Looking Back on His KPBS-FM Radio Years : McManus Provided a Bit of Calm During Stormy Times

The first time Ken Kramer saw Tom McManus get angry was also Kramer’s first day on the job at KPBS-FM. A fledgling studio engineer, Kramer, now a reporter/producer with KSDO-AM, was late. Just as he arrived, the announcers on the air unthinkingly used the common colloquialism for flatulence.

Kramer rushed to put an album on the air to cover the announcers’ uncontrollable laughter. The first album he found: the William Tell overture.

Down the hall stormed McManus, the station manager, his face red, the veins in his forehead popping out.

“All he said was, ‘Couldn’t you find something else to play?’ ” recalled Kramer.

It was one of the few times in the 15 years Kramer worked at KPBS that he ever saw McManus upset.

McManus, who retired this month, spent 20 years turning KPBS-FM (89.5) from a tiny station barely heard outside the San Diego State University area into an integral part of the local radio scene, one of the strongest public broadcasting stations in the country. During those 20 years, few ever saw him angry.

“He was a wonderful calming force,” said KFMB-TV (Channel 8) reporter Hal Clement, who spent a summer working with the station as a documentary producer when he was attending SDSU.

McManus’ personality and style have shaped KPBS since 1968, when he became the station’s first full-time employee. If some people think the station’s programming is too conservative, it’s because McManus calls himself conservative. Conversely, people who have enjoyed the station’s more adventuresome programming--folk music, Spanish-language broadcasts, “Calling Moscow” among them--can also credit McManus.

“In public broadcasting there is a lot of talk about what they should be doing,” said Kramer. “He tried to take it beyond talk. It was an incredibly gutsy thing for him to take the nighttime programming, which was classical music, and say, ‘We are going to do Spanish-language news and information.’ Can you imagine the flak he took for that?”

McManus used his hand like an applause meter to describe the programming at KPBS as he relaxed on the couch of his college-area home.

He used to walk the mile and a half to work every day. The goal of public broadcasting, he said, pointing his forearm straight up, is for programming to fall somewhere in the middle, to attract an audience without catering to a specific audience in the fashion of a commercial station.

“We have to be alert to the need to be creative, not to fall into the trap of being a non-commercial commercial station,” he said.

At the same time, McManus said, public radio stations “should be held accountable. They should be forced to prove they’re reaching an audience.”

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, establishing a national system for funding public radio. In 1970, National Public Radio gave new structure to the public radio stations scattered around the country, with KEBS-FM, which became KPBS in October, 1970, as one of its charter members. A feature report by Kramer was included in the first broadcast of NPR’s now-popular “All Things Considered.”

“NPR gave us quality to reach for,” McManus said. “We could try to sound like the network.”

McManus, 57, has always been one of NPR’s biggest supporters. He served on its board of directors from 1974 to 1977, until he decided he “was not a political animal.” But he remained active in supporting public-broadcasting issues, helping to start California Public Radio, a statewide lobbying group, in 1974.

“He was always the one who articulated the importance of our basic mission of programming,” said Bill Siemering, NPR’s first program director, who served with McManus on the NPR board. “He was always an independent thinker.”

Craig Dorval, KPBS acting station manager, said McManus’ national prominence directly benefitted the station in terms of funding.

“Tom was extraordinarily good at getting national grants,” Dorval said. “I remember the very first National Public Radio conference I went to with Tom. Tom is not a networker; he’s not one to glad-hand. Tom was the person people would want to glad-hand with; he’s the one people were trying to network with. People came up to him.”

Although McManus expressed his undying support of NPR, even when it was within hours of going bankrupt in 1986, he is not 100% enamored with the public-broadcasting network. He would like to see it become more open to using programming produced outside its own studios. He is also “disappointed” with NPR’s “hesitancy” to cover Latin America.

NPR is “a little slow to respond,” McManus said. “It’s a little bit of a bureaucracy, I’m afraid. It’s not a big bureaucracy, but it is teetering on the edge of being a big bureaucracy.”

McManus would love to see NPR develop into an organization like the BBC or its Canadian counterpart, the CBC--independent, diverse, government-supported.

“He has always been concerned that public radio have a strong national system and presence,” Dorval said. “He saw the strengths of public radio, a system divorced from ratings, consensus opinion and marketing concerns.”

McManus, a 1949 graduate of Grossmont High School, had no intention of devoting a major portion of his life to public broadcasting when he left the operations manager job at KSDO in 1968 to become manager of KPBS, then KEBS. He simply wanted to be closer to the campus so he could complete his college education.

“It was not necessarily a good move careerwise,” he said.

Building the station, which at the time was broadcasting for only a few hours a day, became a challenge for McManus. He scrounged equipment from local radio and TV stations. One day the station discovered a cache of microphones hidden in one of its storage rooms, a major find in those days.

In the early days, the station aired lectures, features and classical music. With the addition of NPR programming, it programmed 50% classical music, with the rest of the time filled with features and NPR programming, a mix very similar to the current programming.

But through the years, McManus poked and prodded the programming, often to reflect his personal tastes--the folk music program ‘ ‘Enfoque Nacional, “ for example.

“Tom’s very committed to folk music; he’s a real fan,” Dorval said. “So they’ve always done a lot of folk music at KPBS, sometimes in the face of criticism or the lack of any feedback. And it paid off for us, in the terms of the enthusiasm of the audience and membership growth.”

McManus does admit to mistakes. In 1981 he switched the station’s focus to a local newsmagazine format, which was dropped in 1986 to return to classical music. What he hoped would be “different and exciting” programming turned out to be an incredible drain on KPBS’ limited resources. The station was forced to repeat programming throughout the day.

“We really were way out of our league,” McManus said.

In addition to constant problems of funding, McManus said KPBS must always battle “the threat of mediocrity.” He said NPR’s new policy of “unbundling” programming, asking stations to pay for individual programming instead of paying one fee to NPR, could be a “divisive force.”

“I don’t think the system is strong enough to support competitive programming,” he said.

The worst thing that could happen as public broadcasting becomes more popular, McManus said, is for it to start to program for “the lowest common denominator.”