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Radio man keeps hands on the dial

Exec has worked on air, behind the scenes 35 years

By Joy Dickinson Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News 
Published February 15, 1995
(c) 1995-2002 Dallas Morning News


Ken Dowe nearly spent his life in the air - as a young man, the Mississippi native planned to enter the U.S. Air Force to train as a fighter pilot. Instead, the day before he was to enter flight school, Mr. Dowe followed a hunch and signed on as a disc jockey at a radio station in Mobile, Ala.


That decision launched a career that has kept Mr. Dowe on, rather than in, the air for more than 35 years. Much of his career has been built in Dallas, where the 53-year-old University Park resident first earned recognition as a protege of the late Gordon McLendon, the radio legend credited with inventing the "Top 40" format.
Mr. Dowe emerged from Mr. McLendon's nurturing shadow as a gifted on-air personality and an innovative behind-the-scenes leader.


Although he didn't go into flying for a living, Mr. Dowe retains a pilot's view of the world - looking down on the overall landscape, zooming in to examine the forests but pulling up before crashing into individual trees. He's too busy searching out the next forest, the next radio station, the next issue.

"I've always been a big-picture kind of guy," he said, sipping coffee in his University Park living room on a rainy weekday morning. "I've never been good at the nitty-gritty, the details."

This self-assessment is confirmed by the activity surrounding him. When Mr. Dowe wants milk for his coffee and there's none in the fridge, he turns a mournful gaze on his cup, as if willing the white stuff to magically appear. Dottie, his wife of 33 years, dispatches their son, Kenny, 31, to bring milk from an extra refrigerator that's kept outside.

One gets the impression that Mr. Dowe would happily fetch it himself; it's just that he'd never find it. On the trip outside, his mind would be racing ahead to the next subject, and the milk would be forgotten in the froth of creativity.

"I'm sort of like his memory bank," Dottie Dowe said with a gently reproachful glance at her husband. "He's just not interested in the past at all; he doesn't keep clippings or anything. He lives completely for tomorrow."

Mr. Dowe's latest project epitomizes his "cut to the chase" approach to life. For "Ken Dowe's Information Highway," a daily radio commentary, he squeezes complex issues into 90 seconds of pithy, disarmingly humorous observations. A recent installment, for instance, looked at an early connection between President Clinton and U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

Mr. Dowe described childhood photos of the future political foes: "Each boy sits atop a Shetland pony, in one of those familiar postwar photographs. Each youngster is wearing a cowboy outfit, complete with hat. Bill is wearing the white hat, and Newt's hat is black. . . . But if one searches for clues in these early portraits, at least one other difference is evident already: Newt has a gun."

The nationally syndicated "Information Highway" was launched Sept. 1 and airs locally at 12:10 p.m. weekdays on KRLD-AM (1080). It also airs on the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Network. Mr. Dowe says he eventually would like to expand the broadcasts to 15-minute, daily programs similar to those by Paul Harvey.

Mr. Dowe avoids labels such as "conservative" or "liberal," dishing out good-natured criticism based on individual issues rather than a strictly defined personal perspective.

If pressed, he calls himself a "fiscal conservative and a social centrist." Michael Spears, operations manager at KRLD, calls Mr. Dowe "a whirlwind of energy and ideas. . . . His writing is superb, and this commentary is a terrific, conservative addition to our lineup."

Mr. Spears, who worked with Mr. Dowe in the 1960s at the Dallas rock 'n' roll radio stations KLIF-AM (570) and KNUS-FM, said Mr. Dowe helped many local radio personalities get started in the business. "He was always willing to give younger people

opportunities to play on his team. I was only 23 or 24 when I started working for him."

In addition to producing "Information Highway," Mr. Dowe also serves as director of broadcast operations for Service Broadcasting Corp., where his duties include oversight of KKDA-FM (104.5) in Dallas. He is president of his own consulting firm, RadioXCellence Group Inc., and his son, Kenny, is vice president.

The Dowes' daughter, Anna, 24, somehow escaped the radio bug - she's a graduate student in psychology at Southern Methodist University.

Mr. Dowe grew up in the Mississippi Delta community of Greenville, the son of working-class parents - his dad drove a truck for Standard Oil, and his mother worked at the local Rexall drugstore. As a teen, Mr. Dowe worked as a "gofer" at the local newspaper and radio station and was on the air as a volunteer (i.e., unpaid) disc jockey before he graduated from high school.

He attended the University of Southern Mississippi in

Hattiesburg for two years before heading to the Mobile station. His bosses called Mr. Dowe's air check (audition tape) "really terrible," but they hired him anyway. While in Mobile, he met Dottie, whose father owned the building that housed the radio station.

The road to a job in San Diego took Mr. Dowe through Dallas, and he became smitten with the city.

"It was this incredible city with great radio and beautiful buildings; I'd never seen anything like it. I couldn't wait to come back here," he said.

He got the chance a year later, working at KBOX-AM and later KLIF, where he began his longtime association with Gordon McLendon. Mr. Dowe calls Mr. McLendon a "certifiable genius. . . . Working for him was like earning a Ph.D. in broadcasting."

Mr. Dowe had been at KLIF only a few months when he answered a phone call that gave him a cameo role in Dallas' most traumatic episode.

"The day after Kennedy was assassinated," Mr. Dowe recalled, "I picked up the studio phone and this guy said, `Where's Gordon?' I asked who it was, and he said, `This is Jack Ruby, where's Gordon?' We didn't know where Gordon was, and he hung up. Two days later Ruby shot Oswald. We never did find out why he wanted to talk to Gordon."

In the mid-'60s Mr. Dowe took the reins of KLIF's two-man morning show - by himself. Mr. Dowe carried the show with the help of his popular "alter ego," an outspoken octogenarian named "Granny Emma."

Thirty years later, Mr. Dowe still can slip into Granny Emma's crotchety twang with disconcerting ease. He carries on both halves of a contentious conversation with such verbal agility that if you close your eyes, you'd swear two people (of different sexes, no less) are talking.

"People used to tell me they knew it had to be two people because they'd heard us talking at the same time," Mr. Dowe said with a grin.

Even Dottie once momentarily worried that her husband had met with an accident, after hearing Granny Emma complain about his "not showing up" one morning.

"Granny Emma was my antithesis," Mr. Dowe said. "She was everything I wasn't - rich, acerbic, friend of all the major players, not afraid to say anything about anyone. She once got after Stanley Marcus for selling sweatshirts at Neiman Marcus, because Granny Emma had her own sweatshirts for sale."

He switches to GrannyEmma cadence: "I'll run you out of town, Stan!" The day after Granny's tirade, Mr. Marcus sent over a special sweatshirt to mollify his retailing competitor.

By the late 1960s, in addition to earning some of Dallas' radio's highest ratings ever with Granny Emma, Mr. Dowe was spending his "free time" running Mr. McLendon's stations throughout the country.

Kenny Dowe said he "grew up on airplanes" and was seduced at a young age by the excitement of his dad's profession. "Growing up in the midst of all that, watching radio evolve from the '60s to what it is today, it was so thrilling. I never really considered doing anything else."

Kenny also remembers being awed by the perks that came along with Dad's job.

"One day when I was in eighth grade, I got called to the principal's office," he said. "I thought I was in big trouble. But it was Ringo Starr on the phone. He'd talked to my Dad on the radio, and then he called me at school. It was incredible."of listeners. Within a year under Mr. Dowe's leadership, KNUS-FM ranked No. 1 in the market.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Dowe started buying radio stations with partner Clint Murchison, whom he had met through Mr. McLendon. Their Oklahoma City station had the first soft adult "light" format in the country.

Mr. Dowe sold the last of his five stations in the early 1990s and now focuses on consulting and an array of "big picture" issues rather than the particulars of day-to-day station operations.

One pet project has been removal of "gangsta rap" and other negative music from radio programming. "The black audiences I've worked with, at KKDA for instance, very deeply want family and unity. They want those bad rap records taken off the air, and the ratings go up everywhere it's done," Mr. Dowe said.

Mr. Dowe counts his family and a "tremendous number of friends" as his greatest accomplishment, and said that despite his radio successes, he'd like to be known more for his character than business savvy.

"I always think about what Horace Greeley said: `Fame is but a vapor, popularity is accidental, riches take wings. All that endures is character.' "