Dave Congalton celebrates 30 years in SLO talk radio: ‘I’m doing the job I was meant to do’
Central Coast news talk show host Dave Congalton is celebrating a memorable milestone this week: 30 years as host of KVEC’s flagship program, “Hometown Radio.”
It’s a job that has placed him for years at the heart of the discussion about local news and issues, producing four hours of conversation five days a week, chatting with listeners and reflecting the concerns that are most important to San Luis Obispo County residents.
Of his career, Congalton said his mission is to “hold a mirror up to the community, and I’ve spent 30 years now doing this. I honestly think I’m doing the job I was meant to do.”
Three decades of talking on the radio has left him with a lot of stories and memories.
The day Madonna Inn owner Alex Madonna died in 2004, his wife Phyllis phoned in and spoke for eight minutes straight to thank the community as part of a show dedicated to him.
“She was overwhelmed by emotion and hearing all the tributes,” Congalton said of the four-hour program dedicated to Alex. “The smartest thing I ever did, I just backed away from the microphone and I shut up. I just let her talk.”
Another day, Festival Mosaic Music Director Scott Yoo played a Stradivarius violin, worth millions of dollars, in the studio.
“I sat mere feet away and my eyes welled up,” he said. “I get paid for this.”
In 2007, when PG&E’s popular meteorologist John Lindsey was laid off along with 25 other Diablo Canyon employees, Congalton launched a campaign to help save his job.
“I just went on the air and for the next two weeks said ‘Do not call and yell. Do not get angry,’” Congalton said. “’PG&E needs to understand how important John is to us. So here’s the phone number. Here’s the email. You’re going to call and ask to talk to Peter Darbee (who was the PG&E CEO at the time), and you just help him understand how important John is to us.’”
Within days, Lindsey had been re-hired, and Darbee went on Congalton’s show and apologized.
“It wasn’t me,” Congalton said. “It was our listeners. But it showed that we could make a difference.”
This week, “Hometown Radio” is playing clips of old shows and longtime guests have been looking back at the show’s history and legacy. Friday marks the milestone dating back to Congalton’s first day on Jan. 7, 1992.
“I’d like to congratulate you for 30 years on KVEC radio on the same show,” Lindsey told Congalton on air during a segment this week. “That’s an amazing accomplishment, Dave. You really have been the eyes and the ears of the Central Coast, as the late, great Katcho Achadjian would say.”
What is ‘Hometown Radio’?
In characterizing his show, the 68-year-old host said he seeks guests who offer a wide range of political and community perspectives.
The show is designed to cover “important issues facing the community and chats with a mixture of local officials and interesting people,” according to KVEC’s website.
At times, guests have sparked passionate disagreements and critical listener response, even some complaints about who Congalton has allowed on air and how he has approached a topic.
In 2010, the story of Annie the dog being returned to its original owner, after the new adoptive owner resisted giving her back, generated a flood of calls.
Congalton lobbied to get her back to the pet’s original home. “I still get flak for that, but I do not apologize,” he said recently on air.
Congalton recalls death threats made against a liberal guest over her planned show appearance in 2005 before she was to come on air and discuss the Iraq War. The station hired security officers to escort her from her car to the studio.
In the 1990s, Congalton hosted a Montana militia member speaking about the Oklahoma City domestic terrorist bombing carried out by white supremacists.
“I stopped the interview after about a half hour because I just wasn’t comfortable with the conversation,” Congalton said. “These positions are so extreme.”
National matters are up for discussion, but the emphasis is on the local, Congalton says.
This week, he discussed the upcoming SLO Jewish Film festival, and chatted with guests about whether the “the good old days” for Baby Boomers are gone, quality of life in California, and the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S.
Airing weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on 920 AM and 96.5 FM, along with podcasts posted on the station’s website, Congalton said sometimes the caller phone line lights up, while other days, striking the right chord is more challenging.
“The rule of thumb is you can have a bad show where it just doesn’t come together,” he said. “You come back and get them the next day. But if you have two bad shows in a row, then I would start thinking I’d lost it. It kind of keeps you humble when you throw out a topic and nobody calls in and it’s crickets.”
Congalton said his show thrives “when I talk about topics that national media is not going to talk about,” and often that’s a local issue, such as a conversation on Cal Poly’s planned switch from quarters to semesters this week.
“The Tribune can cover it,” he said.” New Times can cover it. And we’re going to join in the conversation.”
A career in communication
Congalton came to San Luis Obispo from University of Tulsa knowing little about the community after being hired at Cal Poly to teach in the Speech Department as part of a one-year, nonrenewable contract.
After his stint at Cal Poly, he dabbled in standup comedy and moved to Los Angeles briefly to pursue a screenwriting career. But he returned to SLO when things didn’t work out in L.A.
He has since sold a screenplay, which was made into the 2014 movie “Authors Anonymous” starring Kaley Cuoco (“Big Bang Theory”), Chris Klein (“American Pie”) and Dennis Farina (“Law and Order”), and he’s working on another script.
Congalton also coordinated the Cuesta College Central Coast Writers Conference for 12 years.
Congalton was a columnist at the Telegram-Tribune (the newspaper simplified its name back to The Tribune in 1999) before launching his radio career in 1992, replacing Betsey Nash, a popular KVEC voice who held the job before him.
“I thought I was going to have the luxury of starting up in the afternoon and to learn from Betsey and now all of a sudden I’m thrown into the deep end and I’ve got to take over for the No. 1 talk show host on the Central Coast,” Congalton said.
He was hired by then-General Manager Dave Cox, who left the station thereafter and went on to start the marketing firm Barnett Cox & Associates with his wife, Maggie Cox, which was acquired by AMF Media Group in 2017.
He said learned early on who the target audience is.
“People under the age of 35 go to radio for music, but once you hit your mid-30s, you’re searching for news, opinion and analysis,” Congalton said. “Talk radio is basically a 40-and-up demographic. Like our newspaper and TV colleagues, radio faces the challenge of attracting and keeping an audience in this age of social media and podcasting.”
Political divide
Congalton, who describes himself politically as a left-of-center Independent, notes his days of bringing a Democrat and Republican on the show to debate a topic, and then going out to lunch afterwards, are long gone.
“I still have conservative (guests),” he said. “And I still have liberals. But I don’t bring them up at the same time. And I wouldn’t even think about trying to have a debate, because it would just blow up. It just gets personal so quickly.”
His goal now is to “bring in different people and have good conversations and that’s all I’m interested in,” Congalton said.
Congalton said that his show often has a political focus, but it’s important to vary the subject matter.
“You have to be careful because you have to feed the beast and people come to talk radio because they want to talk local or national politics,” Congalton said. “You have to give them that forum a couple times a week. But then there’s also those people that when they hear the topic is political, they switch out. You just want to balance it out with a lot of non-political stuff too.”
Congalton said that talk show hosts such as the late conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh and others with blunt political agendas have helped bring an audience to AM radio, but they also create division.
“I would not have had 30 years without Rush Limbaugh,” Congalton said. “Limbaugh made AM radio commercially viable again and brought people back to AM radio. News talk is the most popular radio format today. But I would also argue that if you want to understand the toxic nature of our country right now, talk radio has played a major role in creating the division and stoking the division.”
Congalton said he doesn’t want his show to contribute to that trend.
“That’s why my show is different,” he said. “I’m not there day after day, spewing out crap just to push my agenda on people.”
Though he loves the grind of filling 20 hours on air each week, Congalton admits it can be grueling.
“The hardest part of my job is just coming up with a show every day,” Congalton said. “That’s the hard part. But this is something I enjoy and as long as I’m having fun, I’ll keep doing it. I don’t know what I would do in retirement.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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