By BILL WOOD
For The Beachcomber

There are lots of retired people on Vashon. I am one of them. In fact, there are so many retired people on Vashon that I don’t have to feel embarrassed when I say, “I am one of them.”  I don’t have to stammer and say, “Well, I used to be… .”

I used to be a writer. In the entertainment business. In Hollywood. Big deal, right? How many people do you know who can say that?

Listen, I spent an evening at a motel in the California desert soaking up Yul Brynner’s philosophy of life. (“I am not embarrassed to share my hammock with another man.”) I once had lunch with Andy Griffith and Don Knotts. (Don had a salad. He had ulcers; he always had salads.) And Jack Nicholson once said hello to me at a carwash. (He got my name wrong.) Stuff that memories are made of, right? Hollywood stuff that would be bound to buoy me up in my golden years. Not really. I used to be a Hollywood writer, and now I was nobody. Just another old man on an island.

I sat by the phone in our rented apartment in Vashon town waiting for a call from my agent. Then I would remember, “Wait a minute, I’m retired.” So, then I’d wander off for a while and then come back to the phone. Maybe my other agent would call. (Multiple agents: sign of success.) Pathetic. The conclusion was inescapable: I was retired. I was a retired person, a mere scab on the rump of life.

We bought a house. Nice house. I kept listening for the phone. Old habits. You know the tubes they talk about? Well, that’s what I was going down.

And then, one evening, my wife pointed to an article in The Beachcomber about a meeting at the late Bill Morosoff’s home having to do with starting up a radio station on the island under the newly created low-power FM program at the FCC. A glimmer of daylight. I had always had a secret ambition to deejay a jazz show. Maybe, you know, a new life, a new start.

The FCC turned down our application for the FM station. But this was a unique group of people. Steve Allen was there; Bob Moses was there; Jeff  Hoyt was there, Lori Gustavson (now Lori Kay), other folks whose names I no longer remember and, of course, Bill Morosoff: retired. We did not want to quit, and Steve Allen, who knew about this stuff, said we should go online.

And so we did. And I started my jazz show, and I’m still doing it, 300 shows later. That was 15 years ago. I became president of the Voice of Vashon board because I was lied to shamelessly about my responsibilities — I would just be a figurehead, they said. But we were in desperate need of funds, not a good situation for a figurehead.

I was not re-elected. But by then I had already started writing the station’s public service announcements. And now, I feel somehow that these ephemeral pronouncements are just as important to me as the jazz show. The jazz show, which I do with my indispensable engineer and producer, Michael-Golen Johnson, gives me an enormous amount of pleasure, but with the PSAs — as voiced by Jeff Hoyt — I had another feeling. As I worked with them, I tried to find a conversational and, hopefully, entertaining tone to dispense this essentially dry information. And the work appeals to me because I feel that I am interacting directly with my community for whom much of this information is important and, in certain instances, even life-enhancing.

I have climbed out of the tube. It’s great when Lori Kay comes up to me in Café Luna and asks if I can help her promote the news of the extension of her show there. It’s a public and physical manifestation of what I do. It feels good.

This is my to-hell-with-retirement story. But the fact is, I don’t see a lot of retirees on this island who are just a-sittin’ and a-rockin’. They’re doing stuff, all kinds of stuff to keep their bodies and brains in shape, and very often in ways that make life on this island the joy that it is.

My agent doesn’t call any more (he’s retired too), but folks who want a PSA for their nonprofit’s latest event do. Now, that’s cool.

— Bill Wood is the host of The Jazz Guy radio show on Voice of Vashon.