When I sat in that open cafe in Mexico eating dog meat and pondering my future I was determined to turn my life around. When I decided to turn myself in and face the consequences I walked back across the U.S. border fully expecting to spend many years in prison. I'm an optimist by nature, but I had no thoughts of an immediate future that involved anything other than high walls and prison bars. In my wildest fantasy I would not have imagined the rapid change that would occur in my life. The reversal of my life between November 1975 and the first of January 1976 is difficult to imagine. Even as I write this forty years later it is difficult to accept how fast things happened. Were it not for the dates thoroughly document in my criminal record, I would not believe how little time had passed. The documented fact is that two months and a week after deciding not to follow a dozen Mexicans through a hole in the wall of the Brownsville jail I was living in Virginia, a free man with a pretty girlfriend and a job in Christian broadcasting. It was a miracle. I knew it to be the truth when Sherry said it. God was performing a miracle in my life and He was doing it for a reason. He had a purpose for my life. All I had to do was figure out what it was.

Using my final paycheck from the Coast Guard I rented a run down house in a poor neighborhood three blocks from CBN. The contract was month to month because I expected to go to prison in the future. Lacking a car I walked to work. The house was a dump. I had no furniture. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag and cooked simple meals on an electric stove. I had pending charges in three jurisdictions, any or all of them could put me in prison with a long sentence. But none of that mattered. Jesus had given me purpose and He had given me peace. I was content. I didn't worry about the next day, only the moment I was experiencing. I celebrated that moment.

As a side note I no longer had a physical drivers license for identity and my Florida license had been suspended, so I went to the Virginia DMV to see how long it would be before I could get my license back. When they looked up my Florida DMV record they informed me that my Florida license was still valid. They issued me a Virginia Driver's License that day. I wasn't even surprised. I was thankful, but had come to expect stuff like this to happen.

I need to tell a little back story about CBN. It was founded by Pat Robertson, a Yale Law School graduate, ordained Baptist preacher, and the son of a United States Senator from Virginia. I don't think Pat ever practiced law, but went straight into ministry, beginning in the worst areas of New York City. In the late 1950's he managed to purchase a run down UHF television station in Portsmouth Virginia. So the youngsters understand I will explain: before cable you received television signals from local stations. In most rural areas you got one or two stations at best, but in the cities you would usually have access to the three big networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS. The big three were broadcast usually on VHF stations, which were channels 2 thru 12 on the dial. (Yes, the dinosaur days before digital buttons and remote control.)

The station Pat Robertson purchased was an underpowered (signal transmission power) UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia. I don't know the station's original call sign, but as soon as he could Pat changed it to WYAH. Because it was a small market UHF station with an FCC license for a low grade transmission, the station itself wasn't worth much so Pat bought it cheap. This was before cable, and the Internet, so all television stations were local, and even then limited by the power of it's transmitter, whose power was tightly controlled by the FCC. Some stations had FCC licenses for more powerful transmitters, which meant they could reach households at a greater distance. A station with a weak signal was rarely given licenses for a stronger one by the FCC. Regardless of the transmission power, a television station could only reach a home within the range of their transmitter. If you compared a TV of the pre-cable era with a local radio station today you'll have an idea of how it worked. Just as you can drive out of range of your local FM radio station, you could live out of range of a local TV station.

When Pat Robertson bought the small UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia he had a vision for a national Christian television network. It was a revolutionary thought. One considered unrealistic by most. But Pat Robertson was a visionary who pushed forward as if it would happen and planned for the day when technology would catch up with his vision. In the limited time I worked for CBN I was there to witness the day Pat's vision became an historical reality. You'll get more on this later in the story.

At this point CBN had two sides. One was the Christian Broadcasting Network, which produced religious programs that were syndicated nationally. Those shows were copied onto two inch video tape (what all TV stations used in those days) and shipped out (either US Mail or UPS, I don't remember which). The premier program, and by far the most significant show in Christian broadcasting for decades was "The 700 Club". The 700 Club was in talk show format, with Pat Robertson as the host and Ben Kinchlow as the co-host. The 700 Club was ninety minutes long with no commercials and broadcast live to the local audience (within the reach of WYAH's broadcast distance) Monday thru Friday. The same show would be seen a week later via affiliated stations using the shipped video tape.

When The 700 Club wasn't being broadcast live, WYAH aired other programs to the Portsmouth, Norfolk and Virginia Beach area. All wholesome family stuff. The kind of stuff a Christian family would be comfortable allowing their children to watch. Small as this audience was, it became the foundation for what would become "The Family Channel" when cable came about. Later Pat sold The Family Channel to the Fox group, but that's another story.

That's the back story, here's where I enter it. My first job at the Christian Broadcasting Network was with WYAH TV. Both WYAH and CBN shared the same facilities and my paycheck was from CBN, so the lines were often blurred as to who worked for which, but in my case it was pretty clear that I worked for WYAH TV. My official job title was "Video Engineer", but in the station I was called the "On Air Switcher." The job fascinated me with all the buttons and dials, but it became boring pretty fast. In these olden days of television, before a movie could be aired, the Switcher had to thread the reel to reel film (film, not video) into an actual movie projector, then cue it up to the beginning ready to be switched on. I had a cool room with two movie projectors, a commercial "cart," a two inch video machine (exclusively used for CBN produced shows) and a NASA looking control desk complete with monitors. I had a format to follow for what was shown when, at what point in the show (how many minutes into it) that a commercial was due, and which commercial to show. My job was to cue up all these different commercials and projectors and send the final product over the air waves. If I messed up, the the kid watching cartoons in Virginia Beach got upset. And if I mistakenly allowed a commercial break to run for more than two minutes, then the station faced a fine from the FCC. It all looked complicated to someone doing a walk through tour, but it was a simple job.

Because the 700 Club show was aired live locally, I had nothing to do during those ninety minutes. After I surrendered control to the 700 Club network guys I'd usually walk the ten steps into their control room and ask if they needed any help. Sometimes they did and I was glad to help, but most often they had everything under control so I walked another fifty feet to Studio B where The 700 Club was being broadcast live for the local audience and taped for the rest of the country. Because of this set up, I was in the studio audience for many 700 Club shows. It was quite an experience for a young Christian, one that gave me the foundation for my faith.

Life had become idyllic, but it ended temporarily four months later, on April 5, 1976. At nineteen years old, charged with burglary of an unoccupied building (the Honda theft), I plead guilty to a reduced charge and was sentenced to two years in a Virginia prison. Looking at the paperwork as I write this I am astonished to see that this crime occurred in April of 1975. So I was sentenced one year after the crime, which is a fairly normal time-frame. What is so astounding, even to I who lived through it, is how much was packed into those twelve months.

The Sherriff in Lynchburg seemed to like me. I suspect John Gilman from CBN had something to do with the favor I received. Whatever the reason, the Sherriff delayed sending me to prison and made me a trustee in his jail. For five months I enjoyed the relative freedom of a trustee, washing county vehicles and learning to train dogs. But after five months I was getting close to being eligible for parole, and for that I needed to be in the state department of corrections, so the Sherriff sent me to a medium security prison. What Virginia called a work Camp. Life in the prison camp was hard, but not unbearable. I worked on the modern version of a chain gang five days a week. We would ride in a truck with an armed guard to an area of state highway and clean out ditches or pick up trash. Whatever was needed. When I saw the parole board a combination of a clean prison record, status as a first offender and a glowing letter from CBN with a promise of future employment was enough to convince the board I was a safe risk, so was given parole.

At this point the charges for stealing evidence in Upper Marlboro Maryland had been dropped. I don't know why, but this was a blessing. I still had charges in Cambridge Maryland for selling pot, so December 1, 1976 when I was released from custody in Virginia I was sent from Virginia to Maryland. In Cambridge on December 9, 1976 I plead guilty to the misdemeanor of selling a half ounce of pot and was sentenced to six months in the county jail. The Sherriff was interested in CBN and fascinated by the fact that I worked there. He made me an assistant cook and often called me into his office to talk about CBN.

On February 17, 1977, after serving two and a half months the judge suspended the remainder of my sentence. Ten months after leaving CBN to go to prison I was once again free, only this time I was free of everything. Nothing was left to worry about. I had one felony and one misdemeanor on my record, but nothing else to face. I took a bus back to Portsmouth, where John Gilman and Sherry had everything arranged for my fresh start.