As part of our 50th anniversary celebration, we're bringing you stories from KUMD alumni to find out where the years have taken them and how their time at KUMD has impacted their lives.

Profiles, Part 3:  Walt Kramer

When Walt Kramer walked in the doors of KUMD-FM more than forty years ago, the radio station was not exactly the broadcasting powerhouse it is today. It was February of 1966, and with only 250 watts to its name, KUMD’s signal didn’t travel far.

 “When I was at KUMD, the station's signal could generally be picked up at my
parents’ home on College Street in Duluth,” Kramer says. “These days, with full FM power, an affiliate in Grand Marais, and streaming on the net, programming gets a lot farther than College Street!”

Walt worked at KUMD from those early days of 1966 until the spring of 1969. “I did most everything from board shifts to managing the station,” Kramer explains. He was initially lured in because working at KUMD was the requirement of a one-credit course known in 1965 as Speech 60A. “A friend of mine, who worked at a radio station in the Duluth-Superior area,” Kramer says “was aware of my passion for radio, dared me to sign up for the course, and see what would happen.”

 And what happened is that Kramer, who is blind, took on the challenge and turned it into a lifetime career.

 “In these days of scanners, scanning software, screen-reading software, Braille embossers, and the Internet, it’s easy to forget that none of the above was available to me 40 years ago,” Walt explains. Some of the biggest challenges, he says, were “figuring out how to identify music, learning to run the control board and avoid distorting the signal by setting volume levels too high, devising schemes for putting news and weather into a format I could read on the air, and developing a method for ‘meeting’ the network—for putting the network on the air, in other words, at the exact time the specified program was to begin.”

 It’s something Walt Kramer remains proud of to this day: “I believe that in a real-life way, I made the point that a person who possesses the talent can make it in broadcasting regardless of disabilities.”

 “Walt was one of the first people I met at the station,” KUMD Station Manager Mike Dean says of those days when, as a student, he started at KUMD. “Walt did just about everything, from announcing, to editing tape, to producing news reports. Plus, of course, he managed the station. I thought that he was quite an amazing person.”

Walt’s experience at KUMD, as he describes it, was “quite literally the springboard to a career that included several years in broadcasting and 25 years in public affairs at Minnesota Power.” Kramer retired from Minnesota Power in 2003.

Throughout those years, Walt Kramer carried with him not only the professional tools he acquired at KUMD but also the personal connections and friendships. Including friend Bob Holetz, who was News Director at KUMD when the two met in 1966.

 “Not long after we met at KUMD,” Walt explains, “Bob became News Director at WEBC, where he hired me as a stringer.” Kramer’s assignment was to provide WEBC with unedited tapes from news conferences held at UMD. “There were a lot of those back then, news conferences held mostly by anti-Vietnam activists. Bob and I have kept in touch throughout the past 41 years. Friendships that last that long and remain as comfortable as this one are their own reward in life.”

Today, Walt Kramer says KUMD “fills a vital role as a more community-oriented public radio station.”

 It’s been 40 years since that first time he stepped inside KUMD’s studios. Yet, throughout the decades since, the experiences and the friendships have remained an integral part of Walt Kramer’s life. And the gifts and lessons Kramer brought to KUMD have remained a part of what KUMD-FM radio is to this day.

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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.