DISMAY IN THE VOICES DISMISSED FROM KFAC

“If you want to learn how to play a new concerto, why throw away the Stradivarius?” asked ex-KFAC announcer Fred Crane.

Crane echoes the sentiments of his listeners--listeners that even he was never quite sure he had during his 39 years as a classical radio deejay. There were marketing surveys and occasional letters from listeners, but nothing to indicate that he had much of an audience.

With his firing 13 days ago, those listeners have proven to be numerous and fiercely loyal. They’ve come out in droves to protest the sudden face lift at the only commercial classical radio station in Los Angeles.

The calls and letters have been coming into KFAC by the hundreds.

“They had to hire extra help at the switchboard just to handle the negative calls,” said Crane’s former engineer, Pablo Garcia. Garcia also was fired but continues to work at KFAC through the end of this week.

Officially, station management says that the complaints are tapering off and even some compliments on the new format are starting to filter through. But even the new owners cannot disguise the overwhelming angry response since Crane and most of the others of the KFAC Old Guard were unceremoniously fired 13 days ago.

Crane’s place in history is assured as the actor who portrayed Stuart Tarleton and spoke the first words of dialogue in “Gone With the Wind.” But he is far better known to his listeners as the host of the early morning show, which was heard weekdays beginning at 6 a.m. over KFAC-AM (1330) and FM (92.3).

The day after New Year’s he was fired by new owners Louise Heifetz and Ed Argow who bought the stations last year from George Fritzinger for $33.5 million. Most of the stations’ on-air and engineering staff also were fired. In all, 11 of the KFAC Old Guard were given the heave ho, including program director Carl Princi, who put in 33 years at the station, and morning man Tom Dixon, who had been at the station for 41 years.

“I can understand when a new owner comes in and wants to make changes,” Princi said. “What I can’t understand is why they don’t make those changes gradually, over time, with the existing staff.”

“I have no quarrel with being fired,” Dixon said. “It was just the heartless way it was done. Not even the symbolic ‘gold watch.’ ”

But Heifetz said her actions were necessary, not heartless.

“Were we heartless? I certainly don’t think so,” Heifetz told The Times. “Did we terminate people who had been here a long period of time? Yes. But I don’t think we were heartless.”

On Jan. 2, Heifetz and her new program director, Robert Goldfarb, told four veteran announcers and six engineers that their services were no longer needed. Princi had been told he was leaving two weeks before and was the only one who had prepared a farewell statement for his audience.

“If we had been told what the new owners wanted, I’m sure we could have adapted,” said Dixon. “(But) we were merely told that we didn’t fit in with their plans.”

Both Heifetz and Argow said the firings are just part of their belt-tightening and their attempt to begin appealing to a much wider audience.

To begin with, they have mortgage payments, they said. The stations, which simulcast their classical programming, have been traditional cellar dwellers when the quarterly Arbitron radio ratings come out.

Heifetz’s plan is to cater to a wider audience that would include younger classical music lovers--a plan that has no room for old-timers like Crane, Princi and Dixon. The idea now is to play more music and have less talk--a tactic Princi and Crane both scorn as a move toward making KFAC an outlet for background instrumental music with no specialized programs at all.

Former owner Fritzinger used to say that his stations’ low Arbitrons meant little because KFAC attracted an educated, well-heeled audience that was very attractive to advertisers. Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz advertised regularly and the stations were never in the red.

But now, simply because of the price they paid for it, Heifetz and Argow are very much in the red. In order to pay off that debt, their logic seems to go, they must ask higher ad rates and in order to ask higher rates, KFAC needs higher listener ratings. That, they say, means a broader and more youthful appeal to the music and its presentation.

According to new program director Goldfarb, the jarring switch in programming is the result of months of marketing and music studies, which showed a potential for attracting a large middle-class audience, hungry for less kitsch and more classics. The new format features longer pieces--whole symphonies in some cases, according to Goldfarb--and none of the eclectic instrumentals KFAC was known for, such as Broadway musicals, film scores, opera excerpts and even jazz on the weekend.

“It’s a question of format and playing what your audience wants,” Goldfarb said. “Not all classical audiences are extremely affluent.”

Most classical music lovers drive Fords and Chevys, not Jaguars and Mercedeses town cars, Goldfarb argued. Though an estimated 16.5% of the KFAC audience does hold Neiman-Marcus credit cards, more than 60% have J. C. Penney and Broadway cards, he said. Such potential advertisers might boost the KFAC profit margins and help pay off the mortgage, he reasoned.

“There are an awful lot of listeners out there who don’t have the butler and the maid do the shopping for them,” said Argow, who was KFAC’s advertising sales manager for 12 years before he teamed with Heifetz in buying the stations last year.

Crane, Princi and the others did not fit into the “game plan,” as Goldfarb calls his new approach to programming.

“I think people were mad about it but they don’t appreciate how difficult it is . . . how much agonizing went into this,” Goldfarb said. The decision to end an era of eclectic classical programming that included everything from opera and jazz to symphonies and even a taste of new wave fusion rock means that KFAC is now officially “pure classical,” he said.

Crane, Dixon and Princi, however, believe that the trio has badly misjudged the KFAC audience.

Outside its Hollywood headquarters in the former Villa Capri restaurant on Yucca Street, KFAC is all flash and flamboyance.

There’s the “Wall of Fame”--a year-by-year catalogue of several hundred advertisers, community leaders and classical music aficionados who have been immortalized with little brass nameplates outside the rear parking lot of the building.

There’s the KFAC mural next to the main entrance depicting former on-air personalities like Dixon and Crane cavorting with the likes of Beethoven, Mozart and Bach.

And there’s the Villa Capri itself--an eatery made famous by the mix of celebrities and hoodlums who used to drop by for a bite or a beer before it closed for good five years ago. Back in the KFAC kitchen, a final surviving Villa Capri menu framed near the microwave features Steak and Pepper Sinatra as the most expensive entree on the menu at $16.50.

In a way, it isn’t at all strange that a classical recording library containing more than 5,000 albums should find its final resting place in a former Hollywood hangout for Sinatra’s Rat Pack. For decades, KFAC’s mix of kibbitz and culture were an entertaining and informative introduction to music appreciation for Hollywood’s nouveau riche who hadn’t the time to dabble in chamber music on the way up the entertainment industry ladder.

“When I started in 1946, Los Angeles was regarded as a cultural wasteland,” Dixon said. “Classical music was a rarity. KFAC pioneered (classical music broadcasting) and Crane, Dixon and Princi were part of it.

“The station went through many phases of style. When I started, talk was restricted to the introduction of a work and a back-announce or after-the-piece identification.”

As they went through various owners, KFAC’s announcers became increasingly stylized in a show-biz sort of way.

“The last owners (Fritzinger) wanted a more informal approach--something akin to a combination of Albert Schweitzer and Rick Dees,” Dixon said.

The new KFAC president was a Hollywood publicist herself before she married violinist Jascha Heifetz’s son.

Heifetz said she believes that somewhere in the vast KFAC recording collection, there may even be an ancient recording or two of Sinatra “and that orchestra. . . . What’s the name of the orchestra leader? I forget.” (It was the late Nelson Riddle.)

From its very beginnings more than 50 years ago, KFAC was the pseudo-cultural plaything of Southern California’s very rich. The son of E. L. Cord, creator of the classic Cord automobile, was its first owner. Both Crane and Dixon recall working for him in the 1940s, before it even became important to advertise as well as announce a bit of history about the next Mahler selection.

“We had to play commercials and then we had to learn how to bury those commercials,” Crane recalled. It was tough following an Enrigo arpeggio with a Big Red chewing gum commercial, he said.

But, gradually, over a generation, KFAC found its rhythm. Each morning at 9, the station carried a syndicated primer on classical music hosted by Karl Haas. There was Martin Workman’s “Luncheon at the Music Center,” which featured daily schmoozings with cultural mavens from all over the country, discussing their latest openings. A. James Liska broadcast jazz on weekends. Various multicultural musical shows featuring everything from Irish folk music to Canadian symphonies, came and went from the KFAC schedule.

Princi himself admits the ham in him, plus his lust for opera, kept him going with his daily dose of arias on “The World of Opera.”

All of that is gone now.

Princi, 66, is getting on with his career of public speaking and maybe doing a little dabbling in voice-over announcing for commercials. Judging by what he heard last week, Princi says KFAC sounds almost exactly like its non-commercial competitor farther down the dial, KUSC-FM (91.5). In February, as he does every year, Princi will emcee the Viennese Culture Club ball in Los Angeles.

“I honestly don’t wish (the new owners) any harm, but I am confused,” Princi said. “I don’t know what they have in mind, but they’re not going to make any money duplicating what KUSC does.”

Goldfarb and Heifetz attempted to lure KUSC’s Gail Eichenthal to KFAC last month, but the veteran Los Angeles Philharmonic announcer chose to remain at the public radio station. They were more successful with KUSC’s other well-known on-air personality, Rich Capparela. He joined John Santana, Mary Fain and Bernie Alan in replacing the Old Guard at KFAC.

Dixon says he just shakes “my aged woolly little head and wonder at it all.

“I could accept the firing easier if I thought they were going to save money,” he said. “For the next couple of years, at least, they are not. It would be easier if I could recognize our replacements as possessing more talent. They do not.”

Crane agrees, noting that the current trend of bland personalities playing lots of music with fewer commercials cannot last.

“Anyone who thinks that art and commercialism are separate entities is living in a fool’s paradise,” Crane said.

Though he will be 69 in March, Crane doesn’t fear the prospect of unemployment. He started out in Hollywood 50 years ago as an actor and, despite spending 39 of those years as an announcer over KFAC, acting may be where he finishes up his career.

“I was the first one to speak in ‘Gone With the Wind.’ I was one of the Tarleton twins,” Crane said. “George Reeves was the other one. Me and Superman.”

Crane plans to return to acting and maybe some voice-over commercial work. He appears later this month on the daily soap opera “General Hospital” and as a guest on ABC-TV’s “Our World” with Linda Ellerbee.

But he would rather be back on the night shift at KFAC, along with his old friends Bach, Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov.

“We’re going to continue to play oldies,” Argow said, sitting in the office that was once the bar for the old Villa Capri.

“We’re also going to upgrade the FM transmitter facility,” Heifetz said.

“What we want to do is play what people want to listen to and, based on research, record sales and what has been popular for hundreds of years, we think we’re doing just that,” said Goldfarb.

“What you have to have is a dynamic sense of growth,” he said.

But Fred Crane dismisses Goldfarb’s words as so much sophistry.

“Oh, maybe I am a dinosaur,” he says, “but I think it’s absurd for someone to believe that the general public, who pay the tab for that radio station, will put up with it.”

Dixon points up a sad irony to his summary dismissal: After four decades on the radio, he found out who his audience really was.

“Because publicity is rather obscure in our pursuit of broadcasting the classics--we are not, after all, your typical day-to-day hot copy--we felt more or less like anonymous creatures,” he said. “I have actually received more recognition by being fired than at almost any other time in my career.

“I had no idea that so many people considered me a part of their daily lives.”

Crane said that knowing how loyal, eclectic and far-flung his audience really was does not lessen the poignancy. He stops short of pronouncing a curse on the new owners, but even now he is tempted.

“I think I make my point,” he said finally. “I don’t want to beat it to death, but it really does deserve a considerable flogging.”