Arizona Daily Sun from Flagstaff, Arizona • 37

public relations The SUN, Flagstaff, Arizona, Sunday, November 3, 1985 Sec. A3 day evening, Conductor Zubin Mehta leads the New York Philharmonic in a series of exciting programs. Tuesday evenings are devoted to concerts by the renowned, popular Philadelphia Orchestra, and Thursdays and Fridays, KNAU listeners are treated to concerts by the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. In addition, 22 Saturdays each opera season, Flagstaff listeners have access to the plush red and gold auditorium of New Yorks Metropolitan Opera House, and from the towering edifice on Lincoln Center are treated to two score plus of live performances of great operatic classics and exciting modern works on the 46-year-old Texaco Saturday Matinees. During The Mets off season, KNAU presents previously taped performances from the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Houston Opera, and, last summer, offered a history -making broadcast of the entire Richard Wagner music drama cycle, The Ring of the Nibelungs, as staged with a stellar international cast at the San Francisco Opera.

All of that sounds impressive. In fact, it all sounds just a little overbearing, too. KNAU has a delightful lighter side, typified by regular broadcasts of Garrison Keillors popular Prairie Home Companion, and a locally produced Sunday evening show called The Oldtimers Place, with Dr. Harold Widdison and Hamnett in the two host roles. That show relies principally on Widdisons extensive personal collection of tapes of historic commercial radio broadcasts dating as far back as 50 years ago, and, as a result, Sunday evening listeners are treated to such classics as Phil Harris, Jack Benny, Amos Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Henry Aldrich, and such thriller series as Johnny Dollar, Gangbusters, and Casey, Crime Photographer.

The historic broadcasts are interspersed with selections of big band jazz, and the result is an evening of complete nostalgia, unabashedly offered with a definite flavor of sentimentality Widdison, a sociology professor the university, has approximately 20,000 historic tapes in his own library and has access to even more through a nationwide organization devoted to their collection and preservation. We figured out the other day, Hamnett says, that we have enough tapes, in his personal library alone, to let us keep doing what do for the next 52 years. And, then, there is news. KNAU, with Matt Markiewicz director, has taken something of lead in solid radio news reporting Flagstaff and Northern Arizona. The news day begins at 6 a.m.

each day with two hours of Morning Edition, from National Public Radio, and fleshes out at 11:30 a.m. for a half hour with the stations locally produced, Mid-Day Magazine. Six days a week, different times, the station also airs the NPR news feature, All Things Considered. The results, Hamnett says, have been particularly gratifying, especially where local news is concerned. Since last December, KNAU never has failed to win some award from Associated Station manager Russ Hamnett checks through ty at Northern Arizona University to a record library at KNAU.

Hamnett took over watt public service "voice that covers all the station in 1981 and in 1983 directed its Northern Arizona, expansion from a 1 0-watt campus-bound facili- Radio KNAU at we as a in at monthly Press for its coverage of local and area news. The principal reason for KNAUs sustained success over the past two years, Hamnett says, is people, both 1 those on the staff either full or part-time, students who work for pay or credit, or sometimes both, and a corps of 11 volunteer producers, people with special expertise from the university community and community at large who donate time and effort to presenting shows that deal with everything from wine appreciation to understanding grand opera. The senior member of this corps is Flagstaff Symphony Conductor Harold Weller who joined the voluntary staff shortly after arrival here in summer 1982. Wellers Sunday afternoon program, Music Makers, has been on the air long before the power expansion in 1983. On the fulltime staff, chief engineer Bill Emshwiller and public relations director Tink Irvin both Please turn to KNAU, Page 6 A ticket to good listening is somewhere near Bismarck, I think Hamnett is manager of KNAU.

He took over the station in September 1981, and most of the work to increase the stations power, and thus increase the scope of its listenership and influence already had been done by the time be arrived in Flagstaff, from Radio WQED-FM, in Pittsburgh, a public service media consortium that operates radio stations, a commercial magazine, and the teelvision station that produces Mister Rogers and the spectacular specials done on behalf of The National Geographic Society. Reed Smith, previous manager of KNAU when it was very much a student station, already had made application for the various grants and matching funds that, in time, would allow KNAU to become what it has evolved into today, a station devoted to fine arts and information. The term fine arts, Hamnett explains, lets us encompass more than just classical music. We also can get into bluegrass and jazz, and, of course, into the fine art of journalism. We are about 75 percent music and about 80 percent of that is classical, of course.

The 88.7 spot on FM dials around Flagstaff reads every eek like a ticket to the great concert halls and opera houses of America. On Mon- Russ Hamnett can tell you the exact date and time Nov. 28, 1983, precisely 1:50 p.m. Hamnett and his staff threw the switches and Northern Arizona University had given the state a new, wonderful gift KNAU. Suddenly, what had been a small 10-watt, campus bound radio station blared out with 100,000 watts of power.

In time, reports would indicate it could be heard, at times, as far away as Sierra Vista, far south of Tucson, just east of San Diego, and near Grants, N.M. There even is one report in Hamnetts file in the cluttered, over-crowded offices of the station that KNAU has been heard in Wishek, N.D., which John Burk program director v'7 e-'-t tit.