Part director, part host

Some people have a “dream” job.

Big deal. Verne Windham has two.

Windham is the program director/morning classical host for KPBX-FM (91.1, Spokane Public Radio) and the music director of the 250-person-strong Spokane Youth Symphony.

The only problem: Both jobs are all-consuming.

“I’m constantly conflicted, because if I had any sense, I’d quit one or the other,” Windham says in his mellifluous baritone. “But I can’t bear the thought of quitting one or the other.”

If he were to quit even one, it would be a blow to the Spokane arts community. Windham, 59, has mentored countless young musicians and has become the voice of classical music in Spokane.

He’s a graduate of the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and a product of the artistic ferment of New York City in the late 1960s. Yet he considers himself a Spokane “lifer.”

He has lived in Spokane for 34 years, and he grew up not far down the road.

“I grew up in Moscow, so obviously in my head, I was a Spokane boy,” he says. “We got the Spokane Chronicle, and trips to Spokane were a big deal.”

His father was a former horn player and music teacher turned post office clerk. His mother was a “brilliant” elementary school teacher. Young Verne grew up immersed in the artistic life of a college town; he says he “kind of grew up in the university library.”

Not to mention the music building.

“I just completely took advantage of the university all through junior high and high school,” says Windham. “I played (French horn) in the university orchestra all through high school, and I took lessons from various teachers either in Pullman or Moscow.”

In fact, he was playing in the Spokane Symphony while still in high school.

“I commuted up to Spokane in my senior year to play in the symphony,” says Windham. “The symphony was not what it is now, but, sure, that was a big deal. It was one of those pivotal moments where you get to run with the big kids.”

Classical music was already his calling. After high school graduation in 1964, he auditioned for the Eastman School and made it in.

“It was one of the great and legendary schools, and I instantly got rocketed into an almost perfect atmosphere,” Windham says. “It didn’t have the neuroticism of a Juilliard. … It was also a fabulous learning environment for a generalist.”

He already had inclinations toward being a musical generalist – educator, conductor, director, scholar – yet by the time he was ready to graduate in 1968, he was also certain that he would have a performing career.

“I saw this big explosion of American orchestras happening, and all of the sudden I saw the job opportunities explode,” he says. “So I was fairly confident that I could get out of college and be a horn player.”

It didn’t quite work out that way.

“Then the Army came along,” he says. “I graduated from college in 1968 and, as was everybody, feeling terribly distracted by the draft, the Army and Vietnam. So I (signed up for the Army) and got in an Army band.”

It turned out to be a fortuitous posting.

“It wasn’t any big deal – Army band,” says Windham. “It didn’t take itself too seriously. But it was in New York City, on Staten Island.”

He and his Army buddies lived off-post in an apartment in Brooklyn and took complete advantage of New York’s cultural scene.

“It was a place where we were all discovering the changing world and listening to Beatles songs and cooking and eating and celebrating life,” says Windham. “We were 10 minutes away from Union Square and 20 minutes away from Carnegie Hall.”

He found himself in a tug-of-war between two cultures.

“The hippie culture and anti-war culture was exploding all around us,” Windham says. “And here we were, having short hair in New York City in 1969.”

He and other members of the Army band ended up being involved in a landmark free speech case. They took the Army to federal court over the issue of whether a soldier had free speech rights while off duty – to attend a protest, for instance. They won, although the case was later overturned on appeal long after the issue had become moot.

Windham says the case helped him to “learn how to have the kind of democracy we were advocating.”

When he emerged from the Army in 1971, his plan was to go to the Yale School of Music for a graduate degree. Just about then, the principal French horn player in the Spokane Symphony took a year’s leave. The orchestra asked its former high school player to come back.

“So I came out here to do this one-year leave-of-absence job,” says Windham. “And I’ve lived here ever since, straight through.”

That symphony job became permanent, and he also was hired to teach French horn at Washington State University.

He soon learned he had a knack for something besides blowing a horn.

“I discovered it was pretty easy to talk to audiences as part of presenting music,” says Windham. “I was trying to find different ways of thinking about music, not as a professional insider, but trying to relate to music as normal people do.”

So when KPBX hit the airwaves in 1980, he became an immediate fan. Eventually he approached the station with an idea for his own classical music program.

“They called my bluff,” he says.

Windham went full time in 1988. He now hosts the classical segment every weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. He calls public radio “a cause, not a profession.”

“It’s a very fulfilling job,” he says. “… There are so many people who by the luck of the draw hear the right piece at the right time and are fed by it. You know that you are casting stuff out there – and it will land.”

It’s a “life,” not just a full-time job, he says. Yet when the Spokane Youth Symphony people asked him to tide them through a crisis in 1996 after their conductor walked out, he was happy to do so.

It was only for a week, after all.

He never left. Windham is music director of the organization, which has five separate student orchestras.

He is also the conductor of the top orchestra, which is called the Spokane Youth Orchestra.

“It’s a dream job,” he says. “But it’s a very hard job. An orchestra is a complicated organization, and there are always 100 details to attend to. …

“But more and more, youth orchestras are actually becoming performing groups where the art is happening in our civilization. … It’s not just, ‘They’re good for bunch of kids.’

“It’s really important art that’s happening with youth orchestras. You have the thrill of discovery, the teenage passion and amazing skill.”

In his spare, apparently third, life he also is the music director of the Mozart in Manito concert every summer in Manito Park.

Thank goodness he has pared down most of his former obligations, including one as choir director of Westminster Congregational Church and another as founding member of the Spokane Falls Brass Band.

Maybe that’s what having cancer will do to you: It makes you focus.

Windham underwent surgery for cancer five years ago.

“The cancer came and went in 2000,” he says. “It was technically called throat cancer. But it was on my tonsil and then it referred to lymph nodes in my neck, which was a much bigger issue.

“It was a very effective surgery by a terrific surgeon in Seattle and follow-up with radiation. I just passed the fifth anniversary, which is, statistically, cured.”

For years, Windham was locally famous for riding his bicycle everywhere. He has cut back on that as well. That’s what having teenagers will do to you.

He and his wife, soprano Susan Windham, have a grown daughter and two boys ages 16 and 14. It’s hard to carpool on a bike.

Meanwhile, if Windham regrets never going to the Yale School of Music, he’s not showing it.

“I think by then (age 25), I was already the way I was,” he says. “I probably would have just done the same things in a different town, wherever I was.

:I have always tried to start things and get involved.”