KUAR — Little Rock, Arkansas (Round 1)

June 1995 – August 1996

I began broadcasting on KUAR-FM 89.1 by hosting a weekly half-hour interview program as part of an independent study class at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I eventually started working part-time for the NPR station while continuing to anchor and report for commercial news station KARN. I eventually moved away from Arkansas, spending 12 years working as a journalist in Richmond, Virginia and Miami, Florida, but returned to KUAR in April 2009 to work as a reporter and anchor, eventually being promoted to news director.

I first met Station Manager Ben Fry and other station leaders in May 1993 at an annual public radio conference in Washington, DC. It was while I was serving as an intern with the C-SPAN Cable Network helping to produce the public radio program C-SPAN’s Weekly Radio Journal, which was aired on KUAR. I had first heard the show a couple of years before then on KUAR. They were excited to meet someone from Little Rock who was involved in one of the national programs they were airing and we had a good conversation which helped begin building a professional relationship.

A couple of years later I got my first opportunity to produce a program for KUAR through an independent study class. Each week during the summer of 1995 I prepared a half-hour interview program called Newsroom. I would find topics for the show and line up guests, with most interviews being conducted at the station. It was my first taste of doing any kind of long-form interview program and I really enjoyed it. Having that kind of time to delve deep into subjects that interested me was amazing. Before then, I had only produced short reports in the 40-second range. I sound pretty goofy in these early shows and clearly hadn’t gotten very comfortable hosting a program, but I felt like I was leading meaningful conversations.

AUDIO: KUAR’S program Newsroom on June 15, 1995, interviewing leaders of an Arkansas Vietnam veterans group about issues like finding missing soldiers and treating those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

AUDIO: Newsroom on July 20, 1995 discussing a one-year, one-cent sales tax proposal to develop Little Rock’s riverfront area, which was then mostly abandoned warehouses. The proposal, which was approved by voters on August 1, also included building an arena in North Little Rock and expanding the Statehouse Convention Center. I spoke with Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey, a proponent of the project, and Pulaski County Property Owners Association President John McCaleb, who was against it.

I was eventually hired at the station and spent about a year serving as a fill-in Morning Edition news anchor and host. I also ran NPR jazz programs in the evenings on KUAR, while hosting a classical program on sister station KLRE-FM 90.5. Never being much of a classical music fan and not even being sure how to say the names of composers, I was a pretty terrible classical music host. I’m sure listeners could tell I had no idea what I was talking about. Also, I was pretty much just randomly grabbing CDs out of our library, not having any kind of structure for what I was playing.

Interviewing inmate before his execution

In August 1996, I produced a special half-hour program on a pending execution in Arkansas. I had covered many executions over the years for KARN, but this was the only time I interviewed an inmate before a death sentence was carried out.

I learned about Si-Fu Frankie Parker through a neighbor of mine who was involved with a Buddhist group that Parker had become a member of while in prison. You can read more about his case in an article I wrote for the Little Rock Free Press. Parker had been sentenced to die for killing his ex-wife’s parents. He also shot and injured a Rogers, Ark. police officer during a stand off at a police station. I got to know many of Parkers’ friends in the Buddhist group and they encouraged him to agree to be interviewed by me.

I spoke with Parker at Tucker Prison, where the Arkansas Death Row was housed, two weeks before his execution. I also interviewed then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who had denied Parker clemency and made scheduling the execution his first official act after taking office. It was rather unique for a governor to talk at length about an execution, justifying why he felt it should be carried out. The program aired on the morning of August 8, 1996, hours before the execution took place.

AUDIO: A special program I produced that aired on August 8, 1996, the day of Si-Fu Frankie Parker’s execution. It includes parts of my interviews with Parker and then-Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The program would win a first place award from the Arkansas Associated Press for Best Enterprise/Investigative Reporting. I also covered Parker’s execution that evening at Cummins Prison, where the death chamber was housed. Needless to say it was a unique experience reporting on an execution after having spent a brief time with the inmate.

At that time, KUAR was located on the top floor of Stabler Hall, alongside the classroom for the Radio/TV/Film Department. It was a rather odd and uncomfortable building in a lot of respects, with long ramps and bathrooms only on alternating floors. I had heard the university ran out of money during its construction, so it wasn’t completely finished as intended. I had to laugh when I was watching C-SPAN in 2003, which was following former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas as he was promoting his memoir “Best Lawyer in a One Lawyer Town.” One stop was at KUAR, where Bumpers grumbled while walking up a ramp, “This has always been the strangest thing that the elevator didn’t come to the last floor.”

I posted about 10 minutes of that broadcast on YouTube because it shows what the old studios were like. Also, Bumpers was interviewed by Ron Breeding, my old news director at KARN, who later was hired at KUAR to build a full-fledged local news operation. KUAR would later move to a shopping center the university acquired on the southern edge of campus which was much easier to get in and out of with much more convenient parking.

By that time I was working in Miami, but would visit with Ron Breeding almost every time I was back in Arkansas to see family. During one of those visits I saw an event would be taking place at the Clinton Presidential Center, as well as every other presidential library in the country, celebrating the release of a new U.S. Postal Service stamp. The stamp commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955, a law that provided for the construction of presidential libraries and the transfer of presidential papers and other artifacts.

I pitched the story to CBS News Radio, which at that time I was still stringing for on the side, and my editors liked the idea. So I covered the event in Little Rock with former President Bill Clinton. I also filed a version for KUAR in exchange for being able to produce my report at the station. It was nice to earn a little money, finding an assignment to do while on vacation and to be able to be heard again with a report on KUAR.

AUDIO: My report for KUAR, aired Aug. 4, 2005, on the release of a stamp celebrating presidential libraries. Former President Bill Clinton took part in this event at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.

KUAR was a great introduction to working in public radio. I later became an anchor and reporter for South Florida NPR station WLRN-FM 91.3, spending six years there and eventually becoming assistant news director. In 2009, I moved back to Little Rock to work for KUAR a second time. I spent 13 years with the station, most of that as news director, until leaving at the end of 2022. I have a separate webpage dedicated to my work for KUAR during that era of my career which can be found here. All total, I spent 20 years working for NPR stations.

MY NEXT POSITION: WRVA – Richmond, VR

Page published in May 2002, most recently revised on Nov. 12, 2023.