This September, WEIS Radio will be celebrating its 60th year of broadcasting.

As part of the station’s diamond anniversary celebration, Sports Director Shannon Fagan has had a series of Q&A features on some of the personalities who have called sporting events or have been behind the scenes around the station’s coverage area in years past.

This week’s edition of “Behind the Mic” is with WEIS station manager and owner Jerry Baker.

Q: I know you take pride in this station celebrating its 60th broadcast year. Why do you think the station has been so successful?

A: “It’s a magic milestone, so to speak, for any business to be around 60 years providing service to a community. We are honored to be a small part of that. We haven’t been here the whole 60 years, but the last 38 years we have. We hope we took something that had a good foundation that had laid some good groundwork and were able to build on what had already been laid down for us, and was able to improve some things hopefully and better serve the community. We’re still here in service today.

“We’ve had a lot of good help over the years. We’ve had a lot of good mentors to point us in the right direction. There was a good basis, a good foundation laid by the previous owners who were here prior to me. Their management skill and business acumen they had, that just made things a lot easier for us.”

Q: What are some of your impressions of being a daily part of so many lives in the county and surrounding areas for so long?

A: “It’s been a privilege and an honor for us to be a part of the listening audience in the county, to be a part of their lives. They’re a part of ours as well. You get to know the people when they’re calling in birthdays or wedding anniversaries, so many parts and facets of their lives, their children grow up, their grandchildren are there. We get to be a part of that and share in so much. That’s quite an honor. To be able to do that, to get to know all these people and really enjoy their friendship, so many of them become like family. We’re just thankful we’ve been able to be here this long. Not many people get to enjoy as many different folks as we do. We reach people all over the area and we’re just thrilled to be a part of that and part of their lives.”

Q: What piqued your interest in radio broadcasting?

A: “I don’t know that I was interested in radio broadcasting. I was talking when I should have been listening and wound up with a radio station. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Q: How did you come to buy the WEIS radio station in 1983?

A: “Mr. Jim Davis, who owned the radio station prior to me, I was his insurance agent. He was in my office one day. He looked a little despondent and down and out. I said ‘Mr. Jim, who died?’ He said ‘What do you mean?’ I said ‘You just look down and out and despondent about something. Is something on your mind, something bothering you?’ He said ‘Well, I had my radio station sold and I thought I was going to get to retire.’ He said ‘I had to take it back over. Things didn’t work out, and I had to take it back over and run it.’ He jokingly said ‘You wouldn’t want to buy a radio station would you?’ I jokingly said ‘Well, I would be interested in buying anything if I could buy it on my terms and pay for it on my terms.’ He said ‘What’s that?’ I said ‘Take it over and run and pay you as it pays me.’ He laughed it off. I laughed it off, and that was it. Three days later, Mr. Jim was back in my office. I said ‘Mr. Jim, what can we do for you?’ He said ‘I came to take you up on your offer.’ I said ‘What offer?’ He said ‘To buy my radio station.’ I was a young insurance agent at that time. I spent all my money, what I had saved starting an insurance agency. I just told him I didn’t have any money to buy another business. He said ‘You’d be interested if you could buy it on your terms and pay for it on your terms. I’m going to let you have it.’ And he did. That’s how I wound up with the radio station. The rest is history. We struggled. We made the payments. We learned broadcasting and worked broadcasting in and out of the insurance agency, operating it. We balanced the two businesses and survived. We’re still here today.”

Q: One of your major assets is you continue to evolve. How well do you think that has served the station and the community?

A: “Things change. If we don’t change, we get stale, or we’re going in reverse. If you’re going to continue to improve and go forward, things have to change. In the broadcasting industry, one thing that has helped us change is technology. Technology has changed so much since we started. It has all with businesses, not just ours. Technology has been what has enabled us to grow over the years as we have. Things change with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and their rulings. For all those years, we were AM only. Then in 2008, the FCC changed the ruling and said AM broadcasters could have a FM translator and put their AM signals on FM channels. That helped us tremendously. Now we have the sound of a good FM station. We’re thankful for that. Those type of things, it’s been technology that has made the opportunities there. We just tried to seize that opportunity and move forward with it when those opportunities came up.”

Q: Another thing I’ve noticed in the short time I’ve worked here is you have a keen eye for talent, like the station’s two newest members, Karli Morgan and Mike Hathcock. What is it that you look for in someone to work in radio?

A: “One of our longtime employees who had been with us 17 years passed away unexpectedly (Kim O’Brien). You can’t replace a 17-year veteran, but you can fill that slot. What we tried to do was to look for someone who has the same type work ethic and mindset that we do here at the radio station. We weren’t rushing into anything. We had received a resume or two, but we didn’t run out and hire the first person who came along. I’m not saying anything good, bad or indifferent about anyone, I’m just saying we were looking for the perfect fit or the best fit for our situation, our station and for our community. The opportunity to bring Karli Morgan in was a great asset to us. We knew she would be a good fit and we brought her on board.

“It was the same thing with Mike too. We weren’t expecting to have a vacancy in our sports programming this year, but it happened. When we did, we wanted to look for someone, and again, take our time and not rush out there and try to just bring somebody in. We wanted to bring the right person. Whoever we bring in here works with everyone else. We’ve all got to be able to get along, know the mindset of each other, work together and have a good work ethic. I know when we brought in Mike Hathcock to be the color analyst in our broadcast booth for high school football this year, I knew he would be a good fit. Mike’s experienced. He has the work ethic, the background, and by the way, he started here in 1977. Mike was here before I was. He left before I come on board, but Mike started here many years ago.”

Q: A lot of managers just run the business side of things, but you’re still one of the station’s on-air personalities. How much do enjoy being behind the microphone in the mornings?

A: “It’s fun. I get up early. I get the honor of waking up the chickens, then we wake everyone else up. It’s a fun thing. When it ceases to be fun, I’ll quit and retire. It’s still fun to fill our morning slot. It can be hectic because there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes other than being on the air, but it’s part of what you have to do when you own a small business.”

Q: Covering sports has been a major emphasis for the station under your leadership. Why is that?

A: “We’re here to serve the community. If the community wasn’t interested in sports that much, neither would we be. The radio station is a reflection of your community. We try to provide what’s of interest to the majority. Obviously you can’t provide everything for everybody, but if you can serve and please the majority of the community, we feel like we’re doing a pretty good job. Hopefully we’re doing that. That’s what we strive for every day. Someone out there listening may not like the brand of music we play. They may not like that genre, but they may want to hear our local news, or they want to hear sports broadcasting, or they want to hear the birthdays, something of that nature that we have other than the music. We have daily information and entertainment and things of that nature. We hope to provide weather information. I tell everyone WEIS stands for Weather, Entertainment, Information, and Sports.”

Q: The high school football season’s coverage has spun off into The End Zone Show and The Scoreboard Show. How did those spinoffs come to be on the air?

A: “We had a scoreboard show many years ago, but in order to have a good scoreboard show, you’ve got to have talent. You’ve got to have people here who can work the phone lines and contacts, and develop those contacts and relationships with other broadcast entities and other sports outlets. Again, technology has evolved and developed to allow us to be more proficient at that, and make it easier for us to contact more people on Friday nights and exchange scores. That’s helped tremendously.

“You’ve got to remember, this is a team effort. Everything that has changed and that has happened hasn’t been my idea. I would like to take credit for it all, but it’s just happened around me. We would like to think we’ve taken advantage of some opportunities.

“The scoreboard show we had years ago, after we lost some talent and they moved on, we had to pick up some scoreboard shows from other areas, like off the state network. We had that for a while, but it still didn’t fill the niche. We had Drew (Hall) come to me and he wanted to do a scoreboard show. He and Tony Hathcock, they had been broadcast partners and friends, and they had the idea. It really wasn’t my idea. It was just I thought it was a good idea. We needed it. We wanted it, but we just didn’t have the right people to do it until that happened. When Drew came and approached me, I thought it was a good idea. It wasn’t mine. It was his. We just allowed that to happened.

“It was the same way with The End Zone Show. It wasn’t my idea. It was Nolen Sanford’s. Nolen came to me and said ‘We think this would be a good fit.’ He described it to me. We talked about it. We massaged the idea, then we came up with The End Zone Show. That was Nolen. I give him credit for that.

“All of the good things that have happened here haven’t always necessarily been my idea. We like to think we’re open-minded enough that when a good idea comes along, we have allowed it to happen and taken advantage of the opportunity when the right personnel was in place to get things going.”

Q: This week begins another season of high school football, with a record 14 games on the WEIS broadcast schedule. How excited are you to begin the biggest season the station has ever had?

A: “It is exciting. Doing the broadcasts has improved so much that it makes our jobs so much easier on Friday nights, but I’m just behind the scenes. The guys who go out there and do the play-by-play, the color, make photographs, write up the stories, I just try to be in the background to supervise and make sure they have the right tools to get the job done as easy as possible.”