From This Valley

By Pete Steiner

Mournful Memories

It’s been a while since I’ve told any radio tales. This month, however, brings to mind two radio anniversaries that demonstrate how our wonderful town is not always as copacetic and quiet as Lake Wobegon. I need to relate these tales for the record while I still can.

August marks the 40th anniversary of the murder of local radio personality Bud Quimby. At 37, Quimby was already an 18-year veteran of the local airwaves. For 11 of those years, he’d hosted the popular “The Bigger and the Better” afternoon drive show on KTOE, as well as serving as chief station engineer. He was fun, funny, a bit eccentric and an electronics wizard.

Bud lived alone at his North Mankato home but could often be found socializing in the evening at local bars. As a fellow DJ, I had attended a couple of the “afterhours” late-night gatherings he liked to host at his home. Most of those featured larger groups of friends and acquaintances. But on Aug. 17, 1981, Bud ended up in his living room drinking beer with just one other person. Just before 3 a.m., that other person called police to tell them Quimby was dead.

Twenty-one-year-old Tom Kulseth initially told police arriving at the scene, he had stabbed Quimby once in the chest with a knife taken from a kitchen drawer. He claimed that Bud had made homosexual advances. Kulseth was eventually charged by a grand jury with first-degree murder. Because Quimby was well-known in the area, the prosecution agreed to move the trial from Nicollet County to Redwood County.

Despite prosecuting County Attorney Bill Gustafson giving what one of the appointed defense lawyers would call, “one of the best closing arguments I ever heard,” the Redwood County jury bought the “homosexual advances” angle Columnist Pete Steiner is pictured here on the far right of the photo.

and convicted the defendant of the lesser charge of first-degree manslaughter.

The Minnesota Supreme Court later agreed with Kulseth that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress statements he made to police at the scene of the stabbing before his Miranda rights were given. However, the court added, “… if anything, defendant benefited from having his extrajudicial statements (re: homosexual advances) admitted as evidence….”

In what can only be considered as a cautionary fact, it came out at the trial that Bud’s blood alcohol content the evening he died was nearly four times the legal limit, while Kulseth’s was nearly 2 1/2 times.

Forty-five years ago, AFTRAaffiliated announcers were two months into a strike against radio station KYSM. Feelings among those involved, as well as their friends and relatives, remained raw for decades, but with only a few of us who participated still alive in the area, it’s time to tell.

On-air staffers had organized with AFTRA by the summer of 1976 but did not yet have a contract – which, of course, proposed higher wages and benefits. The station at the time was in the stone building on the northeast corner of Second and Main streets. It has since moved to the North Mankato hilltop and undergone several changes in ownership and management.

I have always believed that I was brought in as a potential strikebreaker, given my long family ties to the local business community. Be that as it may, I will never forget that first day in the Monday morning sun, on the sidewalk outside the station with a picket sign, and management walking in past us telling us they could not believe it had come to this.

Soon I would be sitting in a wood-paneled conference room at a negotiating table with some of my cohorts and our union agent across from my bosses and their lawyer, whom I had once socialized with. Now we were sniping at each other, occasionally using unprintable epithets. Rod Serling could have used it as a setting for an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

The strike grew more bitter as secondary boycotts were set up to discourage advertisers. We knew we were in trouble when a Teamster delivery truck crossed our picket line, as did legendary Star Tribune columnist Jim Klobuchar. As family pressures grew along with financial need, I eventually left the strike and moved to Minneapolis. At last, by the fall of 1977, a contract was signed, and most of the striking staffers were brought back. I was rehired as a nighttime country DJ to begin in 1978.

The U.S. union movement was already in decline; soon would come President Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers. I leave it to you to decide if there’s a correlation between unions’ decline and the decline of the middle class and the widening wealth gap in this country.

Correction: Apologies to Fred Lutz for misspelling his name in last month’s “Best of” article; everyone knew anyway who I was talking about! Longtime radio guy Pete Steiner is now a free lance writer in Mankato.

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