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Passion for Public Radio

Though he originally intended to major in physics—it was “the era of catch-up-with-the Russians,” he says—Kling eventually switched his major to economics, receiving his B.A. in 1964. But what really captivated him at Saint John’s was the student radio station. “As a child I loved radio,” he says. “I had a crystal set first, I had big console radios, I had long attennas that I strung from the garage to the trees in order to bring in distant stations—St. Louis, New York, Chicago. I took a lot of radios apart. I had some wonderful radios that would now be considered classics, and I simply destroyed them because I was curious about how they worked. Eventually I figured out how they worked, without electrocuting myself—which I now know I came very close to doing.

“So when I went to Saint John’s, I probably spent more time at the student radio station than I should have, and less time in the library. But in the end,” he says wryly, “it kind of worked out.”

How it worked out had a great deal to do with Fr. Colman J. Barry, OSB, a legendary figure in Saint John’s history. At the time, Fr. Colman was a professor of history who was soon to become president of the University. He was intrigued by Kling’s passion for radio. “He’d say, ‘Tell me why you’re so interested in that?’” Kling recalls. “‘Tell me—would that be a way for Saint John’s to reach out to the larger community?’ These conversations went on for a couple of years, and just as I was graduating he said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said I thought I’d go to graduate school, either in business or communications. And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you go into communications, and we’ll pay for it, and then when you come back we’ll give you a job to start a radio station.’ Now that’s a real leap. I was a college student with no experience. But Colman didn’t hesitate. So I went off to the Graduate School of Communication Arts at Boston University, and Saint John’s paid a good deal of the cost of living and tuition. When I came back in January of 1966, Colman said, ‘Here’s your office—start a radio station.’ A year later, on January 22, 1967, we put the first station on the air.”

The launching of KSJR-FM at Saint John’s came at the start of a pivotal period in American public broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was established by Congress in 1969; this meant money for local stations around the country, provided they could develop meaningful ways to use it. Kling participated in research that enabled public radio to be included in the CPB-establishing legislation—research that was crucial because, as he puts it, “in the beginning public television and Sesame Street were all the Congress knew.” In 1970, National Public Radio (NPR) was founded in Washington by CPB and a group of 10 public radio managers from around the country, including Kling, who believed their nascent medium needed a strong national news presence. Pooling their already-scarce resources, they created All Things Considered, a program whose excellence has since become a model for broadcast journalists everywhere. In 1978, the CPB announced plans to fund a national satellite system. As the chairman of NPR’s technology committee, Kling spearheaded a major change to the proposed system. “I met with the engineers who were building it,” he says, “and they said it was a mistake, that we were building a four-channel system that could only deliver programming. But stations around the country were beginning to prove that they could create great programs—and how would they get them heard? So we told the CPB we wanted a two-way system with 24 channels, and with at least 16 satellite uplinks around the country. It was a big battle; we almost lost it. But in the end they acquiesced, and that made an enormous difference. It opened up the voice of public radio to be the voice of the country, rather than just the voice of Washington, and to this day that’s been one of public radio’s great strengths.”

Meanwhile, back in Collegeville, the public radio business wasn’t quite booming. KSJR was broadcasting classical music, concerts, lecture series—working hard to embody Fr. Colman’s vision of extending the liberal arts mission of the Abbey and University into the community. However, says Kling, “we were losing money faster than we thought we would, and the answer seemed to be to expand.” He laughs. “That was the way Colman thought. So in 1968 we built a station in the Twin Cities.”

The new station did allow KSJR to reach a wider audience— but in ongoing conversations between Kling and Fr. Colman, the two began to see that mere expansion would not be enough. “We realized that this enterprise we’d embarked on wasn’t going to work if it had to be totally generated by and dependent on the University,” Kling says. “So we started talking about bringing in other people from the community to be on the board, and we created a separate nonprofit organization”—first known as Saint John’s University Broadcasting, then Minnesota Educational Radio, and finally MPR. To make this new nonprofit immediately viable, Kling says with undimmed awe, Saint John’s did a rare and remarkable thing. “They gave it away. Everything—the investment they’d made in my education, the money they’d spent on building the

first two stations and operating them for two years. Not to mention the labor: the monks, the brothers, built the studio. I designed them by reading books about acoustics, and the monks came and built them. The Abbey’s electricians wired them. When we needed a complex piece of equipment called a cavity filter, a highly technical thing, our engineer designed it and the plumbing shop at Saint John’s built it.

“In essence, they said—and here I’m talking about the Abbey, which ultimately made the decision—they said, ‘We’re going to give these assets to the community, because we think the broader community can take this further than we can.’ Their motivations were absolutely pure.”

The broader community has indeed taken MPR to heights not even Fr. Colman and Bill Kling could have dreamed of in the 1960s. Listeners, drawn by MPR’s mix of balanced, in-depth journalism and superlative music and cultural programming, have provided an ever-growing base of membership support. Regional foundations have given critical support for infrastructure, program development, and technological advances. Regional and national businesses have used program underwriting to raise their visibility with MPR’s audience of educated, engaged citizens. And, as the celebrated Powdermilk Biscuit poster incident illustrates, MPR has been unusually innovative in finding nontraditional sources of funding.

pany was sold to the Dayton Hudson Corporation (now Target) for $120 million, allowing MPR to more than quintuple its long-term endowment fund.

In Kling’s view, the key to Rivertown’s success lay in its origins. The Powdermilk Biscuit poster came not from a selling impulse, but from a desire to serve an audience—from Garrison Keillor wanting to thank his listeners, to learn where they lived (and in fact to determine whether they were out there in radioland at all). When the project went in an unexpected direction, MPR seized the day, and Kling managed the enterprise and its staff in much the same way that Fr. Colman had managed him. “You protect them,” he says. “You give them whatever good ideas you have to offer, and you let good people go. It’s a lesson well learned that sometimes, if your motivations are right, an organization or a service or a concept will thrive if you give it its own head, if you let it run on its own.”

He pauses, then returns once more to the theme of MPR’s origins at Saint John’s. “This institution arose from Colman’s interest in and ambition for what radio could do—not for Saint John’s, but for the people of central Minnesota through Saint John’s. He wasn’t looking to promote Saint John’s, he was looking to serve the people of that region. He had a vision for what this could be, and he protected it. [The original KSJR] was a place typical of Saint John’s, where you could try things, where you were urged to look

“If you look at the entities in public radio, a relatively small group of public radio managers created all of them, from NPR and American Public Radio”—a program distribution service, now known as Public Radio International, founded at MPR and later spun off to make its own independent future—“to any number of program directors’ associations, policy think tanks, fundraisers’ associations, and the like. It’s been a bootstrap, self-made industry, and a lot of its success comes from models based on the philosophy I found at Saint John’s: that it was about the good you could do versus what you got for it. If you do things for the right reasons, more often than not you end up being successful. And the right reason is usually to somehow serve an audience well. To serve the public in some way. Saint John’s has 1,500 years of experience in doing that, and I think their model’s a pretty good one.”

About the Author: Jeff Johnson is a communications consultant who lives in Minneapolis. This article is from the Autumn 2003 edition of Saint John's Magazine pp. 20-22.