Arlen Diamond and Tammy Wiley

[00:04] ARLEN DIAMOND: My name is Arlen diamond. I'm just a whisker under 79 years old. I retired from Missouri State University in 2010. Today's date is April 21, 2022, and we're in the Ozarks in Missouri. I'm here with Tammy Wiley today. Tammy and I worked together at KSMU and Ozarks public television for 19 years.

[00:38] TAMMY WILEY: I'm Tammy Wiley. I am 54. It is Thursday, April 21, 2022. We're in the Ozarks in Springfield, Missouri. My interview partner is doctor Arlen diamond. He was my professional mentor, a boss for many years, and one of my favorite people.

[01:02] ARLEN DIAMOND: Well, that was very nice. Thank you. I'm thinking back to when we first met. That would have been, what, in the late eighties?

[01:14] TAMMY WILEY: Mid eighties.

[01:15] ARLEN DIAMOND: Mid eighties, right. You were a college student, correct? Missouri State University.

[01:21] TAMMY WILEY: That is correct.

[01:22] ARLEN DIAMOND: And I believe you were in my broadcast management class.

[01:25] TAMMY WILEY: Yeah. I don't know that you remember the first time that we met, but I do. It was my first or second week of my freshman year of college, and I had researched the campus radio station, and I walked over one day to that old house, grand and national and asked about opportunities for students to get involved. And they introduced me to the general manager, and we talked for a bit that day. You don't remember that, do you?

[01:53] ARLEN DIAMOND: You can tell by the blank look in my eyes, can't you?

[01:56] TAMMY WILEY: You know what you told me?

[01:58] ARLEN DIAMOND: No.

[01:58] TAMMY WILEY: You told me to. That normally you didn't hire freshmen to enjoy my first year of college and come back my sophomore year if I was still interested. So I enjoyed my first year of college and came back my sophomore year.

[02:11] ARLEN DIAMOND: And you were. So you showed up again at the radio station.

[02:15] TAMMY WILEY: That's right.

[02:16] ARLEN DIAMOND: And I remember that you worked in the news department.

[02:20] TAMMY WILEY: I did, yeah. Worked for Dick Willingham. You know, you're a great storyteller, but Dick Willingham was a good storyteller, too. A fine man. That was my first boss at kid.

[02:31] ARLEN DIAMOND: He was. He came to us from commercial television, had a wonderful voice, wonderful delivery. You mentioned being a student. One of the things that I enjoy and enjoyed for all the years I was at Missouri State, totaling 32 years, was working with students and working with bright students. And you were one of the brightest. I have to tell you that even though you kind of. We're a little disruptive sometimes in class, not that you intended to be, but you just kind of like to talk to the people. You sat in the back of the room and you just kind of talk to people next to you and whatnot. And I remember listening to you giving the news. And I thought, what a wonderful job of articulating because you're a perfectionist. So you. Every word is very sharp. And I thought, golly, she's really doing a good job. And then you said, you know, I've got to quit working at the station. I've got to concentrate, what, on my last year in college or something? So I thought, okay, you know, there goes another good student. But it's always great when you see students who are dedicated to learning and performing well. And then after you graduated, you worked in commercial television for a while, but one day you showed up in my office and why did you come over to visit me?

[04:05] TAMMY WILEY: You know, I think that the higher education setting always appealed to me. I felt very much at home there, and I was considering getting my master's degree and wanted to further my studies. So you were a natural person to contact and visit with, and you encouraged me in that direction, as you obviously value higher education as well, and continued learning. So that started a whole new phase of our relationship.

[04:33] ARLEN DIAMOND: I remember those days at the station. By that time, we actually had two old houses that moving on up, right? The operations all took place in a stucco white house. Second house from the corner at grand and National. And in the corner house, there was an old brick house, and it had served the university. It was right across the street, actually, from campus, and it served the university's many purposes for an old house, until we finally were able to take it over for the radio station. And I remember you came in and visited with me about going back school and about pursuing a master's degree. At that time, we were just starting this new thing called underwriting, locally, at least. And about the only way that happened back in those days was somebody would call the station and say, hey, how do I get an announcement like so and so had on the air? And I said, well, you know, it's pretty easy. We just say your name, your address, couple words about whatever your business is, and we announce it, and you pay us money. So this was becoming burdensome to me because I was overwhelmed with sometimes two calls in a week, maybe one, I don't remember. But I said, you know what? If you want to come back to graduate school, by that time, we had had some graduate assistants at the station, and of course, we had, you know, both paid student workers and volunteers and whatnot. I said, if you will help me with underwriting and take care of that, I will fund a graduate assistantship for you. And so the west, as they say, is history.

[06:33] TAMMY WILEY: Yeah.

[06:34] ARLEN DIAMOND: When you finished your graduate assistantship, where things were moving along at the station, we were having more underwriting and an occasional special event. So I said, you know what? How would you like to just work here? That's my recollection.

[06:52] TAMMY WILEY: Yeah, we recall that the same. You might recall that I was. When I started at the station, I was on a grant funded position that I understood would last one year. One year turned into 30.

[07:08] ARLEN DIAMOND: It seems like it.

[07:10] TAMMY WILEY: But, you know, those years I recall fondly, and a lot was changing in public broadcasting at that time. We realized more and more that we needed more than federal funding to be able to operate and grow the station. So that meant going out into the community and garnering support more actively than we had done in the past. I found in that job that that was a lot about telling the station's story and learning how things worked at the station. And I also found out very quickly how much people valued public broadcasting, and that really spoke volumes to me. And I think that's one reason I really was excited about the work and wanted to stay involved, to be a part of something that people value in the community like they did.

[07:57] ARLEN DIAMOND: It's interesting, too, working with students. I love bright students. I am sometimes a little nervous about some students because they're enthusiastic and they want to do things to help. When we went to have our very first on air fundraiser, such as it was, one young man decided to call the president of the university and get him to record a statement in support of our fundraiser. Operating under the philosophy, it's easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. Of course, I hadn't really pushed this on through the administration, and so when he got the president on the phone and he said, I'm so and so at KSMU. And would you have a few comments for our fundraiser coming up? And the president's comment was, I don't remember approving our fundraiser for KSMU. So we quickly tried to do some mea culpas, but we went on with it. And I also remember very early, in fact, that may have been our first real fundraiser. I don't know, but a Prairie home companion was getting more expensive, and we thought, I mean, it was like $15 a program, but we had a very, very small budget and absolute minimum staffing for corporation for public broadcasting certification. So I just. We started announcing a few weeks ahead of time. You know, we're going to drop a pari home companion. We can't afford it. So we'd get a few calls from people say, well, look, give us a chance to help. So we thought, okay. So I made a promise. If we raised $1,000 on that prayer home companion broadcast that night, we would continue the program, and we would find a way to fund the rest of it. And, golly, we did the $1,000 almost in the first couple breaks. We begin to understand people's attachment. And it wasn't just the classical music people or just the Prairie home companion people, or, you know, just these other kind of little segments of our programming. At that time, we were kind of a very traditional station. We had classical music. We had news, we had this, we had that. And so we thought, well, you know, this might work. In fact, I was talking to a couple of our former staff members, I think it was just a week or so ago, and I said, I remember my enthusiasm for when I found out people would give us money. We went in the. One of the little studios in the old building, and I had the chalkboard in there, because I also taught a class in there, and I made a triangle or pyramid on the chalkboard, and I said, and then I drew some lines across it. So I had levels. And I said, if we can get ten people at $100, and if we can get five people at $200, and if we can get three people at $250 or whatever, and then at the top, if we can get, like, a $500 or $1,000 gift, look at the money that we'll have for programming. And so that's. I mean, that was very primitive, but it worked. And sometimes people typecast, you know, they kind of typecast people who listen to public radio. I think it's different today, but public radio used to be more. More classical music. For the most part, two thirds of the stations were licensed to colleges and universities. And so I remember one day when we had the two old houses, we saw this lady get out of her car in the parking lot. She was elderly. She had walked with a cane. It was difficult for her to come up the steps to the porch. It was a craftsman style house. So she had to come up some steps and come in. And we thought, oh, she's here to complain about the metropolitan Opera or something. And, no, she wanted to donate some money for car talk. She said, I love that program. She said, I don't even drive hardly. I hardly drive, but I love car talk, and I would never work on my car.

[12:40] TAMMY WILEY: I love that story. You're right. People from all walks of life are interested in and support public radio. I was thinking about this a bit earlier when I started at the station, which was obviously a long time ago, there were people that contributed to every fundraiser from the time I started and was involved in it until I left. Just that continuity over time really always spoke to me. What would you say was the most challenging thing about operating Ozarks public broadcasting, managing the stations?

[13:19] ARLEN DIAMOND: The most challenging thing was having truly having enough money to take a vision and grow it. It was not people, for the most part, because our people that worked at the station were also highly motivated and wanting to do a good job. I've always thought of management as kind of like a train, and the general manager gets to be the engineer. So you're picking the track, and then everybody in each car behind you is somebody with a specialization that helps the station run. And so I get to the luxury of being the engineer on the train, but I also have a big responsibility. I have to be sure that where we're going, the people who work for me to get us there have the resources that they need to do their job, and that has always been important to me. And giving people their resources sometimes is difficult. It is. On the other hand, well, I was the kind of person, if my computer screen turned blue and beeped at me, I'd have to call the engineers in and say, what do I do now? But I understood, I think, where technology was going, and so we were very early into station automation to help out. So we didn't need as many staff in scheduling people to come in and work a shift where their primary responsibility was to do the voice cuts and the music and whatnot for maybe a four hour program, but to do that in an hour so that they had another 3 hours available to do other things to help the station. And then truly a large challenge was when, in 2001, the university assumed the license of a UHF a community licensed public tv station that had fallen on hard times. And this was the time when public television was making the transition of digital broadcasting. Unfortunately, the station management at that time did not have a vision for how they were going to raise that money, and they were looking for what they called an educational partner. Translated, you know, we need somebody that's got deeper pockets than we have to be able to make this possible. Otherwise, you know, the station may go off the air. Some other station in a different city may buy it and use it as an extension of their coverage area. So Tammy and I were tasked with trying to figure out how we do this. You know, it was kind of like, I remember an old FedEx commercial or something on tv where the guy's phone is ringing and he's going hello, hello, hello, I'll do that, do that. Got that, do that. And he hangs up all the phones and then he looks blankly and says how am I going to do that? And so we were kind of in that position. But once the president of the university had made the decision, it was up to Tammy and me working together to try to figure out how to put this whole package together.

[17:06] TAMMY WILEY: That was a, that was a challenging time. I think it's also when I realized we always had a good chemistry and we worked together well. But I think it was during that season that I realized how much we thought alike and that I think our vision and strategically the way that we looked at things was always very similar. And at that time we didn't have, we had a lot of work to do. And although many people contributed to the success of that at the university and in the community, like you said, we had kind of the day to day, we had the freedom, they gave us the freedom to have the day to day operations of the station and make a lot of decisions. And I'm proud of that work. And surprised in retrospect how smoothly it really went.

[18:01] ARLEN DIAMOND: It really did. And yes, I'm surprised too. The finances were challenging and the financial controls that a university places on stations are very tight, a lot of oversight. And so we really had to mind our p's and Qs. There was not a lot of fly by the seat of your pants type stuff. You had to know what you were doing. And we were very fortunate too during that time because Doctor Kaiser, the president of the university at that time said okay, we're going to take our people in our little three person tv production unit and we're going to fold that in to this whole new structure that we're going to call broadcast services with tv and radio. And so their lines, university lines for pay will transfer but we're not giving you any money.

[19:05] TAMMY WILEY: So have fun. Right?

[19:07] ARLEN DIAMOND: Yeah. So, you know, good luck and just life is a lot of being in the right place at the right time. We managed in a short period of time to pull together and I'm just going to round figures off. But pulled together a $1 million PTFP grant for digital conversion, a $1 million private gift to support the station, the tv station and a roughly $1 million in kind transfer of a almost 2000 foot tv tower to the university. That was heady stuff. It really was. I remember calling Doctor Kaiser and saying the tv station is going to give us their tower. And he laughed and he said, no, really, what's what you call for? I said, no, seriously, they're going to give it to us. And that once again, I always talk about relationships, and relationships are what drive, you know, so much of our success. So because I started as a broadcaster when I was 16 years old in a little 1000 watt daytime radio station in Pier, South Dakota. I always loved radio. I did. I loved radio. It was very cold in the winter in South Dakota, and it gets dark early. And so the sooner it got dark, the sooner I could start listening to the old clear channel AM radio stations that came in from Chicago and New Orleans and Oklahoma City and places like that. And so I would just listen to the radio and I would just. Marvelous at the magic of it all. So. And I ended up majoring in radio and tv in college, actually, I started in electrical engineering, but I realized I didn't understand calculus and engineering graphics. There's no way I can draw a straight line. So I walked across campus, this was at Kansas State to Nichols gymnasium and went up to the little radio tv department that probably had two faculty members, maybe three. And I changed my major. And from then on it was all broadcasting master's degree, PhD. I have to say, I don't mean any slight to our staff members that work very hard and do an excellent job in tv, but my heart has always been in radio. It always has been. It is such a magnificent medium that from a commercial point of view, you can sign off on Sunday night and come back on the air Monday morning in a whole new format with a whole new staff and a whole new approach. You can be on site anywhere with a simple tape recorder and cover a story. It is a very simple operation compared to television and much less expensive.

[22:22] TAMMY WILEY: That's true. I think that radio seems public. Radio in particular is so focused on content and not all the bells and whistles. And in the media environment today, it seems like there are many bells and whistles and so many different types of technology and ways of communicating. And there is that part of me that wonders if that's all good, because sometimes the content gets lost and the depth. And I think that we see in public broadcasting that that's still very much the focus. And I hope that continues because it is such an important service.

[23:06] ARLEN DIAMOND: It is. We expanded from one FM station with a 250 foot tower. I don't remember what our power was. Wasn't very much back in those days to having transmitters in Springfield and Branson, Joplin, Neosho Mountain Grove, West Plains, covering quite a bit of southwest Missouri. And the growth was phenomenal. Not necessarily because we were brilliant at programming, but because NPR was brilliant at programming. And, you know, I was smart enough to think, gee, you've got all this really good programming. Why are we spending time trying to create so many things ourselves when we can still be the local voice, but not have to go into all that intensive work? I remember one time at a conference in. Where was it? Chicago. Going to a tour of the public tv, public radio station in Chicago and seeing a hundred mailboxes for people's mail.

[24:12] TAMMY WILEY: And I was with you. I remember that. Oh, yeah, Chicago.

[24:15] ARLEN DIAMOND: Yes. That was Chicago. Yes. Let's see, if it was April, it was Chicago. Yeah. I thought, how can you even manage that many people at a radio station?

[24:28] TAMMY WILEY: You know, one of my favorite memories of my early days at KSMU was answering the telephone, and that was back in the day when people, they didn't have social media to get on and vent or complain or make comments. They called the radio station. I think some people called all of the radio stations and tv stations in town, but I learned so much from the times that I answered the phone. I learned to listen to people, not to argue with them, and to just learn from the perspective that they were bringing. And, you know, we've had a lot of conversations about that. And I think that that broader product of public radio and public television is that reporters ask good questions from people that see the world differently, and they just let them talk. And I. You know, and sometimes to each other, and there's so much value in that.

[25:30] ARLEN DIAMOND: Yes.

[25:31] TAMMY WILEY: And, you know, I just think about that core of the people that are drawn to that product. They don't all think the same or believe the same or think that everything that's on the station is presented in the best way, but they do care, and they are engaged in the community and civic life, and I think that's good. We need to definitely protect that resource and grow it, do everything we can in this community to keep it strong. I know we both deeply care about public radio and tv.

[26:02] ARLEN DIAMOND: The university, when it got its statewide mission and name change in. When was that? 2005.

[26:14] TAMMY WILEY: Early. Early in 2000. Yeah.

[26:17] ARLEN DIAMOND: Yeah. And the university had a statewide mission in citizenship, and we found that to be an ideal anchor for the station. I can't quite remember the catchy little things that we used to say, but something about encouraging the citizens, the exploration.

[26:39] TAMMY WILEY: Of ideas, and their application to citizenship.

[26:41] ARLEN DIAMOND: I knew you would know that.

[26:43] TAMMY WILEY: It's in my brain.

[26:44] ARLEN DIAMOND: I need to write that down and put it in my bill. Pool.

[26:48] TAMMY WILEY: Yeah, I'll send you a card.

[26:51] ARLEN DIAMOND: It was. I mean, it was. It was just perfect. It was just absolutely perfect for a university. That is the. Well, I guess it was the public affairs, is what it was, the public affairs mission. And, I mean, we just. We fell right into that as easy as peasy. Easy. Easy peasy.

[27:11] TAMMY WILEY: Yeah. It was definitely a good connection. You were a wonderful manager of the stations, and I can think of a lot of things that you accomplished and the way that you influenced other people over the years. I'm wondering who influenced you and maybe how you approached the station as a result.

[27:40] ARLEN DIAMOND: I'm not really sure, and that's an honest answer. When I was in the air force, I met a fellow from Hewlett Packard. I think it was one of the defense contractors. We were living in Colorado Springs at the time, and he was telling me about this new management approach that they were using at Hewlett Packard, which was called management, by wandering around. And I always tell people that just seemed like it was made for me, because I like to wander around and I like to talk to people. And so, you know, later in the years that I was in the air force, I was in a unit that had probably 100 people working for me. And of course, there were layers of the sergeants that really took care of most of the operations. So I would just spend time walking around and talking to these young airmen who, some of them had been to Vietnam, and they'd be getting out of the service in another six months or something, just letting them know that I was interested in them. And so I always placed a high priority on that. I like to think, tammy, and I was thinking about this the other day, are different approaches. When we go into a staff meeting, I would go in, maybe I would have a legal pad with me and a pencil, and you were the one who came in with everything that needed to be done and needed to be discussed, stacked up in order of importance. You were an organizer, you were a perfectionist, and I was just the old guy that wandered around the station.

[29:22] TAMMY WILEY: But I have to admit, when you retired and I started leading the stations, I learned not to take the notepad into the meetings. So I do recall many meetings I had with you, both internally and in the community, where I knew we were going to address a certain issue, and sometimes maybe something that there was a little controversy around. And I would often wonder when in the world you were going to get around to addressing the issue. And what I quickly learned was that you were building rapport and finding common ground and when you do that with people, it makes it much easier then to lead into those subjects where you're trying to work something out and come to some conclusion or approach for working through an issue. So I definitely learned from that, I have to say, because our time is running short. I knew this would fly, fly by. One thing that I valued, and I think it comes, in part from just the way that I was raised. I have a wonderful family. Grew up in a small town where everybody pitched in to play a part in community life, and everybody was important, so you really felt a part of a team. And I think that's one reason why public broadcasting kind of felt like home to me and why I connected with you in the way that I did. And I do admire many things about you, but you were first and foremost a family man, and that's the way you treated us. You knew that we had families that we cared about and interest, and that life happened, and you always stressed that that came first. And that's the kind of person that people want to work for and to do a good job for. And then when something would go wrong for someone or they would be facing an issue, people rallied around them, and we functioned as that team. And it sounds cliche, but very much a family feel. And if you don't mind, just for a moment, tell me about your family.

[31:50] ARLEN DIAMOND: Well, I was married to a woman I met working at a resort in the Black Hills in south Dakota after her freshman year in college. And after my junior year in college and we ended up getting married, I was in the Air Force for. Well, I went to graduate school for a couple of years so she could graduate at the same time. And I was in the air force for about eight years. While I was in the air force, we had a young son born. We were excited about that. I decided that I wanted my family to not have to live up with moving around the country all the time. So I got out of the air force and went to get my PhD at the University of Iowa. Third year or second year at the University of Iowa, my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. So that really threw things into a panic mode. And I figured, okay, I've got to get out of here after three years, whether my dissertation is done or not, because I need a job, because I've got a family to support, and I've got a child who's terminally ill. And so that was, you know, when I came to Springfield. And the thing that I liked about the university was it was the whole place was a family feel and Springfield, incredibly caring and warm and welcoming community. So it was great. My son passed away when he was six and a half. We adopted my current son as a baby. And family, including soccer games on cold, rainy mornings and band concerts and everything were, you know, number one. And I always told people, you know, you're spending. You spend more time here awake, probably, than you spend awake at home because you're working 40 hours a week here or more. So enjoy yourself. If we. I said, if you can't have a good time at work, work. And you have a good time. And that was truly my philosophy. Happy employees will work much harder than dissatisfied employees. And when you have a dissatisfied, downer person, you need to find a way to marginalize them and keep them from spreading that to the other staff members. I remember, too, you talked about liking to be on the telephone. Your father had an insurance agency, and you like to go down there and work some days. And what did you do down there?

[34:49] TAMMY WILEY: I was running the agents. I felt like I was, bless his heart, he was. I'm sure I was in his way, but he always welcomed me there. And, you know, again, I enjoyed small town life, made all the trips to the bank and the post office and the dime store and all those fun things, and spent a lot of time there. But I observed a lot watching my, you know, watching my dad over the years. He was very good at his job. He. He valued people. He cared about people. He saw the value of everyone. And he certainly shaped my approach to professional life.

[35:34] ARLEN DIAMOND: What do you think? What was the trigger that caused you to be such a perfectionist? And you are, and I don't use that in any negative manner. I'm just saying you make sure everything is done and done right.

[35:52] TAMMY WILEY: I think you helped me get over some of that by encouraging me to make mistakes, which was. Which was a gift, you know, I'm not sure I was always like that. I had a twin sister that I never knew. She died when she was a. A baby. And, you know, as I've gotten older, I've thought a little more about that, you know, and I wonder in ways if I just felt like I needed to be a little. A little better, you know, just not do anything wrong. And. I don't know.

[36:34] ARLEN DIAMOND: Well, yeah, you know, I mean, how do we explain who we are and where we got that from? But I never felt that press for perfection. On the other hand, I realized, because I'm a procrastinator of the nth degree, but I realized you might remember, I always used to personally go through every page of every grant application, read it, you know, write the narrative if it needed a narrative. And then I would actually physically sit in the conference room and put the seven copies together.

[37:13] TAMMY WILEY: I'm going to tell on you here, though, because, you know, you talk about me being a perfectionist, but I never gave you anything that you didn't give back to me with all kinds of red ink all over it. Truth, right?

[37:29] ARLEN DIAMOND: If you say so.

[37:33] TAMMY WILEY: Right.

[37:34] ARLEN DIAMOND: Well, I was a hopeless rewriter, you.

[37:37] TAMMY WILEY: Know, I remember doing that to Rachel, the present general manager who we both think the world of. And she would give me something, I would edit it. She would make the changes and then give it back to me. And then she pointed out a couple times that I edited back to the way she originally had it.

[37:55] ARLEN DIAMOND: I did that. I caught myself doing that, too. You know, just. It's the nature of being a compulsive rewriter.

[38:04] TAMMY WILEY: It's a small club, you know, I mentioned Rachel, a general manager, history of the. At the stations, you know, and so we're all pretty close. What advice? Rachel's kind of early on in her management. She started leading the station during the Covid-19 pandemic. Tough time to take on that role. What advice would you give to Rachel?

[38:28] ARLEN DIAMOND: Well, I would always say, keep your sense of humor. Do things right when at all possible, and keep, and this is the most important part, keep the culture of the station that has grown over the years. I would be remiss if I didn't say most of our staff members started as students, and they have done an excellent job. But just to, you know, continue with your thought earlier, it is. It's a culture. It's a way of operating. And I think the more you can make that seem like family, even as I used to say, we're just one big, happy, dysfunctional family here. That's what you want to do. If you keep the culture alive, you keep the station alive.