Dick Chapin celebrates a half century in broadcasting
By Jeff Korbelik
Lincoln Journal Star
This story appeared in the June 1 edition of the Lincoln Journal Star and is reprinted here by permission.
Amid the plaques on the office wall behind Dick Chapin's desk is a single black-and-white photo.
It's a picture of the 1936 Lincoln South Side Midgets football team.
To know Chapin is to understand the significance of the photo.
In it are 20 or so kids wearing uniform shirts stretched over shoulder pads and leather helmets with no face guards.
"Which number are you?" I ask Chapin, who has taken the photo off the wall.
"No. 1," he replies and then points out one of his teammates who went on to become a successful Lincoln businessman.
"What position did you play?" I ask.
"Quarterback," Chapin says, replacing the photo back on the wall.
The answers are not surprising.
Even as a 13-year-old, Richard W. Chapin was in charge.
* * *
Sitting in his office on the seventh floor of the Wells Fargo building, the silver-haired Chapin looks more like a man of 60, not one who turned 80 in March.
And especially not one who has had open-heart surgery, five bypasses and a stroke.
The Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital is using Chapin as a spokesman. He's the one on the television commercial and the fellow flexing his muscles on billboards around town.
On this sunny spring day, Chapin is dressed in olive slacks and a matching short-sleeved print shirt. His icy-blue eyes actually convey warmth as he settles in to talk about his career.
Chapin, you see, recently celebrated his 50th year in radio broadcasting.
Fifty and counting.
Semi retired, he runs the radio brokerage firm Chapin Enterprises. He also owns five stations: two in Nebraska City; one each in Storm Lake and Spencer, Iowa; and a Christian station in Omaha.
"It's because he wants to be busy," said Roger Larson, who worked with Chapin for 32 years at Lincoln's old Stuart Broadcasting Co. "He loves to be where the action is, where things are going on.
"Plus, he's made so many contacts through the country, it's just natural for him to continue. A lot of business still comes his way."
Chapin may be unfamiliar to younger folks in Lincoln, even to some of those now in the radio industry. But during the 1960s, '70s and '80s, no person was bigger on the local and national radio scene.
How important was Chapin?
Consider he was the first person to chair both the National Association of Broadcasters (twice) and the Radio Advertising Bureau. In 1974, the NAB awarded him the Distinguished Service Award, the nation's highest broadcasting award.
It, too, hangs prominently on the wall behind his desk.
In receiving the honor, Chapin joined the likes of other notables, such as Herbert Hoover, Bob Hope, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Lowell Thomas and Billy Graham.
"I think Dick is responsible for the progress in radio broadcasting in Nebraska more than any other person in the history of the industry," said Larson, a former general manager at KFOR. "He really was an outstanding leader."
And an opinionated one.
His opinions (see related story) are as numerous as the flashy sports coats and ties he is known for wearing.
Ask him about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated television and radio ownership, and those baby blues begin to dance.
"When I got into the business, the attitude in Washington was we do not want thought control," he said. "That's why we bitterly opposed cross-ownership between newspaper and radio.
"You would own the minds of the people, and this is wrong," he added. "I still believe in that. You may not own (the mind), but you would have an undue influence on it."
Actually, Chapin feels partly responsible for deregulation. One of the reasons he joined the national radio board was to help rid the industry of "onerous regulations" connected to radio engineering.
"We had rules that seemed so silly," he said, "like you had to have a transmitter in view of the operating board. We can talk to the man on the moon, but we've got to be able to see the transmitter."
Chapin said the board convinced the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate "500-some rules."
"Then, they went way beyond that," he said. "They started deregulation of the industry. We've come to what we are now."
Chapin said Docket 80-90, rather than the Telecommunications Act, was the biggest change in the industry in his 50 years. The Reagan-era rule loosened restrictions on how many operations could coexist in one market. It added nearly 700 new FM stations to the dial.
"(The FCC) created these stations, and it wasn't necessary, so after a period of time the FCC said we've created a problem; how are we going to correct it?" he said. "We'll correct by having owners own more stations."
* * *
Chapin was born in Lincoln on March 20, 1923. He graduated from Lincoln High School and served three years in the United States Air Force, where he was commissioned a lieutenant bombardier.
After graduation from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1947, he was appointed secretary of the chamber of commerce in Atlantic, Iowa.
He returned to Lincoln as convention manager of the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce and later was named assistant general manager.
In 1953, hearing the money was in sales, he took a job as a KFOR account executive. He remembers owning a radio but rarely listening to it.
He sold his first spot during a Western League baseball game on the station's FM station to Ollie Christensen of Christensen's Appliances.
"The games were being carried on an FM station with no audience (because nobody had radios with FM signals)," he said. "I'll never forget it. You don't forget things like that, I guess."
He was named KFOR's general manager the next year, the start of his climb up the corporate ladder. In 1970, he became president of Stuart Enterprises, which owned radio stations, outdoor advertising plants, an insurance company and several real estate holdings, including the Stuart Building in downtown Lincoln.
Chapin was a shrewd businessman. He was known by his employees for his no-nonsense style of doing things. If they did something wrong, he let them know in so many words.
"We had a lot of rules to adhere to," longtime KFOR morning personality Cathy Blythe said. "Some people were scared of him because he was such a presence. You wanted to please him."
When people ask Larson if Chapin was ever upset with him, he responds with a joke: "Only once, I say, and it was six months after I started working there. He stopped being mad about six months before I left."
Orval Koch, who worked for Chapin for 25 years, called his old boss "very demanding, but very fair."
"He was honest, had great integrity and you could go by his word," Koch said. "He was just a guy who worked hard at what he did."
* * *
In 1985, Stuart Enterprises was sold to DKM Broadcasting Corp. of Atlanta. DKM retained Chapin as president to run the 10 Stuart stations.
After two years, he left DKM and opened a branch office for R.C. Crisler & Co., a Cincinnati media brokerage firm.
"At age 64, after being in the media business 34 years, I just couldn't play golf four days a week," he said back then. "That's not my style."
A short time later, he went into the brokerage business for himself. Over the years, he's brokered deals small and large, including a $52 million one for a station in Pittsburgh and Indianapolis.
"I believe in the brokerage business," he said. "I thought I could be a lot of help to people negotiating for stations. I have knowledge of the business, and I am currently operating them. I'm not sitting on a mountain top overseeing the practice."
Radio ownership seems natural to him. Kind of like putting the football in a quarterback's hands.
"I never thought at age 80, I would be getting back into (ownership), but it's been fun," he said.
