Michael Titterton, PBS Hawai‘i

PBS Hawai‘i

LONG STORY Brief WITH LESLIE WILCOX

Born into a fighting family in the east end of London, books and radio suggested youthfull Michael Titterton a peek into a different life. His insatiable curiosity led him to travel around the world, eventually landing him in Hawai‘i, where he took on the challenge of turning around a faltering Hawai‘i Public Radio. Under his leadership as President and General Manager, HPR has grown into the vital and trusted radio network it is today, serving the entire state. This month, Hawai‘i Arts Alliance will be recognizing Titterton as their two thousand sixteen Alfred Preis Honoree for his lifetime support of the arts.

This program will be rebroadcast on Wednesday, Sept. 6, at 11:00 pm and Sunday, Sept. Ten, at Four:00 pm.

There are very few human behaviors that go back further than storytelling. It’s the quintessential social act. Any time we pass skill from generation to generation, you know, if we don’t have a written language or anything, which we haven’t for most of the history … and it’s how we bond. It’s a wonderful vehicle for healing, for illumination, for understanding, for being civilized. That’s what life is; it’s the stories we get to tell.

Michael Titterton has been in the business of storytelling most of his life. Yet, it’s only one of the many abilities that he needed to convert Hawaii Public Radio from a puny faltering station into a sturdy statewide network. Michael Titterton, distinguished two thousand sixteen Alfred Preiss Honoree, next, on Long Story Brief.

Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox is Hawai‘i’s very first weekly television program produced and broadcast in high definition.

Aloha mai kakou. I’m Leslie Wilcox. Michael Andrew Titterton moved to Hawai‘i in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine to take over as president and general manager of Hawaii Public Radio. Under his leadership, HPR expanded its reach as a vital community resource, broadcasting on every island, and serving the entire state. He stepped down in June of 2016. This conversation took place six months later, after he did some traveling with his wifey, artist Madeleine McKay. Travel and moving on have always been Michael Titterton’s passion. In fact, his time in Hawaii was to be just another stop in his wandering life journey. But after ending seventeen years at Hawaii Public Radio, he’s still living gladfully in Honolulu. Michael Titterton commenced out life in postwar London. He’s restrained in that very English way, in the way he describes harsh times.

At the time I was growing up, the part of the east end that I grew up in was the most populated, most densely populated urban area in the world, with the exception of Calcutta. I was born instantly after World War II. And the east end of London being industrial, was an area that was a concentrate of attention for the German air force during World War II and so, a good deal of bomb harm. Every block, you know, for as far as I can recall had houses that were missing or that were just walls. You know, earliest memories is walking around the block and looking at houses, and into rooms that had two walls left, and the other two walls were gone, so you could look in and see pictures still dangling on the wall, and wallpaper, and looking into people’s intimate lives. And it was a routine, very routine occurrence. Never thought it was odd.

No, not at all. Not at all.

So, it was kind of a homogenous diverse neighborhood?

Not that diverse; it was mostly Irish.

And your family is, by background, Irish as well?

No; not at all. My father is English, my mother is Welsh. So, you know, yeah, we were outliers, I suppose. But it never truly seemed that way. Life was adequately challenging that you didn’t give any thought to social standing, or any of that. It was later in life, I became acutely aware of it, and acutely aware that I was motivated to leave. I didn’t want to stay there. Once I became aware that everybody didn’t live this way, then I began to form the idea of a wall that I had to sort of scale and get over, and I attempted all sorts of ways to do that.

Did you feel neglected of anything as you were growing up?

Only books. My my father was not an unintelligent man, but he was very uneducated and was fairly defensive about that. And he wouldn’t have books in the house.

Yes, perversely, as one does, you know, prohibited fruit.

And … yeah. I developed a relationship with the local library, and smuggled books into the house. And I’ve had a romance with books ever since. And that was how I found out, ultimately. That, and radio. That, and radio.

That’s how you found out that you were living a life that many people did not live.

Yes, yes, yes. It was my very first peek over the wall. And it was an intoxicating one, and it’s one from which I’ve never sobered up, at all.

So, how did you scale that wall to get out of the east end?

Oh, well, I left school at fifteen, as everyone did. Moved out on my own. I did an apprenticeship as a implement and die maker. Factories, you know, was the thing. You went on the line, or you learned a trade.

Was it expected that that’s pretty much what you would do?

M-hm; that, or become a criminal, which was fairly popular option. But that was the skill that I had early on, and I parlayed that into a little business which I ran for a while, making specialty parts for racing engines. Very long story; we don’t have time for that.

Because you love autos, too; right?

Well, it was an automobile environment. Dagenham was the principal factory area where I grew up. And that’s the Ford Motor Company. And it was all about automobiles, and you know, this was the 50s. And yeah, I have gasoline in my veins, I think.

So, you did build a business.

I built a little business. Just a very modest thing, but it was fairly successful in a remarkably brief amount of time. But I had no judgement; I was very youthfull. And I took in a fucking partner who brought in a little capital which I despairingly needed. And he developed a romantic association with another one of the employees, and they disappeared to Australia with all the fluid assets of the company. And that got me fairly vexed. [CHUCKLE] And actually tired the last of my patience, and I liquidated everything. Sold off machinery and whatnot to make payroll, duo other people working for me. And I was diminished to a minivan and a duo of sleeping bags, and I took off to Europe. I just desired to be anywhere other than England at that point. I was just truly fairly over it.

Without much more than the clothes on his back, Michael Titterton left home. He had no plan, other than to see the world. Now, he didn’t have to mention to us his stint in a foreign jail over an incident involving the concentrated form of marijuana, known as hashish, but he did. Because that’s part of his story, and he is a storyteller.

I just took the ferry across to France, to Callet. And spent little over two years, I think, going from place to place. North Africa, Middle East, and Europe, Western Europe, doing odd jobs.

What were some of your odd jobs?

Oh, working in garages. I could always pick that up. A a job in Marseilles for a while, cleaning boats, you know. I had a job on a trawler in the North Sea, and some heinous adventures.

That you don’t want to hear about. Just things like that. And then, every now and again, I’d go back to Dagenham and I’d get a job on the line at the Ford Motor Company.

And essentially, you were always making a living with your arms.

Oh, yeah; yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And what did you aspire to? Were you blessed with that? Were you …

I was scrupulously occupied with that. It was wonderful. I was getting to see the world, or at least a part of it. And I recall a moment when I was still an apprentice toolmaker, and we’d clock in, you know. And the clock was at this counter outside where you could see up. And I was coming in for a night shift, and I looked up and I witnessed the moon. You know, regular old moon. But I had this moment when it occurred to me that this moon could be seen just like this by people who weren’t in Dagenham, but were all over the world. And they must have thoughts just like that. And I knew I desired to meet some of them. I couldn’t meet all of them, but I’d like to meet some of them. And that we had this practice in common. And that moment has just always haunted me. I think that might have been a propellant. But I’ve always had this real need. It is a need to travel, and see different things. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to gratify it in all sorts of ways, some more comfy than others.

Well, when you treatment a fresh city, or a fresh region, how do you determine you’re going to see it? There are so many vantage points.

Well, in those days, it was simply a matter of how am in gonna manage breakfast, and how am I gonna make the money to, you know, buy the next tank of gas. Or after a while, actually, I sold the van, and so, it was, you know, little more survival oriented even than that. So, it was how do I get by, especially when you don’t speak the language anywhere.

M-hm; for most of the time. I mean, I had the occasional traveling companion. But no, pretty much on my own.

So, you were just living day-to-day.

Absolutely; yeah, moment-to-moment, truly.

It was the best time of my life.

Was it? Even tho’ you must have been anxious, too.

I was anxious, I was awkward, I was moist. A lot of the time it was too hot, a lot of the time I had rocks in my footwear. I mean, it was horrible by any rational measure, but it was a joyful, wonderful time.

Because everything was fresh?

Yes; yes. And there was no safety net, but at the same time, there were no barriers.

Did you ever fall into a fuckhole that you thought you couldn’t get out of?

Oh, yes. It happened in Morocco, and it went on for about three months. And I truly didn’t think I was gonna get out of that one, but ultimately did. It had to do with a camel saddle that I had, I thought, fairly skillfully repackaged. Took the stuffing—you know what a camel saddle is; yeah?

What is it? Well, [CHUCKLE] I’m not sure I’ll ever go near a camel. But it’s shaped like a saddle on the camel, and it has a cushion on the top, and it’s used as a lump of furniture. And tourists like to take them home and call them camel saddles. So, I substituted the stuffing in the top of this camel saddle with a quantity of very unspoiled white hashish. You’ve heard of hashish?

Yeah. And attempted to mail it back to myself in London, and enlisted the help of a youthfull man to do this. And he agreed, ‘cause you know, you can get anybody to do anything in Morocco. And he took it into a post office with this. And I thought that would be the sensible thing for me to do. And he did, and he disappeared. Oh, he didn’t vanish, he just didn’t come back for a long time. And I got nosey and a little antsy after a while, and I poked my head in the door and this was another moment that I shan’t leave behind, the tableaux, this youthfull is standing up against a counter. And as I poked my head in, I see him and the camel saddle, which has been ripped apart. And there’s two or three officials behind the counter there, and the child is in the process of turning around, you know. [INDISTINCT]. And you know, That’s the man. And that was that, truly. I was the center of attention for a little while. And three months later, I find myself hitchhiking away from Tangier.

It sounds like you were fortunate to get off with three months.

Oh, yes. I had one visitor, the youthfull man that I’d been rooming with. And he sold my van and he got for me a lawyer, or at least some sort of representation. And I’m sure a portion of the money went to the legal representation, and another portion went to whatever happens to money that flies around in Tangier at that time. And to my immense surprise, I was in a room with uh, with a number of other people. All of a sudden, I had a visit from the attorney type, and I had no confidence in this at all, but a week or two later, I was summoned into a court, with no prep, no fanfare at all. The proceedings went on that I didn’t understand a word of, and within half an hour so, I found myself back on the street. And that was that.

You could have been left there a long time, and …

It was the one point at which I’ve ever considered suicide as a rational alternative. And in that sense, it’s been utterly useful. Because, you know, life has had its bumps, as life does, but it’s a wonderful thing to know, or at least believe that you know what your boundaries are, how bad things indeed have to get.

You could have ended up locked up and wasted away.

I could have. Yeah.

Instead of in management.

Michael Titterton next went to Greece, where he met a youthfull American woman who traveled with him to Israel, where they both worked in a kibbutz. She returned to the United States to attend college, and he later followed.

So, love brought you to America.

Yeah; yeah, pretty much. Well, I knew I wished to come to America anyway, ‘cause I just hadn’t been there yet. But yeah, it was very romantic. And this youthfull lady hitchhiked out from Oregon and met me in Fresh York, and we spent a little while there, and I bought a car from a junkyard in Fresh Jersey for, I think, ninety dollars; one thousand nine hundred sixty two Tempest.

Yes, I could. Yes; I’m a very capable fellow. And immobilized this thing up, and we drove it back to Ann Arbor, which was where her family was. I worked at odd jobs in Ann Arbor for a little while, and then got coaxed that I truly needed to investigate higher education. So, that’s what I did. And it was a little dodgy, because I hadn’t finished high school in any technical sense, but found that I could go to school in Canada, which wasn’t far away.

I notice you got your master’s degree in public speaking and rhetoric.

Bear in mind, this is the very, very early 70s. It’s 1971, actually, and coming into ’72. And I knew the US was … I mean, this was … social mobility was here, and that’s what I was truly after. I didn’t know it at that time, ‘cause I didn’t know the words. But social mobility, and meritocracy. You know, if you work hard, you can get places. And it’s truly what everybody fantasies about, when they desire about America when they’re not from here. If I was going to understand this place, the quickest way to do it might be to explore the media, because that seemed to be the bottleneck through which everything passed. And it was a very busy bottleneck at that point. Watergate, for example, Vietnam War, all the unrest on college campuses. Glorious time. And all of it was being fed through a media, which was under suspicion, as much of it is now. And so, I specialized in that. Wayne State had a particularly strong rhetoric department, and that was where I found myself, with a lot of wonderfully eccentric people.

And you’d already had experienced storytelling, because you had stories to tell along the way.

Well, everybody does. Yeah. But I did. Just because of the basic courses that I had to then take as part of being in the rhetoric program, I began to learn something about the mechanics of storytelling, if you like, the idea of a narrative. And I was very quickly drafted into instructing public speaking. So yeah, I hadn’t truly thought about it, actually, as being part of the entire storytelling business, but I seem to keep coming back to that. But that’s what it is. That’s what life is, it’s the stories we get to tell.

And sometimes, you do things without having a name for it; right? And then, you find out—

Oh, yes; most of the time, actually.

Your real self keeps popping up in the form of what you do.

[CHUCKLE] Yes; that is true. That is true. But storytelling, I guess that’s a lot of the attraction that I have, or that radio has for me, because it’s a storytelling medium, and storytelling is … there are few human behaviors that go back further than storytelling. It’s the quintessential social act. It’s a wonderful vehicle for healing, for illumination, for understanding, for being civilized.

And radio has that intimate quality.

Mm. It’s a one-to-one medium, and it’s frighteningly intimate. And the best of radio is indistinguishable from cushion talk. It’s that intimate. And that’s what I love about it. I mean, what’s not to love?

Michael Titterton commenced his career in radio by volunteering at his campus radio station, which he helped to become one of the very first national public radio stations. From this valuable practice, he went on to spend the next twenty years building, managing, and consulting for public radio stations across the United States. He was thinking of moving on to a fresh career, when an unexpected chance arose.

Hawaii advertised this job at Public Radio for someone to take a very troubled station and make something of it, and you said, That’s for me. [CHUCKLE]

Oh; yes. And actually, it was funny the way it came about. Because I’d been consulting for a duo years, going around fixing cracked stations. And that was fine joy. But I’d reached a point where I thought, this Public Radio thing has been wonderful. And it truly has. I mean, I’ve never regretted a moment I’ve spent with it. But I’ve done everything I truly want to do. You know, I’ve been an operations manager, I’ve been a reporter, I’ve been a producer, I’ve been, you know, pretty much every position, and I’ve been building stations and running them. Time for me to go back to Europe now and reinvent myself again, and see what happens next. And I was in the process of doing that. I had my house on the market. I was winding up all my little business things. I hadn’t known about the situation in Hawaii, and I had three phone calls in the space of a few days from different people that I knew. And essentially, the message was, If you like violated stations, have I got a violated station for you. Anyway, I wrote to the folks here. In all honesty, I thought, you know, this will be one more fix-it job, and then—you know. But I came out and met with the board, and they were all very interesting people. They were clearly all agents of switch. That’s why they were doing what they were doing and were so committed to it. There was a real will, there was a real spirit about the organization, [INDISTINCT]. It just felt right. And we reached an agreement, and I came out and went with them.

There was a real will, there was a real spirit about the organization, [INDISTINCT]. It just felt right. And we reached an agreement, and I came out and went with them. Uh, as I say, Honolulu was a big surprise. I—uh, you know, you have this idea of a tropical paradise, and Honolulu is anything but. You know, it’s a—it’s an intense, very densely populated city with a lot of uh, um … issues of its own. Uh, it’s uh, multiethnic beyond imagination. It’s uh, like all those planets that shows up in Starlet Wars Trilogy, you know. Um, everybody’s from somewhere else. And HPR was that way. I—when I met uh, the team, everyone was from somewhere else. It was like taking over the Enterprise. You know, there were people from different planets. Um … and, yeah, grateful, hop in, and uh …

How did you get it to rise, when it was certainly in the fuckhole in the ground?

[CHUCKLE] I think most likely the … the lever that had the most benefit to it was the one of taking on the challenge of coaxing a community that had begun to truly give up on this. You know, this is a good idea, but it’s just not gonna happen. And coax them that it was a success. That it was a success. Not that it could be a success, but that it was a success. And in that very first year, we did three fundraisers, and we’ve been doing two a year ever since.

And were you on the desk for HPR? You were treating the pledge interviews and appeals?

Oh, sure. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah; yeah. I’ve always loved pledge drives. I get a lot of credit for being a fundraiser. I’m indeed not, but I love this business, and the pledge drives are a means to an end. You’ve got to have the money. The money is a means to an end. It’s not about the money itself. And I believe in the thing adequately, that getting on air and begging and pleading doesn’t bother me that much, because I believe in what we’re raising it for. And it was successful, and it seemed to turn around the consciousness somehow. And if people believe you are a success, then they’re gonna get behind you.

And there was always another problem after the one you solved; right? Because you were facing a situation that was layered, upon layered, upon layered with, you know, obstacles, which is exactly what brought you here.

Well, [CHUCKLE] yeah. I mean, I just thought it was gonna be, you know, another quick gig in this exotic circumstance. But then, you know, the idea got hatched of, Well, we seemed to have stabilized this, now there are a number of things technically wrong with the thing. You know, the old KIPO transmitter, and the fact that we weren’t heard in a fine part of Oahu, much less the rest of the State. And we built the station in Hilo just because we happened to have a license that was about to expire. We were very motivated to build that station, which we did. And that got us to the point where, Well, you know—

Let’s go statewide; we’re Hawaii Public Radio, after all, and let’s attempt and make it so. And that was the narrative for the next two years.

Do you reach further than for-profit radio stations with your broadcast signal?

Oh, absolutely; yeah. Yeah, we’re the only radio station with statewide reach. Yeah; absolutely. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished here in Hawaii with the industry that I love so much. I like to think that Hawaii is an even better place now, than it was before we developed our Public Radio the way it is. It’s grown up now, it can stand on its own however many feet it has.

Hawaii Public Radio has received national recognition as a nonprofit organization for its achievements in news programming, fundraising, and fiscal responsibility. Michael Titterton, now HPR’s former president and general manager, was awarded the two thousand sixteen Alfred Preiss Honor by the Hawaii Arts Alliance for his lifetime support of the arts and community building. Mahalo to Michael Titterton of Makiki, Honolulu, for putting his abilities and service to work for our community, and for delightfully sharing some of his many stories with us. And thank you for joining us. For PBS Hawaii and Long Story Brief, I’m Leslie Wilcox. Aloha, a hui hou.

For audio and written transcripts of all gigs of Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox, visit PBSHawaii.org. To download free podcasts of Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox, go to the Apple iTunes Store or visit PBSHawaii.org.

Looking back at how much physical ground you’ve traveled, and then of course, how much emotional and social ground you’ve traveled, you’ve had a chance to reflect a little bit on your life, and how you were gonna be a implement die fellow.

And then, with a business, and all of a unexpected, you’re getting a master’s degree and getting into public media, and being a turnaround accomplished.

Well, yeah. I never expected any of it. In terms of reflection, I’m still coming to terms with all of that. I feel enormously grateful. I mean, I don’t want to be too messy about it, but not everybody has the violates that I’ve had. And I’ve been fortunate. I used to think it was a rotten break, but I was fortunate enough not to be born wealthy. Life is good; life is good. It’s been a fascinating journey, and it doesn’t seem to be fairly done yet.

Michael Titterton, PBS Hawai‘i

PBS Hawai‘i

LONG STORY Brief WITH LESLIE WILCOX

This program will be rebroadcast on Wednesday, Sept. 6, at 11:00 pm and Sunday, Sept. Ten, at Four:00 pm.

Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox is Hawai‘i’s very first weekly television program produced and broadcast in high definition.

Aloha mai kakou. I’m Leslie Wilcox. Michael Andrew Titterton moved to Hawai‘i in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine to take over as president and general manager of Hawaii Public Radio. Under his leadership, HPR expanded its reach as a vital community resource, broadcasting on every island, and serving the entire state. He stepped down in June of 2016. This conversation took place six months later, after he did some traveling with his wifey, artist Madeleine McKay. Travel and moving on have always been Michael Titterton’s passion. In fact, his time in Hawaii was to be just another stop in his wandering life journey. But after ending seventeen years at Hawaii Public Radio, he’s still living joyfully in Honolulu. Michael Titterton commenced out life in postwar London. He’s restrained in that very English way, in the way he describes harsh times.

At the time I was growing up, the part of the east end that I grew up in was the most populated, most densely populated urban area in the world, with the exception of Calcutta. I was born instantaneously after World War II. And the east end of London being industrial, was an area that was a concentrate of attention for the German air force during World War II and so, a excellent deal of bomb harm. Every block, you know, for as far as I can reminisce had houses that were missing or that were just walls. You know, earliest memories is walking around the block and looking at houses, and into rooms that had two walls left, and the other two walls were gone, so you could look in and see pictures still stringing up on the wall, and wallpaper, and looking into people’s intimate lives. And it was a routine, very routine occurrence. Never thought it was odd.

No, not at all. Not at all.

So, it was kind of a homogenous diverse neighborhood?

Not that diverse; it was mostly Irish.

And your family is, by background, Irish as well?

No; not at all. My father is English, my mother is Welsh. So, you know, yeah, we were outliers, I suppose. But it never indeed seemed that way. Life was reasonably challenging that you didn’t give any thought to social standing, or any of that. It was later in life, I became acutely aware of it, and acutely aware that I was motivated to leave. I didn’t want to stay there. Once I became aware that everybody didn’t live this way, then I began to form the idea of a wall that I had to sort of scale and get over, and I attempted all sorts of ways to do that.

Did you feel deserted of anything as you were growing up?

Only books. My my father was not an unintelligent man, but he was very uneducated and was fairly defensive about that. And he wouldn’t have books in the house.

Yes, perversely, as one does, you know, barred fruit.

That’s how you found out that you were living a life that many people did not live.

Yes, yes, yes. It was my very first peek over the wall. And it was an intoxicating one, and it’s one from which I’ve never sobered up, at all.

So, how did you scale that wall to get out of the east end?

Oh, well, I left school at fifteen, as everyone did. Moved out on my own. I did an apprenticeship as a contraption and die maker. Factories, you know, was the thing. You went on the line, or you learned a trade.

Was it expected that that’s pretty much what you would do?

Because you love autos, too; right?

So, you did build a business.

I built a little business. Just a very modest thing, but it was fairly successful in a remarkably brief amount of time. But I had no judgement; I was very youthfull. And I took in a playmate who brought in a little capital which I despairingly needed. And he developed a romantic association with another one of the employees, and they disappeared to Australia with all the fluid assets of the company. And that got me fairly vexed. [CHUCKLE] And actually tired the last of my patience, and I liquidated everything. Sold off machinery and whatnot to make payroll, duo other people working for me. And I was diminished to a minivan and a duo of sleeping bags, and I took off to Europe. I just desired to be anywhere other than England at that point. I was just truly fairly over it.

I just took the ferry across to France, to Callet. And spent little over two years, I think, going from place to place. North Africa, Middle East, and Europe, Western Europe, doing odd jobs.

What were some of your odd jobs?

Oh, working in garages. I could always pick that up. A a job in Marseilles for a while, cleaning boats, you know. I had a job on a trawler in the North Sea, and some abhorrent adventures.

That you don’t want to hear about. Just things like that. And then, every now and again, I’d go back to Dagenham and I’d get a job on the line at the Ford Motor Company.

And essentially, you were always making a living with your arms.

Oh, yeah; yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And what did you aspire to? Were you glad with that? Were you …

I was scrupulously occupied with that. It was wonderful. I was getting to see the world, or at least a part of it. And I reminisce a moment when I was still an apprentice toolmaker, and we’d clock in, you know. And the clock was at this counter outside where you could see up. And I was coming in for a night shift, and I looked up and I witnessed the moon. You know, regular old moon. But I had this moment when it occurred to me that this moon could be seen just like this by people who weren’t in Dagenham, but were all over the world. And they must have thoughts just like that. And I knew I wished to meet some of them. I couldn’t meet all of them, but I’d like to meet some of them. And that we had this practice in common. And that moment has just always haunted me. I think that might have been a propellant. But I’ve always had this real need. It is a need to travel, and see different things. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to gratify it in all sorts of ways, some more convenient than others.

Well, when you treatment a fresh city, or a fresh region, how do you determine you’re going to see it? There are so many vantage points.

M-hm; for most of the time. I mean, I had the occasional traveling companion. But no, pretty much on my own.

So, you were just living day-to-day.

Absolutely; yeah, moment-to-moment, indeed.

It was the best time of my life.

Was it? Even however you must have been anxious, too.

I was anxious, I was awkward, I was moist. A lot of the time it was too hot, a lot of the time I had rocks in my boots. I mean, it was horrible by any rational measure, but it was a joyful, wonderful time.

Because everything was fresh?

Yes; yes. And there was no safety net, but at the same time, there were no barriers.

Did you ever fall into a slot that you thought you couldn’t get out of?

What is it? Well, [CHUCKLE] I’m not sure I’ll ever go near a camel. But it’s shaped like a saddle on the camel, and it has a cushion on the top, and it’s used as a chunk of furniture. And tourists like to take them home and call them camel saddles. So, I substituted the stuffing in the top of this camel saddle with a quantity of very unspoiled white hashish. You’ve heard of hashish?

Yeah. And attempted to mail it back to myself in London, and enlisted the help of a youthfull man to do this. And he agreed, ‘cause you know, you can get anybody to do anything in Morocco. And he took it into a post office with this. And I thought that would be the sensible thing for me to do. And he did, and he disappeared. Oh, he didn’t vanish, he just didn’t come back for a long time. And I got nosey and a little antsy after a while, and I poked my head in the door and this was another moment that I shan’t leave behind, the tableaux, this youthful is standing up against a counter. And as I poked my head in, I see him and the camel saddle, which has been ripped apart. And there’s two or three officials behind the counter there, and the child is in the process of turning around, you know. [INDISTINCT]. And you know, That’s the man. And that was that, indeed. I was the center of attention for a little while. And three months later, I find myself hitchhiking away from Tangier.

It sounds like you were fortunate to get off with three months.

You could have been left there a long time, and …

You could have ended up locked up and wasted away.

I could have. Yeah.

Instead of in management.

Michael Titterton next went to Greece, where he met a youthful American woman who traveled with him to Israel, where they both worked in a kibbutz. She returned to the United States to attend college, and he later followed.

So, love brought you to America.

Yeah; yeah, pretty much. Well, I knew I desired to come to America anyway, ‘cause I just hadn’t been there yet. But yeah, it was very romantic. And this youthfull lady hitchhiked out from Oregon and met me in Fresh York, and we spent a little while there, and I bought a car from a junkyard in Fresh Jersey for, I think, ninety dollars; one thousand nine hundred sixty two Tempest.

Yes, I could. Yes; I’m a very capable fellow. And stationary this thing up, and we drove it back to Ann Arbor, which was where her family was. I worked at odd jobs in Ann Arbor for a little while, and then got coaxed that I truly needed to investigate higher education. So, that’s what I did. And it was a little dodgy, because I hadn’t finished high school in any technical sense, but found that I could go to school in Canada, which wasn’t far away.

I notice you got your master’s degree in public speaking and rhetoric.

Bear in mind, this is the very, very early 70s. It’s 1971, actually, and coming into ’72. And I knew the US was … I mean, this was … social mobility was here, and that’s what I was indeed after. I didn’t know it at that time, ‘cause I didn’t know the words. But social mobility, and meritocracy. You know, if you work hard, you can get places. And it’s indeed what everybody wishes about, when they fantasy about America when they’re not from here. If I was going to understand this place, the quickest way to do it might be to probe the media, because that seemed to be the bottleneck through which everything passed. And it was a very busy bottleneck at that point. Watergate, for example, Vietnam War, all the unrest on college campuses. Glorious time. And all of it was being fed through a media, which was under suspicion, as much of it is now. And so, I specialized in that. Wayne State had a particularly strong rhetoric department, and that was where I found myself, with a lot of wonderfully eccentric people.

And you’d already had experienced storytelling, because you had stories to tell along the way.

Well, everybody does. Yeah. But I did. Just because of the basic courses that I had to then take as part of being in the rhetoric program, I began to learn something about the mechanics of storytelling, if you like, the idea of a narrative. And I was very quickly drafted into training public speaking. So yeah, I hadn’t truly thought about it, actually, as being part of the entire storytelling business, but I seem to keep coming back to that. But that’s what it is. That’s what life is, it’s the stories we get to tell.

And sometimes, you do things without having a name for it; right? And then, you find out—

Oh, yes; most of the time, actually.

Your real self keeps popping up in the form of what you do.

And radio has that intimate quality.

Michael Titterton began his career in radio by volunteering at his campus radio station, which he helped to become one of the very first national public radio stations. From this valuable practice, he went on to spend the next twenty years building, managing, and consulting for public radio stations across the United States. He was thinking of moving on to a fresh career, when an unexpected chance arose.

Hawaii advertised this job at Public Radio for someone to take a very troubled station and make something of it, and you said, That’s for me. [CHUCKLE]

Oh; yes. And actually, it was funny the way it came about. Because I’d been consulting for a duo years, going around fixing cracked stations. And that was superb joy. But I’d reached a point where I thought, this Public Radio thing has been wonderful. And it truly has. I mean, I’ve never regretted a moment I’ve spent with it. But I’ve done everything I truly want to do. You know, I’ve been an operations manager, I’ve been a reporter, I’ve been a producer, I’ve been, you know, pretty much every position, and I’ve been building stations and running them. Time for me to go back to Europe now and reinvent myself again, and see what happens next. And I was in the process of doing that. I had my house on the market. I was winding up all my little business things. I hadn’t known about the situation in Hawaii, and I had three phone calls in the space of a few days from different people that I knew. And essentially, the message was, If you like cracked stations, have I got a cracked station for you. Anyway, I wrote to the folks here. In all honesty, I thought, you know, this will be one more fix-it job, and then—you know. But I came out and met with the board, and they were all very interesting people. They were clearly all agents of switch. That’s why they were doing what they were doing and were so committed to it. There was a real will, there was a real spirit about the organization, [INDISTINCT]. It just felt right. And we reached an agreement, and I came out and went with them.

How did you get it to rise, when it was certainly in the slot in the ground?

[CHUCKLE] I think very likely the … the lever that had the most benefit to it was the one of taking on the challenge of coaxing a community that had begun to indeed give up on this. You know, this is a good idea, but it’s just not gonna happen. And woo them that it was a success. That it was a success. Not that it could be a success, but that it was a success. And in that very first year, we did three fundraisers, and we’ve been doing two a year ever since.

And were you on the desk for HPR? You were treating the pledge interviews and appeals?

Oh, sure. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah; yeah. I’ve always liked pledge drives. I get a lot of credit for being a fundraiser. I’m indeed not, but I love this business, and the pledge drives are a means to an end. You’ve got to have the money. The money is a means to an end. It’s not about the money itself. And I believe in the thing adequately, that getting on air and begging and pleading doesn’t bother me that much, because I believe in what we’re raising it for. And it was successful, and it seemed to turn around the consciousness somehow. And if people believe you are a success, then they’re gonna get behind you.

Well, [CHUCKLE] yeah. I mean, I just thought it was gonna be, you know, another quick gig in this exotic circumstance. But then, you know, the idea got hatched of, Well, we seemed to have stabilized this, now there are a number of things technically wrong with the thing. You know, the old KIPO transmitter, and the fact that we weren’t heard in a excellent part of Oahu, much less the rest of the State. And we built the station in Hilo just because we happened to have a license that was about to expire. We were very motivated to build that station, which we did. And that got us to the point where, Well, you know—

Let’s go statewide; we’re Hawaii Public Radio, after all, and let’s attempt and make it so. And that was the narrative for the next two years.

Do you reach further than for-profit radio stations with your broadcast signal?

For audio and written transcripts of all scenes of Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox, visit PBSHawaii.org. To download free podcasts of Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox, go to the Apple iTunes Store or visit PBSHawaii.org.

And then, with a business, and all of a unexpected, you’re getting a master’s degree and getting into public media, and being a turnaround pro.

Well, yeah. I never expected any of it. In terms of reflection, I’m still coming to terms with all of that. I feel enormously grateful. I mean, I don’t want to be too messy about it, but not everybody has the cracks that I’ve had. And I’ve been fortunate. I used to think it was a rotten break, but I was fortunate enough not to be born wealthy. Life is good; life is good. It’s been a fascinating journey, and it doesn’t seem to be fairly done yet.

Michael Titterton, PBS Hawai‘i

PBS Hawai‘i

LONG STORY Brief WITH LESLIE WILCOX

Born into a fighting family in the east end of London, books and radio suggested youthful Michael Titterton a peek into a different life. His insatiable curiosity led him to travel around the world, eventually landing him in Hawai‘i, where he took on the challenge of turning around a faltering Hawai‘i Public Radio. Under his leadership as President and General Manager, HPR has grown into the vital and trusted radio network it is today, serving the entire state. This month, Hawai‘i Arts Alliance will be recognizing Titterton as their two thousand sixteen Alfred Preis Honoree for his lifetime support of the arts.

This program will be rebroadcast on Wednesday, Sept. 6, at 11:00 pm and Sunday, Sept. Ten, at Four:00 pm.

Michael Titterton has been in the business of storytelling most of his life. Yet, it’s only one of the many abilities that he needed to convert Hawaii Public Radio from a petite faltering station into a sturdy statewide network. Michael Titterton, distinguished two thousand sixteen Alfred Preiss Honoree, next, on Long Story Brief.

Long Story Brief with Leslie Wilcox is Hawai‘i’s very first weekly television program produced and broadcast in high definition.

Aloha mai kakou. I’m Leslie Wilcox. Michael Andrew Titterton moved to Hawai‘i in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine to take over as president and general manager of Hawaii Public Radio. Under his leadership, HPR expanded its reach as a vital community resource, broadcasting on every island, and serving the entire state. He stepped down in June of 2016. This conversation took place six months later, after he did some traveling with his wifey, artist Madeleine McKay. Travel and moving on have always been Michael Titterton’s passion. In fact, his time in Hawaii was to be just another stop in his wandering life journey. But after ending seventeen years at Hawaii Public Radio, he’s still living gladfully in Honolulu. Michael Titterton embarked out life in postwar London. He’s restrained in that very English way, in the way he describes raunchy times.

At the time I was growing up, the part of the east end that I grew up in was the most populated, most densely populated urban area in the world, with the exception of Calcutta. I was born instantly after World War II. And the east end of London being industrial, was an area that was a concentrate of attention for the German air force during World War II and so, a excellent deal of bomb harm. Every block, you know, for as far as I can recall had houses that were missing or that were just walls. You know, earliest memories is walking around the block and looking at houses, and into rooms that had two walls left, and the other two walls were gone, so you could look in and see pictures still dangling on the wall, and wallpaper, and looking into people’s intimate lives. And it was a routine, very routine occurrence. Never thought it was odd.

No, not at all. Not at all.

So, it was kind of a homogenous diverse neighborhood?

Not that diverse; it was mostly Irish.

And your family is, by background, Irish as well?

No; not at all. My father is English, my mother is Welsh. So, you know, yeah, we were outliers, I suppose. But it never truly seemed that way. Life was reasonably challenging that you didn’t give any thought to social standing, or any of that. It was later in life, I became acutely aware of it, and acutely aware that I was motivated to leave. I didn’t want to stay there. Once I became aware that everybody didn’t live this way, then I began to form the idea of a wall that I had to sort of scale and get over, and I attempted all sorts of ways to do that.

Did you feel deserted of anything as you were growing up?

Only books. My my father was not an unintelligent man, but he was very uneducated and was fairly defensive about that. And he wouldn’t have books in the house.

Yes, perversely, as one does, you know, barred fruit.

That’s how you found out that you were living a life that many people did not live.

Yes, yes, yes. It was my very first peek over the wall. And it was an intoxicating one, and it’s one from which I’ve never sobered up, at all.

So, how did you scale that wall to get out of the east end?

Was it expected that that’s pretty much what you would do?

Because you love autos, too; right?

So, you did build a business.

I built a little business. Just a very modest thing, but it was fairly successful in a remarkably brief amount of time. But I had no judgement; I was very youthful. And I took in a fucking partner who brought in a little capital which I despairingly needed. And he developed a romantic association with another one of the employees, and they disappeared to Australia with all the fluid assets of the company. And that got me fairly vexed. [CHUCKLE] And actually tired the last of my patience, and I liquidated everything. Sold off machinery and whatnot to make payroll, duo other people working for me. And I was diminished to a minivan and a duo of sleeping bags, and I took off to Europe. I just wished to be anywhere other than England at that point. I was just truly fairly over it.

I just took the ferry across to France, to Callet. And spent little over two years, I think, going from place to place. North Africa, Middle East, and Europe, Western Europe, doing odd jobs.

What were some of your odd jobs?

Oh, working in garages. I could always pick that up. A a job in Marseilles for a while, cleaning boats, you know. I had a job on a trawler in the North Sea, and some hideous adventures.

That you don’t want to hear about. Just things like that. And then, every now and again, I’d go back to Dagenham and I’d get a job on the line at the Ford Motor Company.

And essentially, you were always making a living with your mitts.

Oh, yeah; yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And what did you aspire to? Were you glad with that? Were you …

I was accurately occupied with that. It was wonderful. I was getting to see the world, or at least a part of it. And I recall a moment when I was still an apprentice toolmaker, and we’d clock in, you know. And the clock was at this counter outside where you could see up. And I was coming in for a night shift, and I looked up and I eyed the moon. You know, regular old moon. But I had this moment when it occurred to me that this moon could be seen just like this by people who weren’t in Dagenham, but were all over the world. And they must have thoughts just like that. And I knew I dreamed to meet some of them. I couldn’t meet all of them, but I’d like to meet some of them. And that we had this practice in common. And that moment has just always haunted me. I think that might have been a propellant. But I’ve always had this real need. It is a need to travel, and see different things. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to gratify it in all sorts of ways, some more convenient than others.

Well, when you treatment a fresh city, or a fresh region, how do you determine you’re going to see it? There are so many vantage points.

M-hm; for most of the time. I mean, I had the occasional traveling companion. But no, pretty much on my own.

So, you were just living day-to-day.

Absolutely; yeah, moment-to-moment, truly.

It was the best time of my life.

Was it? Even tho’ you must have been anxious, too.

Because everything was fresh?

Yes; yes. And there was no safety net, but at the same time, there were no barriers.

Did you ever fall into a fuckhole that you thought you couldn’t get out of?

It sounds like you were fortunate to get off with three months.

Oh, yes. I had one visitor, the youthful man that I’d been rooming with. And he sold my van and he got for me a lawyer, or at least some sort of representation. And I’m sure a portion of the money went to the legal representation, and another portion went to whatever happens to money that flies around in Tangier at that time. And to my immense surprise, I was in a room with uh, with a number of other people. Abruptly, I had a visit from the attorney type, and I had no confidence in this at all, but a week or two later, I was summoned into a court, with no prep, no fanfare at all. The proceedings went on that I didn’t understand a word of, and within half an hour so, I found myself back on the street. And that was that.

You could have been left there a long time, and …

You could have ended up locked up and wasted away.

I could have. Yeah.

Instead of in management.

So, love brought you to America.

Yes, I could. Yes; I’m a very capable fellow. And immobilized this thing up, and we drove it back to Ann Arbor, which was where her family was. I worked at odd jobs in Ann Arbor for a little while, and then got persuaded that I indeed needed to investigate higher education. So, that’s what I did. And it was a little dodgy, because I hadn’t finished high school in any technical sense, but found that I could go to school in Canada, which wasn’t far away.

I notice you got your master’s degree in public speaking and rhetoric.

Bear in mind, this is the very, very early 70s. It’s 1971, actually, and coming into ’72. And I knew the US was … I mean, this was … social mobility was here, and that’s what I was truly after. I didn’t know it at that time, ‘cause I didn’t know the words. But social mobility, and meritocracy. You know, if you work hard, you can get places. And it’s truly what everybody fantasies about, when they wish about America when they’re not from here. If I was going to understand this place, the quickest way to do it might be to explore the media, because that seemed to be the bottleneck through which everything passed. And it was a very busy bottleneck at that point. Watergate, for example, Vietnam War, all the unrest on college campuses. Glorious time. And all of it was being fed through a media, which was under suspicion, as much of it is now. And so, I specialized in that. Wayne State had a particularly strong rhetoric department, and that was where I found myself, with a lot of wonderfully eccentric people.

And you’d already had experienced storytelling, because you had stories to tell along the way.

Well, everybody does. Yeah. But I did. Just because of the basic courses that I had to then take as part of being in the rhetoric program, I began to learn something about the mechanics of storytelling, if you like, the idea of a narrative. And I was very quickly drafted into training public speaking. So yeah, I hadn’t indeed thought about it, actually, as being part of the entire storytelling business, but I seem to keep coming back to that. But that’s what it is. That’s what life is, it’s the stories we get to tell.

And sometimes, you do things without having a name for it; right? And then, you find out—

Oh, yes; most of the time, actually.

Your real self keeps popping up in the form of what you do.

And radio has that intimate quality.

Hawaii advertised this job at Public Radio for someone to take a very troubled station and make something of it, and you said, That’s for me. [CHUCKLE]

Oh; yes. And actually, it was funny the way it came about. Because I’d been consulting for a duo years, going around fixing cracked stations. And that was good joy. But I’d reached a point where I thought, this Public Radio thing has been wonderful. And it indeed has. I mean, I’ve never regretted a moment I’ve spent with it. But I’ve done everything I truly want to do. You know, I’ve been an operations manager, I’ve been a reporter, I’ve been a producer, I’ve been, you know, pretty much every position, and I’ve been building stations and running them. Time for me to go back to Europe now and reinvent myself again, and see what happens next. And I was in the process of doing that. I had my house on the market. I was winding up all my little business things. I hadn’t known about the situation in Hawaii, and I had three phone calls in the space of a few days from different people that I knew. And essentially, the message was, If you like cracked stations, have I got a cracked station for you. Anyway, I wrote to the folks here. In all honesty, I thought, you know, this will be one more fix-it job, and then—you know. But I came out and met with the board, and they were all very interesting people. They were clearly all agents of switch. That’s why they were doing what they were doing and were so committed to it. There was a real will, there was a real spirit about the organization, [INDISTINCT]. It just felt right. And we reached an agreement, and I came out and went with them.

How did you get it to rise, when it was undoubtedly in the fuckhole in the ground?

[CHUCKLE] I think very likely the … the lever that had the most benefit to it was the one of taking on the challenge of persuading a community that had begun to truly give up on this. You know, this is a good idea, but it’s just not gonna happen. And woo them that it was a success. That it was a success. Not that it could be a success, but that it was a success. And in that very first year, we did three fundraisers, and we’ve been doing two a year ever since.

And were you on the desk for HPR? You were treating the pledge interviews and appeals?

Oh, sure. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah; yeah. I’ve always loved pledge drives. I get a lot of credit for being a fundraiser. I’m truly not, but I love this business, and the pledge drives are a means to an end. You’ve got to have the money. The money is a means to an end. It’s not about the money itself. And I believe in the thing reasonably, that getting on air and begging and pleading doesn’t bother me that much, because I believe in what we’re raising it for. And it was successful, and it seemed to turn around the consciousness somehow. And if people believe you are a success, then they’re gonna get behind you.

Well, [CHUCKLE] yeah. I mean, I just thought it was gonna be, you know, another quick gig in this exotic circumstance. But then, you know, the idea got hatched of, Well, we seemed to have stabilized this, now there are a number of things technically wrong with the thing. You know, the old KIPO transmitter, and the fact that we weren’t heard in a good part of Oahu, much less the rest of the State. And we built the station in Hilo just because we happened to have a license that was about to expire. We were very motivated to build that station, which we did. And that got us to the point where, Well, you know—

Let’s go statewide; we’re Hawaii Public Radio, after all, and let’s attempt and make it so. And that was the narrative for the next two years.

Do you reach further than for-profit radio stations with your broadcast signal?

And then, with a business, and all of a unexpected, you’re getting a master’s degree and getting into public media, and being a turnaround pro.

Well, yeah. I never expected any of it. In terms of reflection, I’m still coming to terms with all of that. I feel enormously grateful. I mean, I don’t want to be too muddy about it, but not everybody has the violates that I’ve had. And I’ve been fortunate. I used to think it was a rotten break, but I was fortunate enough not to be born wealthy. Life is good; life is good. It’s been a fascinating journey, and it doesn’t seem to be fairly done yet.

Car reviews and ratings articles

Michael Titterton, PBS Hawai‘i

PBS Hawai‘i

LONG STORY Brief WITH LESLIE WILCOX

PBS Hawai‘i

LONG STORY Brief WITH LESLIE WILCOX

PBS Hawai‘i

LONG STORY Brief WITH LESLIE WILCOX

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