Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
Joe Gwathmey, who founded Texas Public Radio with the merger of San Antonio Community Radio and the Classical Broadcasting Society of San Antonio, died Wednesday from natural causes at age 84.
"My sweet daddy passed away tonight," his daughter Sara Gwathmey wrote on Facebook. "Jesus came and got him to walk him home. He left us peacefully. [W]e were all in the room with him. I am so, so sad but relieved. Love you, daddy for always."
Gwathmey's career in radio began in 1958 when he began a part-time job at KBWD, a commercial station in Brownwood, Texas, not far from where he was born in 1941. He learned the craft of radio while attending Howard Payne College. He attended graduate school at the University of Denver and George Washington University.
The University of Texas at Austin hired Gwathmey to manage KUT-FM, the university's radio station, placing him in charge of one of the nation's largest educational radio production operations.
In 1969, he joined a group of educational station managers that eventually evolved into the founding board of directors of NPR. Gwathmey joined NPR two years later to help create its programming service. He later managed NPR's program production, news gathering, engineering and promotional activities. He also developed strategies to increase public radio participation in cooperative projects with foreign broadcasters and for marketing NPR programs abroad.
In 1983, NPR named Gwathmey vice president in charge of programming. Within two years, NPR's programming had become more extensive and diverse than ever before, winning numerous awards for production and journalistic excellence.
By the late 1980s, Gwathmey sensed an opportunity to bring NPR programming to listeners in the San Antonio region — the last large market in the country not served by an NPR-affiliate radio station.
He arrived in the Alamo City in 1988 and became general manager of classical KPAC-FM, and he worked with NPR to create KSTX-FM. He also guided a restructuring of the parent organizations licensed to operate KPAC and KSTX that resulted in the creation of a new non-profit corporation which he named Texas Public Radio.
In 1989, Gwathmey led efforts to greatly increase KPAC's transmission power. In 1992, he oversaw the construction of a new studio and office facilities near San Antonio's Medical Center area. Gwathmey also recognized the opportunity to improve service to residents in the Texas Hill Country north of San Antonio. In 1998, TPR launched a third station, KTXI-FM.
His tenure at TPR saw a steady growth in listenership, from an estimated 50,000 regular listeners in 1988 to a current total of about 150,000.
Remembrances
Nathan Cone, TPR's vice president of cultural and community engagement, said that "Joe was a thoughtful and steady leader at TPR, and I appreciated the way he listened, especially to our audience. I've read some of the archived correspondence over the years, and no listener concern was too small for him to address."
Cone added: "And way back in 1998, when I was given the opportunity to take on a position of responsibility at TPR, Joe signaled that he believed in me, which I appreciated. Finally, what an AMAZING voice he had. I can still hear his mellifluous baritone in my mind."
David Martin Davies, host of "The Source," reflected on his admiration of Gwathmey with gratitude: “Just like he did at KUT and then NPR, Joe built Texas Public Radio from the ground up. He did it all with kindness. But he was also willing to take chances. I benefited greatly from Joe allowing me in the TPR door [and] with launching 'Texas Matters.' And then later he hired me to start the TPR newsroom. I will always be grateful. I know that without Joe there would be no Texas Public Radio.”
"Joe Gwathmey was a pioneering force in Public Radio who greatly influenced my career and the direction of Texas Public Radio and NPR in its formative years,” said Ira Flatow, host of “Science Friday.” "His intelligence, instincts and intuition — as well as his great sense of humor — will be sorely missed. Condolences to his family and legions of friends and listeners."
Gwathmey is survived by his wife Linda, a daughter Sara, a son David, and grandson Luca.
Services will be held Saturday, March 22, at 11 a.m. at Oak Meadow Methodist Church on San Antonio's North Side.
Early life
Radio fascinated Gwathmey since childhood. In an interview with Cone in 2017, he recalled how it made him feel. "I did in fact think that there were little people inside the box. ... Radio was the way we found out about what was going on in the world. ... And radio afforded me a way right there at my fingertips to experience something that wasn't a part of my daily life."
Joe Neil Gwathmey, Jr., was born in January 1941, almost a year before Japanese imperial forces bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which formally brought the U.S. into World War II. "I was very young but I can remember that by 1945," he recalled, "I understood what was going on and that there was a war, [and] that we were doing our part."
He was born into a farming life, and his father, Joe Neal Gwathmey, who raised cattle, expected his son to work at his side and eventually become his partner. But his father and mother, Christine, also embraced his desire to explore the world around him. He learned to ride a horse and then a bicycle. The closest town was five miles away, and his parents granted him the freedom to roam.
"The experience of being able to go places was very important to me," Gwathmey recalled, "and my parents let me go, and there wasn't any restriction that I recall about where or how long I could be gone, which is maybe a little unusual for parents of an only child. They were pretty free with me."
As an only child, Gwathmey joked, in his parents' eyes "I could do no wrong ... except for when I did wrong, and then I got punished for it." But he enjoyed a comfortable, enriching childhood in a one-story farmhouse that, he said, was once a two-story farmhouse until a tornado blew off the top half. There was an outhouse in the back, which his mother regularly sprayed to kill any black widow spiders.
His parents signed him up for piano lessons and lessons in oratory, "harking back to the days when elocution was a respected activity and people would take train trips to tournaments to attend public speaking events," he explained. His aunts were teachers, and they sent him books to read. As farming grew more difficult for Gwathmey's father, he encouraged his son to aspire for a different career and way of life.
Gwathmey was a good student in school, but his achievements were met with jealousy from his classmates. "Farm boys were not supposed to be really good students," he recalled. Some classmates teased him for being smart, for being taller than most of the other students, and for not being very athletic, but others respected him and even voted him class president. He played trumpet in the school band, which brought him to San Antonio to march in the Fiesta Flambeau Parade.
After high school graduation in 1959, Gwathmey won a scholarship to Howard Payne College, which, he said, had "an emphasis on civic responsibility and participation in the political process, and I was very much involved in that. ... They encouraged me to think of myself as an educated person, someone who was an active participant in civic life." He majored in speech and graduated in 1963.
A radio professional
In his junior year of high school, in 1957, Gwathmey began working part-time at KBWD. He had won a public speaking contest that had been broadcast over the radio, and the owner asked him if he wanted a job in radio. Gwathmey accepted. "The nighttime disc jockey was willing to take me on and teach me radio," he recalled. "That's how it happened."
He worked there through college, playing music, producing commercials, and offering sports color commentary. He had a special love for sharing the weather, and not just for the region: "I really liked being in touch with the world [and] with that teletype that I used to sprinkle the temperatures in European cities into announcing — you know, 'just in case you're interested, in Copenhagen right now it's 35 degrees.' "
He studied international communications in graduate school at the University of Denver. He didn't know what "international communications" meant, but the school had "an outstanding school of speech and public speaking and theater — the whole gamut, from pathology of speech to rhetoric and oratory," and that excited him.
During his time at Denver, he received a fellowship to George Washington University "to study international communications from the practitioners' point of view and world affairs." He had a "very half-baked idea that I was going to prepare myself to go work in the State Department now and change the world through speech." But when he met other young men and women in Washington, D.C., he felt discouraged. "I was not prepared to compete with the young men, who," he said, "were in the military and were working on advanced degrees in the School of Business and International Affairs, which is my school. And I thought there's no way I'm going to catch up to these guys."
During the fellowship, he worked part-time at the university's public relations department. When he told his supervisor that he would soon return to Texas, she encouraged him to work at UT Austin's radio-television department. She knew the department head, and she wrote him a recommendation. To Gwathmey — who was about to get married to Linda, a classmate, but was otherwise unsure of his future — the idea felt right. "It fit my notion of how to land on my feet because through all these experiences," he said, "my orientation was to try to find ways to make the world a better place through communication, not just through speech."
By September 1965, he was a radio production supervisor, and he was overseeing KUT-FM. He felt proud that he was leading an endeavor that educated people, part of a long legacy of radio used for enriching the community around it. Educational radio stations at the time, he explained, "were providing cooking shows for housewives [and] homemakers, and they were providing farming information. It was very practical stuff. And the tradition expanded beyond the very practical and in the best tradition of extension education. Radio played an enormous role in providing education for the population at essentially no expense."
He started the new role by reaching out to all university department heads and invited their faculty to participate in a weekly radio program focused on a single subject, as long as the conversation could be relevant and interesting enough to a general audience. The programs would be shared with other stations. After a positive response, he said "we began to build what we call the Longhorn Radio Network. We even went so far as orange reels for the tapes." He eventually oversaw at least eight program series. "One of our most popular series was the Longhorn Band," he recalled. "Just a 15-minute program of band music." During football season he would interview Longhorns coach Darrell Royal.
The 1960s saw massive protests against the Vietnam War on campuses across the nation. UT Austin was no different, and Gwathmey used his microphones to capture their speeches demanding an end to the conflict. The relatively clean-cut farmer's son also realized that he may have instinctually kept his distance from the long-haired, peace-symbol wearing hippies on campus, but when he listened to their messages — focused on them audibly instead of visually — his perspective on them changed.
"Rather than having the visual cues of 'this guy's got hair down his back, and he's got a great big peace symbol hanging around his neck, and he therefore must be a hippie, and he has nothing to say that I want to hear,' you get that cue from what you see when you don't see it," he explained. "You're able to focus ... on what the guy is saying and whether it makes sense to you or not or whether it's offensive or not. ... And I thought, 'well, there's something radio can do that TV can't — because it relies on the image, and something that going to the event can't. How are you going to focus on the thoughtful things that are being said in that context?' "
The rise of NPR
By the late 1960s, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington D.C. assigned a staffer to explore how federal funding could be used to improve noncommercial radio. One of the initial steps, Gwathmey explained, was to bring together a representative sample of people who led educational radio initiatives to discuss ideas for what was possible. An advisory group was eventually formed, and Gwathmey used the university's national name recognition and his body of work to get elected to the group.
Gwathmey recalled he and others like him pointed to the broadcasts of the antiwar and civil rights movements as examples of the foundational goal of noncommercial radio — the work of responsibly illustrating a changing and complicated world to the general public — while also using the structure of commercial radio: "Let's provide that in a daily identifiable product because we want to be there every day [at] a dependable time because that's how people are using radio."
Those discussions led to the advisory group's evolution into the first board of directors for National Public Radio. Its first major experiment would be a program called "All Things Considered," which debuted on May 3, 1971.
Gwathmey, still at UT Austin, recalled the program’s early days as ragged and unsure of how to fill 90 minutes Monday through Friday, but also full of opportunity to surprise the listeners and tell them things they didn't know they were interested in learning about. "There was that factor in the early ‘All Things Considered’ that I think helped define what public radio is now," he added.
The program’s coverage of Washington included congressional hearings — "another characteristic that in the early days made NPR stand out," he recalled. "We were providing the opportunity for listeners to hear for themselves what was being said in those hearings," particularly about the Vietnam War, the Panama Canal treaty and civil rights.
Bill Siemering, director of programming and another of NPR’s founding directors, invited Gwathmey to Washington to take over operations for the program department. Gwathmey committed to doing it only for a year but then "that one year turned into 16 years." The fluid organization saw him take on multiple roles. "I had probably 15 different titles during my tenure at NPR. A title change a year!" he joked.
But he also brought order to the initial creative chaos caused by so many different professional experiences clashing against each other. "I used to say it felt like being the desk sergeant in a police precinct. I had a lot of mediating to do. … I could say to the creative types in programming 'this is the way it has to be done. And you're hearing it from programming not from engineering and operations.'" He also developed overall programming guidelines that "gave them some leeway to exercise their creative potential."
But after weathering a financial crisis at NPR in the 1980s, stressful internal fights among NPR and the member stations, along with heart surgery in 1987, Gwathmey was convinced that it was time for a change.
He learned of an opportunity back in Texas that might appeal to his overall mission for public radio and his recent experience as a senior leader at NPR. There was a classical music station that needed a manager, and there was talk that it may be paired with a news-focused sister station. It would be a challenge, but it would also be closer to home. It would fulfill his lifelong aspirations for radio, and it was in a city he loved: San Antonio.
The birth of Texas Public Radio
Gwathmey reviewed the opportunities in the Alamo City and thought back to his time at KUT as he considered what he could accomplish in San Antonio. "We would try to be a reasonable outlet for people who had things they wanted to say,” he recalled, “but within a framework of well-produced information programs that were well researched and could be depended on."
In San Antonio, he encountered supportive voices of people who came from other parts of the nation, where they had greatly enjoyed public radio and wondered if that richness of content was possible in the Alamo City.
He also remembered a morning when he opened a San Antonio newspaper and saw a local news headline: "Exploding Snail Blinds Woman!"
"And I thought, 'San Antonio needs an NPR station.' Oh dearie me!"
Gwathmey met the board of directors of KPAC, the classical station, and showed them a draft schedule of programs that he could put on the new KSTX. The board liked what it saw, and Gwathmey was hired. KPAC and KSTX would, together, be known as Texas Public Radio.
"We chose 'Texas Public Radio' as the name for the merged organization anticipating the possibility of expanding our reach to other communities all over the state," he explained. "And that was something we were signaling by the choice of 'Texas Public Radio' as the name. It also was a whole lot better for marketing than 'Classical Broadcasting Society' or 'San Antonio Community Radio.' "
KSTX went on the air in October 1988 — just barely. The night before the station was supposed to go live, he remembered, the link between the transmitter and the studio failed. An engineer called colleagues around the U.S. as he looked for the part he needed. He found it in Seattle, bought a seat for it on an airplane, and had it flown to San Antonio.
As he went to bed, Gwathmey had no idea if it would arrive in time. "[But] when I woke up about 6 o'clock the next morning," he recalled, "I turned on my radio, which was tuned to 89.1, and there was a beautiful thousand cycle tone, and I knew that the link was operating, and we were on the air."
The easy part was over. Gwathmey now knew he had to save what he had just created. KPAC had serious financial issues, and his strategy was to use KSTX's new offerings to attract a wide range of contributors, form a solid financial foundation of loyal listeners and consistent supporters, and sustain both endeavors.
Fundraisers were directed at old and new listeners, and they were invited to contribute to either the classical music or the news and information. "Otherwise," he explained, "all contributions were going to support all of TPR—both stations."
Gwathmey received glimmers of hope that it would eventually work out. For example, one day he received a phone call from an "unabashed classical music fan" who told him, "Joe, I've been listening to KSTX, and my only problem is that it is so interesting I can't stop listening."
"It was always my thought that we wanted to reach a point at which we could produce network quality programs [for KSTX] that dealt with specific local interests and concerns," Gwathmey said, "and do it in a way that would be a natural counterpart to what was available to us both in classical music programs and in information programs from other more established sources."
He also looked for ways to reduce dependence on federal funding. "We were depending on those grants through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for about 25% of our income. And that was way too much," he said. "By the time I left in 2006, we had knocked that back down to less than 10%. Closer, I think, to [8%]."
‘The window on the world’
Gwathmey and his wife Linda adjusted to life together in San Antonio in the 1990s and 2000s. Their children preferred to remain in Virginia, where they had grown up. Linda studied at a seminary and was later ordained in the Baptist church. Joe became an ordained deacon in the Methodist church.
Gwathmey retired from TPR in 2006. “I had what I felt was a very good middle management team in place," he said 10 years later, "and I felt like I was handing off an organization to a new manager ... who could take it and run with it. So I felt very gratified that I was leaving at a good time, [and] the time had come for me to move on. ... And I felt that I could leave with my head held high. Under my watch we had brought the organization to a stable position and that we had talented people and had the opportunity to do some good things. So I felt I wanted to become a listener and enjoy the fruits of my labor. And that has worked."
Gwathmey admitted that despite facing a world dominated by smartphones and social media, he never lost his fascination with radio.
"I have occasionally gone back to visit where I grew up. ... [T]here is a cemetery down the road where many of my forebears are buried. Stopping there and visiting for a little while, it has been amazing to me to think that in my pocket is a device that I could use to reach anybody in the world, essentially. And how far removed that was from my growing up days with radio as the window on the world."
