I don’t remember any actual time and place when I moved here in the late ’70s that I met Blair. He was just that guy working to create a low-power local radio station. His wife, Becky, worked for the other newspaper down the street, cleverly called The Newspaper. Meanwhile, in my same neighborhood, Susan Finnegan and her husband and kids became friends, and their kids became babysitters for my kids. We decided everyone didn’t need to own all of their own stuff in a small town, so we shared a lawnmower. Nobody had giant lawns in Park Meadows; nothing much grew, and certainly no one had sprinklers here in the early ’80s.
When Blair made the radio station happen, it was an amazement. Suddenly we were all connected! The music wasn’t canned mainstream stuff, but rather the flavor of each DJ who brought into the studio their very own records and spun them on a turntable. Real news was delivered daily with local newsmakers. And by 1985, when Starship launched the song “We Built This City,” we were pretty sure it was all about us.
At some point, Susan and Jim split, and so did Becky and Blair. And then it was Blair and Susan building the NPR affiliate with grassroots parking-lot fundraisers and handwritten thank-you notes. On the news hour, with Blair’s cigarette-and-scotch-rubbed voice crackling, you knew there were ashes falling on the soundboard as he spoke. He was one of the smartest humans I ever knew. Blair could see around corners and into other galaxies. He was a genius at getting the resorts to help pay for equipment for the station because it helped them with their communications.
When I became editor of this paper in the mid ’80s, Blair became my mentor rather than my competitor. We shared news stories and took turns on who would break something of great interest. And if we had serious reasons for not taking on a story first, we let the other make it theirs. Like the time someone in my office was accused of date rape with one of my reporters… I asked Blair to break that once the court docs were public. It was a huge story that lasted for months, and Blair handled it with a tougher hand so we could handle it internally. The station taking the lead was a measure of grace.
It is hard to imagine, but folks just didn’t go out to dinner all that much back then. There were very few restaurants and, other than a lemon-squeezed slice at the always open Red Banjo Pizza parlor, the other places like Adolph’s and The Claimjumper were mostly kind of fancy. So we ate together in different people’s modest homes. Blair and Susan, reporter Rick Brough, and City Manager Arlene Loble would sometimes be at my table with City Attorney Tom Clyde and Police Chief Frank Bell. I had to borrow chairs from the neighbors.
When I found the business of being an editor overwhelming, Blair would remind me the job was hard but critical work. He would coach me on being tougher on spreading out and expanding our coverage. He was generous in his support . And in his criticism… Everyone in town in those years has a story about the time Blair interviewed them and how scared they were. He did his homework every damn time, and if you had not done yours… Well, you would never show up unprepared again. Blair knew where the bones were buried all the way back to the dinosaurs, and he saw into the future about water rights, land use, school bonds, ice rinks, and the Olympics.
Somewhere in the 2000s after he had left the station, Blair and Susan showed up to a costume party for some nonprofit event, and they had crossdressed. It was clever and fun and unlike all the usual stiffs in their sameness. And I remember someone saying, “Blair makes a fine looking woman.” After Blair had left the station, he and Susan started traveling out of town more. They had a place in Florida. And Blair started to dress as Blaire more frequently, not in dresses, but with softer shirts and different slacks and longer hair and eventually an earring. It was gradual. And then one day he showed up at our Rotary Club as she. And she brought with her wife Susan and also the director of a Utah organization supporting transgender individuals to help explain what Blair had undertaken, thoughtfully, over years to become Blaire. It was classic B using the opportunity to both educate and entertain us. There were facts and slides and later there was a conversation about her surgery shared with the club. It was incredibly brave. And informative. And transformative.
Blaire called every couple of months during peak pandemic periods to ask me questions about the “old days.” She was writing a book about it all, about us all, about “the way we were.” The Redford stuff, the bond elections, the Sears Roebuck heir, the BVD underwear heir and how they carved out two mountain ski resorts in one small town with totally different clientele. The part that always remained most fascinating to me was how very hard it was for Blaire to have started the radio station in the first place and what impossible odds were against her in gaining the license and then the equipment.
Nan Noaker — who worked at KPCW, then became editor of this paper, and worked in tandem with Blaire in the news world for 20-plus years — said that what Blaire did was create a network for community and news before those concepts were even understood. And outside of the newsroom, Blaire would create a network and a community that many may never fully understand, but today see the fruits of inside a town striving for inclusivity and a local government championing equity. And the enduring legacy of KPCW — It is the stuff of dreams and scrappy, brilliant, tireless humans who committed to finding the truth in everything, including themselves.
Blaire loved a good, multi-layered, decades-in-the making-story, and she wrote a terrific one in her life lived boldly and authentically. If you were lucky enough to know Blaire Feulner, tell a great story and raise a glass to her this Sunday in the Park…