George and Barb, you both have a huge impact on our community thanks to your work in local radio and television. What makes you so passionate about the community? Did you grow up here? 

George: I was born in a small coal mining camp in a company owned town out in Erie, very small. When I was seven years old, the vein of coal that they worked depleted and they had to—there was no more work—so we came to Longmont and my father bought the house that I still live in to this day. That would be 77 years ago. So, in an earlier day, the people of Erie and the tritowns – Frederick, Firestone, and Docono–were kind of dependent on Longmont for their center of commerce. At payday, the coalminers would come to Longmont as the closest town to buy groceries and they’d get a new pair of overalls from JC Penney–this was the place to come! I’ll tell you, the big entertainment was to drive downtown on a Saturday night when it was angled parking on main street and see your friends walking by and have a visit with them. It provided the social outlet that didn’t seem to exist in any other way.

What’s interesting is there’s no vestige around here of the coal industry which was a major part of the economy. Because all of the mines have been tippled, I don’t think you could find ‘em around here.  There is a little museum in Lafayette. There’s in Erie a statue of a coal miner and the names of coal miners on the plaque at that statue and there’s one in Louisville which are the only vestiges I think of that early day industry that helped this area develop along with agriculture.

Wow! To stay for 77 years is like a love-letter to Longmont in and of itself! What made you stick around?

George: I always loved this town and I still do even though it’s changing a lot. You know, I went to CU but I was very much a homeboy and even in Boulder I got homesick for Longmont to the extent that I walked home from Boulder once on the weekend! I had that great need to not be too far from home for too long.

Barb, did you grow up here, as well?

Barb: Well, I’m a newcomer, actually, only ten years.  I’m a Midwestern heartlander originally from Wisconsin but when I first moved to Colorado I was in the coal town of Walsenburg. George and I often talk about the coal piece, in fact. After that, I lived in Colorado Springs and Taos, and then about ten years ago my husband and I bought a condo here in Longmont.

In the mid-70s when I lived in Walsinburg, the coal mining was over but I went to the public library soon after I got there to look up what books and they must have had 30 copies of the same book. It was The Great Coal Field War by George McGovern who was one of our presidential candidates in that era. And it was his doctoral dissertation on the Ludlow Massacre that happened in Southern Colorado. And there was also the incident on Main Street in Walsinburg where militia came in and seven people were killed during the era when the miners were trying to unionize because of safety issues and whatever. So, even though I never lived through that, the fact that my first place in Colorado was so impacted by that is something George and I have in common.. But it’s interesting that when I first started volunteering here it was about maybe 9 years ago, I don’t know how we hit on the fact that we had some similar memories but I’ve bonded with George over appreciation for the history. Anyway…

As a transplant, what made you decided to stay, Barb?

Barb: You know, I feel like we’re bonding to the community. When my husband and I were leaving Taos, we had never been in Longmont but we looked at a condo here and in 45 minutes we had signed the contract. As we were later unpacking boxes we plugged in our cable box and were channel surfing when we hit upon Channel 8. It happened to be playing a documentary done by Linda Lea who was the director here years ago in the mid-2000s. It was called Portrait of Longmont. Well, we stopped unpacking and watched the Arapahoes here and then the Burlington Township and then the Chicago Colony and then the early settlers: Dickens and then the canning company and the Klu Klux Klan and IBM coming in…Nowhere have I ever lived have I gotten such a comprehensive history of the place and I just thought it was marvelous: the media leaders have such an appreciation for capturing and sharing our history here. And it still plays here today!

Well, the next week I went to the Senior Center because I heard it was such a great place. I picked up a GO Magazine and in the GO it said there was a new club forming—the video production club—and I went to the very first meeting and was hooked. So, I just felt there was some doorway that opened when I moved here: the feeling of  that’s what I should be doing.

If you’ve been volunteering for about 9 years, Barb, you must’ve gotten involved very soon after your move to Longmont—how did that come about? Did you have a background in film?

Barb: I had none—I come from a nursing background, actually, but I ended up working on media and marketing for cancer screening so I morphed from health care into messaging and media. I was chomping at the bit to do film and when I saw the senior center here was starting a media club I thought “This is the club for me.” The other thing that drew me in is that LOCAL identification: local stories, local news, local history. And I can’t believe how much I learn and what a great little networking group this is.

George, do you have a background in radio or did you also come to that later in life?

George: I do have a background in radio. I shouldn’t admit it, but I was around before television came to this area. As a kid, I listened to the radio and all those shows like Fibber MdGee and Molly and The Lone Ranger and the Jack Benny Program. I would spend hours listening so when radio came to Longmont in 1949 in the form of KLMO 250 watt AM station, I started hanging around the station. Well, the people who ran it liked to go for coffee across the street to a place called William’s Cafe. Because I was always watching what was going on at the station they said “Hey kid, would you like to learn to sequel records while we go have coffee?”

Prior to that, they had a little RCA record player that only played 45 RPM records and they would put a stack of records on and go out. Well, the changers weren’t fool proof and sometimes a new recording failed to drop down and you’d hear the same one over and over or it would get stuck in a groove or something like that. So having a live person there playing actual records on turntables–and they were big in those days–they let me do that and I was truly hooked from that moment on. And when I was a high school senior (close to those year), the station changed hands and the people who bought it–a flamboyant Texan named Grady Franklin Maples–asked me if I’d like to be their newsman. So I started at the age of 17 in radio and have been associated one way or another ever since. I went on to CU and got a degree in journalism and worked for the local radio station for about 15 years. I guess it gets in your blood in some way or another.

After that, I went to work for the school district when they opened a new vocational high school called the career development center. They asked me to start a program that was called Communications in Media and hit upon the idea of having a radio station they could operate. Well, I got a non-commercial educational station that was for 10 watts—couldn’t hear it very far, haha!—but it was basically the beginning of KGUD. When radio station fell out of favor I asked the FCC to convey the license to a non-profit and KGUD was born as Longmont Community Radio. I begged, borrowed and scratched what I needed and the community has been great. It has very humble beginnings. Now we have a license to go to 1000 watts, which I hope will happen this summer.

I’m curious—media has changed in so many ways, especially in the last decade. How do you see the impact in radio and television?

George: I have a notion that communication is so important it ought to be considered a public utility just like water and sewer. And if you think about it a little bit, what makes a community? A community coalesces because of what we know about each other. And that’s the goal of Channel 8 and KGUD radio is to let the community know about each other because people who are friends just naturally get along a little better.

What I find kind of fascinating is that the founders of the U.S. knew the importance to the extent that we have a guaranteed free press in the constitution. And they–even though I guess newspapers were the primary means of communication in that era–they could see that a relatively unbiased source of information was so important for the wellbeing of the country that the guarantee of freedom of the press should go into the constitution. That’s something we shouldn’t lose sight of. And with the decline of newspapers and that form of communication that doesn’t mean that alternative forms of communication can’t pick up the slack. I think that’s a goal that we need to strive for. Originally, my real goal with KGUD was news—I’ve spent the better part of my career in the news business—but it’s very intensive to produce. So, our format is easy listening music. And with the help of technology, two volunteers can run the station 24/7.

The station is run by volunteers. JB is the voice of the people here on the radio—he has a wonderful baritone, authoritative voice where I do not, so my job is mostly paperwork and being-the-scenes things at the radio station. It exists by virtue of people sending in contributions. We play a musical format that only adults would care about. We don’t play hip hop or rap or techno because that’s a little out of the league of two 80 year old volunteers. But there are a lot of older people in Longmont who remember music that is called easy listening and that’s what we play here.

Barb: Well, I’m usually here during the day and occasionally someone will come in with a contribution for KGUD and one that I will never forget was a younger woman from Loveland. She said: “You know, I discovered your radio station. I can’t get it all the time where I live, but I can drive to a certain place where I can receive it in my car and when I’m feeling anxious”—she was affected by panic and anxiety attacks—“when I feel one coming on in my car, I drive to where I can listen to KGUD radio and I close my eyes and it’s the best therapy I’ve ever found!” And you know, George, she was not a day over 40.

George: I have gotten two letters–one as recent as two weeks ago from a lady in Thornton who said “my husband died unexpectedly.” She wrote: “We had listened to your station and after he died I kept your radio on continuously 24 hours a day because I found it a source of comfort and thank you very much.” and she sent a contribution. I had a similar incident in Boulder where a mother was sick and her daughter said she so enjoyed the music of that station. I told JB maybe we ought to use the slogan “music to die for!” Ha!

Barb: That’s a new one for me! Hahaha!

Oh, my! Lovely sentiment and a bit of dark humor—ha! So Barb, how have all these changes in technology affected Channel 8 Local Access TV?

Barb: I think Channel 8 and KGUD tends to go for quality over quantity and we’ll see how it goes as we start incorporating newer technology. I’m doing a series of clips on my phone of all the little visuals in our Longmont parks. We also did some testing with iPhones and and iPad when we filmed some of the Longmont Symphony, so we’ll see.

What kind of stories is the TV Production club and Channel 8 producing these days?

Barb: So, in linkage with George, Channel 8 television station comes from Comcast subscriber fees but Channel 8 is also a non-profit. Many people think it’s a City thing but it’s a non-profit run by the Longmont Cable Trust. It’s a PEG station. P is for Public Access–that is totally volunteer-produced programming, programs of interest to the people living in Longmont. The E is Education — school board meetings, St. Vrain Valley sports report, that kind of thing. And the G is for Government –City Council and the planning commissions and things that the city government wants to get out on different initiatives. So Channel 8 also does not do programming of a commercial nature. We’re not littered with ads and commercials. And with so much of the news nowadays being 24/7 sound bites of what we should worry about next, we instead choose to produce programs of an evergreen nature. I call it ‘talking pictures’ or documentaries that tell a story.

Some of our programming may take a year or more to produce–the history of the Callahan family and the Callahan house or the history of the Hover Home vignettes. The Spellbinders Storytellers that are sponsored by the library that tell stories in the elementary schools in Longmont. The Shona Sculptor from Zimbabwe that lives here in Longmont and does his art. Mandolin maker in Niwot, a water color painter, the history of the Risbee church on 63rd street. It all starts because someone gets an idea and we form crews while someone does research for historical pictures or writes a script. Someone comes up with an idea and we put it all together.

We have around 30 volunteers at any one time. We have two award-winning screenplay writers. We have two sound engineers who do original scores or audio cleanup. We have two professional animators who volunteer for us. We have three to four members with their own drones who go get aerial shots.

We have three or four people who have wonderful voices and do voice overs of scripts that someone has written and somehow it all comes together in a program that we show on Channel 8. The volunteers gift the programming to Channel 8. They don’t get any compensation for this. They can’t be paid under the table for their programming. And we also have almost 60 videos that we’ve made DVDs or BlueRays that we’ve gifted to the Longmont Public Library so people can check them out. For the last 6 years, the first Thursday of every month is the Big Picture at the Senior Center where we show our programs. These are things that I think will live on even if television should go away.

As we wrap up, is there a pearl of wisdom you’d like to leave us with? Do you have any compunction about growing older or aging?

George: Can’t do anything about it!

[laughter]

Barb: Oh, come on, George! Give us one of your witticisms!

George: Keep going. Keep going until you absolutely can’t go anymore. That’s what I think.

Barb: You know, I worked in a nursing home when I was in high school. Some folks were vibrant and others were more inactive. Around the same time I found a little gift card that said “When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.” and that’s kind of been a mantra for me—

George: —keep something to look forward to. Everything at the Senior Center counters the notion that “I sit at home.”

Barb: Yes! You walk in there and nothing is ever finished. Anyone can find a club, and activity, play pool, go on a trip, eat lunch, have coffee… don’t ever feel like you’re finished or it’s finished.

Thank you both again for letting me get the inside glimpse of what you do for the community.

The Eyes on Longmont video club meets Mondays at 9am at the Senior Center. For more about the Big Picture film screenings, see the GO Catalog. And listen to KGUD Community Radio at 90.7FM on your radio dial. Don’t forget to tune in Senior Moments, a 15 minute special program, every Saturday morning at 8am.

For more information, visit the Channel 8 website or the KGUD website.