The Public Radio Station That Could

By Deborah Horne
Seattle Local Board Member 

I don’t remember when I first got the news, nor even where I was. But I do remember the jolt it delivered.

KPLU to be sold to KUOW!

How could that be?

Never mind the horrifying way the news was delivered to its staff, reporters I had met on stories we were both covering. But what about me, a devoted listener? Had any of the men and women making the deal, including, astonishingly, the president of Pacific Lutheran University, thought about me?

I am not sure I realized how integral a part of my life the little public-radio-station-that-could had become.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose.

Before I came to Seattle, I knew nothing of its storied jazz history. But I was quickly introduced to it while here for my job interview. I was staying at the Edgewater Hotel on Seattle’s waterfront. Everyone at KIRO kept asking if my room “had a view?” I had, by then, been living for 15 years in Rhode Island, the “Ocean State,” and I had no idea what they were talking about.

Yes, I had a view, I told them. Of what, I wasn’t sure.

But more than that, in the bar was Primo Kim, playing the piano, live. 

Oh, how I wished I could have called my jazz-loving father who, by then, had been dead four years.

Jazz was so much a part of my and my sisters’ upbringing that it remains the thread through all of our lives. When I think of cleaning the house on Saturdays, I think of listening (and dancing with my father) to the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Stanley Turrentine (he especially loved the tenor saxophone) and so many others. It is what makes my sisters and me family.

And incredibly, this city I was considering moving to had a radio station devoted to the soundtrack of my youth.   

I took the job. And thus began a nearly quarter-century love affair with the Pacific Northwest and its jazz-and-blues public radio station.

I cannot imagine life here without KPLU.  And we must do all we can to ensure that I never have to.

This item was originally featured in the April 2016 local newsletter.