KTPB in Kilgore, Texas, and a Greyhound Bus Trip

This Greyhound Bus receipt documents an important piece of personal history for me.

In September of 1990, a few months after graduating from college, I took a bus trip to Kilgore, Texas, to interview for a job as Programming Director at KTPB FM in Kilgore. It was an all-new station and the crew setting it up had solid credentials to back up their credibility. The bus trip was memorable. I met a baby-faced man in his late 30s who had just been released from prison. He was happy to be free and optimistic about his future. A drunk passenger boarded the bus in Alabama and the busdriver took me aside and said “If that asshole gives you any trouble or throws up on ya just gimme a holler and I’ll throw his ass off the bus.” At a gas station in a small Louisiana town I dropped some quarters on the ground and saw some locals move toward it like it was a natural pulse of life. The most haunting memory of the trip was its first 10 seconds when I saw my mother in the bus station letting the bus leave and acting (poorly) like her mind was on something other than me leaving her forever.

Kilgore is in the middle of the East Texas oil fields. That may not seem like a prime location for a classical music station (KTPB was to be all classical programming) but it made sense when you learned that the legendary American pianist Van Cliburn is from that area and that he is nothing less than royalty in the region.

Van Cliburn’s presence in the area of Kilgore and nearby Tyler made an all-classical station a reasonably suitable match for the demographic. I did not get the $40k/year job but that rejection came after a memorably exhaustive series of interviews and background checks that one might expect to endure if pursuing a lifetime tenure position at a major university. The job went to a more experienced programmer from within Texas.

Contrary to the assurances I was given by the fine folks at KTPB I never did get a job in radio, and maybe I never will, though it stays on my radar for things I feel I should do with this life. Other radio stations at the time that could not (or would not) hire me all seemed to lavish me with assurances that I would get my job in radio one way or another, but as of now it is not to be.

I moved to New York City a month after making this epic, no-sleep Greyhound voyage from Tampa to East Texas. My life would probably be very different now had my adulthood started in Kilgore, Texas, where the $40,000/year salary being offered would have afforded me palatial accommodation. Instead my adult life started at the Parc Lincoln Hotel in Manhattan. Things that did happen since 1990 would not have happened, but who knows what adventures would have transpired.

A strange thing happened with KTPB. Several years after I was rejected the person who got the job I applied for moved on to another job, and I would later hear that the General Manager who helped establish KTPB moved on to start a new radio station somewhere else in America (Kansas, I think?). The president of Kilgore College (KTPB was associated with that school and its president contributed to that endless battery of interviews in 1990) contacted me to see if I might still be interested in a job at KTPB. I honestly was not interested but something about the opportunity (flattery at being asked, I guess) prompted me to reserve time at a recording facility to make a fresh demo tape of myself talking like a radio guy — something I had not done for years. Uninspired but yet inspired I went through with it, and the tape was pretty awful. I sent the tape with another application form and other information and this time I was completely ignored. I never even got a rejection letter from KTPB or Kilgore College. Having solicited my application for the job they simply ignored my response.

KTPB, according to this story in Jazzweek (now available at archive.org), appears to have ended its broadcast run in 2006. Most of the people I met while interviewing for the job of Programming Director in 1990 remained at KTPB for all of its 16 years. I have no sadness or regret at having been passed over for that job — I can not say I regret having spent those years in New York City versus an East Texas oil field — but I am glad to know that those nice folks I could have worked with all those years stayed where they were, broadcasting classical music to East Texas.