll was Dunedin. You heard that song? You listen to this? They say the heart of rock and roll is Dunedin.
I don't know. I'm not sure. But anyway, we moved there where I said, oh, and we rented the upstairs of the Cunningham house because we, when we went there and looked, we looked at a house to buy that was built by a guy and he says, oh, well, the builder of our house was a guy named Elmo Jolini. I'll give you his number.
So, my dad called Elmo Jolini from this guy's house that we were looking at buying. Shit about the house. But Elmo Jolini says, hey, I just live over here. You come on over to my house and let me show you some stuff.
So we drove over to Elmo Jolini's house and he goes, I can build you the house you want, right here in this neighborhood in Fairway Estates. I can build you a three bedroom, two bath, 1795 square foot house with a swimming pool, with a screened in swimming pool. How does it get any better than that? And a circular driveway, oh, and all of this for $20,000 and I said, you know, this was it, you know, we moved in there in December, first of December of 1965.
I remember it like it was yesterday. So thank God things didn't go my way and we stayed in Michigan because we got to move to Dunedin where I met all of my friends, where I met all of my loved ones, where I created a life for myself in broadcasting, where I did all kinds of stuff in horticulture and in all of these good things happened because we moved to Dunedin and I am so, so grateful for it. You know? That is so nice.
I just said, you know what I'm saying? That I say, you know, wait too much. You know, I say that. Wait, wait, wait too much.
But I don't have it. I could go by back here and I could edit out all of those, you know, I'm not going to because I don't know. I'm going to go forth and talk because that's what I do. In a little bit, Adriana is going to make me french fries and tomorrow my oldest son Tyler is coming over for dinner or having potato turbate.
You want to know what potato turbate is, go to that thing called the internet and look up potato turbate, Pinellas County Schools. Try it. You'll love it. We'll see you tomorrow.
I promise.