But I was left with a difficult situation. Not long after, I ran out of money. I was kicked out of my hotel and for the next six or seven years was often homeless. Sometimes I was employed and sometimes not. I drifted from city to city.
A good deal of my time during that period was spent in Cincinnati.
I should say that the incident of the newspaper ad wasn’t the sole reason for my problems. I’d tried to do too much using too slender resource and some of what had happened to me had been my own fault.
Coping
And the reader need not feel too sorry for my younger self. I was probably better off then as a homeless person. In my Cincinnati hotel room I’d had the feeling that I was being listened to all the time by assorted Ohio busybodies.
The eavesdroppers may have been trying to figure out whether or not something terrible might have happened if my show on space colonization had been allowed to proceed on schedule. And I found such continual, close attention to my affairs quite annoying.
However my experiences that year were good preparation for the fact that, when my homeless period finally ended in 1983, my living quarters would again be bugged. From 1983 until the time of this writing, in 2008, I’ve had to put up with bugged apartments and with various people–people who often seem to me to be lacking in manners, honesty, good will and common sense–monitoring my activities more closely than I like.
When the paper had refused to run my ad in 1977, I’d tried to appeal and had been told, if I remember correctly, that I should talk to “Mr. Eddie Taft.”
However, it's also possible that the person in question was "Eddie Scripps." Edward W. Scripps, of that publishing family, died in 1987, and his passing was noted by the New York Times. Perhaps that was the person in question.
Going to various newspaper and broadcasting offices in Cincinnati, I had the sensation sometimes of going back in time. A Scripps-Howard logo was displayed in one reception area; there'd once been a Scripps-Howard paper in my home town but, by 1977, it had long since folded.
Here I'm faced with the logical problem of drawing a connection between the newspaper ad that didn't run and Taft Broadcasting, the satirical target of WKRP.
I'm sure that the Taft name was mentioned to me at some point: I didn't make that up.
Possible explanations: People who I talked to were probably not very interested in my concerns and may have given me misleading information just to get rid of me. It's possible that some members of the Taft family were working at the Enquirer; the two Cincinnati papers had a joint operating agreement, and lines of authority may have been blurred.
Also: WKRP was probably in the planning stage at that point; there may have been an effort to feed me misleading cues to see how I'd react. The purpose of that would, or might, have been to help think of situations or ideas for the projected comedy.
It is perhaps fair to say that, during that period, I was often being made use of by others. One may wish to be made use of--up to a point. Beyond that, one may feel one is being taken advantage of.
At any rate, I do think I remember visiting a Taft radio station, which would have been the ABC affiliate, WKRC.
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