He was a bigtime radio talk host in Chicago who got a call that, unlike the thousands of others, could not be put on hold.
Looking at a wintry Hudson River from a highrise on Manhattan`s Upper West Side, Rev. Arthur L. Cribbs Jr. discerns a broad logic in his life`s jagged path. Called by the Lord, he`s left broadcasting-at least for a while- to join the oldest Protestant missionary organization, the United Church Board for World Ministries.
”It`s been a continuum and, for now, this is more important,” Cribbs says. ”As broadcasters, we come to work to talk about what`s popular. If something good comes of it, that`s secondary.”
Only a few months ago Art Cribbs, 40, was a popular talk host on black-oriented WGCI-AM, following a stint on WVON-AM, and a 20-year television and radio career, mostly on the West Coast.
Indeed, on April 3, the night before the Chicago mayoral election, a national audience observed him at work. That evening, WGCI and white-oriented WBBM-AM, the CBS affiliate, originated a simulcast on both the election and race relations from the same studio that housed the historic Nixon-Kennedy debate of 1960. The four-hour show, run by WBBM talk host Dave Baum and Cribbs, was telecast nationally by C-Span.
Worldly, opinionated, firm but politic, Cribbs exuded a confidence and magnanimity that night that belied decades-long striving to identify what was best for him.
Indeed, during three years in Chicago, he juggled tasks and values. While working for four radio and TV stations, he attended seminary, worked at one South Side church, was ordained, served as a minister at another church and served as a chaplain at Cook County Hospital.
He shed the emotionally safe distancing practiced by the journalist as he ministered to drug-peddling kids in the Kenwood neighborhood or aided rape victims at the hospital.
Soon, he realized that his self-image as a more caring, ”advocate”
reporter had never brought him as close to people as the ministry. It was time to make a choice he had avoided for so long.
”I came here to try to do good each day, to articulate issues of justice and peace; to name evil in its many varieties and to help the poor,” he said at his board office, where he has the title of ”secretary for racial and ethnic minority constituency development and recruitment.”
And yet media has exerted a potent influence on Cribbs ever since he was a child in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Competing for his affections was religion, which explains the pulls and pushes that make his resume even longer than his current job description.
His father was a hospital custodian, part-time auto mechanic and a Baptist minister who founded churches statewide. The son`s bedroom was re-arranged into a sanctuary for modest Sunday services.
He was graduated from high school in 1967 and entered Pepperdine College to major in journalism. He did his first radio work on the college station and was on the air to report the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
A pacifist and anti-Vietnam War activist, his Pepperdine stay was brief.
”I`d say I was somewhere between dropping out and getting kicked out,” he said with a grin, continuing to recount a labyrinthine academic journey.
He began ”hanging out” at colleges and universities along the West Coast and, between 1969 and 1971, ”stole an education” by sneaking in and attending classes, sometimes doing other students` work for a fee. He re-enrolled in a junior college but didn`t stay long, though he won kudos as a debater.
By then, he`d sought a conscientious objector deferment from service in Vietnam. While not getting the deferment (ostensibly due to his once having applied for enrollment to the U.S. Naval Academy), he did receive a medical discharge.
Further, he left the Baptists for the United Church of Christ, the product of a 1957 merger of the Congregational Christian Churches and Evangelical and Reform Church.
”The United Church of Christ offered safe haven, saying it wasn`t necessarily one`s Christian duty to wear a uniform,” Cribbs said. ”Some Baptists felt that I had a Christian obligation to fight.”
Still lacking a college diploma, he headed to Reno, Nev., and talked his way into a job as an on-air reporter for KOLO-TV. Native American communities were not far away and Cribbs toiled diligently to report on them, including breaking a story on a utility refusing to provide power to a reservation 200 miles away.
In 1973, he left for Seattle TV station KOMO and spent four years there, which included an undercover series on teen prostitution. Then, it was on to a bigger market, San Francisco and KGO-TV, where he became more of an advocate, including investigating dismal conditions at a Tenderloin district hotel.
Johnathan Rodgers, now the general manager of Chicago`s WBBM-TV but someone who emerged from the same small cadre of black journalists at the time, recalls Cribbs` ”basic performance skills as superb.” He recalls, too, that Cribbs` caring and seriousness seemed out of sync with the ”happy talk” format of the San Francisco station.
In 1982, his KGO contract was not renewed. Though involved in some church work, he said he was ”really running away from the ministry, but the idea of going to the seminary gnawed at me.”
He returned to a Los Angeles radio job and enrollment at the University of California at Berkeley. But he wandered again, to all-black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Before he could complete a degree, he split once more for Berkeley, finally receiving his bachelors in 1986.
During this period, he met Kenneth Smith, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, and mentioned his plan to go to New York`s Union Theological Seminary. Smith persuaded him to accept a fellowship to 185-student Chicago Theological, founded in 1855 and located on the University of Chicago campus since 1913.
Cribbs was ”a strong student and reflected our deep passion for the life of the city and public issues,” Smith said. ”A clergy person, like a broadcaster, is a chronicler. What made Art a fine broadcaster made him excellent for the ministry.”
While a seminarian, he did a show for the Church Federation of Greater Chicago, ”Every Man: Report on Religion,” that aired at 8 a.m. Sundays on WMAQ-TV. He also handled a Sunday morning religion show for WLS-TV, ”Cabbages and Kings” and was a correspondent for a now-defunct syndicated talk show produced by Essence magazine that featured the late Max Robinson as host.
Year of many hats
Last year was especially hectic. He studied at the seminary; interned at Kenwood Church, mostly helping black teens ”trapped by concentric circles of poverty and no extended opportunities”; became associate minister at University Church on the South Side; served as a Cook County Hospital chaplain; and returned to radio, first as a talk host on WVON, then to WGCI when the Gannett Co.-owned station switched from music to talk.
He was a superior host. Dwight Cassimere, who produced the show, said,
”Art had a global worldview and was able to do everything from book authors to El Salvador and city politics.”
He maintained an air of authority and humanity, avoiding the gratuitous or self-righteous, no small feat during a mayoral campaign that divided and infuriated his black listeners.
”He`s a fully-human being who was very adept at dealing with racists of all kinds,” Smith said.
He toiled at a harsh pace. ”I`d race from the hospital to do an afternoon radio show,” Cribbs said. ”I`d confront life-and-death situations, then come and do radio.”
The hospital left a lasting impression.
”The first night I was there, I saw three newborns die, a young kid who was shot in the head and a 12-year-old girl who had been raped,” he recalled. The next afternoon, he tried to put the travail into perspective during a five-minute, personal ”Journal” feature that became a fixture on his WGCI show.
”Being a chaplain helped me understand the distance between real and reported life,” he said. ”As an advocate journalist, I thought I had gotten close to people. But as a chaplain, I realized I really hadn`t. As chaplain, I`d be with a rape victim three or four hours. When a person died, I might have been with the family at their moment of total loss.”
Smith recalls that many attending Cribbs` ordination knew of his plan to move to New York and headquarters of the church`s Board of World Ministries, which is involved in 70 nations and has offices in 41.
”They didn`t want him to leave,” said Smith. He did.
The organization is white-dominated, particularly in foreign lands, and Cribbs` task is to travel both across the land and overseas, giving speeches and recruiting committed non-whites.
A man pulled two ways
He misses journalism, despite his sense of its incessant shallowness. Television and radio strike him as far more powerful than his current medium of communication, though the new work has more heft and gives him ”more room and time to tell a story.”
Cribbs, the broadcaster-minister, is pulled two ways. Perhaps it`s a lucky predicament. Most people fail to find one calling.
Thus, he`s the minister who thinks of ”the kids in Kenwood who are selling dope but could just as well be selling insurance” and whom the church can help.
But he remains a child of the media, who sits far from the electronic fray and concludes, ”I`m still a journalist. . . . Just on sabbatical.”
