Presenting: Walt Bodine - Voice of the People
A Local Treasure on Radio and Television
It’s midnight, and I’m listening to a woman on the radio eloquently, if vociferously, defend President Lyndon Johnson who she feels Bishop Frank misquoted in regard to saying there would be military victory in the Vietnam War “at any cost.” The woman, who speaks with the same properness as Deborah Kerr’s governess from the King & I, calls the misquote “absolutely irresponsible,” insisting on the indefensibility of allowing the remark to stand because it constitutes libel. The radio host calmly demurs to the caller and agrees to listen to the tape of the bishop, who he calls a friend.
Walt Bodine
The exchange is 11 minutes, and is probably the most intense, yet polite, debate that ever took place on the Vietnam War on any radio show. No surprise, considering the host was Walt Bodine, who helmed the show Nitebeat 1965-1968; the segment, along with many highlights of Bodine’s 60-odd year career, are archived online at KCUR, and in the Central Branch Library’s Missouri Valley Room, should anyone want to visit – or revisit – the broadcasts that made Bodine a local treasure on radio and television.
“I spent a lot of time on television,” says Bodine says of his career, of which the last 26 years have been spent on KCUR, broadcasting first in an evening slot then taking the familiar morning spot in his seventh year with the station. “A dozen years on KMBC and on WDAF. Overall I finally figured out that I’ve worked on seven radio (stations) and four TV (stations).”
Speaking post-show – that day, he and co-host Gina Kaufmann spoke to writer Sarah Dunant about her book on women in Renaissance Italy – Bodine asks for his producer Jamie Medlicott to join the conversation. Kaufmann and Medlicott have been with Bodine less than two years, but both have been indispensable to Bodine, as well as sharing a compatible work ethic. Though they both consider themselves to be learning from Bodine, he gives them both kudos as team members.
“The first thing we do is look at ideas and discard them or put them on the block. That’s how you get booked. We usually book folks two weeks ahead of time,” says Bodine. “We work carefully together. Gina does marvelous preparation for the show. I’m a little lax in that since I’m limited in eyesight. My presentation is (to) ad lib at any moment,” he says with a laugh. Medlicott, a transplanted Englishman, says all the ideas come from everybody. Meanwhile, he makes sure callers keep the pace of the show from slipping. As Bodine says, “We try not to get any deadheads.”
The man who coined “What do you say to that” has always been and remains, regardless his dimmed eyesight, a keen observer. His bio on the KCUR site pinpoints his first job at bringing people news of their world; he wrote a page-long story about a huge bird haunting Bodine’s childhood neighborhood of Troost and Linwood. Bodine charged his school friends a penny each to read it and hand it back to him so he could pass it along. Occupying the 10 AM slot, Bodine queries guests and takes calls from listeners with the same sense of simply passing a story along. Prosaic though some stories might be, not every reporter possesses Bodine’s ability to hold his listeners’ hearts and minds.
It’s the voice: Warm, percolating with a lively humor and curiosity to hear what others have to say. That Bodine listens makes him a rarity among today’s radio personalities.
Kaufmann, who Bodine affectionately calls the real star of the show, says,” I can’t imagine a more generous mentor.” The former French major had racked up what she jokes as a lot of “related” coursework with the interest in being a writer. Since joining Bodine, whose admittedly diminished eyesight necessitates some assistance, Kaufmann has, both, guided and taken cues from the jovial Bodine.
“She’s terrible. She raises hell with me,” says Bodine.
As a voice whose career has run parallel to that of the industry he’s worked in for some 60 years, Bodine possesses the rarer-still ability of being humbled to learn the extent of his on-air image. Such as when I call him a radio presence.
“Imagine that,” Bodine says. “I’ve been described as a number of things. That’s the first time I’ve heard myself described as a radio presence,” intoning the last word playfully.
When Kaufmann tells Bodine that his television spots have been captured on YouTube, Bodine gets another jolt of surprised humility.
It’s infrequent the day someone isn’t approaching Bodine to tell him the shows that affected them most. Bodine says people still stop him on the street to tell him their favorite shows.
“One of my most often remembered by other people is Nitebeat. It came on at 10 o’clock at night and went off at one; (it was just) talking to people. It was a fine story.” He stops himself to ask me, “You don’t remember that, do you? Since then, I’ve had many people come up to me, mostly men, and say, ‘I remember you on Nitebeat.’ Kids would get their portable radios and listen under the covers.”
Kaufmann concurs: “I would hear this too, people listening to Nitebeat under the covers.”
Bodine would laugh if described as not slowing down; he has slowed down, but he hasn’t bowed out of the work that made up the race of his life. As of August 27, Bodine doesn’t plan on taking an off-day for what will be his 89th birthday. Nor does he plan on making it the focus on the show. “We’re just going to plough ahead,” Bodine says. “We hope to do a good show that day, and that’s that.”
What do you say to that?
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TheDLC 10:53:51 AM - Thursday, August 27, 2009
Walt should retire