Opinion: My doppelganger cut a wide swath in Maine broadcasting

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Murray Carpenter is a journalist in Belfast and author of “Caffeinated” and “Sweet and Deadly.”

Here’s some great advice for radio journalism, memorable, pithy, and always useful: “Keep your ears open, and your mouth shut.” I’ve passed it along to many aspiring radio reporters. Oddly, this advice came to me via my doppelganger, the Maine broadcast pioneer Murray Carpenter.

I first heard about him in 1997 when I was working as a reporter for The Republican Journal, a weekly in Belfast. When talking to sources, I had the same experience a few times. “Murray Carpenter,” they’d say, “Did you used to work up around Bangor?” I’d say no, I was new to the area. But I got the idea that another Murray might have been out there somewhere.

A few years later, I was publishing Northern Sky News, a newsprint monthly covering the environment of New England and the Maritimes. Carol Carpenter Ketcham, a subscriber in Connecticut, emailed to say that her father had worked in Maine for years as a media entrepreneur. He was Murray Carpenter. Ketcham filled in some of the blanks, and it became clear that my doppelganger had cut a wide swath.

He arrived in Maine in the early 1950s after working in advertising in New York, and began working with former Maine Gov. Horace Hildreth at his Bangor AM radio station WABI. By January 1953, when WABI launched the first TV station in northern New England, Carpenter was the manager and a co-owner with Hildreth.

According to Judith Round’s history of Bangor TV, things got lively when Carpenter applied for a radio license in Portland: “Guy Gannett, another newspaper and radio station owner, convinced Carpenter to pull out of the Portland market, in exchange for licensing preference for a second station in Bangor — WGUY (Channel 2). Carpenter, who had relinquished his ownership of WABI, was now back in Bangor competing against his former partner, Horace Hildreth.”

WGUY never became a TV station, and Carpenter soon sold the radio station WGUY (which evolved into WKIT, later owned by Stephen and Tabitha King). But he kept the studio on Mount Hope Avenue and used it to launch the TV station WTWO in 1954. Carpenter sold WTWO in 1958, and it became WLBZ.

By 1963 Carpenter was in Florida, where he owned the pioneering FM station WTCX. He died of Alzheimer’s in 1990 before I became a journalist, but our connections mounted.

In 2022, a story I reported for NPR caught the ear of Robin Ketcham, in Ohio. He reached out to me to see if I might be related to his grandfather, Murray Carpenter. (Robin is the son of Carol, who’d contacted me 20 years earlier.) Ketcham passed on more details about Carpenter, including that he was a pilot who loved to fly his Mooney airplane. Ketcham said his grandfather had the first TV in Maine; it’s still in the family and it still works.

The most notable connection to my doppelganger came a bit earlier, in 2007, when I was working as a radio reporter in Maine Public’s Bangor studio. I was lucky to work alongside Maine radio veteran Barry Darling, who was eager to hear if I was related to Murray Carpenter.

Darling says Carpenter was one of the most interesting people he met in over 50 years of Maine radio and television work, a broadcasting genius who cobbled Channel 2 together from a heap of used equipment from a station in Puerto Rico. And he had interesting quirks, Darling says. He’d often drop off the radar and go fishing for a few days, leaving the station in the hands of his employees.

Darling’s earliest memory of Carpenter was when he was 13. He and his father, who worked in broadcasting, went to a reception at Carpenter’s house in Bangor. Darling’s father had told Carpenter that Barry was interested in getting into radio.

“Let me give you a piece of advice that I hope you’ll remember,” Carpenter said to the young Darling, “Keep your ears open and your mouth shut.”