May 27, 1986 was a very important day for me – my very first day working at WGTD as its Fine Arts Director. It’s fun- but also difficult- to remember what the station was like back then, which by now seems like the dark ages. In one way, the station was larger than it is today- with seven full-time employees (GM Gary Vaillancourt, Program Director Bonnie Orr, Co-News Directors Bill Guy and Jayne Herring, Engineer Don Betts, EARS Coordinator Steve Kelly, and me) plus two part-time reporters (or stringers, as we called them) and five part-time on-air announcers. Compared to our more modest forces today, that seems like a small army. But the station was also smaller, in a sense, because back in those days we were a fully-independent affiliate of NPR with no connection whatsoever to Wisconsin Public Radio. We were, in a sense, entirely on our own- especially because our working relationship with Gateway Technical College (or Gateway Technical Institute, as it was still called 30 years ago) was curiously muted. The school owned us – we were Gateway employees – and most of our evening broadcasts consisted of Gateway courses – but in many ways the relationship was cautious and unenthusiastic in both directions. (Or at least that’s how it seemed.) So in some very real ways, we felt alone – aside from our listeners.
Our studios were located in an entirely different building back then – the Multi-Purpose Building. (How’s that for a scintillating name?) Our studios were equipped with rather ancient equipment – even for 1986 – and the entire lay out of the studios was cumbersome, to say the least. That was partly because we were in a space not originally intended to house a radio station, so it was something of a patched-together affair. In fact, in those days all the rooms of the station were interconnected with no single hallway to allow unfettered access. (Fortunately, the first of two re-modeling projects changed that.)
But for as awkwardly laid-out and unimpressive as those old studios were, there was something endearing about them as well- as though we were creating good radio despite less than optimal space which to do it. (I suppose it’s similar to my fond memories of my days back at Luther College, when we had nothing like the sparkling Jensen Hall of Music- but instead were farmed out to various buildings sprinkled across the southern edge of the campus. But we didn’t let that stop us from doing great things!) So I remember those days with great fondness- as well as gratitude.
(this photo gives you a little peek at the old equipment in our production room at the time I was hired.)
I began my work at WGTD with responsibilities pretty much limited to classical music programming. I was our DJ for both morning and afternoon classical shifts- plus I chose the music that was played on Mondays, which was one of my days off. And on Saturday afternoons in the so-called “off season” when we weren’t carrying the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, I would host a classical music call-in show called “Saturday By Request.” When I started there, we had basically one short shelf of classical LPs (because my predecessor, Art Jones, had made extensive use of his own personal collection, and most of those records went with him when he retired and moved to Stockton, California.) So one of my highest priorities was to beef up our library, which meant spending every other Monday down in Chicago shopping at stores like Second Hand Tunes and The B Side to buy used records that were in good enough shape to play over the air. (I occasionally bought new LPs but in my mind it was better to enlarge the collection as quickly as possible, even if that meant sacrificing sound quality. Of course, now the thought of playing second hand, used records over the air is just ludicrous to me! But at that point in time, in that particular situation, it made perfect sense to me.) And of course, before too long the world changed to compact disks- and we changed with it! It was around that time that I helped create a music program that aired at night called “Night Music” which featured new age music … which at that time was all the rage. I helped purchase the disks and labeled all of the tracks according to how slow, medium or up tempo they were – because the format of the program was to begin in more upbeat fashion and get progressively quieter at the evening went on. Nowadays, I think I would have trusted the DJs to make the right musical choices, but back then I was a bit too much of a control freak.
When I came to the station, we were still carrying a syndicated program called Adventures in Good Music with Karl Haas – which was a fine series but increasingly expensive. The mutual decision was made for me to create a series of our own to replace it, which I called Music: A Closer Look – and in the early going, I created three of them a week …. one hour each! Pretty quickly I realized that I couldn’t possibly keep doing that without burning myself out, so it became a once-a-week program where I would choose a particular topic, research it, write the script, and then produce it. I still have a few of the original reel to reel tapes of those shows, gathering dust in my basement, and some others on cassette tape. But for the most part, those shows have vanished from the face of the earth. What lasts, however, is the way that my interest in classical music and my determination to learn more and more about it was so powerfully primed. I also created a half hour program called “The Ring of Words” in which I would read (mostly) the word of Wisconsin writers. Most of those shows are gone as well, save for a few tapes in the basement – but back in the day, there were a labor of love for me.
One thing that was only a very occasional part of my duties was The Morning Show. News director Bill Guy was the primary force behind that show, which once upon a time didn’t even air every day- only when Bill had an interview ready. On those days when we didn’t have an interview, we just stayed with NPR for an additional thirty minutes. Only once in a great while would I do an interview. One of the first was when the Kenosha Symphony brought in Barry Tuckwell, one of the greatest french horn players in the world, as a soloist. (He was a solo artist affiliated with LeBlanc, a world renowned instrument maker that used to be headquartered in Kenosha.) Interviewing him was a frightening thrill, and I remember hoping that I would become a much more assured and skilled interviewer so the prospect of doing such an interview wouldn’t be nearly so terrifying. It was only when the Morning Show was made a permanent, five-day fixture in our schedule- and expanded from thirty to fifty minutes- that I became a regular part of it. And with Bill’s death back in 1998 (he died of liver cancer just after his 50th birthday) I became the program’s sole host, and that has now become the centerpiece of my work at the station- and the thing about which I am most proud.
I mentioned that when I began at WGTD 30 years ago, it had a much larger staff and was a fully independent NPR affiliate. (We had our own satellite dish, so we could pull in whatever programs we chose from a rather vast array of possibilities.) But even when I was hired in 1986, Gateway was experiencing some budgetary constriction … to the point where my own hiring was delayed for a few weeks because of a hiring freeze at the school. And general manager Gary Vaillancourt’s departure (which occurred less than two years after I came) led to the hiring of a successor who was experienced and nice- but incapable of championing the station or forcefully advocating for us. And before long, a dispiriting series of staff cutbacks began …. one after another. One problem was that our (sizable) grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting required that we have five full time staff members, which meant that all of the cutbacks had to be from the ranks of our part-timers, many of whom were terrific at what they did. . There eventually came a time (a brief time, thankfully) when we were down to just the five full-timers and no one else – and only two of the five of us (Bill and I) were on-air personnel, which was obviously an unworkable situation. We attempted a move to automation but the computer program in question was unbelievably complicated and not perfectly suited to our needs. Those years of slow decline were pretty brutal, and it was really the support of our listeners that kept us going.
Ultimately, the decision was made for the station to become an affiliate of Wisconsin Public Radio, a move we had all feared would decimate all of our local programming and eliminate most if not all of our positions. Fortunately, the deal that was brokered allowed us to retain some measure of local control- and in the years since our affiliation began, the station has actually gone on to do some of the best work in our history. Two significant reasons for that were general manager Dave Cole and morning anchor Dave McGrath, who are incredibly good at what they do and who helped usher us into this new era. And fortunately for me, that shift from full-time to part-time at WGTD came just as my work at Carthage shifted from part-time to full-time …. a perfectly calibrated teeter-totter that worked out perfectly for me. I am so fortunate in that regard. And not long after our affiliation with the state network, Gateway underscored its commitment to the station by creating beautiful new studios for us in a brand new building- facilities that are in many ways state of the art. (How I wish Bill and some of my other past colleagues could have had the pleasure of working where we are now.)
I am so thankful for what I have experienced at WGTD over the past 30 years. First of all, I am so happy to have had the pleasure of working alongside colleagues like Bill and Jayne and Barb and Sue and Kandice and Playford and Marsha and Mark and many others. I am so grateful that my responsibilities there have allowed me to meet, interact with and interview a dizzying array of fascinating people. And I am so grateful for the listeners who have been our primary inspiration. One thing about radio is that you have no way of really knowing who’s out there listening- although back in the days when we did our own on-air fundraisers, it was great to have listeners calling in and pledging their support. Only over time have I come to appreciate the far-reaching impact of what we do- whether it’s heard over the air in the old-fashioned way or via in the internet. What we do matters to people and that’s a really great feeling. And in a business that can be very volatile – a business that tends to discard people with brutal callousness – I know that I am incredibly fortunate to have been able to remain with the same radio station for three decades. Some of my thirty years here have been quite difficult, painful, stressful – but I know now that it was important for me to experience such difficulty amidst a life that in so many has been a charmed life. I look over it all and am grateful for it all ….. and hope that I can go on doing this work that I love so very much.
(Pictured at the top is an interview I did over the phone with Mike Johnson, talking about the clean up work he did in New York state in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. His wife Jamie was in the studio with me- as were their two boys- and at the end of our time together, I had them come on to the microphone to say hi to their dad. That’s one of my all time favorite moments.) Here are some images of other memorable moments:
Carthage’s Dr. Richard Sjoerdsma and renowned composer (and former Kenoshan) Chester Biscardi……… Moira Smiley and the group VOCO.
Logan Munoz and Dominique Martin talk about “Newsies” //// Carthage opera students Mike Anderle and Nick Huff talk about “The Elixir of Love.”
Guests of the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning //// Local Frank Lloyd Wright expert Mark Herzberg
Miss America Laura Kaeppler ////// the granddaughter of Gandhi
More guests of the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning ///// Veteran Bill Roth talks about the experience of his Honor Flight visit to Washington DC.
Local cancer survivors talk about the next Relay for Life ////// Nancy Constantine talks about her first visit to the Metropolitan Opera
Interviews out in the field: a nationally renowned race car driver visits Gateway //// the captain of one of the fabled Tall Ships that has visited Kenosha
One more glimpse of our old radio studio, with the reel to reel decks in the background.
