Local radio’s Kurt Baker back where he belongs

ALBANY — Given his decades in the radio industry, a good many of them on the Southwest Georgia airwaves, Kurt Baker (nee Steiner) has an abundance of stories to tell.

He tried to get fired from his job DJing an all-night trucker show — three nights live from the sponsoring truckstop — but the more outlandish things he did the more popular his show became and the more celebrities (John Denver, Mel Tillis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Reed) dropped in. He worked with the likes of Jane Pauley and David Letterman. He had an inebriated George Jones walk out on his grand introduction at a Macon nightclub, and he interviewed everyone from Bill Clinton to Reba McEntyre to George Strait to Willie Nelson.

But Baker’s latest radio story may be his best.

Asked by a friend to help keep the Albany/Sasser-based WWQA Christian station on the air as it went through bankruptcy proceedings, Baker worked with judges, lawyers, bookkeepers, auctioneers and FCC officials to take the station through the most unlikely survival story maybe in radio history.

“Think what you want to think, but I have to say it: Jesus kept this radio station on the air,” Baker said. “It was absolutely the Lord’s will that we survived.”

WWQA not only survived, it has been purchased by Anderson, S.C.-based national Christian radio giant The Life FM and is now on the air 24/7 with a strong, clear 5,000-watt signal, playing Southern Gospel music between the mix of local and national programmming. And, like the little radio station that could, Baker has been plucked from the obscurity of an unfulfilling career in retail and put right back where he belongs: on the air and having the time of his life.

“I’d tried my hand at retail and was doing OK, but one day I looked around and realized I wasn’t happy,” Baker said. “I prayed, said, ‘Lord, you’ve given me this talent. What do you want me to do with it?’ Not long after, Frank Story saw me at Liberty Baptist Church and asked if I’d be interested in helping him keep the local Christian radio station going.

“I interviewed and went to work the next day … and it was a mess. They were operating on 10 percent power, had less than $10,000 in assets and were operating in a constant state of confusion because the station was tied up in the Lamad Christian Ministries financial mess. I spent a couple of weeks completely reprogramming the station, and that’s when the owners filed for bankruptcy.”

Baker, the new operations manager of the station, soon discovered that, despite all the brain power involved in its financial dealings, no one else involved knew anything about radio.

“Man, it’s a true miracle that the station stayed on the air during all of that,” he said. “No one knew a thing about what was going on. I knew there should have been money coming in, so I asked the bookkeeper who’d been put in charge of finances if he’d sent out bills. He said, ‘There are bills?’ And while all of this was going on with judges and lawyers and bookkeepers, I also had to deal with potential buyers.”

While all of Lamad’s other properties were cleared through bankruptcy, none of the officials involved was aware that the sale of a radio station has to first be OK’d by the FCC, a process that takes at minimum a couple of months.

“When they realized there was the whole FCC process to go through, the owner was ready to just give up on the station,” Baker said. “I convinced them to hang on while the process was going on, that there was enough money coming in to pay the bills. I can’t believe they did it, but they allowed us to stay on the air all the way through until The Life FM bought the station.”

With his booming, radio-guy voice, Baker and the airwaves are a match made in heaven. He started broadcasting as a 14-year-old in his hometown of Wabash, Ind., after talking his way into an air shift on the local station. It was an early-Sunday-morning gig that no one else wanted that also afforded him the opportunity to broadcast Little League baseball games.

Shortly after graduating high school, the by-then experienced Baker signed a contract with the national CBS radio giant. He started with an overnight shift in Marion, Ind., moved eventually to New York City and then followed the money in a nomadic career that took him to Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Indianapolis and various other spots on the globe.

“To make any money in radio, you had to go to the big cities,” Baker said. “Fortunately, at that time they were throwing money at personalities on the stations with more than 5,000 watts. You had to have a license then to be on-air at a station with more than 5,000 watts, and I had gotten mine, so I had no trouble finding jobs as long as I was willing to move.”

And while he made plenty of money at the big-city gigs, Baker learned the harsh reality of small-town radio as well.

“You did what you had to do to survive,” he said. “I was a shoeshine, a short-order cook, an electrician. I worked for RCA — making $5 an hour when the minimum wage was $1.40 — and I did work for AOL and McIntosh. I’d do anything to make enough money to pay the bills.”

From the time he was 14, Baker had had a constant presence on the air. But in his mid-20s he left the medium of his calling for a period of six years to take a shot at his “yuppie dream of the fancy car and big home.” He worked for Radio Shack during that period, starting in sales and working his way up to district manager. That job landed him in Albany at the Albany Mall.

“I was jocking at Banana’s nightclub — had started doing that at the original Banana’s in Macon — and (local radio legend) Jaxon Riley called me up,” Baker said. “I guess my reputation had kind of preceeded me, and he asked me if I’d do some weekend work for him. And I was back in the business.”

Baker worked on-air at local country station WJAZ and as operations manager of TGMY until that station went broke. Before he’d been out the door long, though, he got a call from Steve Preston, who offered a position at 92 WAZE. When that gig eventually ran out, he left on a Friday and was back at work — at K-Country — the next Monday.

But local radio was gobbled up by corporate giants, and all but a precious few in the industry became victims of the medium’s new world order. Baker was offered positions in Jacksonville, Atlanta, Oklahoma but decided he didn’t want to move at this point in his life. He gave retail a try, found it rewarding but not particularly satisfying, and eventually completed his full-circle journey back on the air at 90.7/97.1 WWQA, The Life FM, where he does “pretty much everything” — including a daily 2-7 p.m. on-air shift — for the underwriter-sponsored nonprofit station.

“My goal in life as a kid was to collect enough stories to one day tell my grandkids,” Baker said. “Man, I have the stories. Some of them are pretty amazing, some of them are sad and some of them I’ll take to my grave. But I’m still here. A lot friends I met along the way aren’t. And I still have an opportunity to give back to the people who have supported me over all these years.

“I miss the good old days, yes, but I’m one of those people who believes the best time of your life is today. I’m probably the happiest I’ve ever been in my life right now. I was able to raise my daughter as a single dad, and I’ve got two amazing grandkids. As you get older, you realize you’ve answered a lot of life’s big questions. So you change what you can and live with what you can’t.”

And, sometimes, you’re an agent in a divine intervention that puts you right back where you’ve always belonged.