So a video has gone viral of Purdue Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon speaking at the school's commencement breaking into Asian sounding gibberish after the prior speaker had made some reference to nonsensical made up language. Keon subsequently apologized, but the controversy lives on, not only for what he said, but also from the reaction of people in the audience who found this funny.
This incident has triggered a forgotten memory of mine dating back about 50 years ago, when a local radio disc jockey. Roger Carroll at KMPC, started speaking words of fake Chinese on the air. While that was something that was much more likely to happen 50 years ago than it would be today, I still found it distasteful and wrote a letter of objection to Roger Carroll, who I was otherwise a big fan of. Around 6:28pm in the evening a couple of days after I had written the letter, my phone rang. The voice on the other end said "David R. Chan? This is Roger Carroll from KMPC." He said he was calling in response to my letter, and his call was in part an apology, and in part of an explanation that he hadn't realized he said something said something offensive. I replied that while it may not have seemed offensive to him, it in fact was offensive to myself and to others.
A funny sidelight to the call was that I noticed when it turned 6:30pm, and said to him "Shouldn't you be going on the air?" He said "just a minute," went to his microphone and said "Good evening, this is Roger Carroll on KMPC" (or however he started his show every night), and then returned to our conversation. It's funny I hadn't thought about this incident in decades until seeing the Purdue video tonight. But I do remember "David R. Chan? This is Roger Carroll" as if it happened just yesterday.
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