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Salwa Khan
I'm speaking today with Brach Thomas, the production director at KWVH. Give us a little background on yourself.

Brach Thomas
I've had a mixed background. <laugh>. Mainly, my career has been in retail. I've worked at Home Depot and other various corporations when I was in high school.

Salwa Khan
So how did you come to radio and to KWVH?

Brach Thomas
I have a minor in mass communications from Texas State University. While there, I was at KTSW, which is the on-campus radio station. I was a production assistant and the production director for one year. Very fulfilling experience, and I really enjoyed it. I didn't get the chance to come back to radio until 2016. I was working at the Kyle Home Depot as a merchandising director, and I saw an advertisement on Facebook. I went ahead and applied for it and, and talked to Mike Crusham and John Brown, who were in charge at the time, and started working here.The rest is history, as they say. <laugh>.

My first day of work was at a Christmas party at Mike Crusham’s house. The next morning, I came in to the station and started to learn how to produce Over Easy with Coach. That's kind of where I cut my teeth, producing his show and learning the ropes from John Brown and Mike Crusham.

Salwa Khan
You had a show on KWVH at one time?

Brach Thomas
I was covering for the morning show for quite some time, on Wednesdays. I had some health issues and I needed to step back. I feel like it's more of a position that a volunteer should be in. If I'm getting paid to be here, I shouldn't be having fun <laugh>. But I did enjoy having my morning show very much. It's kind of like a personal dream to have a morning show.

Salwa Khan
Now you are the production director. Tell me what that means. What do you do?

Brach Thomas
I'm the production director and the operations manager. Essentially what that that means is I do everything. I do pretty much do all the production work here, unless it's a recorded show that a volunteer is doing. Like all the imaging that you hear on the radio station, all the underwriting, pretty much 98-percent of it is my work. I also help manage the billing, like an operations manager. And take care of the day to day and whatever pops up. So, one day I could be out trying to fix the transmitter; the next day I could be sweeping the floor.

Salwa Khan
How did you learn to run the board, to do all these technical things?

Brach Thomas
It was a mixture. I learned a lot of it here, but also had a misspent youth. When I was in college, I went to a lot of underground raves. We called them Renegade Raves. I ended up throwing a bunch of these parties, where we'd find an old, abandoned warehouse or out of the way spot. One time it was an island on Lady Bird Lake. We'd bring out generators and turntables and have a party. And that's kind of how I learned about audio equipment and audio production, by being interested in dance music and being a promoter at these parties. Eventually that kind of morphed into me being a club promoter. I did three or four downtown for quite a bit and it was fulfilling, but I wouldn't want to do it again.

Salwa Khan
Part of what you do here is that you make sure the station is on the air.

Brach Thomas
Yeah, a hundred percent! Essentially if we went down, I'd be the first call. So I'm the first line of defense in any situation where it's an off air emergency. Those are never easy. You never quite get over that sense of utter fear as you're trying to get things back working again. It's something I essentially inherited when John Brown left. It fell in my lap and I picked up the ball and ran. When things get smoothed over, it makes me feel good. That fifty minutes of terror turns into some joy <laugh>.

Salwa Khan
You also handle the automation system, which is how some programs come into the station. How does that work?

Brach Thomas
At one point before we had Wide Orbit, which is the automation system we have now, we were on a New Wave, which is a much lesser version of Wide Orbit. lf it was a recorded show, people would send me the portions of the show, in MP3 format in an email. I would physically take them on a jump drive out to the computer and I would delete and replace all these files, which was a nailbiter, because if you miss one file, not only are you messing with that person's show, but you're off by a whole 15 minutes, which could throw off the entire clock.
Now, it's a little bit easier for me. We have Wide Orbit, which allows me to assign a Dropbox to somebody. And when you throw a show in there, you just name the file a certain way and the automation system's smart enough where it just grabs that file and imports it where it needs to be and places it. That's how everything's generated. Tim (Kiesling) and I shoot logs from a computer that's running a program called Selector, and we'll get a report from that and it'll tell us if anything is missing. So if the show part didn't get uploaded, it'll say empty cart. It's made our lives so much easier.
We're now working with a more professional platform, so it makes it easier on the volunteers, it makes it easier on me and Tim. Because of the technology that we have now, we have so much more time to focus on what matters and that's the community. It also allows us to drop in tracks remotely from our phones. So if there's ever an emergency, kind of like Snowmageddon, no one has to actually come up here. As long as the generators stay on, Tim and I can drop in voice tracks to the automation from anywhere in the world as long as we have internet.

Salwa Khan
What are the greatest challenges of doing your job?

Brach Thomas
I think anybody that's ever worked in a volunteer nonprofit organization would say that the best and the worst part is dealing with the volunteers. I mean that in the most loving way. It's hard because, coming from the corporate world where I had employees; it's a different relationship having volunteers that do things for free. So there's challenges in that, but also it's really rewarding, the relationships that you get to build with the volunteers here at the station. I often feel like most everyone here is my family.

Salwa Khan
Do you have any war stories to tell?

Brach Thomas
My biggest war story would be when Snowmageddon happened. I was dropped off at the station at five AM by EMS. And we actually did a radio show. Most everybody else was Zoomed in. I was in the station, and we were on the air for about 30 minutes before the power went out. And then we were just dead in the water. We were hoping it would come back up. Nothing happened. So I was able to hitchhike home with one of these computers down here and get the station on the air from my kitchen. Talking about my old rave days, I was using a generator and certain tools that I would have used back then. And I thought at the time I was just wasting my youth, but I guess I was training for a job in public radio! <laugh>.

Salwa Khan
You clearly do a lot here at KWVH. What is it that makes it worthwhile?

Brach Thomas
This sounds corny and it sounds rehearsed, I guess, but I think that my favorite thing about this organization is that we maintain an excellent mission statement. Our mission is to tell people about dangers, and we've lived up to that, to warn and inform the community, There's all these great shows that the volunteers and the people in this town get to bring to everyone but that’s just the icing on the cake.
It's a worthy cause and it's not an easy one, but it's definitely something that somebody's got to do. I think that, not just me, but everybody here at the radio station is doing that on a regular basis. It's a team effort which is what makes it the best.