One of the distinct pleasures around releasing a book is all the people you meet and all the paths they’ve taken to have an interest in your book.

The point was driven home recently in a signing staged by the good folks at Washington State University’s Lewis Alumni Centre, where, shortly into the event, in walked a tall guy whom I hadn’t seen in perhaps 50 years.

Though time has a way of chiseling away at our features over half a century, for some reason I managed to riffle through the mental Rolodex and immediately splash forth a name: Rick Simon.

He and I came upon each other via quirky circumstances way back in 1970. I was a senior at WSU, doing part-time grunt work at the school’s news bureau, making $1.40 an hour. They’d give me a stack of press releases on students who had received scholarships from various companies, and I’d bat out a two-paragraph story to be sent (sent, literally) to the student’s hometown newspaper: “Joanie Jones of Federal Way, a junior at Washington State University, has been awarded a $500 Weyerhaeuser scholarship . . . ”

That was my 10-hour-a-week existence at the news bureau. But one day, my boss assigned me a juicy story way out of my work-a-day routine.

Two WSU undergrads had just gotten the rights to the school’s football and basketball radio broadcasts. And they were going to be the on-air talent.

Everybody associates WSU radio broadcasts with the legendary Bob Robertson, who died in 2020 at the age of 91. But everybody forgets – or more likely, is too young to know – that for three years, 1969-71, Robertson interrupted his WSU broadcasting career to work for the rival Washington Huskies.

His two replacements, for two seasons of WSU sports, were Rick Simon and Mark Kaufman, broadcast majors at the school.

So now, 55 years after the fact, Rick Simon is standing there at a signing table, explaining how it all came about. The rights had gone for $2,000 annually, he says, and were owned by KGA radio in Spokane. When the bidding came open, he and Kaufman went large, coming up with $4,100. KGA stayed at $2,000. Lo and behold, they had the rights, at an age when they could scarcely buy a drink legally in Pullman.

They might have wondered what they got themselves into. WSU’s 1970 season was one of the very worst in school history; in a four-game stretch, the Cougars allowed 232 points to the California schools. And in a 63-16 loss to Jim Plunkett’s Stanford, a WSU student from Richland named Terry Smith came out of the stands and tackled a Stanford ball-carrier.

In basketball, meanwhile, beloved Marv Harshman left his job after 13 seasons – for the dreaded, despised Huskies across the state.

Simon worked in the horse-racing industry for a time and in public relations. Kaufman’s working life was in the horse industry; he was PR director at Longacres Racetrack in Seattle from 1977-1990. He died at 47 in Louisville in 1995 while helping plan media services for the Kentucky Derby.

Oh, and a post-script. The boss I mentioned earlier? That was Dick Fry, who had moved into the job as director of the news bureau after holding the title of WSU sports-information director since 1952. He became a walking encyclopedia on WSU athletics, published a colorful history of the school’s sports with the “Crimson and the Gray” in 1989, and today, is 102 years old. His book – and he – were valuable resources when I went to research for “Too Good to Be Through.”