Wallace Smith to Return to Helm of KUSC

Exactly one year after he left KUSC-FM (91.5) to start a new career as vice president of a pair of classical radio stations in New York, Wallace Smith is going to be back at the helm of KUSC, beginning Aug. 1.

But to hear Smith talk about it, he was just away at summer camp--a summer camp he didn’t especially like.

“I did not leave KUSC. I took a different job,” Smith said. “I am, in fact, leaving WNYC.”

Smith was the general manager and guiding light of KUSC from 1972 until his departure. He is generally credited with turning the small college station into what was public radio’s premiere outlet in Southern California.

When he left Los Angeles last summer, Smith’s adieus were peppered with optimistic observations about the rich municipal culture and promising challenge of operating both AM and FM public outlets in Manhattan.

He spent the first two weeks in New York living at the Algonquin Hotel, where he waxed eloquent about savoring the same literary air once breathed by the raconteurs of the legendary Algonquin Round Table.

Speaking from his WNYC office on Wednesday, Smith had changed his views somewhat. He complained about the humidity, the rude and angry nature of New Yorkers and the appointees of Mayor Ed Koch who hired Smith to run the New York City-owned-and-operated classical radio stations.

“Quite frankly, the job I was hired to do at WNYC (AM and FM) did not exist,” he told The Times. “I was not given the responsibility to do what I wanted to do here.”

The job he was rehired to do at KUSC was never filled while he was away. For the past year, USC administrators have been trying to recruit a replacement, temporarily filling the general manager’s post with KUSC’s director of engineering and operations, William Kappelman.

“I think in that recruiting process they learned a lot about public radio,” Smith said.

Among other things, the search committee found that only a small number of candidates knew enough about the specialized world and byzantine politics of public broadcasting to run an operation such as KUSC, Smith said.

The search committee also discovered that none of the candidates wanted to live in Los Angeles, where Smith began building his KUSC empire more than 15 years ago. The station now operates other stations in Santa Barbara (KSCA-FM) and Ventura County (KCPB-FM) and will soon begin operating a fourth station in Palm Springs (KPSC-FM).

The USC search committee offered Smith a new title (president of USC Radio), autonomy and a salary boost to bring him back.

“The fact that they searched as long and hard as they did is going to make it possible for me to have better informed people to work with in the university structure,” he said.

Smith said he plans to create an independent board of counselors, including business leaders, community activists and university representatives, to “design the station’s future.”

One significant new programming change on the horizon will be KUSC’s participation in a new regional news and information service, developed during Smith’s New York sojourn by KLON-FM (88.1) general manager Rick Lewis. The Cal Net network will offer news feeds to public stations throughout the state, supplementing whatever news offerings the stations now deliver.

KUSC, which dropped out of the National Public Radio network more than two years ago, will not rejoin NPR but will probably subscribe to some of its services, beginning with hourly national newscasts, according to Smith.

Beyond that, Smith said he will be concentrating on regaining KUSC’s preeminent position among Southern California public stations. During his absence, he said, KUSC’s listenership has “leveled off” while rival commercial classical station KFAC (1330 AM, 92.3 FM) has increased its audience and Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM (89.9) has become the leading Los Angeles public station.

“I learned a great deal from a group of talented young people working down in the bowels of WNYC,” he said. “They taught me that we have to find fresh new ways to present classical music or we’re not going to have young people around who are going to want to listen to it.”