TURN THE RADIO ON: Video--and other media--couldn't kill radio star Don Curtis' dream of building a statewide chain.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Sun glints off windshields backed up on Interstate 40. It's 7:08 a.m. and Research Triangle Park rush hour is building. Frustrated drivers tap apps on their cell phones and scan car infotainment screens for WPTF 680, an AM radio station. There, Triangle Traffic Network spells it out--an accident blocks the left lane just beyond Airport Boulevard, a 25-minute delay.

Ninety miles away in the serene fields of corn and soybeans of Pitt County, farmers in the cabs of $250,000 John Deeres listen to WNCT 1070 AM's Southern Farm Network reports from the Greenville station. Today, they learn that corn is down 26 cents a bushel, while soybeans are off 9 cents.

The diverse networks, along with nearly 60 Tar Heel radio stations that broadcast them and other programming, make up Raleigh-based Curtis Media Group. Urban WPTF is the exception with most of the stations based in smaller towns and rural communities. Averaging 3 million listeners a week, it is the nation's largest radio network owned by a single shareholder, says a spokesperson for the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington, D.C.

It's not what Don Curtis, son of a Bessemer City druggist, imagined at age 15, when, with scrubbed face, gleaming grin, neady combed sandy hair and black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses, showed up with a homemade audition tape at a Kings Mountain radio station.

"I still listen to the tape," he cringes. "I was terrible."

He didn't get the job, but the station manager sold the teenager an hour block of air time that he could broker to merchants in his hometown. Curtis paid $20 and sold the time slots for $56 within a week.

Such was the professional debut of the broadcaster, now 86, who many consider the voice of North Carolina.

"I've known him for 30 years," says Michael Walden, an economics professor emeritus at N.C. State University who has appeared on Curtis' weekly Carolinas Newsmakers broadcast. "He's a pioneer in the radio industry. It's changed, but he's managed to change with it, and that's what has made him successful."

So successful that his family foundation has become one of the largest donors at UNC Chapel Hill, with donations topping $21 million to the journalism and media school. The Curtis Foundation had about $10.5 million in assets in 2021, according to a federal tax filing.

CABLE DETOUR

Curtis' climb in Tar Heel broadcasting could have been different. While he started his first radio station in 1967, he also joined several investors to build early cable systems in Gastonia, Dunn, Belmont and elsewhere in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was the first president of the fledgling N.C. Cable Television Association.

He quickly learned that cable television required constant infusions of cash to remain competitive. He bailed, just as cable television was hitting its upward stride.

"It was capital intensive," he says, "and the biggest transition of all--satellite TV--had not even come along then."

He and his group sold the business to Greensboro-based Jefferson-Standard Broadcasting for about $1 million in the...