The voice of The Dalles slides into a booth – make that his own booth – at Cousins’ Restaurant as the breakfast crowd is pushing away their plates.
At 80, Al Wynn moves with the vigor of a much-younger man. He sets up microphones, tinkers with wires, adjusts a box that links everything to an antenna on the restaurant roof. He slips off his wristwatch, sets it on the table and keeps an eye on the dial.
At exactly 10:06 a.m., Wynn flips a switch. He leans into the microphone.
“Hey, good morning, good morning. This is show 11,279.”
And with that, “Coffee Break” is underway.
Al Wynn hosts his daily radio show, Coffee Break on KODL, in a booth at Cousins’ Restaurant in The Dalles, Oregon on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian
The talk show, which airs five times a week on KODL AM/FM radio, is a throwback to a bygone era. For the next 54 minutes, Wynn holds forth, his voice covering the city like a warm blanket on a cold day. Those out there in radioland are reminded, once more, the meaning of community and what it is to live in The Dalles, a city of about 16,000.
Wynn talks about the weather and mentions when and where the Kiwanis Club next meets. He offers praise to volunteers doing good things in town, takes calls from listeners and hosts on-air interviews with politicians and civic leaders who drop by his booth. He sometimes heralds the soup of the day at Cousins’.
He somehow combines folksiness and authority. He’s a neighbor, the one who’s always in the know.
“Not one person in The Dalles can do a thing about Russia and Ukraine,” said Chet Petersen, 83, a long-time resident. “Other than voting, it’s the same with national and state issues. The only place we can have an impact is here in The Dalles.”
As such, Petersen makes it a daily habit to tune in to “Coffee Break”.
“On my home radio,” he said. “Or in my pickup. I want to know from Al what’s going on.”
Around these parts, you see, KODL isn’t a call sign.
It’s Al Wynn.
***
A booth at Cousins’ Restaurant in The Dalles, Oregon, is set aside for Al Wynn's show five days a week. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian
Wynn became infatuated with radio when he was 12 and living with his family in Spokane. He had a daily paper route that included a stop at the local radio station. He’d hand-deliver the newspaper to the man who did it all – spinning records, reading the news and doing live, play-by-play commentary for the high-school teams.
“One day he asked me if I liked sports,” Wynn said. “Of course. He told me he had no sons, just five daughters, and wondered if I’d ever like to go to a baseball game with him.”
Wynn got his parents’ approval.
“I got to watch him work,” said Wynn. “I started going to all the games. When football season came along, I was there every Friday. I sat in the press box and spotted tackles for him.”
That, Wynn said, was all it took.
“Ah, you know how kids dream,” said Wynn. “I was fascinated by the radio business.”
Wynn graduated from high school but had no interest in college and bounced around doing what he described as “a bunch of other things.” His constant companion – in the car or at home – was the radio.
By then he’d landed on Whidbey Island, on the western side of Washington, about 35 miles north of Seattle. It was there he decided to make radio a career.
He signed up for a year-long correspondence class offered by the National Institute of Broadcasting out of Canada. Records were shipped to Wynn, who played them continually at home to learn radio lingo, the patter of a DJ, the rhythm of a news reader’s voice, tricks to keep listeners engaged.
“I followed a written lesson plan and submitted taped auditions on a regular basis that were critiqued,” he said.
At age 21, he landed a disc-jockey job at the small radio station on the island.
He later moved on to another small Washington station in Quincy, working the morning shift and then doing play-by-play for high-school sports.
“I was in hog heaven,” he said. “I had the best life.”
The company that owned the station acquired another in Yakima, and they named Wynn station manager there.
“Just short of 24 years old, and I was running a radio station,” he said.
In 1974, when he was 31, Wynn and another man learned that KODL, a 5,000-watt station in The Dalles that hit the air in 1940, was for sale. They teamed up and bought it. In addition to disc-jockey work, Wynn did play-by-play for local high-school sports, which he still does.
Four years later, Wynn became the station’s sole owner and launched “Coffee Break,” which became his passion.
“It’s not about my ego,” he said. “The community has given me so much. This is my way of giving back. It’s a way to talk about ideas and issues, to let people know – in a non-partisan way – what is going on so they can be informed.”
In 2006, the Oregon Association of Broadcasters named him the state’s broadcaster of the year.
Al Wynn is a fixture at Cousins’ Restaurant in The Dalles, Oregon, where he broadcasts his show. Sean Meagher/The Oregonian
He has no plans to sign off anytime soon.
“All my friends are retired,” he said. “Across the board they tell me they quit too soon. I use my brain. I don’t have to get up in the morning and think about what I should do with my time.”
He’s been forced to change with the times. Wynn has mastered radio technology that once would have seemed like science fiction to him.
He loves working in radio as much – or more than – he ever has.
“I’m in the goosebump business, and I’m still excited,” he said.
“To say, ‘Good evening everybody, we’re here at the Quinton Street Ballpark’ makes me feel like that 12-year-old boy I was back in Spokane. Getting to live out my dream is the name of the game.”
He’s never gotten rich doing what he does.
KODL is a shoestring operation. In addition to running “Coffee Break,” Wynn is a sportscaster, a salesman and a bookkeeper. He keeps track of the commercials and when they run. For much of the day, the station plays country music – with the technology today, no DJ is necessary.
Wynn has a part-time engineer who helps. His wife, Marcia Wynn, 75, a retired elementary and high-school physical-education teacher, takes care of scheduling. When her husband is broadcasting sports from the playing field, Marcia is back at the station handling production. The couple, both previously married, will celebrate their 35th anniversary this year.
“People rely on Al,” she said. “This is a small town. He always says he’s a big fish in a little fishbowl.”
Together the couple have seven grown children, none of whom have any interest in taking over the station when it’s time for Al Wynn to sign off for good.
“I need to figure it all out,” he said. “At this point, I don’t have an exit plan.”
For now, as he figures it, the future is only as far away as the next edition of “Coffee Break.”
“I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” he said. “How many people can say that?”
***
Cousins’ Restaurant is not only a local hangout, it’s attached to Cousins’ Country Inn, a hotel. That means the restaurant is usually busy when Wynn takes the air.
On a recent morning, a couple at a table ask the waitress what’s going on, telling her they are from Medford and about to head home. At another table, a pair of locals listen in to Wynn, commenting loud enough for others to hear.
The back booth where Al Wynn does the show – a permanent sign tells people it is reserved for “Coffee Break” between 10 and 11 in the morning – is kind of a local attraction, the place to watch and eavesdrop.
When Steve Lawrence was the town’s mayor from 2013 to 2019, he appeared on “Coffee Break” once a month. Even now he drops by the booth to discuss local issues. The show, he said, is part of the fabric of the town. He said people used to stop him on the sidewalk and weigh in on what he’d said on air during “Coffee Break.”
“Al makes sure important facts, ideas and issues get discussed,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence said the wife of one of his former high-school teachers used to come in to Cousins’ when, as mayor, he appeared on “Coffee Break.”
“She’d sit in the booth behind me and listen to everything,” said Lawrence. “At the end of the program she’d give me a report on how I did.”
Recent local movers and shakers who’ve appeared on the show include the city manager, county commissioners, school-district officials. As has become the tradition, the city’s current mayor, Rich Mays, is on at least once a month.
Billy Brost, the 47-year-old athletic director for the North Wasco County School District, met Wynn when Brost was 7 years old.
“We had just moved to The Dalles,” said Brost. “I was an only child, and my father drove me to the baseball park. Mr. Wynn was the first person I met. He called me ‘young fellow’ and asked me what I was doing. I told him nothing, that I’d just moved to town. He told me to come with him.”
From that moment forward, Brost said, he was a fixture at the local games.
“I helped Mr. Wynn carry his gear,” he said. “I was a ball boy. My time was spent sitting on a little bucket next to him in the press box.”
He knows that sooner or later Wynn’s tenure at KODL will come to an end. He doesn’t know how to prepare for that day. He said he plans to have Wynn record a voice message on his cellphone, something Brost can keep forever.
“Al Wynn,” he said, “is the soundtrack of my life.”
— Tom Hallman Jr.
503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr
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