It was just another Tuesday near the end of a stifling July in Gunnison, the kind of day you might pray for a breeze if you didn’t think it would bring more smoke from the wildfires burning west of town.
Then, like a breath of fresh air, Larry Hayes (’70) walked through The Westerner office door, his daughter, Heather, and son-in-law in tow. He was looking for someone from Western (not us) who had visited him earlier in the year at his home in Santa Fe.
Apparently, they’d had a lovely time talking about Hayes’ past, which included helping launch Western’s student-run radio station, KWSB, building RCA Records’ Denver office, and accompanying a young John Denver on a promotional tour that ended with a performance in a shopping mall.
And somehow, that was just the beginning.
Hayes first arrived in Gunnison in the fall of 1966 when he was just getting out of the U.S. Air Force, and his brother was starting his final year at Western. When they drove north from Fort Worth together, he arrived to find something he didn’t know he was looking for. “My mother asked me if I would drive him up here for the coming school year. I was happy to do that. I’d never been up to this part of Colorado before,” he said. “And when I got up into these huge, open valleys and mountains up here, I was just blown away.”
Hayes had already tried college once, at the University of Denver, right after high school. But two weeks into his second semester, he’d had enough. “My head wasn’t into it,” he said. He walked off campus, enlisted in the Air Force, and hadn’t given it a second thought. In Gunnison, Hayes had a reason to imagine staying. But it was the welcome he got at Western that convinced him to. He enrolled that fall.
Soon after getting settled in, he found that plans for a campus radio station were underway, and the project piqued his interest. He reached out to speech and drama professor Dr. Marty Hatcher, who was helping to lead the campaign, and together they converted a room in the basement of Taylor Hall into a studio.
There was no established station to inherit, so they built everything from the ground up. With the help of Bill Fletcher, a local electronics guru, they assembled the equipment, got the license, arranged the studio, and learned what it would take to make the station operational. Then, finally, a 10-watt transmitter was installed on the Taylor Hall roof, sending KWSB out onto the airwaves for the first time.
At the station, Hayes had the freedom to learn the ins and outs of broadcasting and start building the resume that would set him on his career path. But the life he was building was far bigger than a studio in the basement of Taylor Hall.
He was just starting to ski and, with some friends, rented a house on Crested Butte Mountain for $150 a month, where they could ski to the lifts and people would go to hang out when the weather got bad. He worked as a projectionist at The Majestic Theater in town. Then he met Patty Light.
A Gunnison native and Western graduate who worked for the state licensing and inspecting daycare centers and preschools, Patty had friends at Western, and Hayes would see her around town. She was known, Hayes said, as the first woman to ski from the peak of Crested Butte Mountain. She was also the eldest daughter of Dr. Mason Light, a beloved Gunnison physician whose legacy became part of the family history Hayes inherited here when the two were married.
When he graduated from Western in 1970, the signal that carried KWSB still wasn’t strong enough to go far beyond the Gunnison Valley. But Hayes was, and he was just getting started.
The young couple moved to Denver, and Hayes started taking his sample tape to every station in town, hoping to find a seat in the DJ’s chair. “But I always came in second,” he said. “They wanted guys who had commercial experience.”
It was a problem that presented its own opportunities, and he soon went to work for Davis Sales, a record distributor representing the industry behemoth RCA and other labels. Before long, he was working in promotion and artist development, helping RCA establish a Denver branch and becoming its manager less than two years after leaving Western.
The job placed Hayes at the heart of the music industry. He worked with radio stations, newspapers, and television outlets across the Rocky Mountain region to help performers find audiences and help audiences discover new music.
One of those performers was a young singer-songwriter named John Denver.
Hayes was assigned to organize a promotional tour that would introduce Denver to the city whose name he had adopted. He scheduled radio appearances, arranged newspaper and television interviews, and coordinated public events. The tour culminated at Cinderella City, once the largest covered shopping mall west of the Mississippi, where Denver performed for passing shoppers.
“We had a lot of fun and became pretty close friends,” Hayes said.
From then on, if John Denver was anywhere in the Rocky Mountain region, Hayes was along for the ride. Soon, the two discovered that they’d spent time as children at Carswell Air Force Base outside Fort Worth, where both their fathers had been stationed and were members of the officers’ club.
“In the summer months, John and his family were out there playing at the pool and having picnics like the rest of us,” Hayes said. “But we never met until later. And then we realized we were both there at the same place at the same time.”
Hayes’ daughter, Heather, remembered spending Christmas at John Denver’s house in Aspen when she was about five, stringing popcorn and cranberries for the tree with Denver’s adopted son Zachary, who inspired the song A Baby Just Like You.
But even as Hayes’ career grew, Western remained part of it. When music piracy became a growing concern for record companies, he reconnected with Dr. Hatcher, his former professor at Western, who had gone on to serve in the Colorado State Senate. RCA’s New York office supplied model legislation, and Hayes and Hatcher began working to introduce the state’s first anti-piracy law.
RCA had tried several times to promote Hayes out of Denver, but he’d turned down positions in New York and Detroit. Still, after five years in Denver and before his legislative effort was complete, Hayes agreed to take a promotion in Los Angeles, where he and his family spent the next 40 years, building their lives and careers in the recording industry.
But even then, Western and the Gunnison Valley were more than a memory. They were an integral part of Hayes’ story. And through KWSB, Hayes became an important part of Western’s story. The University was where he’d found a start, a partner, and the foundation for a life well lived. That’s why, for Hayes, coming back always feels “like going home.”
Author Credit: Seth Mensing
