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Classical radio pioneer dies WFMT's Ray Nordstrand became one of the most influential executives in Chicago radio history. By John von Rhein, Tribune staff reporter When young Ray Nordstrand was growing up on the North Side in the 1940s, radio was his window to the world. The only child of Swedish immigrant parents, he loved listening to the giant console radio in his parents' living room. The comedy of Fibber McGee and Molly, the sounds of Glenn Miller's big band, the wartime dispatches of Edward R. Murrow, all seized his imagination. He eventually became one of the most influential executives in Chicago radio history, whose stewardship of WFMT-FM 98.7 from its early years made it one of the most respected fine arts stations in the world. Mr. Nordstrand, 72, died Saturday morning at a Northwestern Hospital hospice unit in Chicago of complications following a series of strokes, the most recent of which was in late July, said his longtime companion, Ethel Polk. He had been at the hospice for the last week. "His ingenuity and his faith in the good taste of people are what made WFMT," said veteran Chicago author and broadcaster Studs Terkel, a fixture at the station virtually since its inception in 1951. "He believed the public — and by that he meant ordinary people— deserved the best in broadcasting." "Ray's passion, vision and devotion to WFMT fueled its growth for over 40 years," said Steve Robinson, senior vice president of WFMT and the WFMT Radio Network. "The success we enjoy today as one of the premiere classical music radio stations in the world is due in large part to his uncompromising standards and unending enthusiasm for the station." Young Ray invented and "programmed" an imaginary station he called WIOU. He used to read racing results and baseball scores into a cigar-box microphone to his pleased father. Years later he picked up a real microphone for the first time and a Chicago broadcasting legend was born. Mr. Nordstrand had been in declining health since suffering a heart attack followed by triple bypass surgery in 1993. He also suffered a series of strokes in more recent years, said Polk. While Mr. Nordstrand had a passing familiarity with classical music, he was by his own admission a businessman, not an arts connoisseur. His real forte was the uncanny business and economic savvy he picked up as a student and teacher of economics at Northwestern University. He put his fascination with the business end of radio to productive use in a 52-year association with WFMT that ended with his death. Norman Pellegrini, the station's longtime program chief, may have set the station's unique tone, but nobody did more to solidify WFMT's reputation than Mr. Nordstrand. Named WFMT's president and general manager in 1970, he helped to turn an anomaly, a cultured bandwidth in a tough town, into a broadcasting powerhouse known and heard throughout the world. What's more, WFMT today towers over a shrunken landscape that has seen many classical radio outlets go out of business, dumb down their programming or switch to pop, rock or jazz formats. Mr. Nordstrand liked to claim there was nothing to equal the station anywhere in the United States, but he modestly shunned the label of tastemaker. "I enjoy having an overview and I enjoy being a catalyst, but I don't feel I'm powerful," he told the Tribune's Eric Zorn in 1985. Others would disagree. WFMT was essentially a mom-and-pop operation in 1953 when the Evanston-born Mr. Nordstrand, then a 20-year-old economics student at Northwestern University, came on board as a part-time announcer. Until then, the announcing was shared by Pellegrini, and Mike Nichols, who later left the station to become a legendary stand-up comic and theater and film director. Nichols was auditioning on-air talent when he happened on Mr. Nordstrand. The gangly 20-year-old had dropped by the WFMT studio with a friend who was trying out for an announcer's job. Mr. Nordstrand, whose only previous experience was as a part-time announcer at tiny WNMP-AM and Northwestern's WNUR-FM, was hired instead. Mr. Nordstrand stuck to announcing for much of his first decade at WFMT until it became clear to Bernard Jacobs, who had founded the station with his wife, Rita, that Mr. Nordstrand had what it took to run the station and keep it solvent. His meticulous, methodical approach to building a financial base for WFMT earned him the nickname "The King of the Abacus." He soon became Bernard Jacobs' detail man and worked closely with the station's co-founder to help sell advertising. In 1955, he and a colleague at Northwestern produced "A Qualitative Analysis of the Audience of WFMT," a landmark study in broadcasting that determined the station's marketing techniques for the next 30 years. Although the practical, soft-spoken Mr. Nordstrand and the musically savvy, outspoken Pellegrini were, as Terkel observes, "from different planets," they made a strong management team. Named general manager, later president, in the mid-1960s, Mr. Nordstrand took charge of the business end while Pellegrini oversaw the artistic side of the operation. Together, they built on the Jacobs' core beliefs: quality and diversity of programming, excellence unsullied by gimmicks. That approach helped separate WFMT from the other 25 or so commercial classical stations in the country. WFMT has never pulled in whopping ratings and its audience was long labeled, unfairly, as elitist. Mr. Nordstrand always preferred the word "select." Under Mr. Nordstrand, the station ran jingle-free, announcer-read ad copy, hired informed program hosts and adhered to an eclectic program formula: lots of live (as well as recorded) classical music, poetry, drama, critical commentary, and "The Midnight Special," the weekly melange of folk music, blues, show tunes and satire that Mr. Nordstrand hosted along with Pellegrini for many years. Mr. Nordstrand sounded more prepossessing on the air than he looked in person. He moved awkwardly and wore baggy suits that hung on his stoop-shouldered, 6-foot-2-inch frame. His on-air delivery was punctuated by long pauses and "uhs." Friends tell of the time he was eating peanuts while a record was playing. One caught in his throat just as the record ended. Listeners heard him coughing for several long seconds. He recovered and, in his best WFMT tone, announced, "We had a peanut caught in our throat." Former WFMT employees recall how he used to go from office to office passing out paychecks to everyone. He was criticized for taking credit for virtually all the station's successes, but that was because of his remarkable command of WFMT facts, figures and anecdotes. He talked about little else except baseball and folk music; indeed, folk music was a passion that made him something of a patron saint to Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, which gave several benefit concerts in his honor. In 1976, Mr. Nordstrand turned the station's program guide into a slick monthly, Chicago magazine, that quickly garnered huge amounts of advertising and became a cash cow before WFMT's corporate parent sold it. (Chicago magazine is now owned by Tribune Co., publisher of the Tribune). And it was his vision that led him to create, in the late '70s, what is now the WFMT Radio Network, one of the world's most successful producers and distributors of classical, folk and jazz programming. But the shifting economic climate of the 1980s raised the stakes and made it increasingly difficult for niche-market stations such as WFMT to carry on business as usual. To some people around him, Mr. Nordstrand seemed reluctant to change with the times. Some insiders said the station had become a two-man operation in which Mr. Nordstrand and Pellegrini refused to allow anyone else much authority — a charge Pellegrini, speaking for himself, vigorously denies. Mr. Nordstrand was asked to step down as publisher of Chicago magazine in 1993. Eventually, both he and Pellegrini were relieved of their posts at WFMT amid listener complaints that the once-revered station was being turned into a "classical Muzak" outlet. But while Mr. Nordstrand's fall from corporate grace rankled, friends say, he maintained a close working relationship with the station. After his heart attack in 1993, he worked part-time as a consultant, overseeing ratings surveys and selling advertising. WFMT played almost continuously on his home radio practically until the end of his life. "WFMT was his life," said Polk. A celebration of Mr. Nordstrand is being planned for later this year at the Old Town School of Folk Music. In addition to Polk, Mr. Nordstrand is survived by a daughter, Erika; a granddaughter, Kya; and his former wife, Diane Nordstrand.

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