Radio Free Shambles: Sky Brother Jimbo (12/7/17)
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40:21 – “You are my brother.” Recorded 12/7/17. RFS 156.
License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Attribution: by Shambles Constant, Falling Cow Productions – more info at onsug.com
Released December 2017 on The Overnightscape Underground (onsug.com), an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.
Fantastic tribute Shambles. I very much enjoyed listening and thinking about Jimbo.
Comment by Chad Bowers — December 8, 2017 @ 8:02 am
This was superb. Thanks, Shambles! I hope Jimbo is wherever he envisioned himself, and if he is, he is listening.
Comment by pqribber — December 8, 2017 @ 2:55 pm
Thanks, guys! I feel like I barely scratched the surface though – I’ll be eager to hear what everybody says in the Central about him.
Comment by Shambles — December 8, 2017 @ 5:34 pm
Jimbo should have become obsessed with at least the title of the old TV show “I Led Three Lives,” because the Web, online forums, blogs and podcasts certainly made it possible for him to lead many more than that.
Someone on Twitter posted a link to what they said was his obituary under his real name. It is a blank except for the name, date and town he lived in, with no funeral arrangements mentioned. Did his family really have no bio to post, and no idea of his lives online? Was his use of the names “jimbo” and “Jim/Jumbo/James mason” based on a real need for privacy? Were there other names he used for OTRRG uploads at archive.org ? He mentioned once that folks confused him and OTRRG’s Jim Beshires because of the first name and initial.
I “met” him as twitter.com/jimbo_otr while looking for help in my research into old radio show portrayals of journalists. (I used to be one, and later a journalism professor.) He helped with a blog item about Vic & Sade as newspaper *readers* as well as Vic’s flirtation with writing for newspapers.
https://jheroes.com/comedies/#VS
Coincidentally, both of us had been exploring the research potential of Google’s scanned-newspaper project. Jimbo eventually interviewed me about my work, and we tagged each other back and forth on Twitter for a couple of years. But since retiring, I’ve been devoting more time to music and less to radio research, and more time to Facebook and less to Twitter, so I pretty much completely lost touch with him. I’m terribly sad to hear that he has passed, and to hear the wheezing sound of his voice on a couple of podcasts I’ve listened to since getting the news.
Well, all I can say is that I hope he had as much fun and fascination — and love — in all of the parts of his life that apparently few of us knew anything about. Rest in peace, Jimbo, and in this strange new kind of internet ethereal immortality.
Comment by Bob Stepno — December 10, 2017 @ 8:15 am