Mike Rowe has made his name being a dirty, dirty man.
Rowe was the ever-agreeable host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs for eight glorious seasons
of him roughing it with the bravest of blue-collar workers and followed that up with his equally
daring CNN series Somebody's Gotta Do It.
But there's a lot more to him than TV fame — so do yourself a favor and dig into some
less-known facts about Mike Rowe's life.
Digging in, after all, is pretty much what got Rowe famous in the first place.
Operatic Roots
In order to break into TV, Rowe needed to have a Screen Actors Guild membership card,
but, living in Maryland, you couldn't obtain one without doing union work, which was impossible
to get without — that's right — those dreaded cards.
Luckily, though, there was a loophole for this catch-22.
Rowe figured out that by earning a membership to a union like the American Guild of Musical
Artists, he could just buy his way into its sister union.
Problem solved.
So, even though he wasn't musically inclined, Rowe chose the opera union as his mark, picking
the shortest performance piece he could find — the coat aria from Puccini's La bohème
— for his audition.
That ... went about as well as you might expect from a guy who just started opera a month before.
After performing his piece, Rowe's reviewer asked, "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?"
"Le mie grazie ricevi.
Wake up up, you producer!"
"Va bene!
Yes!"
Even so, Rowe was told he had a "rich, well-modulated baritone" and that the next natural step was
to dress him up as a pirate and let him in.
Pirate Rowe enjoyed opera so much, he stuck around for seven years, all after originally
just wanting an easy way to get his SAG card.
"I got in and then I realized I liked the music and then the girls"
He even used his pipes to pump up his old QVC infomercials.
"The end is near.
And so I face the final curtain"
Hey, at least he has an artistic outlet for those days when the day job gets a little
too filthy, yeah?
180 minutes
Nine years, 169 episodes, and 50 states later, it's crazy to think that Dirty Jobs, the franchise
that truly put Rowe on the map, was originally only slated to air as three one-hour specials.
That's right — 180 minutes of Rowe is all we were supposed to get, after he caught the
Discovery Channel's attention by sending a tape of one of his more graphic pieces from
a segment he used to do on San Francisco's Evening Magazine.
The segment was called "Somebody's Gotta Do It," and it featured Rowe exploring the wonders
of artificial cow insemination.
Unsurprisingly, viewers reacted to the specials en masse, and in every way imaginable, giving
Rowe the bright idea to see if Discovery was interested in making his fresh, but clearly
eccentric, concept a regular deal.
They were interested all right and, like that, Dirty Jobs was born.
Eagle scout allegiance
After earning the esteemed honor of Eagle Scout as a child, Rowe remembers receiving
a letter from none other than President Gerald Ford congratulating him on his accomplishment.
The letter was written on fancy paper and featured the presidential stamp, with Ford's
name and his photocopied signature at the bottom.
In other words, it was a form letter, which was nice to Rowe in theory but, at the same
time, felt slightly deceitful.
So what did Rowe do when he came up and became the host of his own show?
Why, he created his own form letter for new Eagle Scouts, of course, and offers to send
it signed — and personalized — to any Eagle Scout who requests one, so long as they
provide him with a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
Small digs
Considering Rowe's fame from Dirty Jobs and several other successful projects, it should
come as no surprise he's not doing too bad financially these days, with his worth estimated
at a fat $35 million.
That's surely enough to splurge on a mansion, or two, or three.
But for Rowe, there's been no chunk of change big enough to get him away from the modest
San Francisco apartment he's called home for the last 14 years and counting.
Rowe finally revealed his digs when a fan on Facebook asked him, among other things,
to truthfully admit he doesn't live in a mansion.
It was a pretty easy thing to admit for Rowe, who said the extent of his mansioning experience
is that he house-sat once and "kinda liked it."
Otherwise, he's been more than content sticking with the apartment lifestyle, especially at
a pad that offers such a sweet, and only slightly obstructed, view of Treasure Island and Alcatraz,
which he regards as the best part about his place.
Talk about a killer view.
Death threats
Whether intended or not, Rowe's lengthy run on Dirty Jobs makes him somewhat of a spokesman
for overworked and underpaid Americans everywhere.
So when it was his voice that played over a 2014 ad for Walmart — you know, the same
super-sized retailer frequently accused of overworking and underpaying its employees
— trumpeting the company's pledge to invest $250 million in U.S. manufacturing, it's no
wonder people were peeved.
Some were even mad enough that Rowe received death threats.
Ultimately, Rowe took the threats with a grain of salt, and addressed the criticism with
a lengthy Facebook post in which he wrote that the company's commitment to investing
in America was worth shilling for.
"I'm not a spokesman for Walmart.
I'm a spokesman for American manufacturing."
Birthday suit surprise
The only thing worse than receiving death threats is waking up one morning to find people
on the Internet thinking you're dead already.
Rowe's had the fortune of experiencing both scenarios at the same time.
According to the rumors, he got into a fight with a flying drone and, shotgun in-hand,
died in the process.
But that wasn't the real story — or even half of it.
After headlines declared him deceased, Rowe emerged, very much alive, to tell the true
story of how he almost had a duel with a peeping drone.
As he explained it, he was decked out in his birthday suit and dreaming when he heard a
loud buzzing noise and rose to investigate the culprit.
It turned out to be a nosy little drone, right outside his window, with its camera pointed
directly at Rowe and his exposed body.
Rowe grabbed his shotgun from under his bed and, still entirely nude, stormed outside,
ready to shoot the "electronic Peeping Tom" from the sky.
He pumped a shell into the chamber — which was apparently heard and served as the genesis
of the death hoax — had the shot lined up, and was just about to pull the trigger when
the drone's camera turned toward him and made Rowe rethink his actions.
"But what I didn't know, is… is the drone operator some worthless little pervert within
a mile of me looking at a monitor -- is he recording it there as well?"
He could only imagine a video popping up on his mom's computer with the headline "Dirty
Jobs Guy Totally Loses It — Gets Naked and Shoots Drone From San Francisco Skies," and
that fright was enough to make Rowe drop his shotgun and reach for his cellphone instead.
The only shot he ended up taking was a picture of the drone as it flew away.
Dirty jokes
In 2010, Rowe made a guest appearance on Sesame Street for a segment aptly titled "Dirtiest
Jobs with Mike Rowe."
Unsurprisingly, his appearance included coming into contact with Oscar the Grouch, and the
two made for awesome, filthy television that included an adult joke that was probably a
little too risque for the young audiences that watched.
"So just come around to the back door."
"The back door?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm.
Well.
I always wanted to go in the back…"
Um, yeah.
So, that somehow made it past PBS censors and gave all those parents forced to watch
alongside the kids something to chuckle about.
In hindsight for Rowe, he wrote that the joke was "a cheap and childish double-entendre"
and that he had a hangover to thank for his wild hair that day.
But hey, at least he picked the right character to go there with.
"You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel."
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