Air Bud
The Scoop on Bud Hedinger
by Rob Swanson

      From a linoleum vantage point, Bud Hedinger began his broadcasting career with a soup spoon in his fist and a familiar cadence in his voice. “Good evening, this is Walter Cronkite, broadcasting live from the Hedinger kitchen. Behind me mom’s stirring the gravy. The main course has just arrived down inthe Dining Room. We switch now to my colleague David Brinkley…” As we sat in his sound studio at 540 WFLA, Bud slipped into a credible Brinkley impersonation and continued the gag.

      Bud is a robust man with life brimming from his eyes. He sat in the pilot’s chair with his mouth never far from the microphone even though we weren’t recording. He apologizes often on air that he’s still learning his job, but Bud is clearly in his element. The former news anchor turned radio talk show host is a born communicator with a deep, well modulated voice and a knack for cutting to the heart of an issue. And yet he very nearly didn’t tread that career path.

      Despite a fascination with the talking box, “…I discounted broadcasting because to me ‘work’ wasn’t supposed to be fun. I can’t do [broadcasting] as a career because that’s too much fun. I’ll do that as a hobby!” Bud shook his head at the naiveté of his collegiate belief, never breaking eye contact with me. But pursuing a degree in law and poli-sci left him with no “fire in the belly” as he put it, which led to his very first outcry to God.

“I sat down beside a lake on the campus of Colgate University in New York and said ‘Lord, show me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.’” He leaned forward as he said this, the microphone forgotten, “Every time I have unconditionally surrendered to the Lord, he has responded and honored that prayer. And quickly, I’ve found.” Then back to his story, “it was like somebody lowered a neon sign that said, ‘Broadcasting, you dummy!’” Bud’s laughter is rich and uninhibited.

      “I suddenly got so excited. I’d been on the campus radio station, but that was fun and games. Now it was time to get serious.” He finished his poli-sci degree, and then followed it with a Masters in Broadcasting. Armed with theory, he then garnered experience by doing just about every job in television on the way to becoming the anchorman. After sixteen years in Syracuse, NY, Orlando’s Channel 9 news hired him away in 1986 to co-anchor with Marla Weech. Three years later he bounced up to Nashville for a time, and then returned to Orlando as Channel 6’s main anchor. He reached the pinnacle as the award-winning 10 o’clock anchor of WKCF-Channel 18. He remained the ratings king until WB 18 handed that time slot over to sitcom reruns.

      That left this career newsman without a job. While freelance work has always been a part of Bud’s life, he found a steady paycheck on the other side of the broadcasting street, one he was uniquely suited to with his degree in political science: conservative talk show host. To go from an impartial observer to professionally opinionated appears to be effortless on Bud’s part. But then, subtle – yet life changing – shifts are familiar to Bud. He’d made a spiritual shift 18 years ago during a job crisis that had eternal consequences.

      Each of Bud’s parents had been burned by organized religion, so while nightly prayers were a part of young Bud’s life, church was not… and yet it was. Various boyhood friends invited him to their churches, allowing Bud to attend assorted forms of worship, some feeling more comfortable than others. Still, he never settled on any church, though holding to a form of spirituality. He would have called himself a Christian, certainly, but amazingly, this newsman had never heard the message of salvation until he moved to Orlando and met his co-anchor, Marla Weech. “Marla’s a preacher’s kid and she’s not shy about her faith. She would talk to me about having a personal relationship with Christ. Honestly, I thought that was a little bit… kooky.”

      Then the contractual conflict that ended his time at Channel 9 hit him. Orlando was the place he, his wife Lynda and his kids had fallen in love with. This career tragedy made him feel like he was falling. He became desperate and despondent and realized he could not save himself. “Marla knew of the distress I was in and invited us to church and we said yes. Lynda and I went forward at the altar call to surrender our lives to Christ. At the time, I’ll be honest with you; I wasn’t so much interested in eternal salvation as I was in being saved from the pain I was experiencing right then. And let me tell you, when we surrendered to Him, it was like being a little boy cradled in my mother’s arms and a sense of that fall just stopping. There were still painful things to come, but it was a period of discovery and the Bible coming alive like it never had before.”

      Since then, Bud has been involved with a number of churches, leading a ministry here or there. “Denominations,” he says, “are just tags that either blow off on your way to heaven or burn off on your way to hell.”

      Nor is Bud shy about his faith. He points out that 540 WFLA is a secular station, but he’s never been called off of any Christian stance he’s taken. “At 540 there is no separation of church and station,” he says. Part of staying true to himself is holding to his conservative family values, but he is not a Republican ideologue. While the other right-leaning talk show hosts are predictable in their views, Bud is often out of the box. He’ll praise the mayor or the president and just as quickly take them to task when, in his opinion, they need it. His opinion might not be yours, but that’s just grist for conversation on the “Fifty-Thousand Watt Front Porch” of Bud’s show.

      So, would he throw it over to go back to television? He almost did and if he had, it likely would have cost his life. Listeners to his radio show will recall a week-long, live audition for an MSNBC anchor job in New York. The week went very well and things were looking good for another career move when a liberal blog and e-mail campaign convinced management that his conservative radio show compromised his neutrality. Bud was disappointed, wondering why God had allowed it all to happen. He found a two-fold answer not long after. First: he had been given a week in TV’s “big leagues” again, and second: his life depended on his radio show… or at least on a perk of the job. When an advertiser approached Bud to experience a new heart scan technology to promote it on the show, the idea was to be able to testify how easy the process was. Instead a significant amount of arterial blockage was discovered. Had Bud taken the New York job, “I would have had the ‘big one,’ eventually.” The technology is now known affectionately as the “Bud Scan.”

      For the foreseeable future, then, Orlando will enjoy the radio ministrations of “The Bud-man.” It’s a job he considers the hardest he’s ever done. Show prep – the gathering of topics and content – is entirely up to him. Three hours of seamless programming, five days a week requires a team of professionals and diligent effort on his part. Throw in live callers and Bud has to be fast on his feet.  You only have to see him at it, though, to know he’s extremely happy, or to quote a Bud-ism, this man has a fire in his belly!