DOVER — After 50 years of being the voice and man behind the on-air talent at various radio stations and watching as radio evolved from AM to FM stations to streaming today, Delaware Public Media general manager Pete Booker will retire.
His last day will be June 30.
Although Booker has served as general manager for DPM for three years and consulted before that, he is a veteran Delaware radio executive who has spent 33 years at Delmarva Broadcasting Group. He was president and CEO from 1993 to 2015. That company, which was acquired by Forever Media in 2019, operated Delaware radio staples like WDEL, WXDE, WSTW, Eagle 97.7 among others.
Booker promised his wife that he would not still be working when he was 75, remembering a former boss of his that retired at age 89.
“This August, I turn 74, so I’m pushing it,” he told the Delaware Business Times. “Intellectually, I can still do all this stuff. But I feel as though I don’t want to be one of those guys who hangs on too long.”
When Booker arrived at Delaware Public Radio, he was tasked with stabilizing the station’s infrastructure and adding programs like Hometown Heroes and Money & Politics in Delaware. He also worked to secure new revenue streams and progressed toward expanding the DPM signal range. Booker also recruited several reporters and the station’s first director of advancement.
“I had never done public radio before, but I thought I’d like to give it a shot,” he said. “I still had something in me, and I don’t regret it because we’ve made a lot of progress. But I just want to leave when I’ve done what I can.”
Over his long career, Booker has done all he could—and more.
He started his career at Delmarva Broadcasting as a part-time DJ when he was in college, and quickly became a full-time on-air talent. Three years later, he moved to a station in Detroit, then he came back to Delmarva Broadcasting in 1981. Seven years later, Booker worked at a station in Virginia – only to return for his third and final time to Delmarva Broadcasting as its CEO.
Part of it was the opportunities he was offered, as Delmarva Broadcasting offered him the role of operations manager when another company delayed an offer. Booker went to Virginia because he wanted to try his hand running stations, only to be asked to consult for Delmarva Broadcasting.
“When I was interviewed for the [CEO] job, I had a caveat: I’d like to see us expand. In the 1990s, when deregulation was happening, I just knew larger consolidations were going to happen. Two stations would have been swallowed alive, so we needed to get bigger,” Booker said.
Under Booker’s leadership, Delmarva Broadcasting bought out smaller stations on the Delmarva Peninsula, enabling the company to live up to its name. The first acquisition was WXCY in Havre de Grace, Md. in 1996. By the time he retired, Delmarva Broadcasting Group had acquired a half-dozen stations.
He also witnessed much of the technical revolution and how radio stations had welcomed talk shows on the airwaves. FM radio offered superior sound quality, which led to many stations abandoning AM – but that also meant AM stations needed news, sports and talk radio to remain viable. Delmarva Broadcasting also became one of the first to have the first stations offer 24/7 streaming online.
Over the last three years, Booker has helped DPM celebrate its 10th anniversary as well as start the process of finding a northern Delaware signal. Right now, he’s overseeing the station’s move to Delaware State University Downtown, which will have three studios.
Looking back on the final stop of his career, Booker said he discovered he loved “the mindset of those dedicated to public media,” pointing to the dedicated listeners and financial supporters.
“We’re not beholden to any commercial interests and we’re not trying to be trendy on either side of the political spectrum. I love the difference because the pressure is to deliver on your promise to your community to have the coverage they desire,” he said.
“I was always a supporter of public media, but I think I’ll be a much larger supporter than I was in the past. It gets under your skin once you recognize the value,” Booker added.
