CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Donald Mullally, former general manager of WILL and National Public Radio board chairman, died Tuesday (Jan. 20) at home in Champaign. He was 77. Mullally guided NPR through its worst financial crisis and led a restructuring of the public radio system.
Mullally spent more than 30 years at WILL, the public radio and television station at the University of Illinois, and he had a great love of public radio. He was recruited to head the station in 1973, during the early years of NPR, and he pioneered a local public radio format.
"In many ways, he had the vision that brought WILL into the 21st century," said Dan Simeone, who worked at WILL for nearly 40 years as a reporter, news director, program director and station manager. "He was very much a long-term thinker, and he had a good sense of the direction public broadcasting was going."
Mullally helped move WILL-AM from an educational station that primarily served the University of Illinois community to one that served the needs of listeners in the community at large. He pioneered the news magazine format for morning radio to appeal to busy listeners "who didn't have time to sit down and listen to a half-hour interview or hour-long documentary," Simeone said.
Mullally created the "Weekday 580" news magazine program "a good year or so before NPR developed 'Morning Edition,'" Simeone said.
He also diversified programming at WILL's radio stations, clearly identifying the FM station as music and the AM station as news and information.
On a national level, Mullally was tapped in 1983 to become the chair of NPR's board of directors during a severe financial crisis, with NPR on the brink of bankruptcy and unable to meet payroll. One of his first acts was to recruit Ron Bornstein to serve as NPR's acting president.
To stabilize NPR's budget, Mullally led a nationwide fundraising drive, called "The Drive to Survive." He then devised a new funding structure for public radio in which federal money would go directly to local stations, which then would buy programming from NPR.
"He saved NPR from going bankrupt," said Jack Brighton, director of new media and innovation at WILL. "He intervened and made some hard decisions and saved it from bankruptcy, and started the model that is to this day the way of funding the entire system."
Mullally's former colleagues called him a visionary who was dedicated to public radio and the mission of serving WILL's listeners, and who also understood the realities of what was needed to make it successful.
"He was very early in understanding the potential of the Internet to serve the mission of public broadcasting. He was really ahead of the game there ... in understanding what a website would mean in engaging and serving the community," Brighton said.
Once he laid out the plans for where he wanted the station to go, Mullally trusted his employees to do the work.
"When he had confidence in people, he really let them move forward. He was not a micromanager," said Debbie Day, WILL's former development director. She noted Mullally helped her grow in her role, which she came to from a teaching career, with no experience in fundraising.
"He really was a mentor. He always supported me," Day said. "He never interfered, but I felt that I could always go to him if I needed his wisdom and support. He never failed me."
Mullally also respected the intelligence of the station's listeners.
"I want to have broadcasting that can do things which are not so popular," Mullally said in a 1995 interview on WILL's "Focus" program. "Which can do things that are significant. And which can appeal to thinking people."
"Don Mullally was of the generation that transformed a loose federation of educational radio and television stations ... into the national programming service we know today," Brighton said. "It was operating on a shoestring compared to what it is today, and it was not the deeply engaged community service that it is today.
"He was of the generation that made that happen, and we really stand on the shoulders of Don and the people he worked with."
Mullally is survived by his wife, Carolyn, and two daughters, Katy Mullally (Culver City, California) and Patty Mullally (Berkeley, California).