Interview with Brian Rublein, March 1, 2013

JF: All right. It is February 27th, we're about to run out of month here, 2013, a cold day in February. We're staying in a warm office though with Brian Rublein. How you doing, Brian? Good to see you again, man.

BR: Good to see you, Jack.

JF: We're going to talk about your association with WHAS. What years were you there? Were you there once or twice or ...BR: I was there twice.

JF: What year?

BR: I came down in 1970. I had been working for a few years in public radio at Michigan State University. I went to Michigan State and got my bachelor's and master's and then was hired. Back in those days, you could ... I applied for jobs when I was getting my master's, and I actually had several offers, which ... Talk about how different than it is now. The general manager of the station up there, who became known, and still is, in fact, as the Radio Reader, a guy named Dick Estell.

JF: Yeah. He was the manager.

BR: Yeah. Dick offered me a full-time job as a producer. I had worked there and I'd had a graduate assistantship there when I was getting my master's. I had worked from my sophomore year on, just doing some basic stuff around the station. So I thought, "Well, I really enjoy the college atmosphere." So I stayed for a few years and I did news, documentaries, jazz programming, a lot of jazz programming.

JF: Which was fun. [crosstalk]. Yeah.

BR: It was fun. It was great fun. And then I wended my way down to Louisville.

JF: That was in 1970?

BR: 1970.

JF: And you were there for [inaudible]. How long were you there until?

BR: From '70 to '74, and then back from '80 until 2001.

JF: Oh, yeah. A couple of good stints there, I would say.

BR: Yeah.

JF: Over a period of almost 21 years. Yeah.

BR: Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah.

JF: Well, let's back up a little bit. First, are you from Michigan? Aren't you from Detroit or-

BR: Born in Detroit, yeah.

JF: Where did the idea of either broadcasting or news ... where was the born in you? Was that as an adult in school, or [crosstalk] kid? You had some radio legends in Detroit during that time.

BR: Yeah. I'll tell you how it played out. There used to be, and maybe there still is, a radio station that was licensed to Detroit Public Schools. And once a week they had ... went down to WWJ, which is a legendary commercial station in downtown Detroit. They had a big auditorium for live broadcasts, and they did a show called Storyland. When I was a little kid, when I was in elementary school, my auditorium teacher, out of the blue, recommended me as somebody who might occasionally do these. So I started going down and being on Storyland and [crosstalk]-

JF: Had you had an interest up to that point, or she just kind of picked you out?

BR: No, she just picked me out and thought I ... But you would go down and you would rehearse for, gosh, about six hours. And then the show was broadcast live on Monday morning. You would go down about 6:00 AM Monday morning. You'd get down there and rehearse for two or three more hours. Then they would bring in several hundred kids on buses from around the city who would be there for the show, and you would do the show in front of this sizeable live audience.

BR: It was great. I just enjoyed it. So I always wanted journalism. I was in my high school newspaper. And when I was a sophomore at Michigan State, my advisor called me in and said, "You need to pick a major." And I said, "Okay." And then I got up to leave. He said, "No. You need to pick a major before you leave my office." So I said, "Okay, journalism." And he said, "Okay, print or broadcast?" 4:00I didn't feel strongly about either, but I said, "Okay, broadcast," because I'd ... That's how that started.

JF: [crosstalk] start.

BR: And then I ended up coming down here. I had a really good friend from Michigan State, Susan Spencer, who subsequently went on to become CBS News White House correspondent and 48 Hours correspondent, which she still works for 48 Hours. She was getting married, so I came down for her wedding. At the time, I was working with somebody from Western Kentucky. I was a full-time employee and he was a graduate assistant. He was working for me at the radio station. He loved the University of Kentucky and Cawood Ledford.

BR: He came in and he said, "This great radio station is looking for somebody. I just saw an ad in broadcasting." He said, "You need to apply." I was coming down for Susan's wedding, and she was trying to convince me to move down to Louisville. She had gone to Columbia and was finishing up her master's in journalism. So I called, and I went in and I auditioned. Bob Morse was the news director at the time.

JF: Bob Morse, okay.

BR: They called me a few days later up in Michigan and said, "We want you to come to work for us." Well, I had really not liked Louisville at all.

JF: Oh, really.

BR: I had a really unpleasant time with allergies, sneezing. So I turned them down. I said, "Well, thanks, but I'm going to stay here." Anyway, Dick said, "Well, okay." A couple of weeks later, get another call. It's Bob again. "Well, 6:00we want to make you another offer." I guess he thought I was just playing hard-to-get. So they increased the amount of money. And I said, "You know, man, I really don't want to do it," I said. So I turned him down again.

BR: Several more weeks went by, and the phone rings again, and they said, "Hey, this is Bob Morse at WHAS." And I think, "Oh, man. Leave me alone." So he said, "Listen, we've auditioned all kinds of people over the past several weeks, and you're still the person we like best. We really want you to come down here. So we want to really make it worth your while." So he [inaudible] offered me more money, and they offered me enough money that I thought, "Well, I can go down for a year or two and [crosstalk]."

JF: [crosstalk].

BR: And as you well know, people who move to Louisville, it grows. That was 1970.

JF: And you've been here ever since. How about that. Wow. Now, Bob Morse hired you. He was news director of radio and television at that time?

BR: Yeah. Uh-huh (affirmative).

JF: Was hiring you for a news directorship or as a reporter or ...

BR: At the time, Phyllis Knight was doing afternoon news, and I guess they 7:00decided they wanted somebody ... not afternoon. I'm thinking nighttime news. Phyllis had done ... I'm trying to remember. Phyllis, on the air, doing newscasts, I didn't replace Phyllis, but I kind of took over some of the things she had been doing. She was a big help. Paul Clark was still there.

BR: After I had done that for a while, they put me on Morning Drive. Paul had been doing that, and I took over Morning Drive. Now, that was still back in the days when they had news announcers as such.

JF: Yeah. [crosstalk].

BR: Other people would write their newscasts.

JF: Were you writing your newscasts or were you-

BR: Yeah. Yeah.

JF: So this was a change for you.

BR: Yeah. This was a change, yeah.

JF: [crosstalk] time when Hugh Barr ... Was Hugh the manager of radio [crosstalk]-

BR: Yeah. Hugh was the program director.

JF: [crosstalk] carve out a WHAS radio, so I'm sure you fit right in his plans then [inaudible].

BR: Yeah. Well, it was a big change for the radio station because they had a lot of people around there who were announcers who had ... I subsequently left WHAS and went to WAVE for several years and had much the same situation there with people like Livingston Gilbert and Bob Kay, who were news announcers but didn't write their newscasts.

JF: So they're shifting [inaudible].

BR: They've wanted me, I remember, to ... The suggestion was made that I would want to replace them on the news, and I said, "I don't want to ... That's not the way we need to go." So what I did was, I got women to co-anchor with them, and that worked out really well with Bob in the morning and Livingston in the 9:00afternoon. So they wrote the newscasts, for the most part, and that worked out well.

JF: Interesting, interesting. Well, while you're at HAS, you're doing newscasts. Do you remember who else was in the newsroom there? You had these guys who were ... Were you only one of the guys writing his own newscasts? Were the other guys writing their newscasts or [crosstalk]?

BR: Yeah. All the point in time-

JF: They were making a shift [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah, they were making a shift.

JF: Who else was involved? Was Morse radio and television or [crosstalk]-

BR: Morse was radio and TV. He then left and went to Philadelphia to become news director of WCAU in Philadelphia. He left in a ... I mean, kind of quickly. I think they offered him the job, and he gave them about two weeks and he was out of there. Hugh named Glen Bastin news director. This would have been maybe, I 10:00want to say '73, something like that. So I worked very briefly with Glen. Byron Crawford was there, Chuck Paddock. And then-

JF: Okay, yeah. Were there any women reporters? I'm trying to [crosstalk]-

BR: No. Robin Hughes was the first one. Robin had been hired out of UofL, and she got a job in writing promotion. But she wanted to get into news, and she went about it in the most organized way to learn that I've seen anybody ... Well, somebody I subsequently hired when I came back to WHAS in 1980 as news director, but I hired a woman, and I think I hired her because she reminded me 11:00of her inner tenaciousness of Robin. And she learned much the way Robin had, by coming in early every morning, by coming in on the weekends, being in the newsroom, and really learning how everything worked.

JF: Learning the profession.

BR: And Robin then subsequently was hired and got a full-time job in the newsroom.

JF: Yeah. What was the newsroom like during that time, that early period, that '70 to '74? You still had radio and television. Were they pretty mixed up, or did radio have its own identity or ...BR: Radio sort of had its identity, but the identity was still tied to TV because ... I'm trying to think. When Bob left, Tom Dorsey became news director, and the news director for TV was also over radio, technically. So even though Glen Bastin was made news director of radio-

JF: [crosstalk] like assigning people [crosstalk]. Yeah.

BR: ... he answered to the TV news director. That lasted until 1980 or ... When I came back to WHAS and they made me news director, Bob Morse did, at the time, there was a TV news director named Vin Burke. He was still the big boss of radio and TV. And Bob, at that point, then split it apart and said, "No, Brian is going to answer directly to me."

JF: Bob Morse. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

BR: Because Bob was president of WHAS, Inc. At that point, he had come back from Philadelphia. Radio was carving out a separate identity, but it still was tied to TV in terms of ultimate decisions.

JF: Well, let's see. You were there then during ... Were you there for the tornado? Where you there during the tornado?

BR: No. No, I wasn't.

JF: You were gone, but you [crosstalk]. You must have left just before that.

BR: There were two major stories. One was the court-ordered school busing, and 13:00the tornado. At that time, I was at WAVE radio, the old WAVE radio.

JF: For the busing also? Was that-

BR: Yeah. For busing, yeah.

JF: That's right. That was right. Yeah, that came [crosstalk].

BR: Those two stories, particularly the tornado, helped, I think, make people start taking WHAS radio more seriously as a news source. And then they had good people. And at one point, NBC tried ... Now, I wasn't there. Robin was there at that point in time. Robin subsequently became assistant radio news director and an assignment editor. But do you remember when NBC did the news and information service?

JF: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

BR: And they changed ... it wasn't WAMZ, but it [crosstalk]-

JF: No, it was WFMW, and it became WNAS.

BR: Yeah, yeah. And it became ... and they hired all kinds of people for ... They did that. That didn't work out. But they had a huge news department there for some time. And then at the time, I was at WAVE, and we had, I don't know, maybe six people at WAVE. But we had fun. It was a lot of fun.

JF: [crosstalk] there yet. Was John Asher on your news staff [crosstalk]?

BR: No, John was-

JF: Was he sports [crosstalk]?

BR: John was not there yet.

JF: Oh, not? Okay, okay.

BR: He never worked for me at WAVE. He worked for WAVE for a couple of years, and then I hired him when I went back to WHAS.

JF: Yeah, yeah. Who were some of the people you had at WAVE when you were there? Do you recall?

BR: One of the people I hired there was a sports guy named Gary Hahn, who I found at a small radio station in a little town in Indiana. He would load his 15:00equipment into his car on the weekends and go and do freelance high school games. He sent me a tape and I listened to it, and I ... "This guy's really good." So I went and I wanted to hire a sports guy, so I ended up by having Gary come down, and I hired him. And we started the first sports talk show on radio at WAVE.

JF: I remember that.

BR: Although, subsequently, WHAS has claimed to have the first one with ... when Van started. But WAVE actually predated it by a few years. Gary did the nighttime sports show and just reported on sports. Really wanted to do UofL games, but at the time, WAVE had the UofL contract, and UofL had its own announcer on the games, if you can believe that.

JF: I remember that, yeah.

BR: So Gary could never do that. When I left and went back to WHAS, Gary really 16:00wanted to come over there. There was no position for him, so Gary had two job options. One was to be the play-by-play voice of the Detroit Pistons in the NBA, and the other was NBC. That was how good Gary was. He ended up going to NBC, although he would rather have gone to WHAS, which is interesting. He did some play-by-play stuff for NBC, and he's now, for some years, has been the voice of North Carolina state athletics.

JF: Really. [crosstalk].

BR: But Gary was there, Lou Harpenau was there, Tyler Cox, Jane Hoffman, Mary McCarthy, and I'm trying to think, a couple of other people who were-

JF: Some good people, yeah, Mary. Mary [crosstalk] came over [crosstalk] HAS. Yeah, yeah.

BR: We had fun. Mary then ... Yeah, came over to ... Yeah.

JF: Let's go back to the '70 to '74 era at HAS. That was a Bingham era still, right?

BR: That was big. Yeah. Uh-huh (affirmative).

JF: And it changed a little bit later, but let's talk about that period. What was your relationship with the Binghams or influence with the Binghams, or did you have [crosstalk] or ...BR: Back in those days, I had really nothing to do with the Binghams at all.

JF: Yeah, you were a reporter on staff.

BR: Now, when I was brought back in 1980, then at that point, I made some changes in the way the news department operated.

JF: Let's talk about that. What brought you back in 1980? You're at WAVE radio and-

BR: Bob Morse was back, and he hired me. And Bob-

JF: He hired you as news director?

BR: Well, I came in. I was hired. And Glen was still news director. But not long after I came back, I can't remember the timetable, but Glen had taken a job at the old WAKY. WAKY decided they wanted to challenge WHAS's news dominance, which is a real expensive proposition.

JF: Yeah, right?

BR: Glen had left and went over there. And then they made me radio news director, and Bob split radio away from TV. So it was freestanding for the first time.

JF: And Hugh Barr is still the manager at this time or [crosstalk].

BR: No, no. Oh, no, no. He was gone, yeah. I think Bill Campbell was the general manager then. Yeah.

JF: So you come in and you were the news director. What changes did you begin to make [inaudible]?

BR: Well, I made changes. There were people on the staff that I-

JF: It was a very significant period, by the way. I mean, a lot of things 19:00happened in the news department at that time, establishing a prominence, and awards, and all kinds of things there.

BR: There were people, how can I put this delicately, that I did not see working there under my watch, who had been hired. I didn't fire anybody, but the people who I kind of wasn't enthusiastic about, I think realized that.

JF: Got the message, yeah.

BR: They got the message. It was a fairly slow process.

JF: What were you trying to accomplish?

BR: Just, I had an approach to news, and I knew the kind of people that ... Some of the people stayed. But I knew what I wanted people to do. I knew how I wanted them to tell stories. I knew that I wanted to get the station and the news department more involved in issues and long-form programming, which when the 20:00Binghams owned you, you could do that in commercial radio.

JF: You did a lot of that. You did a lot of it.

BR: Yeah. I wanted people to use sound differently than they ever had. What we had at that point was basically stories where you would have somebody report a story, and they'd stick a sound cut of somebody in, "So-and-so-and-so said ..." And then that would be the story.

JF: [crosstalk] or something like that.

BR: I wanted people to tell stories using sound. I wanted them to get into issues that they might not have thought about doing in the past. I wanted us to do news round the clock, to have on-call reporters.

JF: Where did philosophy come from? [crosstalk] been developing over the years, and you thought, "Well, [crosstalk]-"

BR: It was just that, I mean, I came from public radio, so some of what I felt in terms of how to tell stories probably had a genesis in public radio, my experience there. But it's just, you learn a lot by watching how other people do 21:00things. And it's not that you learn necessarily how to do things, but you also learn how not to do things and what not to do. I mean, that can be a very valuable learning experience too. It's kind of like if you get an internship in news and you decide you don't want to go into news. Well, the internship was still really valuable because it helped you make your decision.

JF: That's right. You [crosstalk]. Yeah.

BR: So you learn a lot.

JF: Just a sidenote that I interviewed Paul Rogers. His dad was an engineer. He had his own company. Of course, Paul wants to go into sportscasting, and his dad is like, "I don't know. That's not a future, or is there money in that [crosstalk]?" He wanted Paul to decide for himself. So he took Paul to one of his jobs. And on the way back, Paul said, "I know what you're trying to do, but just help me. I don't want to do this." And he said, "Well, that's fine." But 22:00[crosstalk] find out.

BR: No. Yeah, at least you know. Yeah. No, that's very true. Yeah.

JF: You assembled some great people.

BR: I remember Anne Marshall was one of the holdovers. Glen had hired her, and she stayed. She really bought into what I wanted to do. I remember, at one point in time, Mother Teresa was opening up a mission in Eastern Kentucky over in the mountains, and she came to this small town when her church and her mission were opening. So I sent Anne over a few days before Mother Teresa got there. And Anne did a story that was several minutes long. She came back and we aired it on the 7 o'clock news on Monday morning. It was, I want to say seven minutes long or something like that, which is unheard of.

JF: Really different, yeah.

BR: But her voice was not on it. It was all natural sound and all narration. I remember it started out well with just her talking to a boy on the street. You could hear sweeping noises. And he said, "Oh, my name is," so-and-so, "and I'm 23:00getting ready. We're cleaning everything up because Mother Teresa's coming to town." And it closed after the service with Anne standing alongside Mother Teresa out under a tree in front of the church, as people, parishioners were coming by meeting her and talking to her.

JF: Special, yeah.

BR: It was just one of those really well-done things that kind of, I think, was a light-bulb moment for some of the other people on the staff.

JF: That's interesting. Who were some of the other people that evolved over that period of time? Of course, 1980 to about 2001, that's a 21-year period there.

BR: Yeah. Well, over the years, we had some just phenomenal people. The Peabody Award is the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

JF: How many of those did-

BR: We won four of those for news [crosstalk].

JF: That's unheard of for a radio station.

BR: Yeah. I mean, nobody else has done that locally.

JF: [crosstalk] too many people have done that nationally.

BR: No, no. And I remember, in fact, that they would give the Peabodys out. The first three were at the Plaza Hotel, and the last one was at the Waldorf Astoria. And you would go over in the morning to just do a run-through. I had walked over to the Waldorf and went into the ballroom. The man who was head of the Peabodys was up on the stage with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who was a very 25:00well-known reporter and writer and public radio and public TV newsperson. She was getting and an award. She was up there with him. And he knew me because we'd won these awards in the past.

BR: He said, "Brian, come on up here." So I went up on the stage. And he said, "I want you to meet Charlayne Hunter-Gault." He said, "This is Brian Rublein." He said, "Brian is news director of what just may be the best radio news operation in the entire country," which is what ... But it was, the quality was just exceptional.

JF: Nobody else was doing it really. They weren't.

BR: No, no. I mean-

JF: I mean, maybe public radio, but-

BR: Especially for a commercial radio station.

JF: Yeah, right. Which involves budgets and things like that. Did you have any pushback from budget people or [crosstalk]?

BR: No, because it started out with the Binghams.

JF: Okay. And [crosstalk].

BR: And the Binghams were really supportive. But at that point in time, I was getting a lot of feedback from Barry Bingham Jr. Barry would listen. He would send notes over. I would get notes. We started winning all of these incredible national awards. We started winning Eclipse Awards for our coverage of thoroughbred racing. Bob Lauder won two Eclipse Awards. Then I hired John Asher, who won another four or five Eclipse Awards. And this is for documentaries and 26:00serious long-form programming about thoroughbred racing. I'm trying to think. Mary Jeffries was a huge [crosstalk]-

JF: [crosstalk] she did one and several other [crosstalk].

BR: And she won two Peabody Awards, one for Schizophrenia and one for a facility in Louisville, the House of Ruth-

JF: Yes, I remember that. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

BR: ... that dealt with women who were HIV-positive and had AIDS and their children. Dan Burgess won a Peabody Award for a program, a documentary that he did about overcrowded prisons. There was a ... Mary won two. Dan won one. And I'm drawing a blank on ... Oh, the first one was Ralph Dixon, Mike Edgerly. That was our first Peabody. They did it for an examination of homelessness in Louisville, and they spent months ... When you really are into what you're 27:00doing, you don't worry about hours and things like that.

BR: They would spend the overnight hours going around and finding homeless people, talking to them in missions. They found one of the guys in one of the missions who was a ... he had spent time in Nashville as a songwriter. He played for them, and they said, "Have you ever read the original music?" And he said, "Yeah, lots of it." And they said, "Why don't you write some songs about homelessness and about your plight?"

BR: So he wrote several songs. And they came back and they said, "Do you think we can bring him in here to record him?" I remember Mary Jeffries had a guitar. She brought her guitar in, and this guy recorded this music that was subsequently incorporated into the documentary. We couldn't figure out a name 28:00for it. And Robin Hughes, who at that point was my wife, we had gotten married. She was working, at that time, for WHAS-TV. She came up with the name Down and Outside for the title. And that's what it was called.

BR: But I remember I dropped a note to Barry Bingham Jr., and I said, "This homeless guy has written all this music, and it's going to be used." I said, "We need to pay him some money." Barry wrote back and said, "You're absolutely right." Can you imagine that in corporate America today [inaudible]? Mike cut a check for this guy.

BR: I mean, I remember another time when ... well, it was after, when Mike and Ralph got their Peabody Award. We went to New York, and I took the two of them and their wives, we went to the really expensive restaurant for dinner the night before the Peabodys. We got back, and I saw Barry out on the side street by the 29:00station. And he said, "How were the Peabodys?"

BR: And I said, "Oh, it was great. I spent a lot of your money." And he said, "How so?" And I said, "Well, I took everybody to the Four Seasons for dinner." And I said, "You'll be getting the bill." And he said, "Oh, I'm really glad you did that. They really deserve that." He said, "That was fantastic. I'm really happy that they got that [inaudible]." What a change from all the [crosstalk].

JF: That had to be heavy times for your staff. I mean, well, how exciting for them to come to work and just [crosstalk].

BR: Oh, yeah. I remember Barry sent over a case of really good French champagne for the newsroom with a note saying ... When they had won their last Pulitzer, he had done the same thing for their newsroom. He thought the Peabodys were as meaningful as Pulitzer, so, "Here, everybody take a bottle and enjoy."

JF: What an atmosphere. Yeah.

BR: Yeah. It was great because people knew that he was ... and people wanted to 30:00work for WHAS because of that connection.

JF: [crosstalk]

BR: And they had opportunities to leave and to go into TV. A couple of people left too, but none of the ... At one point, Mary Jeffries was offered a really high-paying job for one of the agencies in town. I mean, it was very lucrative, and she took the job. Then she came into my office, and we just sat and talked for about an hour. She ended up picking my phone up and calling them and saying that she wasn't going to come.

JF: Is that right? Wow.

BR: It was a good atmosphere, and people had ... I think as a news director, my philosophy was always, hire the best, most creative people I could find and then give them guidance, but stay out of their way.

JF: It's interesting. It just occurred to me. They all stayed a long time too, I mean, considering the [crosstalk]. Yeah. [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unheard of because the standard belief was, people go into radio and they stay a couple of years. And then they try to move on to bigger markets or to TV. There were a couple of people who did that, but not many. I mean, and they weren't out there really trying to get into TV either. They were just having fun as being able to report.

JF: Doing what they wanted to do, yeah. Interesting.

BR: But over the years, I've had so many good people. I mean, two of them are still there, Paul Miles and Mindy Peterson, that I hired. But they really now ... Clear Channel owns them. Now, when Clear Channel first bought, when the Binghams sold all their properties-

JF: You were involved in that [inaudible].

BR: Yeah, Clear Channel ... Yeah, I made a bid to try to buy their stations-

JF: I thought you did, yeah.

BR: ... with Bob Scherer and Mark Thomas. Actually, we had a very ... Boy, what an interesting thing to go through for about nine or 10 months preparing it. We ended up finishing second to Clear Channel. So we were serious. I mean, there were some well-known people who were involved in that process. When Clear Channel came in, it was a huge difference because they're, "Hello. We're a public company, and our goal is to make money." For a few years, it went quite well.

JF: Bob Scherer was station manager.

BR: Bob Scherer, yeah, was station manager.

JF: What was his philosophy? As long as he was there, you guys seemed to [crosstalk] some of the same [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah. Bob was a good station manager.

JF: He had been a salesman there for [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah. He was supportive of what we were trying to do, what we wanted to do. There were a couple of program directors who came in, who didn't agree with the philosophy of long-form programming or longer stories. They kind of had the philosophy that I think is at the station now is, nothing should be longer than 30, 35 seconds.

JF: Definitely a different atmosphere.

BR: We still did it. I remember one of the times there was a documentary, and the person who at the time was program director gave an order that it wasn't to be longer than just a few minutes. Well, of course, it was. And it subsequently went on and won a Peabody Award. But it was very good, and there was a 34:00high-level state official who is on the program. And when the show was on the air, the program director called, if you can believe this, the person who had done the documentary to chew them out for going longer than he wanted them to go on the program.

BR: So this high-level state official who had been in there with him realized what was going on. So he went back and he wrote this effusive letter to Bob Scherer and to everybody, copied everybody about how incredible WHAS was for doing this kind of issue-oriented programming and everything. That was kind of the end of that controversy. So there was a little bit of conflict with some of the programmers, although the one that I got along best with was Skip Essick. Skip was extremely supportive.

JF: He was a good programmer.

BR: Yeah.

JF: He was on top of what was [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah. Out of all the people who worked there. Skip subsequently left and went to WJR in Detroit.

JF: Sure, back to your home ground.

BR: He decided, I think, in a year or two that he didn't want to live in Detroit, so he left that. But I mean, Skip was ... There was more of a feeling of community of commonality with programming and news at that point in time.

JF: Which brings me to, I remember when I came there in the '70s, '73, and it still existed to some degree later on, there was a lot of community. All the departments seemed to head for the same objective. I mean, you understood you had a radio station, you had a good product here, and [crosstalk] community-oriented. I mean, the sales department, the news department, they were all working together for the same thing. There wasn't a ... I mean, there was, certainly, obviously, where they established turf. But they understand that if we could get the sales involved in this or news involved in this, it [crosstalk] be a good thing.

BR: A good example is that is, there was a Louisville Marine who had been sentenced to life in prison for the rape of the wife of another Marine. The Louisville Marine was black, and the woman he allegedly raped was white. But there were a lot of questions about whether he had been wrongly convicted. And 60 Minutes did a story on suggesting that he didn't do what he was convicted of doing in the court-martial.

BR: So right after the 60 Minutes story, the Army announced that they were going to retry him, another court-martial. It was done at a military base outside Washington, and I wanted to cover it. I wanted to send Mary Jeffries there to 37:00cover it from start to finish. We didn't have the money, so I went to the sales department and I said, "Look, how about this? Can you guys get a really classy sponsor, and at the end, if we have a story from Mary, just get them to pay for Mary's plane ticket and her hotel and that? And at the end of every newscast, when we finish, we will say, 'Coverage of the court-martial made possible by a grant from ...' and then we'll list the sponsor."

BR: Well, I got a call back within five minutes. A great sponsor, I think it was Kroger, wanted to do it. So I mean, that was the kind of thing that we did that worked really well.

JF: Yeah. Work [crosstalk].

BR: We were the only people who were there. Even the Courier-Journal didn't cover it every day. Everybody ran in for the conclusion. There was a little room 38:00off the courtroom where you could listen to what was going on and see what was going on. And Mary called and said, "Okay, I'm in. We're not supposed to broadcast this live." But she said, "I'm going to keep this on." And so, we had the court-martial verdict live on the radio. It was pretty dramatic. But it was great. But I mean ... Yeah.

JF: As I recall, after Clear Channel was beginning to evolve, you became, actually, a vice president. I mean, you-

BR: Yeah, I did. I was-

JF: Of Clear Channel or of WHAS [crosstalk]?

BR: No. I was a vice president when the Binghams owned it. I was a Bingham vice president. In fact, I was the only vice president at the radio station, corporate vice president. At that point, George Gill, who was running the 39:00Bingham properties ... He had been a legendary Courier-Journal figure. And then when Gannett bought it, he went back and was publisher for a few years. But that was a pretty big honor.

JF: It sure was, yeah.

BR: It really was. They put a lot of ... some benefits in there that held over when Clear Channel bought. Then they inherited my contract when they bought the-

JF: Okay. Oh, I see.

BR: Even when the Binghams sold the properties, they had this 100-plus-page contract. And one of the things in the contract was that I had a parking place at the back of the [crosstalk]. I mean, they were just-

JF: You had a good association with him, obviously. Yeah.

BR: Yeah, yeah.

JF: Do you remember what the atmosphere was like during that time when it became 40:00known that Bingham was, "We're going to sell the properties"? Of course, you were involved in trying to negotiate. But do you remember the atmosphere at the station during that time? What was [crosstalk]?

BR: It was really edgy. I mean, I think the Binghams, over the years, had worked really hard with lawyers to set up a system where the properties could be kept in the family and passed from generation to generation. What they didn't allow for was the fact that the children didn't get along. And that was subsequently what led Mr. Bingham Sr. ... made him decide to go ahead and sell the properties. At that time, Barry Jr. was running the newspaper, but Barry Bingham Sr. had the power to determine-

JF: Chairman of the ... Yeah.

BR: Yeah. Everybody was just shell-shocked because we never thought that this would happen. I remember when I was made a corporate vice president, they gave 41:00all kinds of extra benefits, some financial, and all kinds of other things. And they said, "We know you're going to be offered jobs by other entities, and our goal is to make this so attractive, that it's going to be hard for you to leave," which was an interesting approach.

JF: Yeah, very much so. That's the kind of people they were [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah, yeah.

JF: Well, now, even after Clear Channel took over, things have changed today. They're different. That's just the nature of things. But you had some good times there working with Bob Scherer. I mean, even during those times with Clear Channel [crosstalk].

BR: Oh, yeah, yeah. Lowry Mays came up a couple of times for budget reviews. That was before Clear Channel became the biggest entity in the world.

JF: As I recall, when they bought HAS, they only had a few properties 42:00[crosstalk], didn't they?

BR: Yeah, they did.

JF: HAS was sort of a shining star in their crown.

BR: Yeah. I remember, right after they made the announcement and they had the press conference with Barry Bingham Sr., Lowry Mays, who was the CEO, asked if I would talk to him. So we went right upstairs into the corner office that had been Bob ... still was Bob Morse's office, and sat in Bob's office. He asked me if I was going to stay. And I said, "Well, I haven't made my mind up."

BR: And he said, "Well, if you leave, what would the reaction of your staff be? How many people will leave? How many people will stay?" And I said, "I think ..." I can't remember what we have, eight people maybe or so. Then I said, "I 43:00think most of them will leave. I think probably six, seven people will leave." So he said, "Well, we don't want you to leave." So anyway, we talked for a long time, and he made me-

JF: He knew that you had been involved in negotiations in competition with him [crosstalk].

BR: I'm sure he did, yeah. But he was ... Clear Channel had a bad reputation, and that was one of the things that made people very nervous because if you ... You were there, weren't-

JF: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

BR: So you know how they would call other people at other Clear Channel stations around the country, and some of them had had really bad experiences and said, "It's going to be terrible." There was one person for Clear Channel who, and I forget what his name was-

JF: That was the key to the problem.

BR: He more than Mays, Lowry Mays, the CEO, was involved in going in and getting rid of people and everything. At one point, during the sale process, there were some of us who wrote ... I'm trying to remember how this played out. We wrote to the Binghams, and we really had some real concerns about Clear Channel because it looked like they were going to get it. But mind you, we were still really involved in this.

BR: The Binghams called Lowry Mays, who was on a cruise on the Yangtze River in China. And he left and he flew back and came to Louisville and met with a group of us who had written this note of concern. I remember George Gill saying, "If 45:00you have questions, boy, let him have it. Don't hold anything back." So it was a pretty ... He pretty much allayed fears, I think, of ... And he said he was going to be more involved, which he was. He did become more involved. He had not been, up to that point.

JF: I recall the early years were pretty good. I mean, they [crosstalk].

BR: As I recall, they gave us a figure, "We want you to make this profit."

JF: [inaudible].

BR: We did it, so they left us alone. So we were able to keep our approach to news. The Binghams were so hands-off. I mean, I remember ... Do you remember a show at 11:00 every weeknight, Garner Ted Armstrong?

JF: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

BR: A Limited appeal program, a very, very right-leaning religious program. They 46:00paid an enormous amount of money to WHAS. I guess they were on Clear Channel radio stations around the country.

JF: Yeah, they get around [crosstalk].

BR: We were talking one night, some of us, and we said, "It'd be really good to get that show off the air because the people who listen to it ... it's not a large number, and people who have it on who don't like it turn to another station. And so, when they get up in the morning, their dial is on another station." So we decided we need to get that off the air, but it's a lot of money. So we contacted the Binghams and said, "Here, this is what we'd like to do." They wrote back, "Fine. Drop it." I mean, it was just like ... They were about as perfect as they could be when it came to owners.

JF: Yeah. Good community citizens [crosstalk].

BR: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they really regarded the station as a trust, as a public trust.

JF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you've had some great times there. You've had some really [crosstalk].

BR: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I try to think of the people who were so great over the years, and I leave people out, I know, but it's-

JF: Well, you've worked with some interesting personalities. You worked there with Wayne Perkey all those years.

BR: Perkey and Fred Wiche for so many years.

JF: Fred Wiche, yeah. And you were there for several years of Terry Meiners. You were-

BR: Oh, yeah. Terry, yeah, for probably 15, 16 years.

JF: [inaudible] came in '85. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BR: Yeah. So 16 years with Terry, yeah.

JF: That's good.

BR: The way broadcasting is now, it's a lot more syndicated programming, a lot 48:00less local programming. When you have a corporate owner the size of Clear Channel, they have all these people that they have do programming, and then they put them on multiple stations around the country, and that's kind of the way-

JF: That's just the way things are. When we came along, we were replacing the Paul Clarks and people [crosstalk].

BR: The people who had been announcers, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

JF: So it was [crosstalk]. It's just the way it is. We had some great times. And they're still doing some good things in a different atmosphere. That's all there is to it.

BR: Yeah.

JF: Yeah, good. So what are you up to now, Brian? What are you doing now?

BR: For 10 years, I've been the media relations manager for Norton Healthcare. Some people would say I went over to the dark side. But it's been fun. I enjoy it. I work with reporters, and I think I-

JF: What is that like?

BR: Well, it's been great. I mean, I know how reporters work. I suggest stories to them, and I know what good stories are, so I try to give them good ideas. 49:00When they call with needs or requests or want information or want interviews, I know how to get those for them and I know the timetable they're operating under. So it's been [crosstalk].

JF: It just occurred to me. There may not be as many radio news reporters [crosstalk].

BR: Oh, there are not. No, there are not.

JF: [crosstalk] Paul Miles or somebody like that.

BR: Yeah, now, Paul I hired, and Mindy Peterson-

JF: [inaudible] radio station.

BR: I will hear from them once in a while, or some of the other people who are there. But yeah, I mean, there used to be a few different radio stations, WAKY and KLO and-

JF: WAVE.

BR: WAVE. Yeah, WAVE was viable. I mean, nobody's doing it anymore. Now it's WHAS and it's public radio too-

JF: Yeah, yeah. Public radio.

BR: ... which is doing a nice job.

JF: A very nice job, yeah. You mentioned you're married to Robin. You've got some kids. Your kids are growing up.

BR: Yeah. We have three kids. Jessica is 28 and is a Spanish teacher at Assumption High School, working on her master's in counseling.

JF: Oh, my goodness.

BR: She went to Centre and then spent an academic year in Spain on a grant to teach English after she graduated from Centre. Collier lives in Louisville. Collier is 21, and Spencer is 23, living in Louisville too.

JF: That is so hard to believe.

BR: Everybody's healthy.

JF: [crosstalk], Brian.

BR: Yeah. Everybody's healthy.

JF: And you're pretty much resolved to living in Louisville. Even after that first encounter in 1970, you're okay though.

BR: Yeah. My employment with Clear Channel was brought to an end by Clear Channel. They fired me. That was 2001. At the time, my firing got a pretty fair 51:00amount of publicity in the newspaper. So I subsequently filed suit against Clear Channel. It was scheduled for trial, and Clear Channel asked me if I would consider talking about an out-of-court settlement. So we worked that out, and we settled out of court. But at the time, when I lost my job, I got some calls from other parts of the country. And we kind of decided that we were going to stay in Louisville.

BR: We had two kids who were in elementary school. Jessica was finishing up high school and had been accepted at Centre. I mean, anybody who's worked in 52:00broadcasting for any length of time, the time that we had at WHAS was stable. I mean, people don't work in broadcasting the way we did. So I turned down these opportunities to talk to other people in other parts of the country. In a lot of ways, Louisville's a small town. So it took me, I want to say 10 months or so to land a job. But that was when I heard about Norton Healthcare and applied, and they hired me.

JF: Sounds like it's been a good fit.

BR: Yeah, it has been.

JF: Good, very good.

BR: It's been good. But it's just, I mean, most people who work in broadcasting lost their job. That's another reality.

JF: That's for sure, yeah.

BR: So I mean, everything is cyclical, I guess.

JF: Well, you've given us some good stories and brought back some good memories. And I'm sure people listening to this over the years will enjoy [crosstalk]-

BR: Can I add one thing? Do you have-

JF: Oh, sure. Yeah, sure.

BR: Everybody talks about the best thing that they did, and I think a lot of the people would talk about the tornado coverage if we were there in the '70s. Heavens, we did so many great things in terms of ... The Radio-TV News Directors Association used to give out eight awards a year, and it was really prestigious. We were twice named the best radio or large-market radio news department in the country. We got awards for best newscast, for best spot news coverage for a mine disaster and for the sewer explosion in Louisville, back in the early '80s. We 54:00just won all kinds of national awards.

BR: The one thing, though, there was a blizzard in '94. That was when we got 20-some inches of snow and the temperature went down, I think, to 27 below and everything froze. Mary Jeffries came into my office. You know what ... The newsroom was busy with closings and every phone line ringing.

JF: Sure, yeah.

BR: Mary came in and said, "I've got a woman on the phone whose granddaughter is waiting for a liver transplant at the University of Nebraska. She got a call this morning that they have a liver and she needs to be there by 7:00 tonight." Well, the airport was closed. So Mary said, "Can I work on this?" And I said, "Oh, God, yeah." So Mary spent the whole day on the phone. And others, we got 55:00involved. And slowly, other people picked it up, the Courier-Journal and the TV stations.

BR: They came over and they were ... We were on the air. I remember calling Fort Knox and saying, "Here's the problem. This little girl needs to be ... You guys have got helicopters that could fly from Louisville to Nebraska to get her to ..." Or to wherever she was. I'm trying to think of where she needed to go. But I said, "We can't get a plane out of the airport." And they said, "Well, we can't do that. We've never done anything ... We can't do that." And I thought, "Aw. Oh, yeah."

BR: So anyway, we kept trying and we kept trying. And finally, a few hours later, the guy from Fort Knox called, and it was almost a Rambo kind of moment. He said, "Did you ever get anybody to fly the little girl out to ... so she 56:00could have the transplant?" And I said, "No." And we're running out of time. He said, "Okay, we're coming in." He said, "But it was whiteout. It was snowing so hard." He said, "You need to let us know. Give us some ... so we can find where to go." So we said, "Okay." At that time, Southeast Christian was not where it is now, but is still a really big church on Hikes Lane.

JF: [crosstalk].

BR: So we said, "Well, let's go to the Southeast Christian parking lot." We gave them instructions on coming up the Watterson and turning, and we said we would get a fire truck there to put the lights on so they could see where to land. Then we went on the air and we said, "We need people to shovel the ... so that the helicopter can land." And it was like the scene out of the movie Field of Dreams, where people came out to the ... All these people appeared, 100 people with shovels, and they shoveled the parking lot and cleared ...

BR: And then in the meantime, one of the private people at the airport with a private jet had been working to try to clear the runway with plows so they could fly the little girl out. We went on the air and said Fort Knox was coming in. Well, at that point, one of the air ambulances who had told us they could not help us when we called earlier decided that they could help when they knew Fort Knox was coming in. So they shot from downtown over to the ... and landed. We put the little girl on the helicopter. And at that point, we had a flight. The plane said they thought they could leave.

BR: So we got the little girl on the helicopter. She went over to the airport. I remember I called Fort Knox and said, "Hey, this is really ... Sorry you guys are making a wild good chase." He said, "Well, it wasn't a wild goose chase. Maybe it inspired the other people to come and ..." They were great about it. But she got off the plane. Just barely made it out of the airport in terms of 58:00lifting off. Got her to her ... She had the transplant. And after I joined Norton Healthcare, I subsequently met her, she and her father. She was down for some occasion, and she was doing just really well. This was many, many ...

JF: Really. Oh, my goodness. Wow, what a story.

BR: But that was the one thing, the people who were involved in that, that's what we felt best about out of all ... And you cover huge stories, the Carrollton bus crash. I mean, you're proud of your work and you win all these awards, which we did for [crosstalk].

JF: That is community-oriented [crosstalk].

BR: But it was really tangibly helping somebody. I remember after that, Tony Danza took an option on making a movie out of the story.

JF: Is that right?

BR: And this person from Hollywood kept calling me and bothering me, wanting to 59:00come in and film the movie partially in the newsroom. Well, it never got off the ground, which was probably a major loss to moviegoers all over. But one of the weekly magazines did a story on it, and they wanted to come in and they wanted to talk to Mary. And Mary refused to talk to them. She said, "I didn't do that so I could be written about in a magazine." She said, "I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do." They did their story, but they talked to other people. They didn't talk to Mary.

JF: What a deal.

BR: But it was just one of those things you really feel, and it was all day long. I mean, it was like eight hours or something like that. I mean, it was just from early in the morning until after [crosstalk]. Yeah.

JF: That's what it's all about. That's what it's all about. It's amazing that we can pull stuff like that. First of all, having the heart to do that and then taking the time.

BR: Yeah, yeah.

JF: Yeah. And get so many people [crosstalk].

BR: How fortunate that Mary answered the phone and said, "I want to help." 60:00Somebody else might have answered the phone and said, "I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do." End of conversation.

JF: Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, I bet if we kept the mic on for a little longer, we could-

BR: We probably could, yeah.

JF: ... more stories like that. But that's a good one [crosstalk]. That kind of sums up what it was all about really, your atmosphere, your philosophy of news, and then your staff and the people around you, and then getting the rest of the station and the community involved. And that's really what the magic of WHAS at that time was.

BR: Yeah, yeah.

JF: Yeah. Good. Very good. Well, thanks for sharing, man. It's been great.

BR: Thank you. Good talking to you, Jack.