From 'Golden Boy' to Aspiring Chef

"When I was young, I used to hear people say, 'He's a golden boy. Look at that guy. Can you imagine what he's going to be like when he grows up?'" Beck recounted in a January 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal. "I was in Washington, D.C., on the morning show, by the time I was 18, programming a station by 19, No. 1 in the mornings. I think I was making, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars by the time I was 25."

He continued: "By the time I was 30 nobody would work with me. I was friendless, I was hopeless, I was suicidal, lost my family-I mean, it was bad. Bottomed out, didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef-go to work in a kitchen someplace."

Growing up, Beck would pace his room after school, practicing his radio voice into a hand-held tape recorder. He made his debut at Mount Vernon's local AM radio station at the age of 13, after winning a contest to be a guest DJ for an hour. That same year, his parents were separated, and his mother, who Beck has described as an alcoholic, won custody, and moved him to Payallup, Wash. In May 1979, when Glenn was 15 years old, his mother went boating in Puget Sound, and was discovered dead - an incident which he would later describe as a suicide.

After his mother's death, Glenn Beck moved back in with his father, and attended public high school in Bellingham, Washington. While still in high-school, at 15, Beck sent an audition tape to Seattle's new FM station, KUBE 93, and got a job as a weekend overnight DJ. After school each Friday, the ambitious Beck would take a Greyhound bus from Bellingham to Seattle, then transfer to a city bus to the station's studios, work the graveyard shift, and sleep in the station's conference room over the weekend.

Following graduation from high school, Beck forwent college, and took a job at a Top-40 radio station in Provo, Utah, but left after six months because his drinking, smoking and partying lifestyle didn't fit in with the area's predominantly conservative Mormon culture.

From there, in 1983, he moved to a station in Washington, D.C., WPGC, where he met his first wife, Claire, who worked in the accounting department. He would have two daughters with Claire, one of them born with cerebral palsy. He left the nation's capitol later that year, and over the next 17 years his career would take him to Corpus Christie, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; Phoenix, Arizona; Houston, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; New Haven, Connecticut; and Tampa, Florida.

Alcoholism

During this time, professional life had its ups and downs, but Beck's struggle with alcohol drove his personal life into tailspin.

While working in Baltimore, he was arrested for speeding in his DeLorean with one of the doors lifted open. In New Haven, things got worse. His marriage fell apart, and his work relationships deteriorated. "I fired a guy one time for bringing me the wrong kind of pen," he told ABC News in a June 2009 interview. "I was beyond a jerk."

He said, "I hated myself. Hated myself I tried for two years to stop drinking. I'd look myself in the mirror and I'd say, 'You're not an alcoholic, you don't have a problem.'" Beck says he hit rock bottom in 1994, when at breakfast he couldn't recall a bedtime story he told to his daughters the night before. "They said, 'Dad, Dad, that was the best one ever, tell us that [nighttime] story again,' he told Forbes in an April 2010 profile. "I realized that not only could I not remember the story, I didn't even remember tucking them in." This prompted him to attend his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Though born Catholic, Beck didn't become religious until he met his second wife, Tania, in 1998. "I apologize, but guys will understand this," he joked. "My wife is hot and she wouldn't have sex with me until we got married, and she wouldn't marry me unless we had a religion," he said. "I'm like, ah, you've got to be kidding me! I've got to go to church for this?" The couple settled on Mormonism, and were baptized by Beck's friend and radio partner Pat Gray in 1999.

Glenn Beck Inc.

As his personal and spiritual life evolved, so did Beck's career. For most of the 1980s, Beck had developed a reputation as a DJ on various "morning zoo" format shows - in which hosts would mix music with various skits and pranks.

During this time period, he did the voice of a muppet-like character named Clydie Clyde, a routine that grew old by the time he landed in Houston in the late 1980s. "It was the worst time in my broadcasting career, and I wish people would stop bringing it up," he told the Houston Chronicle in January 2009. "It's the most embarrassing thing I ever did on radio. If I could make everybody forget about my time in Houston, it would be good."

By the mid-1990s, Beck began taking an interest in talk radio, and during his show in New Haven, he began to engage callers and mix in conservative-leaning political commentary.

In 1998, he started guest-hosting on talk radio for WABC in New York City on weekends. In 2000, he made his career move complete when he was given the opportunity to host a political talk-radio show on Tampa, Florida's WFLA.

While the show got off to a rocky start in the ratings, Beck received a boost later that year during the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. He would find his footing after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as he tapped into the mood of his listeners at the time. In January 2002, he became syndicated, and had picked up 150 stations within two years. In 2010, he was the third-highest rated host nationally, behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

In 2006, Beck added TV to his repertoire, when he was given a show on CNN's Headline News , which would eventually lead to his current show on Fox News Channel, where he started in January 2009.

Beck's TV show, though politically-focused, integrates a lot of the style he learned in his radio career, including the use of humor and sarcasm. He also frequently uses props, and delivers monologues with the aid of chalkboards. He often gets personal and emotional, and has cried on air on a number of occasions.

Beck presides over a media empire, which he named Mercury Radio Arts. On top of his radio and TV shows, Beck has written six New York Times bestsellers, both fiction and non-fiction (five of them debuted at number one). He also tours with one-man comedy/inspirational shows.

ABC described one such performance as, "a wild show -- complete with dead fish, parodies of Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' documentary and other stunts, like one in which Beck pretended to pour gasoline on a guest to illustrate the onslaught of government growth." In an April 2010 article entitled, "Glen Beck Inc.," Forbes estimated that Beck, all together, he earned $32 million in the preceding 12-month period.

Yet in a personal development, Beck announced in July 2010 that his doctor told him he could be blind in a year as a result of his battle with macular dystrophy.

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