Alan Bickley
From Philosopedia
Alan Bickley (2 January 1934 - )
Bickley, who has had a career in broadcasting, was born in the oil-and-ranching town of Ponca City, Oklahoma, where he graduated from its public high school. His father (Fred Bickley, 1891-1974) was a painting and decorating contractor who, as a new member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), received his little red card from the redoubtable Bill Haywood.
His mother (Kittie Moss Bickley, 1898-1985) he has described as "a brilliant but, alas, blinkered woman whose intellectual gifts were blighted by the bigotry that afflicted our part of the world in the early years of the 20th century." Her mother and father were in the last great Oklahoma land rush, the Cherokee Strip opening of 1893, and she gave birth to the first white child born in the Strip shortly after she staked a land claim. She was a believer, but his father was a skeptic who was repelled by the behavior of professing Christians.
Of his parents, Bickley has written, "From this unlikely pair I imbibed a love of words and of history that has been both blessing and curse in my working life."
In an interview in 2007, Bickley said,
- I attended the University of Tulsa and Oklahoma State University, but I did not graduate. That did not discourage Depaul University from employing me as an instructor in its School of New Learning where, for six years, I taught a course of my own devising called Deciphering the News. In the 1980s and early 90s, the course was one of the first college courses to look critically at contemporary press, radio, and television as purveyors of propaganda.
- Although I had intended to prepare myself for a vocation, possibly teaching history, possibly being in the Foreign Service, I abandoned college and settled into a stormy career in radio and television broadcasting. I did what broadcasters do in towns as small as Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and in cities as large as Los Angeles, on networks that spanned North America, East Asia, and Europe. I was present in Dallas when President Kennedy was murdered, and my skepticism about the official story of that event followed me to Boston where my prematurely correct analysis of the Vietnam War brought me into conflict with the bosses.
- Red-baited out of Boston – there is no other sufficient word for it – I moved to the CBS owned-and-operated WBBM in Chicago where as a news anchor I was able to keep my head down and my opinions to myself for perhaps three years. It was the fact that my listeners were getting an alternative, and, as proved to be the case, accurate account of that and subsequent wars and other public issues that put me once again at odds with the bosses. In 1992 it became possible for my wife, Susan, and me to retire together. She had worked for some time in the public schools before doing ten years in a Chicago-area publishing house, and she convinced me that Madison is a grand place of retirement for people who think as we do.
A member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he was quoted in their Freethought Today publication:
- Of my history with religion I can say this: I left the Methodist church summer school one morning in my eighth year convinced that none of what I had heard made sense. Following this, my day of emancipation, I have been completely untroubled and unimpeded by the crises of faith and spirit that hobble so many of my contemporaries and provide plot lines for novels, movies, and TV programs. I am no jihadist of atheism; neither do I smile wanly when believers challenge me.
- A college class back in Boston many years ago asked me what, as an atheist, I think about religious broadcasting. I answered that I am for it because the airwaves belong to the people, and some of the people seem to want such programs. But I am for it only to the extent that the airwaves are equally open to disbelief and skepticism. We are not there yet.
