“Then one day a couple of the managers are sitting there having lunch and they keep looking over at me. I was worrying, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to throw me out.’
“Finally, one of them comes over and says, ‘I’ve got to ask you, aren’t you the talk show guy? Aren’t you Mark Schlemmer?’
“I just shook my head.
“And he says, ‘I’m just curious, what have you been doing in here every day for the past couple of weeks?’
“As much as I didn’t want to, I told him the truth. I said, ‘I’m homeless.’
“He was stunned and said, ‘You’re what? What in the world happened?’ ”
And that leads to the almost unfathomable story about Dayton’s most popular sports talk show host — a 54-year-old guy who was a former star athlete here, the University of Dayton’s baseball coach and a minor-league manager — whose sudden downward spiral has left him, as he puts it, “homeless, jobless and penniless.”
Tony Caruso, the equipment manager at UD and before that a standout baseball player himself, has known Schlemmer for more than 30 years and is shaken by his friend’s situation:
“You hear about this happening to people around the country, but when it hits you in your own small little town and it’s someone you grew up with, someone you just heard on the radio, it just shows you how a situation can turn in an instant.”
Actually, Schlemmer’s life has been buffeted by several traumatic events in the past decade:
• Nine years ago his 16-year-old daughter Lindsay — his only child — was killed in an auto accident near the Shelby County town of Houston, where she lived with her mom, Schlemmer’s ex-wife, who had remarried.
• For the past several years — and now without health insurance — he has dealt with prostate cancer and diabetes.
• In 2009, the Patterson Park home of his late mother — the place where he was living — went to the bank.
• The final straw came this summer when he lost his job as host of the radio sports talk show on 980 WONE-AM. Because of his local recognition, the cavalcade of guests he regularly had (everyone from Cincinnati Reds, Bengals and Ohio State legends to many local college and high coaches, NASCAR drivers, wrestling headliners, golfers, bowlers, etc.) and especially because of the show’s passionate following, no one saw this coming.
“I told him, ‘Look, I’ve known you a long time and you’ve screwed a lot of stuff up over the years, but man, this time it doesn’t look like you messed anything up,’ ” Caruso said. “You had found something you were really good at.”
Some people close to the situation say it boiled down to a personality conflict with one of his bosses, but WONE executives won’t shed any light.
“I’d love to comment, but as a matter of Clear Channel policy and out of respect, we don’t comment on internal staffing matters,” WONE general manager Nick Gnau said.
Other Clear Channel hierarchy didn’t return calls.
Schlemmer said the split has left him “in a life I didn’t know existed.”
For a while friends from the radio station secretly put him up in a run-down motel south of town. After that he said he stayed in his aging Saab at night in parking lots of 24-hour McDonald’s, Meijer stores or apartment complexes where he felt safe.
And then matters got worse. His car was impounded, and with medical bills now coming out of his mostly empty pockets, he doesn’t have the extra cash to get it back. For the time being a friend is giving him a place to sleep.
“Right now,” he said quietly, “I’m just trying to survive day by day, but I really don’t know what to do.”
That’s why next Saturday his friends are putting on a benefit for him from noon to 7 p.m. at Brixx Ice Company across from Fifth Third Field. There will be celebrity guests, door prizes, live music, a silent auction and, most of all, a show of support for a guy who needs it now.
Rocked by tragedy
Following a standout baseball career at Fairmont West High School and Union College in Kentucky, Schlemmer played briefly in the Detroit Tigers farm system before returning to Dayton and becoming an assistant baseball coach at UD and then the head coach of the fledgling program from 1989 to 1993. After that, he spent four years as a manager in the independent Northern League.
When his daughter was killed, he said he went into a tailspin.
“People say time heals, but no, it doesn’t,” he said as his eyes filled with tears. “There’s no playbook that tells you how to survive. It just took all the gas out of me.”
Finally, some four years ago, he said, former Dayton Daily News sports writer Chick Ludwig called him and said, “Dude, you got to start living again,” and told him WONE — which had just switched formats — was doing a half hour on the Reds.
“Chick called them, I went down and it just took off from there,” Schlemmer said.
“He kind of put that station on the map,” Caruso said.
A two-hour show expanded to four and eventually Schlemmer was doing remote broadcasts across the Miami Valley that drew big followings.
“I know I wasn’t Joe Buck or anything, but the show did seem to connect with people here,” he said.
John Ortez, a UD basketball season-ticket holder for 25 years, is a self-professed sports fanatic:
“Dayton is a real sports town, but we had nothing. If you wanted sports talk, you had to go to a Cincinnati station, but they never gave Dayton a fair shake. Mark gave everybody here a voice and people loved it.”
Several callers became regulars and Schlemmer gave them nicknames like Back Porch, Big E, 12-Pack and Pork Chop.
“Mark did the show like he was casting a play and all the characters played their roles and got to talk a little bit,” said Darrell McKinney, a local sales rep and sports artist who was dubbed The Commissioner. “It became like a Broadway play or a sports soap opera every day and Mark was the perfect ringmaster.”
Deal fell through
When he first started at WONE, Schlemmer said he worked for free in the hopes the show would develop into something more lucrative. Finally, he was paid $7 an hour for the time he was on the air.
In truth, though, he said he was working 12- and 13-hour days, writing an early-morning blog for the station, answering emails, lining up guests and preparing for his show.
Although he would make considerably more money at remote broadcasts, they were sporadic. So a year or so ago he said he asked for a little more pay because he couldn’t make ends meet:
“I wasn’t trying to be Jed Clampett, but I had bills to pay.”
He claims he was led to believe something could be worked out, but come spring nothing had materialized so he said he told Tony Tilford, his immediate boss, he would handle the two fundraisers the station was involved in — for Hospice and the Epilepsy Foundation — and then resign in early July.
When he announced his departure on Facebook, he said some in management at WONE said they had heard nothing of his advance notice. Finally a Clear Channel executive from Boston became involved and soon Schlemmer said Gnau called him in.
“The meeting couldn’t have been friendlier,” he said. “He offered me a real contract and it was my understanding I’d go back on the air Aug. 22. A few days later he had me come sign the deal and meet with Tony Tilford, who had been on vacation.”
He said Tilford reacted negatively to the decision and after that the station would no longer take his calls:
“Finally, I got a text from them saying because of all the calls and emails they got from listeners who were upset I wasn’t on the air, they felt they couldn’t bring me back,” he said. “Explain that to me.”
Replaced by ‘kids’
Schlemmer has been replaced by two young guys who worked with him — Clint Davis and J.D. Smith.
While the “Clint and Smitty Show” has followers, former Schlemmer regular James “Pork Chop” Rodgers said he is “totally boycotting” the effort. And he isn’t alone.
As McKinney put it: “The guys doing the show now have no sports background. They’re like two kids playing in their big brother’s suit. They try to make it fit, but it just doesn’t.
“Sales people there have said the station has lost all kinds of sponsorship money and because of the way Mark was treated, it’s lost listeners, too.”
Tim Williams, the former Ohio State kicker who now runs kicking clinics at colleges across the nation and also does personal instruction, often was a Schlemmer guest and said what has happened is “asinine.”
“Mark had so many good people on his side and was so connected to the area — it was such a good thing for Clear Channel, but they flat out dropped the ball,” he said. “They had to hurt their ratings, but worse than that they helped ruin a guy’s life.”
Ortez, who works as an exterminator, said he has noticed one other thing recently:
“I go in 15, maybe 20 places a day and in the afternoons I used to hear people listening to Mark’s show. Now I don’t hear WONE on anywhere. People just don’t have it on.”
The way he sees it, the radio station, in some ways, is now homeless, as well.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@coxohio.com.
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