Mike Lear is a serious broadcast journalist with a serious job.
Since July, he's been the multi-media services coordinator for the Missouri House of Representatives Communications Department. Toiling in the windowless basement of the Capitol, he's tasked with keeping Missourians informed about what the speaker, the bipartisan leadership and the members at large are doing via the House's website and numerous social media platforms, as well as feeding audio to the state's radio stations and video to Missouri TV stations.
Then there's the Lear who's also a husband and father of five girls, guitarist every chance he gets and shooter of pool if he had the time. A tall man with a deep, resonating voice, for fun Lear stalks the darkened cells and shadowy walkways of the historic Missouri State Penitentiary almost every night the place is open. Usually, he spins the lore for three sets of visitors each night. The prison has attracted more than 32,000 paying customers to Jefferson City, up from 3,000 in 2009.
"That's a pretty creepy place," said Lear, one of the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau's veteran tour guides and one of those especially trained to lead its popular paranormal tours.
So does he believe in ghosts? "Personally, no," Lear said. "But I've seen, heard and felt some weird things there. I've had some experiences there that are pretty difficult to explain away."
Lear came to Jefferson City in June 2011 as a reporter for Learfield Communications' Missourinet radio news network. He became managing editor of Learfield in 2014. When legendary Missourinet news director Bob Priddy retired last year, Lear was promoted to succeed him, becoming only the second news director in Learfield's history. Lear had been with the statewide KWIX-KRES group of stations in Moberly as news and farm director since 1997 - his first career position other than the fast-food endeavors of his youth - until joining Learfield in 2011.
The prison tour guide/radio-TV professional and his wife, Lisa, have daughters: Ciana, 16, Teagan, 11, Gwendolyn, 6, and twins Zoe and Zara, 3. Lisa homeschools the girls. Lear is from Moberly, and his wife is from the Cairo area.
"Jefferson City doesn't feel a whole lot different from Moberly," Lear said. "It suits us really well - not a St. Louis or Kansas City, but it feels like a small Midwestern town, which suits us just fine."
Lear has always had the melodic voice and precise diction, at least since he came through classes with teachers Chris Miller and J.D. Hunter at Moberly High almost two decades ago. The voice runs in the family, Lear said, with all three of his brothers also blessed with similarly pleasing pipes. His brother Tony, 10 years older, was at KWIX-KRES and helped him get that all-important first job in broadcasting. Once inside the door, network leaders Brad Boyer, Ken Kujawa and Bill Peterson allowed Lear to show his skills on the control board, ad writing and rewriting Missourinet and USDA press releases.
It wasn't long, he recalled, until the food-service job was in his rearview mirror and he was motoring into radio news with an open road in front of him. As the news director at Missourinet, Lear had been fully involved with covering both houses of the General Assembly, as well as other elements of state government inside the Capitol.
"I've made many, many friends at the Capitol," Lear said, "and learned a great deal, especially from Bob Priddy."
Priddy, the acknowledged expert on Capitol history, serves as a role model for Lear in his work at the historic penitentiary. Lear hopes to work at the prison "as long as they let me," he said. "I'd like to be an expert on prison history like Bob is on the Capitol."
Working with Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, and Republicans and Democrats alike is his future, though, and Lear said he is privileged to work with Missourians of high character, ethics and morals, as he describes the current group of 163 state representatives.
"This is a very special group, and I'm honored to be working with them at this place at this time," he said.