I’m a transplant to Green Bay, but I grew up in Chicago, a city boy at heart. Even from a very young age, I loved to tell stories.
Mario Gonzalez | Green Bay, WI
When I went to see a movie, the thing I looked forward to most was going home, seeing my cousins, and telling them exactly what happened in the movie. I was interested in taking in information and then sharing it out with others, which has been a running theme through my life.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was a natural storyteller. We always joked that if you walked past my house, you were going to have to strike up a conversation with my grandfather whether you wanted to or not. He was just a social and talkative person, and growing up around that rubbed off on me.
I was fortunate that there were a lot of kids on our block growing up. We knew our neighbors well and knew what was happening in the neighborhood, even when there were new people coming in. I didn’t realize it until later, but that strong sense of community was a big part of every decision in my life, especially for my career.
As a kid, I had a pretty creative mind. My imagination was always running wild. Stories were a way I could make things up. Then in school, I always liked writing about people. In seventh or eighth grade, I got to write a pretty extensive piece about the baseball player Roberto Clemente. I enjoyed that. Telling stories was my way of sharing experiences and connecting with others.
Later, when I was in college at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, this interest turned into me working for the radio station. My dream had always been to be the play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs. I grew up playing baseball for my high school and even got to play at Wrigley Field for the city championship. Unfortunately, playing college baseball wasn’t in the plans for me. Still, I knew I enjoyed writing and decided I wanted to work in sports, so I chose to be a broadcast journalism major.
As I got ready to graduate, I read one of my weekly emails from the College of Media with a list of broadcasting jobs at TV stations in the U.S. One day, I saw an opportunity for the Alaska Baseball League and clicked on it. When I realized I was qualified for it, I applied and got a call from the GM two days later. He said, ‘Hey, I’m at a doctor’s appointment right now, but you seem like you’re really interested in this.’ He asked me a few more questions and then offered me the opportunity to go up to Alaska to do the play-by-play for what was called the Mat-Su Miners of the Alaska Baseball League. Mat-Su was short for Matanuska-Susitna Valley, named for the valley they lived in, which was surrounded by mountains.
So I graduated and then had my bags packed two weeks later to leave for Palmer, Alaska, a town with just over 3,000 people and one stoplight. It was a real whirlwind. Going to Alaska was never something I had pictured for myself, let alone to call baseball games, but it felt like a great stepping stone. The town was so small that there were multiple occasions where I would go to shake hands with someone and they would say, ‘Oh, Mario nice to meet you.’ They already knew who I was because they were excited about the team. They said, ‘Oh, we’ve memorized the roster. We know every player, what school they’re coming from, and the broadcasters.’ So getting to be a part of that community was really cool. The organization even made baseball cards for the team, including ones for the broadcasters. So I have a baseball card with my face and information on it.
The Alaskan baseball season only went from June through August. They cram fifty-five games into fifty-eight days because their summers are so short. They play every day. So it was very rare to ever have an off day, but it was an incredible experience to be able to call these baseball games and help to connect these kids to their families back home. And then on top of that, I had an amazing time exploring Alaska. I did things like Whitewater River rafting, whale watching, and hiking glaciers, things that I never thought I would do in my life. It was also incredible to look out and see the peak of a mountain in the distance from home plate or even from the stands or the broadcast booth upstairs when the conditions were right. I’ll never forget that.
I was fortunate that the Mat-Su Miners invited me back for a second season with the Alaska Baseball League. This time as their media advisor overseeing their broadcast team.
I started writing for the local paper in Palmer, as well as filling in for the public address announcer. After my first year there, they selected their next three broadcast teams from the University of Illinois. It ended up becoming a kind of pipeline between the school and the team.
One of my favorite things was how long it stayed light at night. Games would start at 7:00 P.M. After the games ended, I would do post-game interviews, break everything down in the booth, and head out between 10:30 and 11 o’clock at night, but it still looked like it was 2 o’clock in the afternoon. I could spend eight hours at the ballpark and still feel like I wanted to be outside, to go eat, to go do something. That never got old. After my two years there, I set my sights on television and started applying for jobs.
In school, the professors always talked about how if you want to end up on TV, it was unlikely to land your first job in Chicago, or LA, or New York. So I was prepared when my first TV job was located in Elkhart, Indiana. South Bend was the nearest city. At the station, I did a little bit of everything. When I first got hired, I was the weekend reporter, which meant I was out and about collecting the stories. I was also the weekend show editor, so I would go get my stories and then come back to edit the show right away. On the other days of the week, I was a Nightside reporter, then eventually got moved to just Nightside Monday through Friday. Later, I was moved to the morning show.
I was also the fill-in anchor for sports, which I enjoyed. It was a little bit of everything and a great experience, too. I liked the fact that every day was something new and that I was constantly learning. I wasn’t sitting in a cubicle for eight hours, but was out and about in the community. I got to meet people, tell their stories, and learn all kinds of skills from video editing, to writing, to keeping up with strict deadlines.
It could get very chaotic. For instance, for Friday night sports, whether it was football or basketball season, we would have maybe nine people out filming and getting their highlights for their games. Then everyone came back and we would have just minutes to prepare our stories before the broadcast began. We would see stories coming online, and then have a commercial break, and then someone would hand you a piece of paper with the last name and touchdown pass or whatever to give to the sports director. I’d run the paper in, then he would read it as if it was all scripted. The pressure of those deadlines was incredibly hard, but it was a great job skill to learn for any future job.
For much of my time there, I was the live reporter that you see out in the field on TV every morning. Those stories encompassed everything from the fun stuff where I could be behind the scenes at a zoo with a snake coiling around my wrist as I’m reporting, to the more serious things. Other times, I might be out in whiteout conditions saying, ‘As you can see, we can’t see anything in front of us.’ Those are the days I don’t miss. It was hard driving on icy roads just to tell you that they’re ice-covered when you could probably just look outside your window and see it yourself.
There were also days I knew were going to be hard. When something awful happened, like the death of a child for instance, it was my job to go knock on those parents’ door and ask them something about the child that they just lost. It felt awful doing things like that, and I would feel torn because it was something I needed to do as part of my job. So all that stuff slowly and surely built on itself until one day I woke up and realized I lost my passion for the job.
I met my wife working at the TV station, and our relationship grew there. We knew our crazy schedules and the hours we kept wouldn’t work when we eventually had children. So we decided to get out of broadcasting work. My wife found a job in Green Bay, which is how we ended up here. Then I found a job in the nonprofit world with a company called Wello.
Sharing a story and having someone be able to connect with it, to see how that story resonates with them, is very special .When the person on the other end hears the story, they reciprocate and then you’re learning from them. Storytelling is interactive that way.
When you’re sharing something, the person listening has their own experience with the information. My communications job at Wello can be challenging at times because our work is more complex than a featured human interest story. My job is to write about and share the success stories that Wello and our community partners are having every day. Telling stories of large-scale community-level efforts can be very hard. To say we get food to people is accurate, but it is not actually telling the correct story.
Wello’s mission is to co-create community conditions that are fair and just in order to drive high levels of health and well-being for all. When I say conditions, I’m talking about policies, systems, and the environments that are in place. Our non-profit is not like a direct service. If someone needs food, they don’t come to our office to get it. Instead, we are working at that system level. We work with school districts, institutions, local farmers, and others in the community. Brown County is the perfect place for us to work because there is a large need for advocacy here. Off the top of my head, we have well over 450 registered nonprofits within the county, but the infrastructure isn’t always there to get those services to the people who need them.
When I first interviewed for this role, I remember saying that I didn’t have a public health background. Now, however, I think it was good for me to bring a different background and fresh pair of eyes to the work we do. My outside perspective helped me look at what Wello was doing and ask everyone to clarify what the work was for and what our intentions were. That information would, in turn, help me share our work with the larger community in a way that everyone would understand.
The community engagement I liked from being a field reporter, when every day was something new and I was constantly out in the community meeting people, really has a good home here at Wello. I love being part of a community-based organization because I get to build good relationships with the people who live and work here. I get to tell their stories just like I did in the news. Only now it’s in a different form, and without all the odd hours and crazy schedules.
At the end of the day, the biggest thing to remember is that we’re doing work to create a better future for the people who live here. On top of that, I’m a part of this community, too, along with my wife and daughters. I always had that passion for helping others and being involved in the community, but then when I became a dad, it was like, ‘Well, now all those things that I’m working to are also going to benefit my daughters at home.’ And so when I go to work every day, I’m not just working for the community at large, but also my family. And if I can make a difference that impacts the community in a positive way, that’s also going to impact my family as well.
It’s kind of full circle because my drive to be involved in helping the community around me comes from my own family and community growing up. My brother has a similar mindset. He spent five years in the army and is now an ICU nurse back in Chicago. Before my mother passed away, one thing she said was that she was the proudest of having raised two boys who were each able to contribute to our society. That was always important to her and was one of those things that surrounded us as kids without us even realizing it. That’s something I want for my daughters as well. So whether it’s joining sports, clubs in schools, or whatever else, just being involved in your community can start to ingrain the importance of giving back, working with people, and doing good.
This summer, I’m going into my seventh year as a volunteer with the Miracle League of Green Bay, which is a baseball league for kids with disabilities. They play on a rubberized baseball field meant for wheelchair users, but the league is inclusive of all kinds of kids, whether they have physical or intellectual disabilities. We work with kids from ages 7 to 19, and I have been partnered with the same kid for all seven years. He was 8 when he started, and that opportunity has been wonderful for me. It has allowed me to combine my love for baseball with my love for being involved in my community and helping people who need it, which is something I try to do as often as I can.
Mario’s story was produced by Alexandria Delcourt. Click here to learn more about Wello.
