Joel Dunaway:  

JOEL DUNAWAY I was a child prodigy at the piano, but my mother had seen kids on the Jack Parr TV show and other such shows where little kids perform fears of mathematical memory calculations, and other talents. She thought it was like they were performing like trained seals or other animals, so she forbade me to ever play in public. I was given no real lessons and we had no piano until I was in High School. So, I was self taught. I am and always have been a multitalented intellectual with a 1440 IQ. High School didn't challenge me, and bored me to tears. I was teased and bullied during school for it, for just being me. That is partly why I just gave up, had to repeat the ninth grade, and then dropped out as soon as I legally could at age 16. I went to work for my father at our Chevron Gas Station next door to the school the day I dropped out of school. I worked there until I was 17, then entered the Merchant Marines. I sailed as a crew member of cargo ships taking supplies to the war in Vietnam. On my second trip, I was exposed to digoxin contaminated agent orange in the forward cargo hold while trying to lash down broken barrels of the chemical that had broken loose. The barrels were shifting about, threatening to capsize the ship during a typhoon in The South China Sea. Myself along with seven others literally took a bath in the stuff. Many military service members during the Vietnam war later came down with medical problems just from brushing up on foliage that has been sprayed with the contaminated Agent Orange... The seven of us saving the ship that night took a bath in it. The ship was damaged, and later, with another crew, sank in almost the same spot in The South China Sea with all hands on board. She was empty and riding high, so she capsized during another storm. I lived, because by then, myself, along with the rest of my crewmembers, were aboard another ship headed for Japan, so we were saved from a watery grave. I am the only one of the seven that got soaked on that first ship that is still alive. For some reason I did not develop cancer like the others did... But nevertheless, the contaminated Agent Orange has haunted me ever since, and has greatly hampered what I could have accomplished in life. I spend a lot of time in Thailand on shore leave during the unloading of cargo on my first trip, and time in Japan on the second trip. On both trips we refueled and took on fresh water and food in the Philippines, and I had shore leave in Manila as well. After my second trip on the ships, I joined the United States Marine Corps. The contaminated agent Orange had begun to slowly affect me. The USMC discharged me due to unknown medical problems. By that time I was just about to turn 20 years old. That year, my father drove me to New Orleans, and enrolled me in Elkins Institute School of Broadcasting. While in school, I worked for WNOE-FM and gained enough experience between the station and the school, so that I easily went to work in radio broadcasting as a DJ the following year. At that time I married the first of my three wives, and we moved to Georgia where I worked for three different rock stations ...Expand for more