Holton's Bauman to join KAB Hall of Fame
After he graduated from Bern High School in 1974, Ben Bauman wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life.
But as a farm kid growing up in northeastern Kansas, Bauman remembers the family radio always being on at home in the morning, in the kitchen, while he was preparing to go to school — and the radio ended up playing a part in helping him to decide on a careeer.
“Dad was always listening to the news and the farm markets and all that stuff,” Bauman said. “One of his brightest moves to keep me working in the fields was to put radios on the tractors. I could do the work that he needed me to do while listening to a football game on a Saturday afternoon. It’s always been a part of my life. And as I look back on it, I especially remember being somewhat fascinated by the whole idea.”
Bauman, a resident of Holton since 1978, would eventually parlay that fascination into a career in broadcasting that would span more than three decades, first as a newscaster and later news director at WIBW-AM radio and then later as a news anchor for KTKA-TV in Topeka.
Next month, he’ll be honored for his dedication to broadcasting at the annual Kansas Association of Broadcasters convention in Wichita, where he’ll be inducted into the KAB Hall of Fame.
It’s an honor that Bauman said he “didn’t expect.”
“It’s very humbling to be chosen from among all of my former colleagues and peers for an award like this,” the Holton resident said of being one of four KAB Hall of Fame inductees.
It’s a career that Bauman didn’t get into until after he’d married his wife, Marj, in 1975, and moved to Holton three years later, after he’d gotten “an inkling that I wanted to go back to school and finish my degree in something.” He went to Washburn University in Topeka to study communications and got his first job in broadcasting as a student part-timer at KTWU, the university’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) station, in 1982.
The next year, he took on a weekend radio news job at WIBW-AM 580, the same radio station that was always on in the kitchen back home in Bern.
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