John Cooney and the Christmas World

John Cooney was a public radio fixture in Western Oregon for over 35 years.

Starting as a KLCC station volunteer in 1979, that’s the public radio affiliate operated by Lane Community College, John quickly moved onto creating and producing shows.

In the early ’80s John created two long-running KLCC programs, This Sunday Morning and Straight Street, a show focused on Rhythm and Blues which remained on the air into 2020.

In 1999 John created and produced another show for KLCC, Natural World.

Natural World was a weekly, 4-5 minute show where John reads a field journal entry of nature observations from his travels around Oregon.

It was kind of like a podcast, just five years before the term was coined.

It didn’t matter if John was talking about Chanterelle mushrooms in the Coast Range or wildflowers at Horse Rock Ridge, or a gull, soaring over Stonefield Beach. He had this ability to create an immersive, sensory experience in the span of just 4 minutes.

It’s hard to articulate what was so special about John Cooney’s Natural World, so here’s a link where you can listen yourself.

Natural World: Stonefield Beach

I didn’t start listening to Natural World until 2011 when I started working at the University of Oregon (Go Ducks!).

My morning commute increased from around 5 minutes to over half an hour. With all that extra time in the car, I stumbled upon Natural World and it quickly became part of my weekly routine, every Thursday morning, while I slowly crawled from one side of the city to the other.

I would occasionally spend the walk from the parking lot to my building creating my own Natural World episode. In my defense, it was a long walk from the parking lot.

I listened to John’s vignettes each week until October 2014, when he stepped away from his program and entered hospice care. John lost his fight with lung cancer the following month. As his family put it, “He left surrounded by family with a taste of wine and a smile on his lips.”

It’s been over 10 years since the last Natural World episode aired, but I still think about John regularly. Usually when I catch myself appreciating something in nature that I would normally brush past, too busy to notice.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what a Natural World show would sound like if the setting was moved from the Oregon outdoors to the North Pole. A “Christmas World” if you will.

So, as an homage to John and borrowing heavily from his formula, I’ve written several “journal entries” of my own, each a quick, focused glimpse into life at the North Pole. Since these are going to be no more than 5 minutes each, rather than take up here or on the Podcast with them (that is after this one), I’m turning them into an ongoing YouTube series.

So, without further ado, here is the first episode of ‘Tis the Soundtrack’s Christmas World.

If you are interested in listening to more of John Cooney’s Natural World, you can check out the episode archive at KLCC.org.

Here is the YouTube playlist where I’ll be publishing future episodes of Christmas World. They are just going under the main channel, so if you head over there, subscribe and turn on notifications, you’ll get the alert when new episodes are available.

Cheers and Merry Christmas!