For 52 years, he is stored Aggie followers, and Cache Valley, knowledgeable and entertained

SALT LAKE CITY — Whether or not anybody may ever do it once more, contemplating the arrival of social media, podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music, SiriusXM, AI and all the opposite improvements which have transpired since again within the day when radio was king, is debatable. Who is aware of what broadcasting jobs are going to seem like sooner or later?

However Al Lewis is not frightened about any of that; he is simply grateful, and nonetheless a bit astonished, that for the previous 52 years he is been in a position to get up each day pleased and enthused about what he did for a dwelling.

“I received to do precisely what I all the time needed to do,” he says.

Ever since August of 1972, when he began his freshman yr at Utah State College, Al has been employed by KVNU, the longtime Logan radio station that has been in operation since 1936. Fifty-two years. One job. How many individuals can say that?

Al retired this weekend. In a couple of months, he’ll be 70, and he can be narrowing his focus to 2 issues: one, touring together with his spouse, Teresa, and two, making an attempt to shoot his age on the golf course.

One factor he is not going to do going ahead is ready the alarm for 4:15 a.m. — his commonplace getting up time the previous half-century so he might be prepared for his 5:30 morning present.

Lastly, he can sleep in.

However oddly sufficient, his primary fear is he will not have the ability to pull it off.

“Even after I go on trip I get up at 4:15,” he says. “My physique is aware of I may use some sleep, however I am unsure it is ever going to actually occur.”

It was a love of sports activities, and Utah State College sports activities specifically, that turned Al right into a broadcaster. As a child rising up in Logan, virtually within the shadow of the Block A, he used to take heed to Karl Klages announce the Aggie video games on the radio. Not solely did he idolize Klages, however his dad and mom had been associates with the Klageses, so he received to fulfill him and be round him. Klages gave Al recreation packages, the occasional autograph and a duplicate of the e book he’d written about ” be a sportscaster.”

So there, at age 6 or 7, the die was solid. Al and his boyhood associates Greg Hansen and Brad Larsen can be enjoying wiffle ball within the yard and Al wouldn’t solely take part but additionally do the play-by-play.

If understanding Klages wasn’t serendipitous sufficient, when Klages moved on to change into play-by-play announcer for Purdue College, the person who changed him as voice of the Aggies was Reid Andreasen — Al’s next-door neighbor.

Quick-forward to Al’s first yr at Utah State — he by no means thought-about going to varsity wherever else — and Andreasen, who was program director at KVNU, employed the 18-year-old to do Saturday and Sunday reveals.

Al’s profession was set. He’d spin data, report the information and climate, interview friends on the station, after which head off to announce a sporting occasion. Finally, that included doing the Aggie video games.

In all, he is spent virtually half of his profession — 24 years — broadcasting Utah State soccer and basketball video games — barely greater than 1,000 of them within the years KVNU has had the Aggie contract: 1977-78 and 1995-2017.

Within the years when he wasn’t doing Aggie video games, he was doing play-by-play at Logan Excessive College basketball and soccer video games — masking a 26-year span that ran from 1972-1977, 1979-1994 and 2017-2022. (KVNU has been broadcasting Logan Excessive College sports activities for the reason that mid-Nineteen Forties, the longest-running native broadcast in Utah.)

For the previous half-century, you would be hard-pressed to search out anybody in all of Cache Valley who has seen extra, watched extra, talked extra and had his finger on the native pulse greater than Al Lewis.

“It is actually been a dream,” he says. “I received the possibility to do the Aggie video games and the Logan Excessive video games, which is why I received into broadcasting within the first place, however I additionally received the possibility to have the ability to watch, observe and touch upon Logan and Cache Valley, locations that I actually love and care about.”

Al’s KVNU morning present with longtime sidekick Craig Hislop, himself a former Utah State play-by-play announcer, has been a morning staple within the Cache Valley for the previous 16 years. In a paean to what native radio has all the time carried out greatest, Craig and Al wake individuals up, entertain them, inform them and hold them linked.

And whereas it could be true that radio’s glory days are fading now that you may take heed to Taylor Swift with out the adverts on satellite tv for pc radio and click on on Apple Information in your cellphone, Al can let you know that the information of native radio’s demise is untimely. Lots of people on the market in radioland nonetheless find it irresistible like he is cherished it.

Satirically, he discovered this out by means of social media.

“The day I put it out on Fb that I used to be retiring, I went dwelling after work, sat down and had lunch on the home and began trying on the responses,” he says. “You possibly can’t consider how many individuals commented, individuals I might interviewed or I might met or individuals I might by no means met who had been longtime listeners. To be sincere, I did not know for positive how many individuals listened to radio anymore. I sat there and cried for quarter-hour over what individuals mentioned and the way a lot they cared.”