Joseph Sabino Mistick: We could use a little of Jack Bogut's storytelling these days

When Jack Bogut was the king of morning radio in Pittsburgh, waking up to your favorite station was not as scary as it is these days. We always seem to be on the brink of something terrible or faced with something terrible that happened overnight — political violence, mass shootings, the pandemic — but it wasn’t always like that.

Bogut ruled Pittsburgh morning radio from 1968 to 1983. As the drive-time voice of KDKA-AM — the 50,000-watt broadcast radio station that could be heard in 38 states — he eased us into the day with his gentle manner and storytelling. In Pittsburgh, often described as a cross between the Northeast and the Midwest, he appealed to our Midwest side.

Bogut’s stories are extraordinary because they are so ordinary, so familiar. The subject of his 1993 book “Big Sky Café and Other Schools I’ve Attended” is the diner of his Montana youth. From the customers to the cooks, servers and food — a “breakfast that lives in the memory forever” — Bogut calls it “a place we all know. Even if we’ve never really been there.”

At his peak, Bogut was named by “Good Morning America” as the No. 2 radio personality in the nation, and in 2011, he was inducted into the Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Here at home, Bogut was known for his on-air playfulness, like the Farkleberry Tart holiday fundraising campaign he created for Children’s Hospital.

Pittsburghers flocked to his broadcast booth in the window of Horne’s department store, depositing their donations in a barrel, exchanging a few words on the air and picking up their mysterious tarts. “People were bound together by the radio and their own generosity,” Bogut says.

Growing up in a religious household, young Jack was held to the Ten Commandments, so he developed his own 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not take thyself too seriously.”

“Start your day with a smile,” Bogut says, “because the bad news will come. And when it came during our broadcast, we stopped the entertainment to take care of business.” After those tragedies passed, there was steady Jack Bogut, telling another story that made you smile.

As for the difference between those days and now, Bogut is realistic.

“It is in the nature of things to change, and the world is just different now,” he says. “For six months after 9/11, this country was united as one, not selfishly inclined. But when the pandemic came, it just pushed us further and further apart. It’s a traumatic time we live in.”

And the media doesn’t help.

“My main philosophy was to talk to just one person on the air. Now it’s more and more impersonal,” Bogut says.

But if you ask him if he sees a way out of this mess, his answer is quick: “Storytelling is the way to put ourselves back together.”

And he returns to the introduction to “Big Sky Café”: “I’ve always been amazed at how much you and I have in common, how many things we share, even if we have never met and don’t know each other … we share more things that make us the same than set us apart.

“We are all bound together by a common denominator, that sometimes sticky glue of human experience that we thought happened only to us.”

That’s a story worth telling.