(Unrelated aside, for those who did not see my riff on a bad pun on Twitter, yesterday I forked a literal blockchain.)

By now I am hoping that enough people have caught up with their podcast listening to have heard that Joe Frank passed away about a week ago.

I first encountered Joe Frank’s work when I was splitting my time between Ithaca, NY and Long Branch, NJ. I was teaching in West Long Branch on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, so I would drive back from Ithaca on Sundays. I timed my drive so that I could listen to Jolly Joe’s Bavarian Bandstand as I drove through Pennsylvania. And on Sunday nights, as I lie in bed, I would listen to Joe Frank on WNYC.

I could have driven back on Monday morning, since I was teaching night classes. This was part of the department’s attempt to be family-friendly: People without children would teach only night classes, and people with children would teach only day classes. I was tenure-line faculty. Everyone was shocked and upset when I quit after a year for a non-tenure-track position at the University of Tennessee. But I drove back on Sundays, just so that I could hear The Other Side on WNYC.

While the title of this post is Joe Frank, I have nothing more to say about him than all the public radio celebrities have podcasted out over the past few days. Secretly, this is possibly yet another post about neurology, as those drives across the middle Atlantic states were made possible by a chain of events starting with a head injury. But I did cut my weekend short—just about every week—just so that I could listen to his show.