John A. Rodgers IV — 1970-2020
In the age of social media, it’s now entirely possible to not hear from a friend for a while, go to their Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, etc.) profile to see how they’ve been and what they’re currently up to… only to find out they’ve passed away four years earlier. To coin an internet trope, “I was this many days old” when I found out our good friend of Big Shout Magazine and kind-hearted sales rep John Rodgers passed away in June of 2020 as a result of a bad car accident.
John came to the magazine straight out of college to apply for a sales position during a strange time for the magazine. It was February of 1996, and I was in the middle of negotiations with a buyer for the magazine (unbeknownst to anyone but our attorneys and co-owners). Up to that point, we literally hired almost anyone off the street to fill the position. It was a straight-commission job, meaning you received a generous percentage of the ad totals you sold, but you got nothing else. Most people didn’t last more than a month, which was extra annoying for me because it took me most of an entire work day to train them. The ones who were successful and made it past the one-month mark tended to have a killers instinct and usually looked like they were out on prison work release.
John wore a tie to his interview and looked like he had been the president of his college fraternity. Actually, it turns out he was the vice president but founding member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon chapter at Lynchburg College in Virginia. I spent very little time training John because I had little faith that he would last more than a week. He stuck out like a sore thumb in our group of tragically-hip, alternative lifestyles, artistically-forward employees with strategic facial hair and piercings. John looked like a product of prep school and he had the “yuppie” look that the tragically hip were despising in the 1990s.
But John took on the job like his life depended on it. He became our only sales rep to graduate to a full-time position, and we rewarded him with his own office at our digs on West St. in Wilmington, DE. Actually, it was sort of a consolation prize because a previous co-owner had moved on to take a full-time job elsewhere, so I allowed John to move into her abandoned office.
John turned the gloomy office into his own personal living space. It became a chill-out environment with wall hangings, incense, and candles that was decorated in a kind of hippy aesthetic that John also seemed to have.
This was when I realized there was more to him than met the eye. He never flinched at any of our articles, attitudes or behavior at the magazine. In fact, he was drawn to all of this, which didn’t make sense when you saw how he looked and dressed. I figured he would be our secret weapon to allow us to get more advertising from the stodgy Wilmington banker advertisers that had been previously out of our reach.
John looked like a much shorter and stockier version of Conan O’Brien, he was fond of the music of Neil Young, and he introduced me to the great guitar playing of Michael Hedges. He also had a few great stories about meeting both of these musicians when he was a frat VP in college. He could party with the best of us, and he was instrumental in creating a gathering of some of the Big Shout staff for our final celebration of Wilmington’s Halloween Loop in 1996. We used the Big Shout office as our headquarters and John was the ring leader for that unofficial event, and I have great memories of it.
Johnny-O, I’m so sorry to hear of your passing, but the six quick months you worked for our magazine made a deep and positive impression on me. It’s only fitting that the road took you. You had a wandering spirit and I know you’ve wandered to new adventures..
‘May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields
and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand’
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