Tonight Dan Verbeck will go to bed at 5 p.m., or try to anyway. He will rise shortly after 11, along with the rest of the third-shifters and any zombies lurking around area graveyards. And then, for the last time, he will work what seems like one of the grimmest assignments in all of media: reporting live from the scene as murder, mayhem and mischief spill out onto the darkened streets of Kansas City.
Some time before 8 a.m. on Friday -- his employer, KMBZ Radio, wants him back in the studio for a special goodbye show then -- he will file his last report from the KMBZ mobile unit, including his familiar signoff, “Cruiser 980, clear.”
What is amazing and even inspiring about Verbeck is that this has been his job for 23 years on KMBZ (980), and as he prepares to leave, it's not because he's grown bitter or weary at all the carnage his fellow humans can cause to themselves and one another. No, he's leaving because he has an aging mother in California, a wife and teenagers at home, three grown kids (including two by a previous marriage) and a granddaughter on the way and at age 64, he's earned the right to spend more time with all of them.
“I never have a chance to keep up with their activities in school,” Verbeck is telling me on the phone. He's talking about his daughters, one in middle school, one in high school. For a radio broadcaster, he sure doesn't talk like one. He speaks slowly and very softly. I kill an office fan and cover my other ear.
“My mother, who's coming on 93 and lives in California, still in her own house -- I want some ability to be free, when needed, to go out and give her a hand.”
This newspaper writes about Dan Verbeck from time to time. Print folks, I think, have a soft spot for old soldiers in radio (Charles Gray, Walt Bodine). Maybe we have some nostalgia for what is largely regarded as a dying breed, though Verbeck would dispute that.
“Radio has something the (inaudible) sisters don't have,” he says. I should interrupt to ask about that word I missed, but then I would be breaking the long sinew of his thought, which would be worse.
“You can have a photo laid out before you and a YouTube video, but you are still able to translate with radio what you hear and you get to use your mind and imagination,” Verbeck says. “Radio allows the recipient to have some intellectual intimacy with it. They have to work just a little bit to get something out of radio. Not a lot, but a little. Head and heart.”
I was the one who last wrote about him. It was after he returned from New Orleans, where Entercom, which owns KMBZ, sent him to help staff sister station WWL-AM just before Hurricane Katrina struck. Of course, he had no idea that 22-hour days would be awaiting him, or that he would take phone calls in the dead of night from people trapped in their own homes, desperate because the water was rising to their necks.
Earlier in 2005, another reporter wrote about “Bernice's Ashes,” the powerfully poignant little campaign Verbeck launched to give a proper burial to one Bernice Hickmon, whose family moved out after her death and abandoned the urn with her remains. The next tenant turned the ashes over to police.
“Somebody told me there was an urn down in the evidence room,” Verbeck says, “so I went down and asked and the sergeant said 'Yeah, been there since '85,' almost 20 years. She was treated like the matriarch of the place. Her name was on the urn, but they didn't know anything about her.” Verbeck found out about her, told her story on KMBZ, and arranged for a donated plot and burial service. Seats were left empty in the front row, where the family would've sat.
“Bernice is resting under a nice cherry tree in the Elmwood Cemetery,” he says. “She finally got some respect.”
Nineteen eighty-one was a pretty eventful year as well. He was at KCMO then, having been fired from KMBZ by a manager who reportedly didn't think Verbeck sounded happy enough on the air. First, a deranged Lansing inmate came into the station holding a saleswoman at knifepoint. Verbeck interviewed him and played the tape on the radio while SWAT teams, guns cocked, hovered outside. Then, four days later, the Hyatt pedestrian bridge collapsed.
Yet when I ask Verbeck what story was the most meaningful, the most important he'd worked on since picking up a microphone in 1974, he says it was the death of Kansas City Fire Capt. John Tvedten in a warehouse blaze in 1999. It wasn't the way Tvedten died that cut him to the quick, but what this firefighter meant to the department and the city.
“John Tvedten was the conscience of the fire department,” he says. “There were problems with the radios that the firefighters used, and John was outspoken about this. He was told he was committing career suicide by speaking out. But whenever an opportunity rose and the radios didn't work, he would give me information and I would break stories. Ironically, he died in a warehouse where the radios were working fine.” Even after his death, Tvedten was the department's conscience, as changes were made and drills initiated to ensure another firefighter didn't run out of oxygen in a smoke-filled room, as Tvedten did.
I can understand why Verbeck would relate to firefighters. He runs into a lot of places that most of us would rather run out of. He figured out how to do this a long time ago without falling into cynicism or despair. That, to me, is his great accomplishment. Here's how he describes it. For best results, you might want to read it aloud, and imagine you're hearing him on the radio.
“Every story, Aaron, has its own variation. I realize people can burn out on it by making it a fill-in-the-blank. But, take a crime. Homicide. They're all different. People who suffer -- both sides, perpetrator and victim -- they're all different. The facts may be pretty much the same, but they're not all the same. The human element. People who've gone out to break the news to the bereaved have told us that there are three or four different types of reaction -- blame on the deliverer, anger -- but everybody receives it in a slightly different way. I couldn't do that. I would burn out if I had to break the news to people that their loved ones died. But they're all different. It gives a reporter life. You could almost say he's nurtured by doing it, because it leaves his curiosity alive. And if I'm just curious about the human condition….”
His voice trails off.
Cruiser 980, clear.
