KUSC MANAGER WELCOMES NEW CHALLENGE IN N.Y.

“It was time to leave,” said Wallace A. Smith, the general manager and architect of Southern California’s most successful experiment in classical-music broadcasting in more than a decade.

“In my mind, I have thought about other jobs, and when this job opened and I was invited to become a candidate, I threw my hat in the ring, and one month ago it got serious.”

So serious that after 15 years, KUSC-FM (91.5) will lose Smith to WNYC-AM and FM in New York come August.

“I’m leaving primarily because this is a new opportunity with new challenges,” he said this week from his offices in the off-campus studios of KUSC.

Smith, 52, took over KUSC in 1972 when it was still a low-power, on-campus, student-operated station.

Today it is a small empire, with satellite stations in Thousand Oaks (KCPB-FM (91.1)) and Santa Barbara (KSCA-FM (88.7)), all owned and operated by the University of Southern California. The primarily student staff has been replaced with professionals and the smattering of listeners has increased to more than 300,000. KUSC has the largest number of paying subscribers--30,000--of any public-radio station in the Los Angeles area.

A new general manager has not been named and, in fact, Smith will be a participant in the eight-member search committee to find his own successor.

In the meantime, Smith said that he is gearing up for his new assignment.

Both New York stations are licensed to the city of New York but are funded by a private, nonprofit foundation. Like KUSC, WNYC-FM is a 24-hour-a-day classical music station, but WNYC-AM is a low-powered public-affairs and news station that only broadcasts during daylight hours.

“But we have a permit to make it a 24-hour operation,” Smith said. “That’s an opportunity. And WNYC-FM is classical and 24 hours, but it’s focused its programming on 20th-Century music. That’s an opportunity.”

In his new position, Smith will also return to the fold of National Public Radio.

Two years ago, he dropped KUSC as an NPR affiliate and replaced most of the NPR public-affairs programs, such as “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” with offerings from the American Public Radio network, including “Monitor Radio.” Because KUSC became the largest station ever to defect from NPR, there were ill feelings between Smith and NPR President Douglas Bennet for a time.

But, according to Smith, Bennet was one of the first to call and congratulate him on his move to New York.

In addition to NPR, Smith will be moving to a metropolis that he criticized--albeit whimsically--in the latest edition of the KUSC listener’s guide.

In his monthly “Letter to Subscribers,” Smith described his recent stay at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, when he was interviewing for the WNYC job.

“I was determined to give New York its best opportunity to impress me that day,” he wrote. “Immersed in the civility and culture of the famed Algonquin Hotel, I bravely set about the task of absorbing New York’s culture.”

When he put on his radio headset, however, all he could get was rock and roll. He tuned into WNYC and its commercial rivals, WQXR and WNCN, but still, all he got was rock. Later, he wrote, he discovered that he was too close to the Empire State Building, where many of the radio transmitters are located in mid-town Manhattan, and his classical stations were being jammed.

Nevertheless, he spent a good deal of space in his column castigating his new home for the rock in its airwaves.

Didn’t he have anything good to say about New York City?

“Yes, I did, but my editorial staff took out the good stuff I wrote about it,” Smith said.