Before I finally get around to toasting the great Jeff Dubay, the namesake of this temperamental blog, I have to raise a glass and propose a toast to a true bastion of media excellence: Dennis "Rusty" Gatenby.
I am in awe of Dennis. I don't know a lot about him, but I know a bit:
He was an off-camera lackey for the 1980s television choo-choo known as Good Company. From what I read recently, he weaseled his way on camera occasionally. I remember seeing the husband-and-wife team of Steve and Sharon on weekday afternoons after school. I'm not sure why I ever dialed up their show, but I know I saw it occasionally, and I vaguely recall seeing Dennis grace the airwaves now and then.
In the mid-1990s Good Company was scuttled, and Dennis, being some sort of Hubbard bastard child, retained a paycheck. He became the go-to guy for any fluff piece that had nothing to do with news. He did a lot of entertainment interviews, (crucial to Twin Cities news,) and inherited the job of breaking down the traffic maps every weekday morning. He had that gig for many, many years. Beats working for a living, I suppose.
I'm speculating a bit, but I'm reasonably confident Dennis was married, and that his wife was an architect working in Shorewood, a sleepy little suburb with some valuable real estate.
That nugget would seem to be more than a little coincidental as word broke – thanks to the Star Tribune's pompous "celebrity gossip" maven – that Dennis was dismissed from the Hubbard empire after three decades because he was busted for DWI in Excelsior, which he claimed is close to his home in Minnetonka. (Excelsior and Shorewood's borders are often blurred, particularly by those who live there.)
The irony is that Dennis lost his job as a traffic reporter because he drove drunk. Ouch.
The Hubbards have been cutting salaries recently, and there's no guarantee they'll replace those salaries with fresh meat. (How many stations in the country have five on-air meteorologists in the fold? Ch. 5 did for a time.) As has been proven for years at various local stations, you can hire barely competent broadcasters to do traffic reports, and you can get 'em cheap. Why pay Dennis a real salary for that crap when you can find a desperate to be on TV babe to stumble through a traffic report for peanuts? Dennis was bloat, and his drunken driving was the perfect excuse for Hubbard to finally stop paying him.
That annoying gossip maven noted in her writing that people either love or hate Dennis, but he's the type of guy that gets people to watch, either way. Perhaps so, but I never found him to be worth my time, although I would sample his broadcasting skills on occasion. And every time I'd wonder how the hell he has a job. Those days are finally over. I won't miss him.
Funny tidbit: I noted that I am reasonably confident Dennis was married. If I'm right, he has traded his wife in for a younger model. A nugget from the arrogant gossip maven, circa 2008, noted that Dennis was at an event with a rather young woman by his side. The suggestion wasn't that Dennis was escorting a daughter at the event. This was Dennis's date, evidently. If that be correct, as stated by the maven, I wouldn't be shocked at all. You can be an average looking middle-aged dude with a silly job, but as long as you're recognized as being somebody and catered to like you're important, there will be a babe half your age waiting to act as your arm candy when it's time to trade the old wife in. What a country!
