Eighth-grader lands exclusive interview

By DAVID GUNTER

Feature correspondent

SANDPOINT — It’s one thing to read an interview in print, another to watch it on television. A third option is to settle in for a good listen as questions and answers are bandied back and forth on radio.

One area student discovered how much work goes into putting together a compelling Q&A session when he recently interviewed local resident Sue Vogelsinger, who spent considerable time at the epicenter of the Kennedy Administration, taking dictation and transcribing notes from JFK himself.

That interview, scheduled to air on April 26, as part of the KRFY-FM community radio morning show, put a young man named Tom Carty behind the microphone for the first time. And at 14 years old, he already has discovered the lure of the airwaves.

A student at the Sandpoint Waldorf School, he started training in radio as part of a school internship under the supervision of Suzy Prez, an instructor at the school and program host at the station. At first, the attraction was all about the gear — mics and amps and mixing boards, not to mention the computers that keep the signal flowing.

“I have an interest in tech, so there’s that,” said Carty. “Then I decided to do an interview, which sparked an interest in all the other aspects of radio.”

Away from the mechanical world of technology and square in the lap of one-on-one interaction, the young broadcaster learned the first — and hardest — lesson of interviewing: Good questions elicit good answers, while less-interesting queries usually are met by “yes” and “no” responses. The former makes for good listening; the latter is a tortuous form a slow death for everyone involved.

Good mentoring saved Carty from the agony of single syllable rejoinders. He dove into the project like a man preparing for a doctoral thesis.

“It definitely took a lot more planning than I expected,” he said. “I revised things a lot — probably five or six times to improve the questions and make them sound better.”

But even the best list of questions can fall well short if the interview host forgets the old adage about having one mouth and two ears and, more critically, using them in the same measure. Instead of slavishly adhering to his list and plodding gamely through the questions by rote, Carty did something that eludes some broadcasters for years — or for entire careers.

“I listened,” he said. “I listened to what she was saying and came up with other questions based on that.”

What Vogelsinger was saying turned out to be the ultimate inside story of Camelot in the early 1960s — not an airing of the president’s by now well-known misbehavior, but a portrait of a complex human being and the political powder keg of the short time he held office. As in all good yarns, the devil is in the details. To his credit, the radioman-in-training managed to bring those fascinating character traits and personality quirks to the surface.

By way of example, Carty learned that JFK’s penmanship left something to be desired, listing it as one of the surprises that came out of the interview.

“His handwriting,” he said when asked about things he discovered about the fallen president while talking to Vogelsinger. “She said it took her a very long time to learn what he was writing.

“And I was surprised at his personality,” he added. “She told me he had a great sense of humor. I did not know that.”

Vogelsinger got to see the light-hearted side of Kennedy, but also was at the center of things on the day he was assassinated in Dallas.

It seems like everyone of a certain age can remember precisely where they were when they heard the president had been shot. In Vogelsinger’s case, she was sitting on Air Force One, waiting for the first couple to return from the parade route through Dallas.

“She mentioned that a stewardess came running in to say, ‘Pack up — we have to go,” Carty shared. “She also told me that the Texas delegation was in high spirits during that time.”

That dark revelation drops like a bombshell, even for those who were aware that Kennedy had few fans in southern states. Not long after the Kennedy staffers were hustled off of Air Force One, Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in on the aircraft, Jackie Kennedy standing in shock beside him and, at her insistence, still wearing the pink dress spattered with her husband’s blood during the bleak ceremony.

It’s hard to know whether Carty fully understands that his first-ever interview was the kind of exclusive most people wait a lifetime to land. One thing is plain, however — he has a taste for the broadcast medium and wants to do more.

“I had no clue what radio was until I did this and realized how cool and interesting it can be,” he said.

As his mentor, Prez couldn’t be happier with the end result.

“This is a really exclusive, very interesting interview,” she said. “Sue has a great story to tell, but the interviewer helped her do that. Tom asked some questions that got her to go a little bit deeper.”

The raw interview ran nearly 35 minutes, requiring Carty to edit it down to just over 28 minutes to fit the morning show program format. Along with the in-studio sit-down, his internship involved handling all promotion for the upcoming broadcast, including writing press releases and designing posters advertising the event.

To punctuate the training, the tables will be turned when Carty himself is interviewed on-air about the process leading up to the program.

“It’ll be nice to just show up and answer some questions and not have to arrange a bunch of stuff,” he said. “I’m happy to have the (JFK) interview done — it was a lot of work.”

Tom Carty’s radio debut will air at 8 a.m. Wednesday, April 26, on KRFY-FM, found at 88.5 on the radio dial.