Gerald Michael Anderson

We are taking a trip down memory lane this week looking at the infamous ‘On the Air’ series and the episodes that capture the wackiest and surreal moments of Dad’s adventure on the airwaves. Gerry’s Bad Day During Dad’s career, journalists and radio professionals would always ask him how he prepared for his show and…

Dad was never a big fan of fiddle-dee-dee music. But he thought Irish musicians, including Christy Moore were among the best in the world. Maybe it was due to all the time he spent in Shandrum Co. Donegal. He was surrounded by “traditional music” so it never became a special thing. It was just something…

Good Friday this year, 2023, marks the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, a true turning point in the course of Northern Ireland’s history. In the recent words of Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris: “The signing of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement on 10 April 1998 brought an end to 30…

From his earliest days of going to the cinema as a boy, Dad was crazy about cowboys and indians. He watched endless western matinees in the 1950’s. And those films left a lasting impression on him. In fact he loved to do a Jack Palance routine with Sean Coyle on his radio show: “Pick it…

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I came across a speech that Oscar Wilde gave on 17 March 1882. He was aged twenty-seven and on a lecture tour of North America. He participated in the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations that were organised in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. Like Gerry, Oscar rarely veered into patriotism or politics. He…

Hail Glorious St. Patrick! For many of us, St. Patrick’s Day is the day we wrap up in green and flock to local parades to watch blue-kneed, curly-wigged Irish dancers display their talents in front of the judges’ podium (the back of a container lorry). And marching bands bring colour and a sense of occasion…

Rich Pickings There are rich pickings indeed in the Belfast Telegraph column that Gerry wrote over the years – Life According to Gerry. I delight in browsing through the articles and losing myself in the reveries that they offer. In each one, he leads me down various meandering paths that somehow get tied together at…

Every year it was the same. The conversations would start at the Christmas table: I could do with a wee holiday, you know….. And our response would be to tell Dad to stop talking about it. That we hadn’t even gotten Christmas Day over. Or it was far too early in the year to start…

It’s important to know who you are… who your people are, and where you come from to give you context, grounding and identity. For Gerry, it was Derry. But for his mother’s people, the McLaughlins, that was deepest Donegal. A wee homestead called Shandrum – a two-bedroomed, whitewashed cottage with a series of sheds, a…

As Valentine’s Day approaches, some of us will wonder what to buy our beloved. And some of the less romantic among us won’t – complaining that it’s just another Hallmark Card celebration… Gerry was very much in the nostalgia camp. Every year he went out to buy twelve red roses. Very romantic! And being a…