Seven Dirty Words Read Online Free PDF Page B

her younger son a gift for completing his studies at Corpus Christi. Carlin told his mother that’s what he wanted—a tape recorder.
    He thought of it as a training tool, infinitely more useful than his Latin textbooks. Carlin’s state-of-the-art, reel-to-reel tape recorder—“big as a Buick,” he joked—was one of the earliest commercially available models, made by the consumer electronics pioneer Webcor, the Webster-Chicago Corporation. He quickly became adept at recording himself doing mock radio broadcasts, commercial parodies, and other comic bits. “I’d do little playlets about the neighborhood,” he recalled. “I’d make fun of the authority figures—the shopkeepers, the parents, the priests, the policemen.” Friends of his older brother began asking Patrick to bring Georgie to their parties, to entertain with his tapes. His career in comedy was already underway.
    He was in a headlong rush to get on with the transition to adult-hood and out from under his mother’s suffocating expectations. For one thing he was engaged, however briefly, to a neighborhood girl named Mary Cathryn. Shortly after quitting high school, Carlin decided to enlist in the Air Force. Not quite a decade into its existence, the Air Force was considered the country club of military service by many enlistees. Rather than train to storm a beachhead or engage in hand-to-hand combat in some godforsaken jungle, Carlin reasoned that he’d rather “fly over the area, drop some bombs, fly home, take a shower, and go out dancing.” Though military life held no attraction for him, with the draft looming he figured he would enlist early, put the service behind him, and then use the G.I. Bill to train for a career in radio. (A regular listener to radio Hall of Famer Martin Block on WNEW’s Make Believe Ballroom , Carlin had been thinking for some time that he might be cut out to pursue a similar career, introducing the hits of the day on the air.) Seventeen-year-old George Carlin—his mother signed his enlistment papers—was assigned to be a radar technician with the 376th Bombardment Wing’s Armament and Electronics Maintenance Squadron, working on B-47 bombers at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, outside Shreveport, Louisiana.
    The duty was not particularly captivating, and Carlin soon began looking for extracurricular activities to occupy his time. He heard about a local Shreveport playhouse that was auditioning for a new production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy and decided he’d try out. Joining the cast at the Shreveport Little Theater, he met another aspiring actor, a local man named Joe Monroe. Monroe was part owner of a Top 40 “daytimer” radio station (which went off the air at sunset, then a common practice), a thousand-watt channel at 1480 on the AM dial known as KJOE. When the fresh-faced New Yorker mentioned his eagerness to break into broadcasting, Monroe took him down to the station. He asked Carlin to have a go at reading news reports from the ticker tape machine. Already working to tone down his New York accent, the linguistically inclined kid from Morningside Heights “read it off like nothing,” recalls Stan Lewis, a well-known music distributor and record-store owner from Shreveport known as Stan the Record Man. Lewis was good friends with Monroe, bringing the latest rhythm and blues releases to his station and playing poker with him once a week. Lewis soon befriended Carlin, who often hung around the Record Man’s shop, listening to the newest records by Stan Kenton and other favorite jazz artists. Hired for weekend duty at KJOE for sixty cents an hour, Carlin read promotional copy and filled in whenever a disc jockey was absent.
    Carlin’s military future was considerably dimmer. He was in near-constant trouble, not only with his superiors, but with local law enforcement as well. He has claimed that he was once stopped for riding in a car with two black enlistees. (In a 1974 interview he said that