Say Farewell to Gerry House This Morning on WSIX

If you've always regretted you didn't watch the last episode of M.A.S.H., or you missed Johnny Carson's farewell to late-night TV, switch over to

right now. Today is Gerry House's last broadcast with the House Foundation after three decades at the mike, and anything's possible over the next four hours. Except maybe a call from Bella Abzug.

After spending a typically hectic morning with the House Foundation, Carrington Fox penned this appreciation in 2009:

It all looks playfully simple, sitting around with a bunch of coffee and Diet Coke, cracking on current events, but House is clearly a thinking man who takes his humor seriously. "I try to write 25 jokes a day," says House, a former writer for Roseanne who has ghostwritten for Brad Paisley and Reba McEntire when they hosted the CMA and ACM awards, respectively. At the end of every morning's broadcast, Falklen dutifully catalogs the punchlines, and anyone who has ever tried to be funny on command must envy the volume and consistency of humor that emerges from every four-hour session. "We try to entertain ourselves, and hopefully people listen in," says House, whose candid commentary—more liberal than you might expect on a country music station—spawned the nickname Mr. Controversy Pants, albeit a nickname he coined himself. "We're really trying to be funny. We're not trying to be controversial. But a lot of times things come out of that."

While House might be the current-events filter for a large drive-time audience, he says he doesn't think too much about politics anymore. Since being hospitalized with a cerebral aneurysm in 2003 and surviving three subsequent craniotomies, he has tried to become more Zen about things—from politics to the future of broadcast radio to his own career. House says he's a lot less driven than he was before his brain exploded—a phrase he throws around with the same levity with which he displays a cartoon caricature of himself as a brain-trauma patient at Centennial Medical Center. He also says that he and his high-school-sweetheart-turned-wife, Allyson, have adopted a mantra that they don't go anywhere they dread and they don't see people who have drama.

Check out the 773-and-counting

on the WSIX website, and maybe add one of your own. In a grove of toothpicks, House has been a sequoia.