Junior High School guidance counselors across the country should be applauded for all they do to help shape the lives of our young people. Except for a certain counselor in Bristol, Connecticut who got it all wrong. It was in the late 1960’s and a student with dreams of a broadcasting career was shocked to hear his advisor say, “Don’t do that. Do something normal.”  Thankfully, “normal” was something that this young student was trying his best to avoid.  He more than succeeded, and it is with great pleasure that the ABA inducts Bob Grip, one of Alabama’s most illustrious broadcasters, into its Hall of Fame.

“Actually, from an early age, my mother thought I was going to be a weathercaster,” says Grip. “She found me one day when I was around three – I had crawled up onto the top of the couch and proceeded to draw a weather map on the wall … a newly- wallpapered wall, I might add,” he laughs.

It was in 1969 that Grip got the validation he was looking for.  “I was one of the winners of the VFW’s Voice of Democracy contest and we all had to go to the radio station to record our essay. After I did it in one take, the engineer came out to me and said, ‘Have you ever thought about a career in broadcasting,’” Grip says. “You never know what just a little bit of encouragement can do for someone”.

Within a short time, Grip got his “big break”. He was hired on at WBIS in Bristol. “I was on from Sunday sign-on to sign-off … the job nobody else wanted,” Grip chuckles. “But I was delighted to do that for $2.50 an hour.”

“It gave me a world of experience to do the news, to spin records, to listen to foreign language shows that I didn’t understand. I was happy to start at the bottom because I figured I had to pay my dues, plus it was a great place to make mistakes.”

After succeeding in his radio career, Grip moved into television, eventually taking the news anchor position at WALA FOX 10 in 1984. The job has given him the out-of-the-ordinary life for which he hoped by providing opportunities for untold experiences. One of his most treasured memories is of meeting John Paul II.

“I got the idea of shooting a documentary with a local Catholic archbishop who was going to Rome to basically make a ‘status report’ at the Vatican,” explains Grip. “He got it all worked out and we got to be in a receiving line where the Pope was going around pretty quickly.”

I tried to think what I could do to get his attention and I figured he knew Slavic – the language of my grandparents – so when he took my hand, I gave him a traditional greeting. Sure enough, he stopped, looked at me and started talking! It was one of those moments where the world just sort of stops for a second.”

Broadcasting has also given Grip a way to serve his community, especially with Fugitive Files, a weekly series that features cases where the criminals are still at large. “The series has led to 714 arrests,” says Grip. “People often just turn themselves in when they see themselves on TV. One time I was doing a stand up in front of a house … I didn’t even know the guy they were looking for was asleep on the porch … and he turned himself in before the package even aired!” Grip says people often associate him with the series when they see him in public. “Yeah, people will say, ‘I didn’t do anything, Bob,” he laughs.

After 33 years at FOX10, Grip plans to retire in January 2019. “But I don’t plan to sort of fade to black,” he smiles. “I want to remain active, maybe pitching in as anchor say in Montgomery or Birmingham should a station find themselves in a pinch. I plan to continue to teach at Spring Hill College. And I’m interested in voice work – I have a studio right here in my office.”

And it is on his office desk that you’ll find an old three inch reel-to-reel tape that was used to record Grip’s Voice of Democracy essay, and that continues to symbolize a time in his life when  he didn’t know the broadcasting career of his dreams would come true.