Radio's Tom Joyner Writes a Semi-Serious Book

If you tune into The Tom Joyner Morning Show on radio, then "oh, oh, oh" -- you are among up to 10 million daily listeners.

Why is he called "The Fly Jock" and "The Hardest Working Man in Radio?"

First, because before he became famous and rich, he would fly daily from Dallas to Chicago and back, in the employ of two major metropolitan FM outlets. He would do the morning drive time in Dallas and the back-home drive in Chitown.

Hardest working, indeed. And to boot, he's a big James Brown fan.

His book reflects his radio persona. He combines the hard news stuff, such as when Tavis Smiley is featured, with the humorous cackles that he shares with regular and special guests.

With the title of his book, Tom is telling us that he still wants to have some fun on his pages, but that he also has something serious to say.

A reader will learn that he is a product of Tuskegee, Alabama, home of both Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and of the Tuskegee Airmen, a famous African American unit. This environment back in the late 1950s and early 1960s gave a youthful Joyner a sort of conservative work ethic, but not entirely. He describes himself as an overweight cookie-chomping kid who slid though school on C-minus grades.

But talk about a creative and determined entrepreneur: Joyner later helped pay his way through college when he went to a campus greasy spoon, collected the fried food's spare flour and cornmeal coating crumbs (think Long John Silver's), and then sold the tidbits in greasy paper bags for a quarter apiece. His customers were hungry students engaged in late-night dormitory studies.

Joyner's views evolved along the lines of W.E.B. DuBois, who was more radical than Booker T. Washington. Joyner, like DuBois, is very light skinned -- "high yellow," Tom jokes in terms of himself -- but politically he is Black with a capital "B." He even capitalizes all the main letters of HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for which he has raised millions of dollars and for which he devotes a chapter of his book.