It’s the end of an era. After nearly six decades of service to listeners, Prairie Public Director of Radio Bill Thomas is retiring. He is the first – and so far, the only – director of the statewide operation. Dakota Datebook was his idea. So was Main Street.
He was at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Pete Seeger once helped him escape a gas attack. More than that, he's been a calm but innovative leader. We couldn't let him go without a retrospective.
Interview Highlights
Find the full transcript after this section.
How he fell in love with radio:
"When I was little, like three years old, my parents had, they don't make them anymore, it's a floor set like a piece of furniture that had a record player in it and a radio in it. And I would lay there on the floor right next to it, like snuggled up to it because it generated warmth. And I would play March Slav by Tchaikovsky, which I really loved.
I remember it very well. And I would reach up and fiddle with the knobs and listen to the radio. And one day I was doing that and I accidentally pulled it over and it fell on top of me.
And one of the radio knobs actually stabbed me in the forehead and made a gash that needed stitches. So maybe that's how radio first got into me."
Bill loves all kinds of sound.
"I love sound. Sounds like a train engine going by, or the wind, the rain, or birds, or the pops of materials expanding and contracting, or weird electronic sounds."
That led to a fascination with a rather specific style of music.
"I had a very early attraction to musique concrète, a movement that started in France that involved editing and manipulating sounds in kind of a musical way."
Bill plays many instruments, and considered being a professional musician.
"I thought about it briefly after I got paid $350 for a one-hour performance for a picnic that a bunch of doctors were putting on. I was playing for their children."
He likes performing for kids. Always has.
"Their curiosity and their willingness to engage. It's great when you're telling a story or singing a song and they will clap their hands or do a chorus or if you ask them to provide part of the story or make up a verse for the song or something like that, there's always some kids that are game and will try it out. Their attitudes about embarrassment and competence are in a different place."
Working in radio turned out to be an awfully good fit.
"I always had this interest in trying to understand things and help people understand things and a feeling that we could do much better in getting to where we wanted to be, whether it was enjoying a piece of music or figuring out a political issue or a social issue that often people were talking past each other or not getting what other people were feeling and that was making everything harder. And so the feeling that I could help with people trying to understand each other and people trying to understand what's going on in different ways."
Bill happened to be in Berlin for a radio conference in November 1989:
"Just two weeks after the initial cracks in the Berlin Wall had started appearing, it was in the winter, and going over to the wall and hearing the sounds of all the people there, and the pounding and the cracking and tapping and knocking on the wall. There was a German Dixieland jazz band, you know, “We're going to play here our music until this wall is coming down.” So that was a really fun piece to produce where I felt like I could really help people get into an unusual place.
This moment when this wall is coming apart and really get a feel for what it was like to be there."
On his encounter with folk singer Pete Seeger:
"I was at the American Folklife Festival. This was on the mall in Washington, D.C. And nearby the Folklife Festival, a bunch of demonstrators were demonstrating against the Vietnam War at the Washington Monument. Something happened over there, and the police started chasing the demonstrators, and they came running through the Folklife Festival, being chased by the police who were firing tear gas at them.
And I was walking, trying to figure out what to do. I was recording at the time, actually, and heard some interesting sounds going on. I came by, actually, a teepee that was set up, and Pete Seeger was there. I was coming with the tear gas. I was just ahead of it. So that's how that ended up happening."
His advice for listeners:
"Enjoy. There is some wonderful stuff coming your way. And listen and enjoy. Just listen."
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Ashley Thornberg
Fifty-five years ago, a long-haired college kid stepped into his first radio studio.
Bill Thomas
I was on the air at 3 a.m.
Ashley Thornberg
And he's never left.
Bill Thomas
I love sound.
Ashley Thornberg
Bill Thomas grew up just outside St. Louis, Missouri.
Bill Thomas
I was born in Alton, Illinois, which is a town on the Mississippi River right where the Missouri runs into the Mississippi.
Ashley Thornberg
When Bill was a kid, TV exploded into homes.
(clip of I Love Lucy)
Ashley Thornberg
In 1946, a few thousand households had TV. By 1960, that number ballooned to more than 45 million households. But Bill always loved the medium that let him use his imagination a little more.
Bill Thomas
When I was little, like three years old, my parents had, they don't make them anymore, it's a floor set like a piece of furniture that had a record player in it and a radio in it. And I would lay there on the floor right next to it, like snuggled up to it because it generated warmth. And I would play March Slav by Tchaikovsky, which I really loved.
I remember it very well. And I would reach up and fiddle with the knobs and listen to the radio. And one day I was doing that and I accidentally pulled it over and it fell on top of me.
And one of the radio knobs actually stabbed me in the forehead and made a gash that needed stitches. So maybe that's how radio first got into me.
(clip of 1940’s era radio)
Bill Thomas
I listened to radio a lot when I was a kid, like many kids my age listen to pop radio and other kinds of weird radios, maybe some stuff a lot of kids my age didn't listen to. Wait, like what? I liked to listen to data broadcasts that happened at the time that were sort of like Morse code, but they weren't Morse code, but were data streams that were being sent.
So they were changing electronic tones of different sorts. I enjoyed listening to that.
Tune around and just hear all the, wow, this is from Texas. This is from Germany.
(clip of 1940’s era radio)
This is from Japan. This is from Des Moines. This is from Chicago. This is from Boston. That was fun.
I love sound. Sounds like a train engine going by, or the wind, the rain, or birds, or the pops of materials expanding and contracting, or weird electronic sounds.
Ashley Thornberg
That led to a fascination with a rather specific style of music.
Bill Thomas
I had a very early attraction to musique concrète, a movement that started in France that involved editing and manipulating sounds in kind of a musical way.
Ashley Thornberg
How many instruments do you play?
Bill Thomas
Oh, it depends how you count them, I guess. I play the harmonica and the recorder and the juice harp and the guitar and the mason jar with a lid on it that makes a little, like a water drum, like a hand water drum that gives you that kind of boop-boop-boop-boop-boop sound when you play it. So those are, I guess, the main ones.
Ashley Thornberg
He briefly flirted with being a professional musician.
Bill Thomas
I thought about it briefly after I got paid $350 for a one-hour performance for a picnic that a bunch of doctors were putting on. I was playing for their children.
I'm sure I played some of my usual child repertoire. There was probably You Can't Make a Turtle Come Out and Wheels on the Bus and a children's version of Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor and Same Old Man Working at the Mill and just Clean-O.
Ashley Thornberg
Bill likes performing for kids. Always has.
Here's a clip from when he was still getting started.
(music clip)
Bill Thomas
Their curiosity and their willingness to engage. It's great when you're telling a story or singing a song and they will clap their hands or do a chorus or if you ask them to provide part of the story or make up a verse for the song or something like that, there's always some kids that are game and will try it out. Their attitudes about embarrassment and competence are in a different place.
It's not that they don't have feelings about that. It's not that they can't be embarrassed, but it's in a different place than adults in a way that is simpler and realer to connect with.
Ashley Thornberg
But fate took him another direction. What was your first job in radio?
Bill Thomas
I got into it backwards through a roommate who wanted to do it and was nervous to go to the auditions by himself, so asked me to come along and I thought, what the heck, I'll audition too. It could be fun. So I started volunteering, doing a show there.
That was my freshman year in college. I went home that summer and there was a very unusual station that had started up in a city near me. There was underground FM rock radio and this took it further, more eclectic, more exploratory, more experimental.
Ashley Thornberg
More experimental. I'm recalling a story, Bill, that you told me about a piece of sound that you made and you were going to play a recorder over it.
Bill Thomas
Yeah, yeah, the flute-like recorder. So I like playing the recorder and I prepared a soundtrack of intermixing and cut-up sounds of different sorts. Some were human voices and some were not and prepared that soundtrack.
And then I used that and played that and then performed live with the recorder.
Ashley Thornberg
Working in radio turned out to be an awfully good fit.
Bill Thomas
I always had this interest in trying to understand things and help people understand things and a feeling that we could do much better in getting to where we wanted to be, whether it was enjoying a piece of music or figuring out a political issue or a social issue that often people were talking past each other or not getting what other people were feeling and that was making everything harder. And so the feeling that I could help with people trying to understand each other and people trying to understand what's going on in different ways.
Ashley Thornberg
That approach, that listening is a kind of love, he got it from his parents.
Bill Thomas
Both were very community-involved and I think they both had an emphasis on listening. My father was a lawyer, kind of a general practice lawyer. He did pay attention to what people were saying in a way that everybody doesn't always do and was very interested in trying to figure out what happened or what needed to happen or what somebody wanted to happen, not what he thought but what they thought.
And my mother started a shelter for women who were fleeing abusive relationships. She went out and talked to people to figure out how to make this work right rather than just like, okay, we're going to start a shelter, we know what's needed.
Ashley Thornberg
He learned a new kind of listening when his kids were still too young to talk.
Bill Thomas
When our first child was a new infant, she calmed down much faster if she was in a fussy or crying mood if you went and walked with her outside. And we used something called a baby sling. Just feeling this surge of emotion that was unprecedented.
It was just unlike anything I'd ever felt of this feeling toward her and combination of love and protectiveness and concern. What did your kids teach you about how to interact with the world? They expanded my capacity or awareness of the need to do that thing we talked about before, the understanding what the other person is trying to get at.
I think I understand that in a different way after having children.
Ashley Thornberg
His innate nature combined with his parents and parenting helped him to remember to prioritize putting the other person first.
Bill Thomas
I became very aware of this when I was program director for Nebraska Public Radio, is one of the important things you are is a window on the world for people. And so bringing the feeling that wherever you are, whatever town you're in, with your immediate surroundings, that you can use our service to expand what your horizons are, to expand what you know about.
Ashley Thornberg
He understood the power of radio.
Bill Thomas
When you're talking through a microphone and it's going out to people, it connects with them in their brains in a way that gives you a chance to really try to tell them about something and help them to understand it.
Ashley Thornberg
He was good on the air.
Bill Thomas
Somebody called up and talked about hearing me describe the way trees looked in a very, very, very high wind. And she said, I just want to thank you. I'm never going to look at trees the same way again.
You changed my understanding of trees. Maybe I didn't bring peace to the world, but there's always people that you can feel like you've affected them some way, in a good way.
Ashley Thornberg
One of his most memorable experiences was when he just so happened, in November 1989, to be in West Germany.
(clip from ABC World News Tonight)
Ashley Thornberg
Where the Berlin Wall used to be.
Bill Thomas
Just two weeks after the initial cracks in the Berlin Wall had started appearing, it was in the winter, and going over to the wall and hearing the sounds of all the people there, and the pounding and the cracking and tapping and knocking on the wall. There was a German Dixieland jazz band, you know, “We're going to playhere our music until this wall is coming down.” So that was a really fun piece to produce where I felt like I could really help people get into an unusual place.
This moment when this wall is coming apart and really get a feel for what it was like to be there.
Ashley Thornberg
Here's a clip of what Bill produced from his time in Berlin.
(clip)
It was after nightfall, and as we came up, we could see that the people with their hammers, or the wallpeckers as the Germans called them, had chipped open a pretty big hole. It was about eight inches wide and maybe a couple of feet high, a sort of elongated oval. Like I said, it looked like it was designed by Judy Chicago.
Our side of the wall was very dark, but through the hole came light. It was that bright, bright sodium vapor light, bright. So it was this glowing hole, and there were three or four people around it as we came up, two Dutch girls it turned out were talking, maybe flirting a little bit, through the wall with three East German border guards on the other side.
We looked through the hole, we could see them, and they looked so young and just angelic, with their rosy cheeks on the other side in the bright light. And they had a hatchet, and they were knocking pieces off the wall and handing them through. When they heard that some Americans were there, they offered to sell us pieces for 10 marks.
They'd been giving them to the people before. Ten marks is about $6. And if we could supply a pen, they would sign the pieces.
Bill Thomas
And, yeah, you end up in some interesting places sometimes.
Ashley Thornberg
Somewhat surprisingly, that's far from the most interesting place he ended up. There's also the time he and his folk singing heart were at the American Folklife Festival. And, well, you just have to hear where this story goes.
And how did you come to get gassed and run into Pete Seeger?
Bill Thomas
I was at the American Folklife Festival. This was on the mall in Washington, D.C. And nearby the Folklife Festival, a bunch of demonstrators were demonstrating against the Vietnam War at the Washington Monument. Something happened over there, and the police started chasing the demonstrators, and they came running through the Folklife Festival, being chased by the police who were firing tear gas at them.
And I was walking, trying to figure out what to do. I was recording at the time, actually, and heard some interesting sounds going on. I came by, actually, a teepee that was set up, and Pete Seeger was there.
I was coming with the tear gas. I was just ahead of it. So that's how that ended up happening.
Ashley Thornberg
So that's how he got tear gassed and met Pete Seeger in the same day, by chance, just like when he was at that conference when the Berlin Wall fell. And at the risk of sounding like an infomercial here, but wait, that's not all.
Bill Thomas
And you've been in riot situations in L.A. The Rodney King thing happened, and we were living there in an area that was a very mixed area of Los Angeles. Retail got burned up and trashed, and there were sandbag machine gun emplacements on some of the corners that you passed by, and definitely a weird feeling in the neighborhood to be there.
Ashley Thornberg
And if that's not enough, he faced violence in very close proximity.
Bill Thomas
I can always say when a meeting is over, even if it's been really bad, at least nobody got shot at this one.
Ashley Thornberg
Okay, why do you say that?
Bill Thomas
Well, somebody got shot at a meeting once at a radio station I was running. We had a guy who was an older guy. He was out on parole from an armed robbery violation.
He really saw the radio station as a great opportunity for him to build up respect and get skills, and he was just way into it. And then a new volunteer came to the station who was younger than him, charismatic, smart, had a lot of ideas, and the older guy just was picking on everything the younger guy said. It was so obvious that he was just feeling hostile to the younger guy and just anything he'd say he'd object to or try to pick apart.
And the older guy jumped up and pulled out a .45, waved it around, and he fired it. And I think what he meant to do was shoot a shot into the floor to shock everybody. But he ended up shooting a guy who was not part of the dispute at all in the foot.
I kind of went after him to help him. And then the guy who'd done the shooting came after us and handed me the gun. Here, take care of this.
Clearly, Sonny, the guy who did the shooting, is off the staff. The next day, he came up to the station. He said, I heard that you kicked me out of the station.
I said, well, yeah, you shot somebody at a station meeting. And he said to me, well, Bill, I like you. You're a nice guy.
I appreciate the work you do here. But I'm coming back to do my show tomorrow, and I don't know if anybody's in my way. Blood is going to flow.
I had everybody else leave the station the next day when he would come back. And I called a bunch of his friends and said, like, if he comes back to the station and he said, like, that he might try to shoot me or something, that's going to be really bad for him. He's going to be back in prison.
And his friends got to him and calmed him down. He accepted his exile from the station.
Ashley Thornberg
You weren't scared?
Bill Thomas
It all happened so fast. I mean, maybe if I was somebody who'd been, you know, a soldier or something like that where I was used to, I could have done it. But I just, at that point, just reacted on instinct.
Ashley Thornberg
He certainly does have good instincts. He also has good advice. Here is what he wants for all you listeners.
Advice we fully expect him to take himself.
Bill Thomas
Enjoy. There is some wonderful stuff coming your way. And listen and enjoy. Just listen.
