Terry Conrad and William Marcus

[00:01] TERRY CONRAD: Okay. This is Terry Conrad. I'm 76 years old, and today is Thursday, May 26, 2022. And we're in Missoula, Montana. And I'm here with my longtime colleague, William Marcus.

[00:18] WILLIAM MARCUS: And I'm William Marcus. I'm 70 years old. Today is Thursday, May 26, 2022. We're in the Missoula Public Library in Montana. Terry Conrad is my partner, longtime partner and mentor and one time boss man who hired me, and then we switched places. Right. So.

[00:46] TERRY CONRAD: I guess we're here to talk about public radio. We are.

[00:50] WILLIAM MARCUS: And other things.

[00:51] TERRY CONRAD: And other things. I've been here 49 years now, and next year will be my 50th year at KUFM. And I feel that we need to talk about Phil Hess, because he was the father of us all, I guess, in a sense. And he started the station as a student training station in 1965 at the behest of Nathan Blumberg, the dean of the journalism school. And radio and tv was part of journalism at that time. And it was his mission, as designated by Nathan, to get a radio station on the air. And he accomplished that in, what, January 1965? And it was ten watts antenna hanging out the window of the third floor of the journalism building on campus, and it barely got to Arthur Avenue, which is on the edge of campus. And people. I love this story. The people would drive in on Saturday afternoons to listen to the Metropolitan Opera in their cars because they couldn't get at home. And that was the first live broadcast that was distributed by telephone line. And I don't know if it's still going, but it had the longest run of any radio show at that time, and since the 1930s, I guess. So it was a lot of fun. And then public radio came along about 1971, and I was in Detroit, and we got to know public radio thanks to WDET, which was one of the charter members of National Public Radio. And so we, my wife and I, and our young daughter moved out to Missoula when this job became available to us. And the job was production director for KUFM. It's a nine month job for $6,850. And Phil hired me because he wanted us to put together a public radio station, which we did. And it was challenging because. And exciting. The opportunity to start something from the beginning is very, very rare thing for people in our business. Most people just fit themselves into what's going on and make changes as they can. And that's where we met you. I met you, student. What brought you to public radio? You were not training to be a public radio person, right?

[04:17] WILLIAM MARCUS: I was not. I came to, um, in 1970 from eastern Montana, thinking I would study psychology. That didn't go well. I started taking photography classes from Lee Nye and others in town and on campus. The best dark room was in the journalism building. So I went to the photography instructor, Don Miller, and said, could I use the darkroom? Yeah, if you're a major in radio or television or journalism. And I said, no, I'll do radio tv. So I started taking the courses. You were my teacher and graduated in 74. Just when the station needed an additional staff member to stay qualified, the CIDA program was going on. So Charles Lubrecht and I got jobs then. I was the interim news director for about three months that 1st, 1974. I still have the newscast from when Nixon resigned. I kept that and then pretty much just in the right place at the right time.

[05:35] TERRY CONRAD: Well, you did okay in my class.

[05:43] WILLIAM MARCUS: Yeah, okay. It's generous.

[05:48] TERRY CONRAD: Your interest is more in photography than I think, than in radio production. But you blossomed when you came on the air and became one of our staff people, and your production skills are unparalleled. You developed a wonderful relationship with national Public Radio and supplied them with a lot of stuff from Montana, including Kim Williams.

[06:25] WILLIAM MARCUS: Phil discovered Kim Williams.

[06:26] TERRY CONRAD: Well, that's true.

[06:27] WILLIAM MARCUS: I taped her pieces and sent them in.

[06:29] TERRY CONRAD: That's true. That's true. She was a journalism major, and we had a lot of fun back then. We do, as I recall, we do. It was all brand new because nothing was like it at all in Montana, even before KGLT. They came on a few years after Kufm. So we were able to just do anything and everything because everything needed to be done. There were a handful of. A couple of rock stations and an easy listening station and a country and western station. That's about all there was. And they didn't have access to other things that were going on in the musical world, and they certainly didn't have the massive news that developed on NPR over the years.

[07:27] WILLIAM MARCUS: So I'd like to go back a little bit.

[07:29] TERRY CONRAD: Go back.

[07:32] WILLIAM MARCUS: I mean, Phil was from Chicago. Yeah, you're from Chicago. Do you think there was. He saw you coming out, and there was an affinity there between the two of you, that you were big city boys in a small mountain town and you were going to do something together?

[07:50] TERRY CONRAD: Well, one thing I still have is my coffee cup. Workers of the world arise with Wally Phillips on WGN. He had one, and there was another one, and no one else had it. I guess he was waiting for somebody from Chicago to give it to, and he gave it to me and said, we had a pair for a while, and then he broke his, and I have mine tucked away in a safe place.

[08:19] WILLIAM MARCUS: So what was the Chicago radio like when you grew up?

[08:23] TERRY CONRAD: I grew up with jazz and classical. WFMT was on.

[08:30] WILLIAM MARCUS: Did you listen to FMT as a child?

[08:32] TERRY CONRAD: Yeah. And listen to jazz artists, jazz disc jockeys Sid McCoy and Daddy O'Daly. WCFL was the station that had mostly jazz, that was the Chicago Federation of Labor radio station, and Sid McCoy was on from midnight to five. And I would either get up early or stay up late when I was ten or twelve years old and listen to him and listen to the music, because I really enjoyed it. Even at that young age. I enjoyed the classical music on WFMT, and I also enjoyed their midnight special, which I'm happy to say is back on KUFM and Montana Public Radio Saturday nights at six. Yeah. And it was such an inventive show, combining all kinds of music, folk music primarily. And it was at a time when the folk music craze and the political edge to that, folk music was very keen. And so they developed themes using Broadway selections, too, and comedy routines. I heard the second city and their spoof on football, or when football came back to the University of Chicago kind of thing, was hilarious. One thing I missed was Mike Nichols, who created that show on WFMT when he was a student.

[10:31] WILLIAM MARCUS: Mike Nichols of Nichols and May?

[10:33] TERRY CONRAD: Yeah.

[10:33] WILLIAM MARCUS: Really? I didn't know that.

[10:35] TERRY CONRAD: The great Mike Nichols. Yeah, he grew up in Chicago, and.

[10:39] WILLIAM MARCUS: He started the midnight special.

[10:40] TERRY CONRAD: He was on WFMT. He was one of their announcers, but he had left before I started listening. I was too young to appreciate that.

[10:51] WILLIAM MARCUS: I mean, you studied music at the art institute. How did you end up in Detroit on WD?

[10:58] TERRY CONRAD: Sherwood School of Music.

[10:59] WILLIAM MARCUS: Sherwood School of Music, right.

[11:00] TERRY CONRAD: I did attend the art institute for a year.

[11:04] WILLIAM MARCUS: So you ended up in Detroit.

[11:10] TERRY CONRAD: It was a woman. I mean, what can I say? It was the woman.

[11:17] WILLIAM MARCUS: Still is.

[11:17] TERRY CONRAD: And still is, yeah. 52 years. I had gotten out of the military, out of the air force, was visiting my sister, who lived in Detroit with her husband at the time, and she had a couple, and they were doing building cooperative housing or something. And so I went there to visit, and they had a party with their colleagues, and so they got one of, there are people to find a blind date for me. And so this woman by the name of Kathy Bull was a friend of Jeraine and she said, well, I've got this guy who's a 27 year old marine, and he's, you know, we want to. We want you to. I want you to come to this party with him and be his blind date. And she said, do not crap out of it at the last minute like you're apt to do sometimes. So she promised that she wouldn't do that. Well, what she got was a 24 year old conscientious objector who just got out of the air force, and we talked all night, and we saw each other for four days in a row. And the following June. This was in April, end of April. And the following June, I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. And we were married in November, the day after my birthday, because she was almost three years older than I still is. And so we had to get married after my birthday, so we'd only be two years. Apartheid. So we're married on November 21.

[13:45] WILLIAM MARCUS: So you're in Detroit and looked for a job and ended up on the radio.

[13:49] TERRY CONRAD: Well, I was trained as a high school band director, essentially. I played trumpet, but my degree was in music ed, and so I had a job as a full time music substitute. So I had to go be traveling around Detroit because I did decide to move there and be with her. And the thing about band directors is when you're filling in for one, they don't let you have any of the instruments because they're all locked up in the lockers, because it's Detroit kids, who knows who owns what kind of thing, which is the school trumpet and which is the one that the kid owns. So I had to deal with these kids without instruments. So we talked a lot about jazz and stuff. Anyway, it was not a very satisfying career prospect. So I decided to go to a broadcasting school, commercial broadcasting school in Detroit. And they taught me how to do a commercial, pretty much. And then there was a jazz station in Detroit, WCHD, owned by consortium of dentists, and they had an FM jazz station and an AM soul station. And so I visited them and asked if I was able to put together a little tape, because they did teach me how to do that, too, and walked in, and they gave me a part time job. I was the only Caucasian in the place. And that, I think, was one of the most important experiences of my life. They treated me with respect and with caring, that I can't imagine the other reverse being that way.

[16:11] WILLIAM MARCUS: So you got the job because of your love and knowledge of jazz, you think?

[16:17] TERRY CONRAD: Because the program director and I were just talking about, who's your favorite trumpet player? And you just want to know if I knew anything about it. And I remember being on the air. I ended up there working six nights a week, 6 hours a night, midnight to six, six nights a week. And I remember getting a call from Bill Curtis was his name. Not the Bill Curtis, but the other Bill Curtis. And he was a little bit in his cups, but he called up and he said, damn it, conrad, I knew you were a dj the moment you walked into my office. So I think he liked my show. And I would get a lot of calls from musicians getting off of work. 04:00 in the morning tell me the.

[17:17] WILLIAM MARCUS: Story about Lady Day and the movie. I love this story.

[17:26] TERRY CONRAD: The movie Lady Day. Diana Ross was playing Billie Holiday and the song that kind of, like, hung it all together, Washington, fine and mellow. And it was just this medium, bluesy song that she wrote. Not Billie Holliday, not Diana Ross. Diana Ross. For some reason. Dorothy, things happen when you're in your mid seventies, so it makes sense that.

[18:02] WILLIAM MARCUS: You would lose the name of Diana Ross and not Billy all the time.

[18:06] TERRY CONRAD: But there was another singer, Etta Jones, who did a recording of fine and mellow on the album that was from the sixties, and she did such a nice interpretation of Billie Holiday songs, and she kind of used that as a career thing until she passed him. But what I did, I had two turntables, and I wanted to make a point that they shouldn't have had Diana Ross do it. They should have had Etta Jones do it. I don't know if she's an actor, but she certainly could sing the songs. And so Billie Holiday and Diana Ross and Etta Jones and had two turntables, three records. So I was kind of starting with one, pick up with the next one. It started with Billy and then had Diana Ross and then brought in Etta Jones. And then I was able to, just by sheer luck, couldn't repeat it, hit the points in the song that were close or overlapped with the previous one, and it just came out as though I had a big digital display in front of me. It turned out it was like 05:00 in the morning. All the phones lit up. You don't think anyone's listening at 05:00 in the morning. But cities have big cities, a whole other life after dark. So that worked out, I think. I tried it one time and it was okay, but it wasn't anything like the first time anyway, so it's a memorable moment in my career, and it was totally unplanned and totally luck.

[20:35] WILLIAM MARCUS: Yeah, but sometimes things like that happen because you know the music and you know how it would go together and imagine it. And then it happened. So that's. To me, it's an example of luck favors the prepared mind, I guess. So WDT was your first public radio experience?

[20:57] TERRY CONRAD: Yeah. I was working midnight to 06:00 so I would spend a couple of hours a week volunteering at WDT during the day. I read news. I filled in sometimes. One of the interesting characters, there was a guy named Gary Barton, not to be confused with Gary Burton, the vibes player. Gary Barton ended up in Cincinnati, I think, working, being a classical music announcer. He had a very low key, slow presentation, and Jeraine and I were sitting on a couch, and we were listening to WDT, and they were raising money, and he was doing his spiel, very easygoing. And he said, you know, I'm talking to you, I'm talking to you. Get off of your ass and go make a pledge. I said to Jeraine I guess he's talking to us. So we did. And that was the kind of station there was at the time. And what I really liked about it was the variety of people. The whole Detroit community was part of that station. And I was sitting there waiting to do the news one time for Gary's show, and in walks Herbie Hancock, and he's talking about his brand new release called crossings. And he had to wait about ten or 15 minutes before he was scheduled to be on the air. So we chatted. Very nice fellow. I mean, he was as easygoing as not at all the arrogant superstar. You would imagine someone in his position, even at that time. In the seventies, he was a very important musician, and he had already had 20 years of experience and output, and now he's a legend. But at the time, he was a very approachable person.

[23:21] WILLIAM MARCUS: So to leave all that opportunity, the city life, the Kirby Hancock walks in the door kind of thing, to move to Montana, where I assume you really hadn't been before.

[23:36] TERRY CONRAD: What was that about? We were out west. Well, I was intrigued with public radio, and there wasn't a job at WDET, and I enjoyed my work at WCHD, but we had a seven month old daughter, and working all night is difficult. Some people like to do it. I enjoyed when I got there, but it was difficult leaving the house at 11:00 at night. So we both had been out west, and I was a member of the National Educational Broadcasters association at the time, and they had job openings in their newsletters. And so there were a couple of things that I applied for and had interviews for in public radio. One was in Rolla, Missouri. One was in Colorado and there was one in this place called Missoula, Montana. And they were looking for someone to replace Bob Haney, who was a Montana broadcaster of note. And he was a. I think he was a student, or at least he was a staff running the student training facility that got on the air in 65. But he was moving on and he didn't want. I think Phil wanted to make public radio happen at KUFM and Bob didn't feel like he wanted to do that. Maybe it was some direction else that he wanted to go, but. So when we got off the interstate, we even had the interstate not totally complete, but it was. Got us to Missoula, Montana. And I just had a good feeling here. How would you like to live here, dear? She was more skeptical, but there was just an emotional reaction immediately because it was a pretty day like today and it was a spectacular place to see, nestled in the mountains. And Phil was just so accommodating. He was lots of fun. Talked about Chicago and he talked about what he wanted to do. And I think part of the attraction that I had or that he had for my application was the fact that I was a part of WDT even as a volunteer. So these volunteer positions, I keep telling the students are very important and even if you're not getting paid it's still valuable experience and valuable work that you do. So he had to make his decision. I don't know how many other candidates there were but we went to visit some friends I had in San Francisco and he gave us a call and said, you're hired if you want it.

[27:16] WILLIAM MARCUS: So when you got here, what charge did he give you? What did he tell you to do?

[27:22] TERRY CONRAD: Well, when I got here, the station was off the air because he had just gotten through grant a 4000 watt transmitter. It went from like. Well, it was a ten watt. I think it might have gone up to like 300 watts by the time he got to the 4000 watts transmitter. And it was in the shop on the third floor of the journalism building. There was a big. Sorry, there was a big tower out in front of the journalism school with the antenna on it and they turned on the transmitter and it wiped out all the electronics within on campus. Kufm was in the language lab. People were trying to listen to their french lesson and all they got was KUFM. It screwed up the math computers, it screwed up the seismographs, the geology. So they turned it off. And so that's when I came, the station was off the air and they had this humongous transmitter on the third floor of the journalism building. Fortunately, the administration at the time, I think it was President Pantzer made the decision, instead of turning it off and going back to kind of a nothing training facility to move the transmitter to where the location is now on Big Sky Mountain, on top of snowbowl. And it was 8000ft up, and it was all of a sudden able to reach all the way to Butte, actually. And so the responsibility of the station totally changed at that point because it was no longer a campus station, it was a public station. So one of the things I had to do was help move this sucker down three flights of terrazzo stairs, and there were like 14 people and rope and pulleys. And we got it onto the flatbed truck and at least I didn't have to go to the mountaintop. So we were able to get it on briefly in December until a storm came through. That was in 1973. And the storm came through and knocked over the tower. Because the tower was not designed to be on top of an 8000 foot mountain in Montana. It was designed to be on the floor of the valley, not on top of it. And so it took another six months waiting for construction weather to come by, and we were able to get it back on the air in mid 74. And then we started getting programming from National Public Radio, who had gotten a grant, an expansion grant from CPB. It was me and Phil, and Darrell Kinghorn did the engineering part of it, I did the programming part of it, and Phil did the financial part of it. And then we were accepted and got this huge grant to hire people like you. So that's pretty much how it got started.

[31:14] WILLIAM MARCUS: Public radio back then, most stations were, you know, had the old block programming, a variety of different kinds of things. But KufM, I think, still was your invention, was your vision of what the community needed. And why did you think that Missoula, Montana, or Montana writ large with a larger transmitter, would respond to the schedule you put together, which was very eclectic, very challenging in some ways. Jazz, that was not a music that was heard here regularly. How did you go forward?

[31:58] TERRY CONRAD: I didn't know that at the time, but there were a lot of jazz elements in various places in Montana. Hearing the history now, jazz clubs and great falls and things like that. Again, there was so much that people could like. I mean, just because it's a small population and it's pretty homogenous doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of as many different tastes as there are in a big city. There's just more people in the big city, not necessarily that everyone, all in a small town all thinks alike and all likes this kind of music and nothing else. And just the fact that people would go out of their way to listen to the opera by coming onto campus. This was just in Missoula, but it's like if you build it, they will come. It's like the children's programming. I wanted to have children's programming because no one ever did it. Even now, there's very little of it. And people would say at public radio conferences, other managers would say, you can't do that. Where we are in Seattle. Yes, you can. All you have to do is do it. Kids don't listen. Well, they will. If you have something for them to listen to. You have to have the product first, and then the audience will find it. And the notion that you have to have a large audience for each and every thing in order to justify its existence, I think is nonsense, because in a public service station, service, you're presenting what various elements of the community like to listen to, and they share the airtime, and they allow things they don't like to listen to, to be there because they know someone else is listening to it. And then when you put all those people together, you have quite a large audience, not just for one kind of music or one kind of thing. And that's, you know, we had that experience where KUFM was the top rated station for, in the community for many, many years.

[34:44] WILLIAM MARCUS: One validation that I always noticed and appreciated was when people would write in with their contribution or whatever and say, I've started to like listening to jazz because the radio was on and it started. And that way of bringing people into the music by making it available, I think, is one of the hallmarks of, of your approach. How did you. I mean, there was pushback. People who wanted Morning edition until 09:00 and you stood resolutely against making those changes for a long time, because I thought you believed in that variety of things, and that one is not necessarily more important than the other. How did you think about those kinds of feedback moments?

[35:37] TERRY CONRAD: Well, people need a lot of things to make themselves happy or make themselves complete, as close to complete as they possibly can. It's a lifelong work, but the cultural life is as important as the political life as anything else. Keeping up with what's going on in the community, it's all important. And having access to a lot of different kinds of experiences is very essential. I think it was always a difficult balancing act. I would have loved. I mean, like the BBC, they have a variety of services. BBC one, BBC four. They're all different kinds of services, emphasizing one kind or just the narrow scope of what people like to listen to, but they can make choices. We didn't have that luxury of having four different radio stations on the air in one place.

[36:58] WILLIAM MARCUS: Since we're almost out of time, I want to get to one more thing, which was the fact that you put people on the air more with an emphasis of their knowledge and love of music or culture or children's learning. More important than whether they sounded like a big buoyed announcer. How do you think THAt AFFected how people responded to the station?

[37:29] TERRY CONRAD: Well, I think what I liked was that the people on the air, for the most part, sounded like they were just talking to you in your living room. They were just friends on the radio. They sounded like real people and not the top Woody DJ with the imitation voice. And a lot of these in a smaller town, a lot of these people kneW. Everybody knew a lot of people. Their listeners knew who they were and they sounded just like they were. I think that's what made the connection between the community and the station so strong. And that's why we made a lot of money, relatively. I mean, and we had such a strong, loyal followership for so many years. I mean, when a third generation of kids are listening to the pea green boat, that says something to the quality.

[38:35] WILLIAM MARCUS: Of the service, I think, yeah. I want to take the opportunity to thank you for your mentorship, for really opening up a world of radio to me that I had not experienced before, and your support for the kinds of work that I wanted to do on the air and your careful direction, to me, when I would say get and fur and help me sound better in that way has always meant a lot to me. I still remember us sitting, opening up boxes and boxes of jazz albums and you telling me about each one of the artists and the history, and it's a moment I'll never forget. So thank you.

[39:24] TERRY CONRAD: Well, I thank you. And you've always been a special person, so I'm glad we had this 50 years together.

[39:33] WILLIAM MARCUS: Yeah, me too.

[39:34] TERRY CONRAD: It's.