Veteran TV and radio broadcaster Stan Turner believed that preparation was the key to any successful interview, TV broadcast or radio show.
In 1983, for example, Turner spent days preparing for an interview with President Ronald Reagan. He assembled a thick file on the president that included clippings, facts and questions to ask, said longtime friend Tom Oszman.
“Stan always wanted to do quality work,” said Oszman, who runs TC Media Now, a nonprofit dedicated to digitizing local TV broadcasts. “He would prepare for his show all morning, probably even before he came in with lots of papers. He knew about his guests. He knew about their history. He was very factually correct. He was very prepared. He didn’t just come in and turn the microphone on.”
Turner died Sunday at Our Lady of Peace Hospice in St. Paul of complications related to breast cancer. He was 81.
Turner had one of those voices that was instantly recognizable, Oszman said. “He loved telling stories. He loved telling stories about people in our community. I think that we have lost one of the great storytellers of our area.”
Turner told the Pioneer Press in 2018 that his love of journalism was sparked by reading “My Weekly Reader,” the educational classroom magazine, while he was growing up in St. Louis Park. “I just loved reading about things and then telling other kids what I had found out because I knew they weren’t reading it,” Turner said. “It sounds corny, but that’s how I got into it. I love telling stories.”
Stan Turner and his daughter Laura during their regular walk around the Maplewood Mall in December 2020, not long after he underwent open heart surgery. (Scott Takushi / Pioneer Press)
Turner was born to be a journalist, said his daughter, Laura Turner Schubkegel, who lives in Woodbury. “My dad just had this uncanny, insatiable thirst for knowledge, facts and reporting. And that voice of his. He’s always had it. It was authoritative and believable. You knew you could believe this man. It was very credible. Trusting, that’s the word. Oh, and it was smooth. Just like butter.”
Turner majored in journalism at the University of Minnesota and, while still a student, got a job in the news department at KDWB Radio after splicing together an audition tape at his childhood home in St. Louis Park. He moved to KSTP Radio News in 1966, then was hired back at KDWB as news director a year later. He returned to Hubbard Broadcasting in 1968, taking a job as government reporter for KSTP-TV.
“That’s when he found his niche, covering government and the political scene,” Schubkegel said. “That’s where he really wanted to be. He just loved the truth. He loved the action. He liked the two sides in the chambers going at it, trying to pass bills. He found that fascinating, and he made a lot of friends at the Capitol. Politics just really resonated with him. People trusted him. He knew that was the most important thing.”
Turner, who taught an Introduction to Radio and Television Journalism class at the University of St. Thomas, always stressed the importance of impartiality and fair and balanced reporting, said KSTP chief political reporter Tom Hauser, one of Turner’s students. “He always said that the story is the story. The reporter is not the story,” Hauser said. “He would say, ‘People don’t care what you think. They care what the people you interview think.’ I’ve always kept that in mind, and that’s how I report the news.”
Turner also believed that “reporters and photographers are the backbone of any news operation,” Hauser said. “An anchor just kind of throws to what the reporters are out in the field doing. He always felt that nothing was more important than covering what the government is doing with your taxpayer dollars and with policies they are passing.”
An innovator
Turner served as KSTP’s associate news director, weekend anchor, news director and weekday co-anchor before he was hired, in 1989, to help launch a 24-hour satellite news channel for Hubbard Broadcasting called the All News Channel, where he served as primetime weekday anchor and writer. He lost his job when the channel went off the air in 2002.
Turner was “an innovator and a great broadcaster and a great newsman,” said Stan Hubbard, the chairman of Hubbard Broadcasting, which owns KSTP.
“It’s a terrible loss,” Hubbard said Monday. “Stan was a wonderful person. He was a hard-working, dedicated newsperson who was not afraid to go after the truth. He was always very prepared. He was terrific. Everything he did was good.”
In 2004, Turner became news director, reporter, and newscaster with the Minnesota News Network. He also began hosting a Saturday program on KLBB-AM Radio in downtown Stillwater. His “All Request and Dedication Show” soon took the noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday slot.
Turner’s time at KLBB was a gift to everyone in the east metro and beyond, said Don Effenberger, a longtime friend and former Pioneer Press editor.
“While there’s all this well-deserved attention to Stan’s newsgathering and all his news jobs, I wouldn’t want it to be forgotten what he did for the east metro community with his KLBB shows, both that Saturday show he did and of course, the ‘All Request’ one,” Effenberger said. “Stan found so much joy in music and sharing it with people, and I think that’s what made the show so popular.”
Turner told the Pioneer Press that his love of music came through “osmosis” when he was a baby. “I had eczema, a terrible skin rash, when I was born, and I almost died from it,” he said in 2018. “It was tough to get me to take naps or get to sleep because I hurt all the time, so my mother would roll the crib over by the radio, and that would help me go to sleep. I think that’s part of it. I just absolutely adore music.”
Among his favorite artists: Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. His favorite Presley song was “Loving You,” he told the Pioneer Press. “I like lyrics. I like melody,” he said. “I like words I can repeat.”
Here’s part of the playlist from one of his “Request and Dedication” shows on KLBB in 2018: country star Terri Gibbs, Chuck Berry, novelty songs, Motown, some Johnny Mathis, local chanteuse Sharone LeMieux and Guy Marks singing “Loving You Has Made Me Bananas.”
Each song had a story, one that was meticulously researched by Turner. His music library filled his KLBB office and included “Billboard’s Hottest 100 Hits,” “The Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock and Soul” and “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950.”
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“I love doing research. This is my bible right here,” Turner told the Pioneer Press at the time, pointing to “The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits.” “I find out information people wouldn’t otherwise get or have or know. I call them ‘Eureka moments.’
“To me, this is a logical extension of being a reporter, which I’ve been all of my life,” he said. “We are hunters and gatherers.”
Turner’s popular show ended in March 2018 when KLBB went off the air. “He was a loyalist,” Oszman said. “He did that show till KLBB closed; it was not canceled. He did the All News Channel until they went off the air. He stayed with companies until they were done, and he had a 35-year track record at Hubbard. He was at KLBB for about 14 years. He was a loyal guy, a loyal friend, and a loyal employee.”
A ‘St. Paul guy’
Stan Turner, left, is joined by Anthony Andler, the proprietor of Heimie’s Haberdashery, for a test run of his popular “All Request and Dedication Show,” in a new radio broadcast space in Andler’s business in the Hamm Building in downtown St. Paul on Sept. 27, 2019. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)
Turner was a “St. Paul guy through and through,” said Rick Shefchik, former Pioneer Press reporter, columnist and media critic. “As a radio newsman, he became intimately knowledgeable about politicians, lawmaking and legislators at the Capitol,” Shefchik said. “When he moved to TV in the late 1970s, he was one of the key faces in a fiercely competitive TV news market at a time when local anchors became celebrities.”
But Turner was “never taken with his own importance, being a news reporter to his soul,” Shefchik said.
Turner clearly reveled in his years hosting the “All Request and Dedication Show” on KLBB, said Shefchik, a frequent guest and the author of “Everybody’s Heard About the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock ‘n’ Roll in Minnesota.”
“When a famous musician died, Stan would meticulously assemble a tribute show, and took great satisfaction in researching the background of even the most obscure songs requested by his loyal listeners,” Shefchik said.
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Turner said: “In this day and age of hard, jagged corners and nasty rhetoric and everything, it’s nice to connect to this every day, isn’t it? I am lucky. I’ve always known that. From Day One. I never have taken this for granted.”
Turner met Ruth Juneau Huberty, a part-time weather reporter and office manager at KDWB, when he worked there in 1965; she was a divorced mother of two children, John and Katie, whom he later adopted. The couple got married in 1966; their daughter, Laura, was born the following year. The couple divorced in 1981.
Turner is survived by his children, Laura Schubkegel, Katherine Urich, and John Turner, and his longtime companion, Mary Brennan.
A celebration of Turner’s life will be held at a later date. Wulff Funeral Home in Woodbury is handling arrangements.
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