by Zinta Aistars
Published in ENCORE magazine
Kalamazoo, Michigan
December 2013 Issue
 |
| Keith Roe (Photo by Erik Holladay) |
He wants to hear your voice. Whatever you have to say,
whatever your viewpoint or political stance, whatever your cause—if you are
working to better your community, Keith Roe wants to hear your story on Monday Night Live.
The story of Monday Night Live begins in 1991, under the
original name of My World Today. The host for the community television show
then was Jim Amos, a retired Western Michigan University professor.
The host today is Keith Roe—but his story begins a long
distance from the tiny television studio at 359 S. Kalamazoo Mall, where a
group of four on the third floor of The Epic Building bring the show alive
every Monday at 7 p.m. and broadcast it on channel 96, with reruns of the
week’s show on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 7 p.m. on channel 97, and again
on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. on channel 97. Keith Roe is there like clockwork, along
with his television crew of Anthony Arent, William Lindemann and Roger Pacific.
Roe’s story begins in the small town of Wakefield, in the district of West Yorkshire, England. His British accent and genteel manner belie his roots.
“It was a small, industrial city, and we lived in a
Victorian cottage,” Roe says. “My father was a steam locomotive engineer, what
people then called the respectable working class. In the 1930s, that was an
important distinction.”
The Bible, says Roe, was the most important family
possession in the house, and his father sometimes preached on a Sunday. “That
earned us a respectable air. I was the only child, and my mother nearly died
when I was born at 7 months, four and a half pounds, and 27 days in intensive
care.”
Roe’s mind works that way: details stick, history intrigues,
intellect hungers for more. Coddled and spoiled, he says with an arched brow
about his childhood, but then tells of household chores of cleaning windows at
age 7. He recalls a world of post-war Britain, bankrupt and showing the scars
of war, but education was free, as was health care. These are points that to
this day stick in his mind, if not his craw, and make it to the airways on
Monday Night Live on occasion, as well as to the discussion groups he so enjoys.
Roe studied physiotherapy at the West London School of
Physiotherapy, manipulative medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital London, and
hydrotherapy at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases Bath. Overseas
in Kalamazoo, The Upjohn Company, predecessor of today’s Pfizer, found Roe and
employed him at their United Kingdom subsidiary in 1959. In 1980, married and
with a family, he moved to Kalamazoo to help develop a worldwide strategy for
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