RADIO HEAD
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Wayne Downing will keep hosting ‘In the Mood’ Tuesday afternoons on KMUN 91.9 FM ‘until the voice and the brain give out’
Wayne Downing looks too big for the chair
and board in the KMUN studio until he sits
down and puts on the headphones. He adjusts
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voice welcomes listeners to “In the Mood,” his
Tuesday afternoon show. He assures them that
the big band number he is about to play, “will
melt the buttons off your jammies.”
Downing got into radio when he and his
daughter, a classical musician, challenged each
other to get beyond their comfort zones. She
chose to play trombone in
an all-woman Dix-
ieland jazz band.
Downing
volun-
teered at KMUN.
That was over a de-
cade ago. He began
with folk music, then
looked around for
a kind of music that
KMUN wasn’t already
playing. He chose the
big band music of the
1920s through the 1950s
because his mother liked
it, and “In the Mood” is
now one of KMUN’s most
popular programs.
“I thought I knew a lot
about the music,” Down-
ing says. “I knew nothing,
but I’m learning as I go
along.” He has come to love
big bands, and he continues
to play them because, “This
music is really good. We
shouldn’t discard Harry James,
Woody Herman, Ella Fitzger-
ald and Billie Holiday.”
Downing’s road to where he
is now has been a long and rocky
one. Her grew up in a Seattle suburb and en-
tered the University of Washington intending to
be a scholar of Shakespeare and the Jacobean
era, but the 1960s interfered. “I lost my way for
a while. I’m not good at self-management,” he
says. “I asked myself, ‘Why should I be a stu-
dent when I can be a worker?’”
He left school and took a job for 2 dollars
4 | November 5, 2015 | coastweekend.com
Photos by Dwight Caswell
Above:: Wayne Downing hosts “In the Mood,” a popular big band radio show, on
Tuesday afternoons on KMUN 91.9 FM.
Left: Wayne Downing’s road to where he is now has been a long and
rocky one, but he is a man at peace with the world.
an hour. “One of my regrets,” he says
today, “but when you’re young you think
you’re superman.”
Then there were what he calls, “the psy-
chedelic misgivings of the ’60s,” and he be-
gan drinking. And smoking. In the end he was
sleeping in an abandoned house with police
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‘I have never
been a slave to
the dollar. I prefer
a good book or
a painting, or
music. I can’t save
the world, but I
can save the little
part around me.’
as I got,” he says. “My wife came and got me.
She brought me in from the cold. Most women
have an incredible power of forgiveness.”
Downing “crawled out of the ’60s on my
hands and knees” and returned to the suburbs.
“The lawnmower, the matching dishes, the PTA
meetings,” he says. “I really wanted them.” He
worked as a typesetter and printer “until my job
was replaced by the Mac,” and he quit smoking
and drinking, “because my daughter didn’t de-
serve a jerk for a father.”
Eventually he and his wife, Cecelia, moved
to the coast. “I love the rain, and I really like the
people here. I like the volunteer spirit in this part
of the world,” he says. “In the Mood” and his
column in the Chinook Observer have now be-
come his life. The column “is my psychiatrist’s
couch, and KUMN is an island in a great big
ocean; only good things happen here.”
Downing is a man at peace with the world.
“I have never been a slave to the dollar,” he
says. “I prefer a good book or a painting, or mu-
sic. I can’t save the world, but I can save the
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his time on earth, and a conversation with him
is full of aphorisms about what is important to
him: “Don’t get upset; follow your passions; the
world is a better place for music; know good
people, and be kind to your neighbors.” About
writing: “Get to the truth, and write what you
feel.” Downing says, “The key to success in my
life has been to keep it simple. Complicate your
life, and everything falls apart.”
Downing’s wife passed away recently, and
then he had a bout with cancer that resulted in a
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my mind about living and dying,” he says. “I’m
okay with it. We all have our time, and I’m com-
ing to the end of mine.”
Meanwhile the beauty of music keeps him
going. “I’ve never understood punk rock,” he
says. “It’s about anger, and I’m tired of being
angry.” So he will continue to play the mostly
cheerful big band sounds and old radio shows,
“until the voice and the brain give out.”
And every Tuesday afternoon he signs off
with his signature phrase, “I’ll see you on the
radio.”
Coastal Life
Story by BY DWIGHT CASWELL