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Never let it be said that Whitworth English Professor Leonard Oakland doesn't know a good gig when he finds it. He's been at the college for 40 years now, and for 20 of those years he's also been on-air talent at Spokane's National Public Radio affiliate, KPBX.
Oakland got his start at KPBX via a stint at Whitworth's own KWRS. In the early '80s he approached Gino Borland, '85, then the station's general manager, about doing a program. "I didn't want to do student music," he says, with something approaching horror in his voice, "and I didn't want to do a classical show. I wanted to learn to be a better speaker." Borland suggested a jazz show, and Oakland jumped at the chance. "I learned a lot about jazz that year, and I was completely terrified," he says. He developed a friendship with the owner of Mirage Records, whose then-wife worked for KPBX; after she'd met Oakland and listened to his KWRS show, she recruited him to work for Spokane's public-radio station. He's been there ever since.
Oakland, whose interests are famously wide-ranging, has been able to indulge quite a few of them at KPBX. "Let's see," he says: "I had a jazz program Sunday evenings for a couple of years. Then I added a chamber-music show, on Tuesdays. Mostly I've had a Sunday-morning classical-music program." After a brief pause, he says, "Oh – I was also a regular on Movies 101 [a film-review program that includes three local critics] for quite a while." When all of this extracurricular activity began to be a bit much, Oakland pulled back to just the Sunday-morning classics program and an occasional guest appearance on Movies 101. (Editor's note: He will be a regular on the program, which airs Friday nights at 6:30 p.m., throughout May and June.)
Leonard's Favorite Musical Pieces
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2
Beethoven: String Quartet No. 14 in C-Sharp
Minor and Symphony No. 7
Schubert: Song Cycle: Die Schöne Müllerin
J.S. Bach: Suites for Solo Cello and Partita
No. 2 for Solo Violin
How does this certified Whitworth icon (see Page 31) prepare for his Sunday classics show? "I hate to admit it, but sometimes I don't," he says. "I take two soft suitcases full of stuff that I've selected. I have in mind a big piece and an opening piece that I'm going to play, and from then on I often make it up as I go along. Otherwise, if it's all mapped out in advance, I find that I'm bored, and then I'm not as good on the air. It turns out that I need a little terror to keep me on my toes."
Oakland's time at KPBX has included its share of on-air snafus, from punching the wrong buttons to forgetting to punch the right ones, that resulted in various amounts of emphatically dead air. When he talks about the changeover from the use of reel-to-reel tapes to the current digital setup, he also mentions the need to stay on top of "that technological ballet that people who are 20 years old can master with no trouble at all, but that, for those of us who are older, can be daunting."
Taking into account the technological ballet, the moments of terror, and the additional workload for a man who, at nearly 68, continues to teach full time, how long does Oakland plan to continue at KPBX? "Until I get so inept that I need to get off the air," he says. "I don't really want to quit teaching or being on the radio or talking about movies or any of those things. Those are the things I love."
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