Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everybody, my name is Giselle Kowalski and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours and today I'm with Tyson. Tyson, how are you? What's up?

Tyson Taylor:
I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. How are you doing?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm good. So you got to speak with Dale Blasingame. How was that?

Tyson Taylor:
It was super good. I've had Dale as a professor for two of my classes, and I learned a lot about him and the personal side of things instead of the professional and academic side of him that the students see on a daily basis.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, no, he had a lot of cool stories about sports-

Tyson Taylor:
Yes.

Giselle Kowalski:
And people that he's met in the NBA. I didn't know any of that and I was a student of his, too.

Tyson Taylor:
He was spitting out names like Gregg Popovich, David Robinson, Shaquille O'Neal. I had no clue he was even in the same realm as those guys. So it was super interesting to hear his experiences.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. So we hope you guys enjoy this conversation with Dale Blasingame and Tyson.

Tyson Taylor:
All right. Dale, well we are no strangers to one another, but for those that do not know you, could you please state your name, what you teach here at Texas State and how long you've been here?

Dale Blasingame:
Yeah. So my name is Dale Blasingame. I'm an associate professor of practice in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I teach in the Digital Media Innovation program. But yeah, 11th year teaching.

Tyson Taylor:
Congratulations. Well, for our podcast we like to start it off with a little ice breaker. So I want you to tell me what was your first ever email address or your first ever username?

Dale Blasingame:
My first ever email is probably still my email today. It was my Texas State. It was DB28455, the old days of Texas State where they'd give you five numbers. Now it's only your initials and two or four, but still is my email to this day. So I don't think I had one before that. I don't think we did because my first experience on the web was here at Texas State. That makes me sound so old.

Tyson Taylor:
Any particular funny usernames?

Dale Blasingame:
No. I never had anything like "Bieber lover" or something like that. I went straight from my Texas State to a Gmail account and I've had that my whole... So I've really only had two email accounts my whole life. So I guess that's what happens when you're early in the process. You youngsters coming in late, you've got to fight for usernames. But yeah, we were able to get our names pretty easily back then.

Tyson Taylor:
Yeah. You're better than a lot of us because I have at least six emails myself and they have crazy names but. All right, so we're going to go back to the beginning. Please tell us where you're from and what was it like growing up in that area?

Dale Blasingame:
Yeah, so I'm originally from Harlingen, Texas, which is as far south in Texas as you can go. It's like 10 minutes from the Mexico border, about 30 minutes from South Padre Island, which is probably the most recognizable city down there. I kind of hated it growing up down there. It was so isolated from everything. I remember things like going school shopping, we'd have to go hours away just to go to a nice mall. We would go to Corpus if we kind of wanted to go to a mall, but really we'd have to go to San Antonio if we wanted to go to an actual mall.
And I just remember things like that being really frustrating and then playing sports my whole life. We were insulated down there in the valley and we thought we were really good until we'd go play a Dallas team or go play a San Antonio or Austin team and get beat by 50 points and so those were kind of frustrating things. But now looking back on it, I'm incredibly thankful that that's where I'm from. I think because we were so isolated, we were always safe. We knew everyone. Even Harlingen is not a small town, but it's not a big town either, and just was able to have a normal childhood and didn't have to worry about things and play basketball with the same people every day and it's crazy how that switches when you leave. I couldn't wait to leave Harlingen and now I miss it.

Tyson Taylor:
So after you graduated high school, you went to Texas State?

Dale Blasingame:
I did. So this is the only school I applied to. I came here for basketball camp my junior, so before my junior year and before my senior year, so whoever the basketball coach was at the time, I came up to his camp and that was one of the bigger camps we could go to and so I did that and I remember I had a couple of scholarship offers from really expensive schools. Even though they would give me 50% of tuition or something, I still couldn't afford that, so I ruled those out and being a sports fan growing up, that was the only thing I knew about schools was just what sports there were. And I grew up a massive Duke fan my whole life. After I came here my freshman year, I tried to transfer to Duke and I got denied. It didn't hurt as much as I thought it was going to.
I knew I probably wasn't going to get in. It was just one of those I feel like I need to apply to Duke and I got the letter saying, we have so many students trying to transfer and we only accept a certain number. And I was like, OK, well I made the right decision. I'm here and I loved it here. It wasn't like I was transferring, I was trying to transfer because I was unhappy, I just felt like I owed it to myself to at least apply to Duke and I stayed here and loved it and I'm so glad I did because Texas State's my life basically, aside from leaving to go work in news for 10 years, this has been my whole adult life.

Tyson Taylor:
Going back to Harlingen, what was it like moving from that? Not so small but suburban town to a big college town like San Marcos?

Dale Blasingame:
It was eye-opening in several ways. In Harlingen, the racial demographics are quite different. I think my high school is like 98% Hispanic and so I was used to being the minority at school and we had one or two African Americans at our campus and very few people outside of that. And so coming here it was just like, oh, this is what the real world's like. You're in this kind of melting pot of everyone, and especially I got put in the football dorm and so I was around all the football players and it was really good for me because a lot of people from the Valley I think just kind of stay in the valley and there's nothing wrong with that, but they might go to Pan Am or they might go to a community college down there, which again, absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it really did open my eyes to what life is probably more used to be for most people because yeah, it's crazy how isolated you are down there.

Tyson Taylor:
In those times when you're in high school and early years in college here at Texas State, what were the first couple of jobs that you held?

Dale Blasingame:
Well, I was one of those that changed my major a lot. So when students come to me freaking out about their major, I'm like, that's normal. It's much more rare for someone to come here and never change their major and never change their idea of what they want to do. I came here thinking I still had hopes I was going to be a college basketball player, so I was like, well, if I can't play college basketball, I think I want to do something around athletic. So I originally came here on an athletic training scholarship through the School of Education and I took an anatomy course my first semester and I was like, this is not going to happen.
So right around then, so it was after my freshman year, I went home over the summer and my sister got me a job at the cotton gin where she worked. So I was working overnights from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. seven days a week making $5 an hour, and I was by myself. It was me in the office and all I would do is I was weighing these cotton bales as they were coming in off the gin. And this thing, sports talk radio has just kind of become a thing at that point. And so I had an old-school AM radio that was in the office and I would tune into this national sports radio broadcast every night and listened to it for 12 hours and I was like, OK, well that's what I want to do. I want to do sports radio. And so I switched to mass comm and electronic media in particular that kind of shaped everything. I thought I had a 0% chance of doing anything but sports radio. My first job was kind of in sports radio.
I worked at a news station in San Antonio and as part of my job I covered the Spurs. I was always in charge of the opposing locker room, so I got to interview a lot of the NBA guys at that time in the early 2000s. And then after about a year of working in radio, I got a call from one of the TV stations in San Antonio saying the anchor, the Morning Show anchor, listens to my newscast every morning because I was the overnight news anchor and that he liked the way I wrote and he wanted to know if I would come in and interview to be a morning producer. That was my first job, was in news. And then realized after about 10 years in, that was right when social media was starting to explode and I was really kind of frustrated with how slow we were adapting to it and came back to grad school here to mainly study social and then that kicked off what now is my career because of that.

Tyson Taylor:
Well, it's really interesting. I've had multiple classes with you and I never knew any of that. Talking about the sports field. I'm wanting to get into sports radio myself. I work at the radio station, so that's very interesting.

Dale Blasingame:
There were some interesting times. It was weird to run into David Robinson at a store and him know you, that type of stuff. I remember running into him at Best Buy one day and I was like, "Hey dude." And he like, "Hey man, how's it going?" And you could tell it wasn't a fan walking up and saying hi. It was just like, "Hey man," and just leave him to their own. And I had a weird thing with Coach Pop. I was the one who always asked the closing question.
So anytime he was fed up with the press conference, he would point to me. Because I always asked about the next opponent. That was a recurring thing at Spurs games is when he would start getting fed up with reporters, he'd just point at me and I'd be like, "So what about the Nets? What's concerning you" or something. Just like little things like that, that it was 20 years ago, but those are still cool memories to... Interviewed Shaq like a million times. Shaq was always one of the nicest dudes in the world. So yeah, just cool moments like that.

Tyson Taylor:
That is absolutely insane. That is some crazy milestones. I would say milestones indeed. Going from being in the sports world for a while, then going to TV, and then going up teaching, what was the jump like from being in the media world and then going to teaching?

Dale Blasingame:
So it started fairly easy because I was brought on to teach electronic media writing classes like TV news writing, which my boss still today, Dr. Judy Oskam, she brought me in and whether they did it on purpose or not, it ended up holding my hand, giving me classes that weren't going to throw me for a loop. I started as an adjunct while I was in grad school. It was classes where I knew the material inside and out.
Then, slowly as I got more experience from the marketing perspective, that's when I created the advanced social class and started teaching FDOM, which is our big Foundations of Digital and since then, broke out to stuff like drones and things like that. So I'm very appreciative of those early writing days because that really taught me how to be a teacher. I think if I would've just been doing lecture classes, I would've struggled.
Whereas, coming in and teaching writing, you're working hands-on every single day with the students and again, it was something that I knew like the back of my hand to be able to do and hit the ground running, and so transition wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. I still was nervous. I remember that first day teaching my first class, I wore a black shirt, because I knew I was going to be sweating, so my shirt went from black to a gray at the end of lecture because I was sweating so much. So things like that, obviously the nerves were there, but it was material that I knew and that thank the lucky stars for being able to teach something that you had been in the business of over 10 years.

Tyson Taylor:
Yeah, definitely. And you're one of the professors at Texas State that I feel almost every student that has taken one of your classes, you can say that you've helped students get to where they want to be. Is there someone that has done the same for you in your career journey or a personal life?

Dale Blasingame:
So one, I appreciate you saying that. That means a lot. My heroes growing up, Dr. Fluker who's still here. She just, still to this day, is one of my heroes and I'm so fortunate that I get to work with her and I not only consider a very close friend, but an amazing mentor, and some of my best college memories were trips with her and her husband where we went to Charlotte, North Carolina, for a conference trip, and so she's just amazing.
I lost my parents a couple years ago and she was one of the very first people I called because I knew she would know what to tell me. I remember the day my dad died, I told my sister, "Before we do anything, I got to call Dr. Fluker and tell her." And our relationship means the world to me. Larry Carlson was probably the professor that I had more than any other professor.
He's the one who taught me how to write. He also kind of pulled me out of the ditch. When I was in college, I used to party a lot and I was one of those students that never went to class, which is why I am kind of a jerk now when it comes to attendance policies because Larry pulled me aside one day and was like, "Hey, you're wasting your potential and you can keep going down this route. Never come to class, not learn anything. You might get a job, you might not." He's like, "Or you can fulfill your potential," and I don't think I missed a class from that day. I remember having that talk with him upstairs, in Old Main. I don't mind being that person for someone else if they're struggling with attendance and stuff like that. I know what that meant to me to be able to do that.
And Tim England as well, which is Tim, just retired this past year, but I remember telling Tim in his TV news class, "I don't know why I have to take this class because I'm never going to work in TV." Because I was so confident I was only going to do radio. And of course then I spent nine years working in TV, so Tim and I used to laugh about that quite a bit.
But yeah, just again, going back to Dr. Fluker, I remember calling her the day I realized I wanted to quit TV, and so I remember going outside and calling Dr. Fluker and being like, "Could I apply to grad school still?" I was having a really bad day at work. She's like, "Well, you missed the deadline, but if you get me your application, I'll make sure it gets to the right people." And she's like, "Have you taken the GRE?" And I was like, "What's that?" She's like, "Sign up for the GRE tomorrow. I don't care what your score is." We used to have to take the GRE to get into grad school and I bombed it. I literally just went and took it the next morning with no preparation or anything. But again, she was the first person I thought to call at that point. And so again, I'm so glad I did because that kicked all of this into order when that happened.

Tyson Taylor:
Laurie Fluker, definitely, I had her from one of my classes and definitely one of the most inspirational and motivational professors I've ever had. On a subject of teaching, what is the biggest lesson you have learned from your students and how does it change the way you teach?

Dale Blasingame:
Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if it's just me getting old, getting soft as I get old. I used to be a really, really, really strict grader, but I took pride in that and I think students eventually came around to why it was important. And I'm still kind of a strict grader.

Tyson Taylor:
I agree.

Dale Blasingame:
I'm still kind of a strict grader, but my parents passing taught me a lot about things happening in people's lives that are uncontrollable and my students got me through that. I'm still going through it now three years later, but that immediate period after, the way the students in those particular classes got me through. There were days I couldn't get out of bed and I would have to teach class on Zoom with my camera off because I was literally in bed in my pajamas, not able to move, and I never had a student question why this was happening. It was like they understood, and that taught me a lot about empathy and how they handled that situation. I would like to think that has changed the way I handle situations. I'm still kind of a jerk when it comes to grading, but a little bit more understanding and trying to be empathetic to what people are going through.

Tyson Taylor:
As of today, how different is your life than from what you expected coming into the real world of working?

Dale Blasingame:
Yeah, I would say it's 180 degrees different. Before I came here, before I met Dr. Fluker and Larry, I probably would've never thought I wanted to teach. I used to be scared to death of public speaking. My voice is really low, so I always hated to hear my voice. And so yeah, I just never thought I would want to teach until I came here, and that always planted the seed in the back of my head like, hey, that might be something down the road. And so, I'm so glad I did. I just turned 47 and I feel like I'm still 25, because surrounding yourself with young people and energy and having a laugh at yourself for not understanding what they're saying or what they're talking about keeps me feeling young, even though some might say that makes you feel old. But for me, I try to laugh it off and think about it in that perspective.
So yeah, it's crazy. Again, I tell that very brief story about me changing my major so many times because I think that's a pretty typical journey of what a student goes through. And I see some students who are just crushed when they come here and they realize their first major is not going to work out and figure that out now, not five years down the road when you hate your job and you hate what you're doing and you wish you could have changed your major. This is the right time for that decision to be made. So, I'm living proof that you can make those changes, still enjoy what you do, it does tend to work out in the end. And just listen to your gut when it comes to those because I'm really glad I did.

Tyson Taylor:
Well, those are all my questions. I want to thank you so much for giving me the chance to talk with you. And thank you, Dale.

Dale Blasingame:
Oh yeah. Thank you. It's awesome to be interviewed by a former student.

Tyson Taylor:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. Make sure you tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty. Also remember to follow us on our social media, TXST.
This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and guests, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm Tyson and I'll see you next time.