It was in 1972 when, as a UMD student, Phil Glende walked past the KUMD studios and heard jazz music drifting through the hallway. That was the sound of KUMD-FM’s unique jazz programming, heard virtually nowhere else in the area.

From that moment, Glende’s life and KUMD became intertwined. He first volunteered to do a jazz show and in the years that followed held a regular evening jazz slot, hosted a weekend jazz orchestra show, arose with the chickens to do the morning “Awakening” program, and filled in for classical and rock shows plus “pretty much everything else on the schedule,” as Phil explains it. “I did interviews, made and played tapes, read the news, handled ordering for the library, worked with the volunteers, prepared the published schedule, administered the meager budget, and dealt with the university administration.”

In 1973, Phil Glende served as the station’s Program Director, in 1974 as the Station Manager, and in 1975 through 1976 as KUMD’s News and Public affairs Director, all positions that at that time were held by students.

“There's no easy way to describe how KUMD affected my life,” Phil says, “except to say that everything I did afterward was in some way related to it.”

A psychology major at UMD, Glende had no experience with radio or any other medium before stepping into his KUMD years. Yet he was able to parlay that hands-on skill in broadcasting into the beginnings of a career. “I worked briefly in commercial and public radio in Duluth and North Dakota after leaving KUMD… and worked on a biweekly magazine in Duluth. It’s unlikely I would have done that without the KUMD connection.”
 
Phil Glende left Duluth in 1979 for a newspaper reporting job in Minot, North Dakota, and has worked at five newspapers since. Today, he works as a copy editor at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison and teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “My course is part reporting and part media technology, and it includes a sound-editing component for radio and the web.” Phil is also working on a Ph.D. in journalism and mass communication, with a focus on 20^th-century mass communication history and labor journalism.
 
KUMD radio can take credit for quite a number of lifelong personal relationships, including Phil’s marriage to fellow KUMD alum Ruth Vander Horck, with whom he has two daughters, aged 22 and 25. “I was lousy at staying connected to people as I moved around,” Phil admits and says he’s looking forward to making up for some of that lost time and connection with fellow KUMD friends when he and Ruth attend the 50^th anniversary event in May.

Glende hasn’t been involved in radio since his KUMD years, but he says the opportunities he tapped into at KUMD have stayed with him throughout the decades: “Since that first time I heard jazz coming down the hallway, KUMD has been a part of my life.”

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 For more information about KUMD's 50th Anniversary events—including the May 4h concert at the DECC featuring Shawn Colvin, Iris Dement, and Pat Donohue—contact Mike Dean at mikedean@d.umn.edu 

Barb Olsen is a former volunteer director of morning programming and news at KUMD-FM. She is the author of "Out of Order! A Voter’s Chronicle of Duluth City Council Proceedings" in the Reader Weekly newspaper.