Q: Despite his amazing success, director and writer Quentin Tarantino once described himself as a frustrated theater owner, referring to the simpler joy of being able to share his favorite films and enthusiasms with a wider audience. Do you ever miss your DJ’ing days from Williams College?
WM: I look back on those college radio days with fondness, but I can’t say that I miss broadcasting. My college radio experience did give me an opportunity to develop and hone my skill at remastering 78rpm records, which has led me inexorably, one small step at a time, toward the work that I’m still doing fifty years later. In those days, I got a genuine charge out of sharing my favorite old recordings with a small student and faculty radio audience, and I have never ceased to feel that sort of thrill being able to share my remastering work with a worldwide audience.
After college, I produced and presented a series of 58 hour-length programs on Philadelphia’s National Public Radio affiliate. The series, “Stokowski, The Philadelphia Years”, chronicled the great conductor’s complete recorded output with the Philadelphia Orchestra between 1917 and 1940. I had been collecting Stokowski records since I was a boy and by that time I had somehow managed to locate every last one of them.