Controversial Radio Host Back To Stay

SALISBURY — Better than just about anyone around here, Mike Flint remembers the area’s political climate before he moved out of the Northwest Corner nine years ago.

"At least every other week we were fodder in the newspapers for something I said," Flint recalled. It was a reference to the mid-1990s, when Flint’s controversial Sunday morning radio show was the talk of the towns.

"Straight Talk With Mike Flint" had thousands of regular listeners — some of whom were self-professed addicts of the show and others who would not even admit to having listened to it.

"They would call me afterwards and say, ‘I don’t listen to the show but I heard you said such and such a thing,’" Flint said.

The run on what was billed as "The Tri-State’s Only Conservative Talk Show" ended in controversy when a listener called in and made disparaging personal remarks about a local newspaper reporter, prompting threats of litigation and the cancellation of the show by the management of Lakeville’s WQQQ-103.3 FM about six weeks later.

Flint, a carpenter by trade, subsequently moved to the "Gold Coast" of Fairfield County to "make my fortune" in the construction business. What he found was a familiar story.

"The cost of living is astronomical," said Flint, a Salisbury native. "You make more, you spend more." A modest two- or three-bedroom apartment in Greenwich, where Flint and his wife, Theresa, hung their hats, fetches upward of $2,000 per month.

And life in Greenwich was impersonal and frenzied. Flint said it sometimes took almost half an hour to get in and out of the post office, where "you would see a bazillion people and you don’t know anyone."

To make matters worse, about a year ago Flint "got really sick. It seemed like I saw doctors every day." The diagnosis: systemic lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that is potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal. The key is to try to keep the disease under control through medication and, ultimately, to force it into remission. Nevertheless, his doctor told him, "It’s yours to keep."

"It provided us a motivation to come back to the peaceful Northwest Corner," Flint said, speaking of his wife and his daughter, Amber, a kindergartner at Salisbury Central School.

Flint, a former member of the Salisbury Republican Town Committee and columnist for the now-defunct Voice newspapers, had been thinking of moving back to the area for awhile.

He grew up in the Ore Hill section of town between Lakeville and Millerton. He left town for the first time in the 1970s to attend Ball State University in Indiana, where he met Theresa, who was from Muncie.

He worked in the retail sector in the Hoosier State before moving back to the Northwest Corner and taking up carpentry. In 1995, he ran unsuccessfully as an independent for the Board of Selectmen, in part because "politics has always been in my blood."

Upon returning to Salisbury from Greenwich in July, Flint said people began stopping him on the street and asking him if he was "going to do that show again." He considered the idea and later was offered his old Sunday morning slot by Marshall Miles, his former boss at WQQQ.

From studios at Geer Village in Canaan, Miles runs the nonprofit Tri-State Public Communications, which features CATV6 (a cable television access channel), RobinhoodRadio.com (an Internet radio station) and an over-the-air dawn-to-dusk radio station, WHDD-AM 1020.

"To the disappointment of many, I have come home to stay," said Flint, 48.

The return of "Straight Talk" made its debut Jan. 7. By his own admission, Flint was somewhat nervous and shuffled through dozens of pieces of paper while talking about peculiar bits of state legislation. And it was his "maiden voyage" on TV, as the show is simulcast on CATV6.

But by the second half of the show, he had settled down to talk about one of his favorite subjects, Falls Village, where late last month voters approved a controversial donation from the town to a children’s theater company that wants to purchase a downtown building.

"It has earned its status as my favorite town again," said Flint. "Falls Village basically gave me an opening show."