(ambient music) - A stellar career in public radio, WUWF's leader, Pat Crawford, on this edition of "Conversations."

(inspiring music) In 1982, Pat Crawford was enticed to leaving his position as station manager at WFDD-FM in Wake Forest University to come to what was basically a startup.

WUWF radio had just recently signed on the air in 1981.

The decision turned out to be a good one, both for Crawford and the community.

Since that time, Crawford and his team have grown WUWF into one of the region's most respected broadcast and media outlets.

In addition to NPR programming, the station is rich with local news and locally-produced entertainment programming, like the acclaimed RadioLive.

We welcome the executive director of WUWF Public Media, Pat Crawford, to "Conversations."

Thanks for being here.

- It is an honor and privilege to be here, Jeff.

- As we tape this program, WUWF has been on the air for 40 years, so celebrating 40 years.

That's quite an accomplishment, and it's been a trajectory of upward growth, it would certainly seem to me.

What was the magic thing about the station that you saw to leave Wake Forest and come here?

- Well, I came down here, never been to Pensacola before, for one thing, and I was excited about a startup, because Wake Forest was a very established university, very established radio station, and it was a great station, but the idea of helping to mold something right from the very beginning, that was very enticing.

Of course, the university was fairly young back in 1982 as well.

So the combination of the two things, and then coming down here and just seeing all the excitement that was in the air about the station, 'cause it was so new people were just finding out about it, and I thought, "This is great.

"It's a great way to start and help to mold its future."

- Yeah, I read somewhere where you feel like you don't really go to work every day.

- I don't, I don't still after 40, well, 39 years for me.

I do not.

It is a pleasure to come to work.

It is family, and that's the way it's always been, that's the way I like it, and we're very close, the entire staff.

- I wanna get into more of that in just a minute, but you personally, what was your interest in radio?

At what point in your life did you say, "Boy, I'd like to be involved in broadcasting or media?"

- Well, Chris, it goes all the way back to my childhood, practically.

When I was a kid, probably from middle school on, I was very much involved in electronics.

I used to build Heathkit, little sets and things like that.

And I loved music, so that combination right there.

And so I had next door neighbors on both sides who were friends, and I buried wires in our yards over to their houses.

And so I really had sort of a little broadcast station right there in my neighborhood.

So I guess that was telling me, "You know, maybe I should do this."

But the interesting thing was, when it became time to go to college, I didn't feel that way.

I mean, I had done that basically always growing up, but I was listening mostly to commercial radio, and it was good, but I really couldn't see myself doing that.

I don't think I felt like I, I was kind of an introvert, I didn't feel like I had the personality for it.

I was listening to the rock and roll stations and the DJs were like great, and I listened to the ones at night on AM from Chicago and New York and Cousin Brucie, and all those people.

And so I thought, "Yeah, that looks like fun, "but I guess I need to figure out something else."

- Yeah, so you go to college and, what, major in broadcasting or media?

- No, actually I went to a very traditional liberal arts, all-male school, Presbyterian College in Virginia, Hampton City, that's the name.

And it was very liberal arts.

In other words, they would not have any courses in journalism, because that was considered like a trade.

So, really, you had to take Latin, Greek, chemistry, biology, it was primarily like a pre-med school.

And I went there thinking, "Well, maybe I'll try that."

So, first semester, I knew I was not meant for science.

So in the meantime I had met some friends who kind of were like-minded like me.

We liked music, we liked stereo systems.

I was a real audiophile by then, that was the big thing.

So we got to talking, and one thing about the college is, as I said, it was all male, 600 students, in the middle of nowhere, in Southside Virginia.

It's about 50 miles south of Richmond.

But there was a girl school about 10 miles down the road that had 3,500 girls.

So we said, "Well, how can we share our talents with this girl's school?"

And so we said, "Well, maybe we should build a radio station."

And of course, back in those days at universities, your radio stations were what they called carrier current.

You had to ran wires through the dorms.

Well, that wasn't gonna work on our campus.

So we got very high-minded and said, "You know what?

What if we could actually put "a real radio station on the air, "with a transmitter, the whole bit?"

And we were like, "Hey, why not?"

So it just was coincidence.

And this is why I think my whole life has been this one series of coincidences after another.

My girlfriend at the time, her dad worked for Westinghouse, and at Christmas break, she lived in Pittsburgh, I went up to Pittsburgh and I was at a cocktail party with some of her dad's fellow employees.

And it turns out there was a Hampton City alum there, and he was the director of research and something else, and I told him what I was doing.

And he said, "Well, you know, "we have a 10 wide FM transmitter "that we used one time in an experiment."

He said, "I'm just gonna send it down to the school for you."

I was like, "Whoa!"

So I came back after Christmas break and said, "Hey guys, guess what?

We've got a transmitter."

And from there on we said, "Okay, now what do we do?"

So we found an alum who was an attorney and he said, "Oh, it's not easy.

"You're gonna have to go through the FCC."

So this was my second semester of my freshman year.

Well, it took until the second semester of my junior year for us to finally go on the air, because of all the legal stuff you have to go through for licensing.

And then also getting equipment.

It turned out we had another alum who owned a radio station in Norfolk, Virginia.

And he sent us, and we're talking old equipment, we're talking the old 16-inch turntables, the cart machines, the old stuff that they never used anymore.

He sent it to us.

So that was our first studio.

And, yes, we went on the air my junior year and I had the bug then.

It was like, "You know what, this is what I wanna do."

- But I can imagine, I mean, just learning the process of going through with the FCC, that had to be extremely valuable as you moved on in your career.

- Yeah, everything, and learned with, you know, learned how to do a lot of the engineering, 'cause we didn't have an engineer, but we had a physics professor who was pretty good at stuff like that.

And he kind of taught us what we needed to know about that.

So yeah, it was fascinating.

But you'd think at that point I was well on my way.

No, well, and also I only ended up majoring in economics, because that was the closest thing to business.

And I said, "I kind of know something about business," but they wouldn't teach business 'cause once again, too trade for liberal arts, pure liberal arts.

So I graduated and moved up to Richmond, Virginia, and went knocking on doors and said, "Hey, I'd like it that," Went to some of the commercial stations and I said, "Hey, I'd like to do this."

And they say, "Well, you put that little toy radio station "down in your college."

They said, "That's not really "what we're looking for right now."

And I went, the guy from Norfolk said, "Well, come on down here and interview my people."

Well, he wanted me to interview with his sales manager.

So he was thinking, and I'd never even thought about sales.

I didn't know that was something I wanted to do.

And after I went to lunch with this guy I was convinced it wasn't what I wanted to do.

Because at lunch we were talking about different things, and what's important in our life, and I said, "Well, you know, good friends, "it's very important to me."

And he laughed and said, "Man, if you got money, "you don't need friends."

And I thought, "Yikes, I don't wanna work "for somebody like this."

So that wasn't gonna work out.

So in the meantime, I went to work in the insurance business in Richmond just to pay the bills.

And I decided, I've got to figure out something else.

And about this time there was that startup, NPR, that someone made me aware of, and I found where a station was, and I tuned in and I heard the very early days.

'Cause this is about the time that NPR went on the air, about the time I graduated from college.

And I heard and I said, "Wow, I've never heard anything like this on radio before."

And I knew this is what I wanna do.

So I decided, okay, I'm obviously gonna have to go to grad school, 'cause I got no credentials right now to get into anything, and especially this public radio, because these people are very high-minded and, yeah, it's not rock and roll.

- What makes NPR so special?

- It's just their approach to their programming.

Like I said, the first time I heard it I said, "Wow," "these are people speaking with great authority, "but just talking common sense and telling you a story, "and really painting pictures in your mind "which is the gift of radio."

And they did it so well.

And it was like nothing I'd ever heard before.

And also all the women on public radio, because you didn't hear women on regular radio stations.

They weren't there.

And so that was fascinating as well.

So I heard that and I said, "This is what I wanna do."

So I figured out, "Gotta go to grad school.

"What am I gonna do?"

I decided to go to the University of Arizona 'cause my sister lived in Tucson.

I'd been out there to visit her and I said, "Hey, Arizona's a cool place.

"I'm gonna go out there and go to school."

Well, I went out and I met with the Dean of the College of Business, and the Dean of the College of Communication Arts, and I said, "I wanna get a Master's degree "in public broadcast administration."

They were like, "What?

What is that?"

And so I explained it to them and they said, "Okay, we can work with you on that."

So that is my degree.

My master's degree is in public broadcast administration.

And at that time there were like 300 stations in the country.

And they said, "Well, you kind of, you know, "better hedge your bet."

And I said, "No, if I can't do this "I don't know what I'm gonna do.

"I gotta make this work."

So that was how I ended up in Arizona.

And while I was there I got some good experience too, got to work at the PBS station, and the NPR station, both at the university, and gained some experience and thought, "Okay, I'm on my way now."

So... - When you first got to UWF, or, excuse me, to WUWF, what did you see?

What was your, when you looked ahead, I'm sure you said, you know, 10 years out, 20 years out, or whatever I want this station to be.

What were you thinking in those days?

- Well, one thing that I said right from the beginning was I said, "What we do off the air "is gonna be just as important as what we do on the air."

Which means we're not gonna sit in our ivory tower and broadcast, we have to be engaged with community.

Everybody on the staff needs to get out there and get involved in something.

And we need to help make things happen in this community, in addition to just reporting on it, or just providing good entertainment and news for people.

So that's kind of my philosophy.

And I thought what better chance to do it with a station that's brand new, just getting started.

And so, once again, that was the appeal at that point.

- Now, as I understand it, initially WUWF, a few NPR shows, a lot of classical music.

And how has it evolved since that time?

- Well, yes, we started out with, when I got down here, we ran Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which were the news tent posts.

And then during the day we were all classical, and at night we were jazz.

And we did have a news director so we had some news.

He was a one-man show, so he basically, rather than trying to do breaking news or anything like that, he did a half an hour public affairs program once a week where he kind of just condensed all the things that he'd been collecting during the week.

And that worked out all right, and that was pretty much the formula for all the public stations.

They were all like that.

The one I came from in Winston-Salem, same way, same way.

So it was working for us, but then we started to slowly kind of change somewhat musically with the jazz.

Jazz kinda started to, we started doing the space music program, Music From the Hearts of Space, which was really different.

And then we started locally, not locally at first, but then we brought, one program that we didn't have when I got here was A Prairie Home Companion.

And we'd had that in Winston-Salem and I'd also worked with a group of, they are called the Fiddle and Bow society, and had them produce an eclectic music program in addition to Prairie Home.

So I said, "Well, maybe we need some of that down here."

So we brought Prairie Home online.

And once we brought that online, people loved it, 'cause nobody had heard it down here.

And that was very successful.

And we kind of spun off with that, We started doing an event we called The Prairie Hoedown, which is sort of our version of it.

And we set up a stage outdoors on campus and we did a few of those and people liked that.

So I said, "Yeah, yeah, that's good."

So then we kept creeping in a little bit more programs like that.

And that was good.

So I said, "All right, this is great."

In the meantime, we were getting very involved in the community.

I got here in 1982.

In 1983, we got involved with The Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival, which had already been around for like 10 years, it was very established.

It was definitely the premier arts festival, still is, I think, in the country, probably.

But they didn't do much with live entertainment.

It was mostly visual arts, and they did have dance, and some of the other performing arts, but not a real stage.

So we actually started the main stage at The Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival in 1983.

Then, soon after that, I met Dr. Norman Vickers, Dr. Jazz, and I also got involved with the Arts Council, and I ended up being the president of the Arts Council.

And he came to one of the meetings, and after the meeting he said, "Why don't you and the executive director "come over to my house for a little drink "after the Arts Council meeting?"

I said, "Sure."

So we were over there and I always joke and tell him he plied me with alcohol, and he said, "You know what?

"Pensacola needs a jazz festival, "and you're just the person to make this happen.

"You and I together, we can make it happen."

And you can't tell Norm no.

And so the jazz festival was born.

And so that was a joint venture between the Jazz Society and WUWF.

And then we got really involved with it and we said, "You know what?

I think," And the Arts Council was also involved.

The Arts Council a little while later, they kind of backed away from it.

And we said, "You know, we could probably run this thing."

So for the next 10 years, we were the administrator of the Pensacola Jazz Festival.

And, finally, after that, I said, "Norm, my staff's spending about 40% of their time annually on this festival, and we're losing money (indistinct).

I think after the 10 years we broke even, 'cause some years we'd do great, some years we'd lose everything we had in there.

But that was great, and it lives on because the Jazz Society took it over again and they have done a wonderful job with it and we still support it.

Dale Regal, our technical director, still helps do the sound, and we supply some of the equipment that they use.

And so that just worked out really nicely.

- How did the RadioLive come about?

- RadioLive came along a few years later.

And, once again, was kind of inspired by Prairie Home Companion.

We had done, as I said, these Prairie Hoedown programs and said, "Hey, well, you know, "maybe we could do something more regular."

And so what spurred me on was when they hired Morris Marx as university president, and they came to me and they said, "You know what?

"We need to do something entertaining "as a part of his inauguration."

And I thought, "Okay, this is what we'll do."

So we came up with the show and we really modeled it after Prairie Home, including deciding, "Well, "we're gonna do some satire too."

Because that was one of the hallmarks.

Not that I would ever be a Garrison Keillor, or even close.

But I said, "Okay."

And I said, "Well, maybe I'll just do satire about the new president," who I had not met at that point, and did not meet before the show.

But I did a little research on him and his wife and I said, "Okay, you know, what the heck?

"You know, what do we got to lose?"

Who knows?

Thank God he was one of the most kind people and forgiving people in the world.

So I had never met him prior to the show.

So we get up there and I found out that he liked blues music, and that he kind of had this New Orleans, kind of liked the New Orleans scene and all that.

So I made up this whole scenario that he was a jazz pianist in New Orleans before he became president of the university.

And he met his wife, Sally, she was a torch singer at the bar that he worked in.

And I had Ken Keratin from Christ Church, who I became very good friends with, Ken, of course, was a music director there for many years, and we became very close friends, and I said, "Will you play Morris, and play the piano for this?"

And he said, "Sure, I'll do that."

And then Linda Gray, who was in the choir, and Linda Gray is well-known by a lot of people.

In fact, Linda Gray and Don Pardigan started The Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival.

So I said, "Linda, would you be my torch singer?"

And Linda is, if you know Linda Gray, she'll do anything.

She's a ham, and just a fabulous singer too, a fabulous soprano.

So we put this whole skit together where Morris was in this bar and that's how he met Sally, his wife, and then she serenades him, and that's the great thing.

And what she does is the song that goes, you know, "more than the greatest," all that.

Well, it was Mo, "Mo you're the greatest."

And so we even printed up a t-shirt that said, "UWF, the university with Mo."

And I presented that to him at the end of the show.

Well, he took it in good stead, but I have to tell you, Sally Marx told me many years later, she said, "For years, women's groups would call me and say, "'would you come and sing for us?'"

So I said, "Oh, sorry about that."

But that was the beginning of RadioLive.

And then we had so much fun, we said, "Well, let's just keep going."

So we did.

And that was since 1988.

- And you've had so many talented people come through there and perform.

It's just amazing.

- Well, singer/songwriters.

I just, that's my favorite kind of music.

And then, of course, John Macdonell picked up the gauntlet and started doing his acoustic interlude program, and then his acoustic interlude sessions, and that has really grown.

So that's what they call the triple-A format, adult, alternative, acoustic, and it's worked very, very well for us.

- You know, when I listen to the station, I always feel like I learn something, whether it's maybe about music or maybe it's one of the news programs or something like that.

I think NPR and NPR stations just do a wonderful job of storytelling, so much better than a lot of commercial, which brings me to this question, are you surprised that some commercial broadcast entity hasn't picked up a similar type format?

- I am in some sense, but then again not really.

I don't know.

It's interesting, NPR has always been so different in sound and everything.

And then, of course, for years we just fought with an image problem.

It's like well nobody knows NPR, NPR now is everybody knows it.

And it was interesting moving down here because the only people that knew NPR down here were usually the military folks who had been somewhere else and lived and heard it.

And they said, "Oh, I'm so glad you have a public radio station here.

The people that were natives down here, who had never been exposed to it at first, they were kind of like, "Well, what is this thing?"

I don't know why commercial stations haven't picked up on that.

Except I think part of the beauty of NPR is that it doesn't have commercials.

So you don't have that interruption.

You don't have to be running spots and things like that.

So you can do long-form programming, because that's the other thing, I think most of the commercial people, and for good reason, they need to keep things moving.

You're big on soundbites and you want to do, you're doing more spot news, things like that, and brief interviews.

Whereas NPR, their philosophy from the beginning, with All Things Considered, if it takes 25 minutes to tell this story, then you can have 25 minutes of this 90 minute show.

And it works for 'em.

- And I think what was really neat about it is how they'll mix so much of the natural sound, and I mean, we were talking before we went on camera, just talking about, you know, the talent of the people who are editors and producers and stuff like that.

And that's a whole different set of skills, so to speak, to be able to do that.

That's really neat.

So tell me about, you had an experience a handful of years ago where you just went for a walk.

Tell me about that.

- I did.

It was actually a midlife crisis.

No, it was actually, well, maybe it was a midlife crisis that I turned into an opportunity for the station.

I just decided one day, "I think I'd like to do a long walk."

I mean, like a long walk, but I don't want to do, they said, "Oh, Appalachian trail."

I said, "No, I don't wanna do the Appalachian trail.

"I want to do more of an urban walk "and just walk through towns, cities."

So I found a book by a name Peter Jenkins called "A Walk Across America."

And he had graduated from college in the mid-seventies when we were, of course, still wrestling with the Vietnam War and all of it, the aftermath.

And he was just really feeling a little worried about the country.

He thought, "You know, what's happening with the country?"

He said, "Maybe I don't want to stay here.

"Maybe I might wanna go live in Europe or somewhere else, "but I think what I'm going to do, "I'm just gonna walk across the country "and meet normal people, and find out," 'cause he lived around the beltway, so he said, "I'm not getting the right vibes here."

So he took off, I think he took slightly more than two years.

He walked literally from New York to New Orleans with his dog, and he stopped along the way and he would work and stay days or weeks at a certain place, which is why it took two years.

And the upshot of the whole thing was, he said, "You know, the American people are fantastic "and they will do anything to help someone."

And he said that completely.

He said, "I became a Patriot at the end.

"It completely restored my faith in our country."

And so here I was, in my time, and I was thinking, "Okay, I'm kind of a little worried about our country too," back then, that was in 2007, "and I'd kind of like to do the same thing," but I said, "I don't, I don't have two years "to do it in."

I said, "I'm gonna make it a little bit shorter."

So I said, "You know what, "I'm just gonna walk from Florida to NPR" and walk to headquarters at NPR.

And so I said, and I'm leaving from Jacksonville, because I think if I had to leave from here, walk over to Jacksonville, and then up, I wasn't up for that.

And it turned out to be almost a perfect thousand miles.

I said, "So that's perfect.

A thousand miles."

So we hatched the idea, I told the staff, they looked at me like, "Dude, you have lost your mind."

And it was very funny.

They would say things like, "By yourself?

"You're gonna to go by yourself?"

And I said, "Yeah."

They said, "Well, aren't you worried "about mean people out there?"

And I said, "Well, no, that hadn't even crossed my mind."

And then one of my staff members, she says, "What about roving bands of pit bulls?"

I said, "What?"

And then she said, "Oh yeah, that's a real thing."

And I said, "I don't think it is."

So I just kind of discounted it.

She said, "No, no, you're gonna need pepper spray for that."

I said, "Okay."

So I bought a little thing of pepper spray about the size of a chapstick, which was like, what, six or seven squirts, and I hung it on my pack and I said, "Okay, "I've got this with me.

I'm gonna wear this."

So then I started training for it.

I just started walking and walking and then added all the weight, and then they added a full pack and just walked and walked and walked.

That was the best way for a couple of months.

And then I took off and did the walk and it was a life-changing experience.

I mean, it was far more than I ever thought it was gonna be.

And it also benefited the station, we made about $30,000 plus in pledges because people got so involved with it.

You know, people really wanted to see me make it.

And so that was, that was great.

- What were you, and I've got about five minutes left, but what was the most surprising thing about doing it?

What happened to you during that experience that you did not expect?

- Well, like I said, it was life-changing and there was one incidence where I was walking in Georgia and I suddenly had a pack of pit bulls.

Guess what?

Coming down this road after me, coming down this hill, and I thought, what am I gonna do?

I hadn't seen any cars or anything for several hours in either direction.

And just as they were getting ready to cross the road to get me this white Nissan pickup truck appeared from nowhere, slammed on his brakes, laid on the horn, and spooked the dogs.

And they went running back up to where they came from.

And then, almost instantly, the truck took off.

He had a blacked out window, so I couldn't see who was in the truck.

He took off, and I thought two things.

Number one is don't leave yet, the dogs might come back.

And then the other thing was, who are you so I can thank you?

Well, I had no idea.

So I started walking, and as I walked along, I kind of looked up at this beautiful day, cloudless sky, I thought, you know what?

There was a higher power driving that truck.

I don't need to know who it was.

And I felt so comfortable after that, and so assured that nothing was going to be bad about the rest of the trip, that I threw my little pepper spray thing away that night and said, "I don't need this.

"I don't need anything."

And I didn't.

And I had several instances along the way where literally I would blog and say, "There are angels and they show up when you need them."

And they did.

- What a neat story, what a neat story.

About two minutes left.

Media businesses is changing, how do you see WUWF over the next four to five years.

- Big changes.

Digital revolution.

I mean, already now, there is far more potential for audience on the digital platforms than there is over the air.

We'll always have the on-air audience, as long as we have hurricanes, because digital is not gonna do much in that realm.

But other than that, we've really gotta change our way of doing things and approach everything we do as, "How's it gonna play out on all the digital platforms "in addition to on the air?"

because that's what we've got to cater to, And we've gotta make sure that we capture that audience.

So that's it, the digital revolution is cause for transformation, and we're working on that.

- But great storytelling will continue to be the key.

- Always, always, well, and it's great on the digital sphere.

That's why podcasts, podcasts are it because people who can tell a good story and do it in a short period of time and people can subscribe to it, that's where the future is.

- And really, some of the most successful ones have come out of the NPR stables, so to speak, or folks affiliated with that and everything.

40 years, pretty amazing.

And you've been 39 of them?

- I have been.

- 39.

How many more to go for you?

- We'll see.

We'll see.

But I just wanna say right now, I'm blessed.

I have the most amazing staff, many of them have been with me, a couple of them have been with me almost as long as I have been here.

And we're a family, a tight family.

Everyone has everyone else's back and there's love in that family.

And they are my family just as much as my real family, and that's what makes a difference.

- Well, and they're awfully talented in so many ways and very, very creative.

And people can find you online @wuwf.org.

Is that correct?

- Yes, yes.

- And then, of course, over the air at 88.1?

- That's right.

And then there's a couple of sub channels too?

- Yes, we have HD channels.

HD two is classical 24 hours a day for anyone who's thinking, "Where'd the classical music go?"

That's where it is.

And then the third channel is SightLine, the reading service for the vision impaired.

- Right.

Okay.

Very good.

Pat Crawford, thank you so much, my friend.

- Thank you, Jeff.

- Congratulations.

40 years WUWF radio, and Pat's been there for 39 of those 40 and has kind of shepherd the station through a big evolution.

Lots of changes over the years, from analog, to digital, to now who knows what the future may hold.

But, as we mentioned before, great storytelling, you'll continue to win.

And I know they'll be doing a great job with the many talented professionals they have out there.

Thank you so very much for watching.

By the way, you can see this program and many more of our conversations online at wsrp.org/conversations, as well as on YouTube.

I'm Jeff Weeks, thank you so very much for watching, take wonderful care of yourself, and we will see you soon.

(inspiring music)