Good country air

Old-time music, daily yodels, community news -- they're what endears KCLW-AM and its new owner to the town of Hamilton

By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, March 24, 2006

HAMILTON — Let's say you have something you don't want — a litter of pit bull pups, a Gooseneck trailer, a refrigerator sitting on your front porch, a baby goat castrato.

This is what you do, should you live in or near this town of some 2,500 about 90 miles northwest of Austin: Pick up the phone and call radio station KCLW-AM. A very energetic guy named Kyle, possibly abuzz from not one but two Dr Peppers, will say, "Good morning you're on 'The Trading Post'!" and you're on the air, describing your stuff, giving out your phone number — sometimes just the last four digits is all you need — as he jots your items in a spiral notebook.

This is how it happens at 11 a.m. every weekday, following Junior Brown's "Sugarfoot Rag" intro, on "The Trading Post" — usually pronounced "Tradin' " — one of the signature shows on KCLW (try dialing into 900 AM if you live in far Northwest Austin, or listen online at kclw.com). Most of the airtime is filled with old-time country music, real old-time country music, music for people who believe the genre died with Faron Young, if not Patsy Cline. On Sundays there's religious programming. Morning and evening news. A lady comes in and reads news briefs from the Hamilton Herald-News when it publishes on Thursdays.

Designated to broadcast at the 900 AM frequency without interference from other stations, KCLW has the largest signal range in Texas, stretching from San Angelo to Waco. Although the station is proudly provincial, it also has a substantial Internet audience. There's a pub in London that tunes in most every day, simply because few stations play this stuff anymore.

Improbably, quaintly and (not to condescend, but it must be noted) almost exotically, in an age of Clear Channel this and corporate consolidation that and overnight format overhauls, KCLW is a total and unreconstructed throwback. Like dozens of other small, independent or quasi-independent, low-budget operations in Texas, it's doing OK despite the competitive winds. On top of that, KCLW's owner — you'll love this — has a nutty idea that radio stations can and should be forces for good in the communities they serve.

Though the station welcomes change as warmly as Kreuz Market welcomes sauce on its barbecue, KCLW came in for one in the summer of 2000, when Lasting Value Broadcasting Group Inc., acquired the station. Lasting Value is basically a guy named Meredith Beal, who had a quite interesting career in media, music and high tech before cashing out at Dell and acquiring a radio station or two.

Beal, 52, lives in Austin and manages the station with a light touch. But when he drives up U.S. 281 to visit KCLW, he's easy to pick out. There are usually no more than three people at the station's storefront operation on the square in downtown Hamilton. If it's morning, walk in and say hello to disc jockey Kyle Phillips and General Manager Sammie Casey.

Then look for the black guy. The black guy whose business card says, "Chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo for Individual Happiness & World Peace."

"I got a pop-up camper that I need $300 for and three pigs. And I can deliver the pigs."

Meredith Beal grew up in Los Angeles but his father came from Marshall, and the boy spent a good amount of time in Texas. He went to college at the University of Houston, majored in journalism and got a job as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Later he was editor of the Rhythm and Blues Report and other publications. When Motown Records founder Barry Gordy sold the company in the late '80s, Beal consulted on the transition and then joined the company, buying 40 computers (40 more than Motown had before), designing a network, developing budgets and marketing campaigns, working with artists. Later, he went to work for Dell.

But years before that, in 1978, he was helping out at his cousin's liquor store in L.A. when three men in stocking masks came in. One of the three had a sawed-off shotgun, which he fired into Beal's face and chest.

According to a piece Beal wrote later for a Buddhist newspaper, doctors told him he had 50 pellets in his chest, five in his heart, four in a lung, one in his left eye and 34 in his left hand.

"They said I would die or be a vegetable for the rest of my life and that there was nothing they could do," Beal wrote. "They would have to remove my eye, fix a hemorrhage behind it and put it back, but I probably would never see out of it."

Musician Herbie Hancock a couple of years earlier had introduced Beal to the Buddhist practice of chanting, and Beal credits chanting with saving his life. Scar tissue surrounded a worrisome pellet in his heart, and he still has five there, one in his eye and four in his lung.

"I live when doctors said I would die," Beal wrote. "I can see when doctors said I wouldn't."

Hence the business card.

Suffice it to say that Beal is the kind of guy who — this happened recently — when a bank teller mistakenly gives him too much money, he gives it back. Karma. And yes, he watches TV's "My Name is Earl."

A longtime musician, Beal also has played on and helped produce numerous records, everything from Gambian music to a children's album by a character called Thursty the Elephant, the creation of Jonathan Clark of Austin, who's known Beal since they played Little League in L.A.

Got all that?

Beal eventually made his way to Central Texas, where he worked as global Webmaster at Dell. He also worked as an information development specialist, doing training in many countries. He left the company in 2001.

Beal is quite a walking advertisement for Buddhism. He's soft-spoken but loquacious, optimistic and bottomlessly calm, despite the fact that he usually has 68 irons in the fire — activities with the Central Texas Buddhist lay organization, a CD of harmonica instrumentals, a Web development class for Huston-Tillotson University, a fundraiser in Hamilton this month that raised $20,000 for area volunteer fire departments drained by winter wildfires. "Meredith is just like that," says Clark, who is also a former Motown executive. "He's the most easygoing, almost too-nice man you'll ever meet in your life. He's a freak."

Beal says his goals have always been to build businesses, serve the community and do good. He saw a need for a "higher ethic" — more service, less sensation, more localization — in news, which led him to form Lasting Value, financed largely by the sale of Dell shares.

While still at Dell, Beal learned that KTXJ and KCOX, an AM-FM pair in Jasper, were up for sale. The asking price was $950,000. Lasting Value bought it. In the town famous for the 1998 dragging death of a black man named James Byrd Jr., the ownership change was not entirely welcomed. Although the station remained essentially unchanged, one exception being the addition of local news, advertisers pulled out after some customers asked, as Beal puts it, "Why are you giving that nigger some money?"

"What I experienced in Jasper was unreal," Beal says

Beal speaks of Jasper in the past tense, it's worth noting, but he still owns the stations. It also didn't help that Hurricane Rita knocked them off the air for three weeks.

"I'm getting a serious beating," Beal says. "I had the right idea, I still believe."

The number of blacks in Jasper is only slightly fewer than the number of whites. By contrast, Beal says, "You can't find a black person in Hamilton." Beal thought he saw one once, but it turned out the guy was a UPS driver from Killeen.

Nonetheless: "They love me there," he says. "They appreciate the fact that we haven't changed the programming and we're doing community radio."

In fact, Beal and his station won a local community service award.

Light touch notwithstanding, it is just a little incongruous for a black Buddhist former Motown and Dell executive who got shot and was supposed to die — could this be the idea for a country song? — to own a classic country station in small-town Texas.

"My first thought was what is he doing in country music?" recalls honky-tonk legend Carroll Parham, who has a regular show on KCLW and heads up the house band at the Cross Timbers Country Opry in Stephenville. "I told him this."

Steve Almquist, a part-time advertising salesman for the station who also does play-by-play of the high-school ball games, is a tad more direct: "You gotta remember, you got a bunch of rednecks up here. They're pretty conservative. And they like the old country music."

"During that commercial break, I ate a burrito."

That's Phillips, 35, sitting in the studio, helping people sell their stuff, whipping out a cowbell for the Deal of the Day. His hair is long; his cap is backwards; his computer monitor has a photo of the drummer from Slipknot, the painfully heavy and hugely popular rock band from, of all places, Iowa. When "The Trading Post" calls slow, he gives utterance to a grave threat: "Don't make me put on my death metal CD. I'll do it."

And he does.

Moments later, the phone rings. Caller: "I just called to get you to stop that."

Phillipspays the bills by working as an electrician in the afternoon and also is the station's engineer. He wound up in the area when he inherited some acreage.

"I've never been happier," he says. "It's the middle of nowhere, but my wife and I are happy."

He also has a hard time imagining giving up a radio gig he "just kinda fell into" because he enjoys it so much.

"One lady tried to sell her Cessna," he says. "Seriously. A Cessna. One lady called in trying to give away her horse (manure). She probably got calls. One guy needed one hubcap for a Buick."

Then there was the woman looking to unload a mess of silk banties (poultry), which got read and/or heard as "silk panties."

There's a good deal of affectionate joshing between DJ Kyle and his regular callers, despite the fact that they're mostly twice his age or more and have never heard of Slipknot.

A woman is looking to make extra cash by taking in people's ironing.

Somebody's going on a ski trip and needs her dogs watched.

Then there's Estelle, a vinegary regular and DJ Kyle's most reliable foil.

"I need a small drop-leaf table," she says one morning.

"It's gonna cost ya," Phillips says.

"No," Estelle says. "My yodeler's broke." (This is part of the routine banter between these two. Give us this day our daily yodel.)

After more prodding from Phillips, Estelle succeeds in rebooting her yodeler.

"She's our No. 1 fan," says Casey.

After "The Trading Post" ends at noon, Phillips mentions he has a box of sausage to pick up from Estelle. On this pretext, a call is made. Estelle is Estelle Price, 86, and she resists a visit — she's in a housecoat, her hair is a wreck, etc. After a little more prodding, not unlike the prodding that unleashed the yodel, Phillips, Casey, Beal and two members of the Mainstream Media from Austin are on their way to see Estelle, Phillips having obtained an excused-absence pass from the boss and put some music on to play while he is gone.

Despite telling the on-air talent that he's "too full of burritos to do your job," Estelle Price is fond enough of that DJ Kyle boy on the radio that she used to make him pies — chocolate, pecan, pumpkin. When he was tardy in coming to get them, she started cutting pieces out.

"I quit making him pies and he quit coming back," she says.

This is, of course, shtick, but not without its charms. Price says she has the station on all the time "and that's why I don't get anything done." She's exactly the kind of person Casey is talking about in describing the station's listeners: The paper only comes out once a week. People need this station. They need to know who died, where the church supper is, who's playing the dance on Saturday, even if they're feeling too poorly to go.

"The thought of something happening to the station would devastate the town," Casey says.

This is a place where people look after one another, and it is a place served and strengthened by an AM radio station that's been on the air for more than six decades and that hasn't changed much at all since Ike and Mamie were in the White House.

Why does Beal do it?

"I guess humanity," he says. "It has a lot to do with how I was brought up. Both sides of my family are service-oriented. My Buddhist practice also drives me toward creating value for humanity. Part of our effort for world peace is to make whatever environment you're in better. It's not that I don't want to make money. It's a way of doing both."

Phillips steps into Price's kitchen and retrieves the promised Purnell's Old Folks brand sausage patties.

The visitors leave her alone in her house and her housecoat.

The radio plays on.