By Billy cunning Him to Great America and welcome to this glorious Friday afternoon in the driest Dead Reds Baseball kicks off tonight Hunter Green on the Mound in Milwaukee. One hell of a series with the brew Crew. The Reds have been terrible with Milwaukee. I think they're like something like twenty nine and thirteen on the wrong side of that and it's time. If they're going to make a move in the Central Division, it's time to get it done. Plus,
the Bengals three day camp has now expired. Joe Burrow is not hurt yet this year, we'll see what happens, but until then, Chris Cuomo of News Nation, welcome again to the Bill Cunningham Show. And Chris, first of all, this time of the year we celebrate fathers and I had a particularly bad one. You had a particularly good one. What did you learn from your father that causes you to be a better dad? Oh boy, Bill, that is a great question. And thank you for having me on.
Thank you for being a role model to a lot of people out there about how to think and what to care about and how to prioritize and starting with family is always the right thing and finishing with families the right thing. My pop was very committed to public service, and that absolutely put a strain on our dynamic because it's such an unnatural thing. But one thing that he was consistent in was that you know what the right thing is, and it
helps to have people give you moral backstops as a kid. But his consistent teaching all through my life, you know, and all through his life was, look, you don't need me to tell you what the right thing is. You know what the right thing is, and very often you have to do what is hard to do what is right. And you know, it's a simple lesson to say. It's a very hard one to live, and I have certainly struggled with it myself. I am amazed, Bill Cunningham,
you are the great American. I am the great mistake maker. I'll say this that on your dad. Mario Cuomo. He was the reluctant politician. He was unlike the politicians of today. He was perceived in nineteen eighty eight nineteen ninety two as the future of the Democrat Party. And I can recall the speech he gave in nineteen eighty four, which was I didn't care much for it at the time, but it was very articulate, well spoken,
represented a viewpoint. And the public persona is one thing. The private dad is another because the lights are off and it's you and him, and he had many kids. You have many kids. And the Mario Cuomo of the public certainly was not the Mario Cuomo who was a dad and a father. The Bill Cunningham on the air is not the Bill Cunningham as a father and a grandfather. Different persons, not on the professional sense, but in the
personal sense. You've had difficulties in your life. I've had difficulties in my life. There's nobody I know that doesn't have serious difficulties. And were there times when you went through the bad issues that you called your dad and said, Dad, I got a problem, Man, I need your help. I'll tell you something that is a little embarrassing, but I think people can probably relate to it. When I got I'll use polite language because I respect
you and your audience. When I got fired, let's say, I don't usually refer to it as that, but that's what happened. I found myself, you know, lost on a lot of different levels. And you can say I'll please it was just a job. It wasn't brain cancer, true, but it was kind of an identity, and it took me by surprise, and I was shocked and hurt by the people who precipitated it, because
they were full of it and they knew it. But I actually called my father in a moment of like, I just forgot for a second that he's gone. And I called my father's old number two one two three, one seven two seventy three three, And you know, if you call it now, it's disconnected or somebody else's, but it's one of the only phone numbers I remember, and I called, and I just forgot, And I remember
hearing that disconnected thing and realizing, oh god, it's not here. And I wish so much I could have had him, because that's exactly where he was at his best, you know, when things weren't the worst. He wasn't a great guy to celebrate with. My dad was kind of a stiff. You know. He didn't want to hear how he didn't want to hear how good you were, and he didn't want to hear you celebrating because he felt that you were making yourself soft and vulnerable. He used to joke that
success is failure of herded. But in tough times Bill was. He was a phenomenal backstop for people. He would do anything for you. He would make it very clear. Look, there's no question you're going to get through. You're absolutely going to get through this. How what shape you'll be in on the other side, I don't know, but it's going to pass. So do what you can to control how it passes. And again easy to say, hard to live. But you know, the most important things that
I know about life, I know because I watched him live them. You know, Chris crooma Chris Croloma. My dad was a raging alcoholic and at the time my best friend, my baseball coach, my basketball coach. He left at the age of when I was twelve years old, and I remember specifically my mom sitting down, had four kids of tender years and in a little home of four kids, two parents, and my dad was my best friend. But I knew he had an alcohol problem because of the war.
I'll talk about that later on, but I never saw him again. About fifteen years ago by and I'm in law school in University of Toledo. I got a little baby and married the same woman now as I was then, and out of the blue, my dad calls me and hadn't heard from him in fifteen years. At this point, I'm like twenty seven, finishing up law school. And he said, Billy, this is your dad. And I said, my dad. And I asked him two or three questions to make sure it was him. I said, what's my day to birth?
He gave it? Where was I born? He gave it. I said, who is your assistant coach with Rutgers Pharmacy in Deer Park and he gave me. I said, I said, what do you want? He said, let me tell you what I want to see you? And I said, why do you want to see me? He said, I'm dying. I said, well, what are you dying? He said, I have liver. They tell me I got liver and kidney cancer. I'm not going to make it. And I said, no. Where are you? Said Missouri? I said, I'm in Ohio and I'm up to my ass and
I I mean. I worked eight to four as a constable and common police court swearing and witnesses for four years, went to law school at night six to ten. I was busier than I could be. And I said look, I'm not coming to see you. So I quickly called my mom and said, Mom, you can't believe he just called me. And Mom said it was your dad. I said yes, he said he wants your number, and she explained to me that he was dying. So I didn't go
see him. And then about two months later he calls me again. Didn't have call or d at the time, and I said, what do you want? He said, they tell me I have a week to live. I really have to see you. I said, no, you weren't a father to me in the living years. I'm not going to be a son to you and your death. No, goodbye, and I hung up.
About fifteen more years ago by Chris Cuomo and I'm at one of my sports bar restaurants, Willie Sports Cafe, and this old man comes up to me and he taps me on the shoulder and met the bar a pretty good crowd, and he said, can I see you? And I said, now, what do you got? He said, I was your dad's best friend. I said really, so I took him off to the size side of the table. He said, let me tell about your dad. He was a wonderful guy, funny hilarious. But at Guadalcanal he was a grunt.
He killed Japanese soldiers. He watches, he watched his buddies being killed. At night, they would put bodies of his friends and bags. And that went on for months and months and months and months and minds. And when that got over with and the war was one, he was on ships outside of Japan ready to invade when the bombs were dropped. When he came home, he became a raging alcoholic because it was medicine. It was a pain
of what he went through. And at that point, Chris Cromo, I felt like I was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, that I should have reached out to my dad in his hour of need and listened to the story. I had no idea of the pain it was calling out PTSD at that point it was like shake it off, just get over it. Well, he couldn't get over it, and he died a raging alcoholic, with a new family in Missouri, so to speak, and he left us to live on our own. It was my aunt, my mother's sister, who
took us in. Otherwise all of us would have been an orphanage. And so I had nobody. Growing up, when I had big decisions to make about life, I had nobody I could call, no one. What do you say to the kids like me that didn't have an functional father that was with you, and that you had no one to rely upon other than your own judgment. I think that what life teaches you was, at the end of the day, you have to be enough. First of all, you
know I don't know you that well, Bilbi. You know I have premendous respect for your success and what your work is about. Regret is the most wasted of human emotions. You have clearly taken very profound lessons from what happened with you and your father at the end of his life, and it unquestionably has given you a sensitivity and a sense of forgiveness that you didn't have for him in that moment, which absolutely makes perfect sense. But at the end
of the day, sure, everybody has their challenges. My father wasn't perfect, my upbringing is far from perfect. But at the end of the day, you take what you can from the people around you. But it's going to be about you in the end. Even if you have faith, even if you believe in something bigger than yourself, everything that's going to manifest in your life is going to be you. It's always on you at the end of the day. So you may be alone, but we're all alone at
the end of the day. And you make the life for yourself that you can. There's no such thing as luck, there's no such thing as fate, there's no such thing as destiny. You make those things happen, and that can be scary. People would like to know that there's someone carrying them along or something carrying them along. But at the end of the day is your own actions and intentions, and if you do the right things, you got a chance of having the right things happen to you. They're no guarantees
in this world. Chris, what you just said is so accurate. Two things I said. I said, number one, I may have many difficulties in my life, but drugs and alcohol will never be one of them. Well, whatever I'm going to do, I'm not going to drink and I'm not going to smoke, and I'm not going to do that. And number two, when I get a son, I'm going to be the best father to him that my dad wasn't to me. And I took the lessons of that to say, you know what, I'm not going to drink. I'm
not going to be a derelict. I'm going to take care of my family and I'm going to be a father that he never was. And I took from those circumstances that, and I hope I passed that on to my family, to my son, to my grandkids. That family is more important than wealth, more important than anything else in life. But when you bring lives into the world, damn it, you take care of those kids and you love them as much as you can. And the same thing with alcohol and
drugs. My gosh, right, now, look at the problems we got with alcohol and drugs and gambling. I have so many people. Now, you know, my wife works with the State of Ohio and the Casino Control Commission and gambling. She's a commissioner up there, and it goes back and
forth. But nonetheless, there are so many opportunities for kids to gamble on their phones and young kids more than oh my god, let's not forget what it is though, right, So do these ills, these sins, this disease, these behaviors all exist and then more supply than ever, Yes, yes, yes, but those again, those are consequence what we are really struggling with in our society uniquely so because we have the burden of choice so
much to the society. But everybody's not out there, you know, trying to find fish in a mud pond to survive, So you have choice. People have hard times here, but hard times in America are different than hard times in Uganda, you know. So what we struggle with here is a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning what are we about? And people get lost in that. They wind up, they wind up idolizing the wrong things. And we don't have the value structure and we don't have a common
admittment to values, so we're all there's so many who are lost. They don't have a structure around them that they can mimic. If they don't have a path that's laid out for them, they're not going to just necessarily be Bill Cunningham, who takes adversity, who takes a lack of love, a lack of concern, and turns it into a commitment to those things. It's
very rare, So why get be great American? They will fall and they will look for something to make themselves forget how they feel and their disappointment and the pain, and that's where the drugs come in. That's where the addictions come in. That's where all the antisocial behavior comes in. And as a society we have reinforced those problems by having no mercy, no sense of grace, no sense of forgiveness. Was the only thing that bothered me about Hunter
Biden's case other than the politics behind it. He did it, He's guilty, Okay, he's guilty. Yes, they don't bring those cases. But the fact that he's an addict. Even Heraldo Rovert was a mentor of mine and he's out there in Ohio suis. I love him to death, respect him so much. But he looks so hard on Hunter for being a junkie. He kept saying, it's junky horrormonger who's ruined his family. The guy's
sick, not just bad. And it was interesting to me, and I said to him in private and on television, why are you so hot on him as someone who's been obviously struggling with a disease for so long and it's recognized within his own family, why don't you recognize it? And He's like, you know, after a while, I'm just like enough to stop doing what you're doing. It's bad, but they can't, you know, And it's really part of what we got to look at it about ourselves. You
know. You and I were talking before we came on about how divided everybody is and how it almost seems like contagious. And I talk to people, I'm very lucky in my life, Bill, like the people like you. I mean, think about it. How many guys like you and me you get to have the exchanges that we have in this business. We're not allowed to talk to each other like this. You know, people don't want to hear you know, my audience will be like, why are you doing on
those writings. You're talking to them because I love them, because they're my brothers, because I believe in them. I don't care if they care all the same ideas. I care so much about what you do and I have so much respect for why you do it. And people will look at me like I'm saying, you know, maybe the Celtic's arms so bad, Maybe I'm not just a Knicks fan. You know, leave that for sports,
not for politics, and for our humanity. You know, Chris Fomo, I spent years and assistant ag on commitment hearings of the mentally ill and those with difficulties. And I'm thinking all those thousands and hearings I conducted for the AG about committing people in mental hospitals, and they came into the room and it was like, my God, but for the grace of God, there goes Aye. And I'm thinking, those guys, just shake it off.
You can come over that like my father and those who came back from the war, whether it was to World War two or the Persian Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan. Hey, just shake it off. It's going to be okay. Quit drinking, quit using drugs. Today drugs are everywhere, marijuana is legal. You have young men and women that don't want to form family structures until they're thirty thirty five years old, and the attitude of no big deal, just just just get rid of it. What damn it is.
I know it is not easy to shake it off and just forget about it and move on. It's not easy. Ill it's illness. It's illness. Look, I am ridiculously fortunate in the land of people who gets exposed to bad things. And I got to tell you, I'm years of traveling to foreign wars and watching where the humanity has to offer absolutely affected me, and I needed therapy, and I needed people around me to tell me when my
behavior was changing. And then I was exhibiting in sensitivities that were obviously a reaction to me trying to deal with watching heads pop and watching you know, people killed for sport and all the other horrible things you see in this business. And that's just a touch of what the fighting men and women have to deal with. So I've always been very sympathetic to human frailty. You say, but Bill, We're so lucky. We're lucky a lot of people.
But a lot of people do believe in grace because you don't believe in God. So I don't believe that there's anything that could hear and that can matter more than our own beings. And I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, and I rely upon that. I wanted to talk to you about Hunter Biden, about Trump's visit of the Capitol. I want to talk about the Disaster Finds trip to G seven and here we are talking his sons about dads and dads about their sons. So anyway, we got a run matter. This matters a
lot more my son. You're graduated, Bill, He's going away to college next year. And that's all that matters in terms of my legacy for me and Christine and my wife's made him. Thank God, he looks like her. Okay, he's putting good into the world. And my time here was everything else before the year is don I like to get Sean Compton, me and you and have have dinner in New York. I spent so much time there. I actually we've never I seldom meet my guests. I want to
sit down across the table with you and Sean Compton. Would that be good? Man? Dinners on me. Bill. You've given me a great opportunity and I love to be with you. God bless you. Chris Clomo, thank you very much. Let's continue. And I wanted to talk about everything that, but one question led onto that, and I hope you, as a great American listener, found it worthwhile. Now's the time to reach back and solve difficulties. Bill Cunningham, News Radio seven hundred WLW. Are you
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