By james art Melanie Miller, a Pampa native who ran radio newsrooms in her hometown and Lubbock before catapulting a Houston news station to the top of the national ratings, will be inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame on Saturday.
Miller is one of 20 broadcasters out of 200 nominees to be inducted into the hall Saturday at the Texas Broadcasting Museum in Kilgore. She was elected to the hall in a poll of her peers, including past members of the Texas Radio Hall of Fame and voting members of the organization.
She will be honored for her pioneering career in news radio that spanned eight stations from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and broke glass ceilings in the broadcasting industry.
“To be voted into the Radio Hall of Fame when they had more than 200 (nominees) and only 20 got in is really sweet. That’s the icing on the cake,” Miller said.
After an internship at KUT-FM in Austin while a student at the University of Texas, Miller began her career in earnest in 1980, returning to her hometown of Pampa to take over news operations at KPDN-AM. Family connections got her the job, Miller said.
“The only reason I got a job there is because the owner of the radio station ran into my godfather at the Rotary Club and mentioned he needed someone at the station,” Miller said. “My godfather knew I was looking and called my dad. My dad called down the stairs and said, “Missy, I’ve got a job for you!”
At Pampa, Miller was a “one-woman band” anchoring a dozen daily newscasts, anchoring a morning talk show, covering breaking news and producing docu-series and features. Her work won a Best Documentary Award from the Texas Associated Press Broadcasters, the station’s first news award in 20 years.
While in Pampa, Miller also worked as a stringer reporting news from Pampa for Amarillo radio stations KGNC-AM and KIXZ-AM and television station KAMR-TV.
“The good thing about Pampa is I was the only guy in the news game,” Miller said. “It created a really great foundation.”
From 2020: Lubbock broadcaster, Councilman Beane, Texas Radio Hall of Fame honoree
Miller left Pampa in 1983 to join KWAZ-AM in Lubbock. A few months later, the station changed its callsign to KTLK-AM and reformatted, becoming the first news station in the Southern Plains. Miller became the station’s news director amid the change.
“The news director who hired me had a heart attack about four months after I started. He never came back, so I was promoted to news director by default,” Miller said.
At KTLK, Miller leads a five-person news team, anchors newscasts, produces series and collaborates with CNN and ABC Radio. She won the Texas Associated Press Broadcasters Awards for her spot news and radio documentaries—a first for the station.
“Over time, I took on programming and production responsibilities, as well as some promotion, and that was due to Jerry Hudson becoming chairman of the broadcast journalism department at Texas Tech,” Miller said. “He was heavily involved with KTLK and gave me a lot of chances. He said, ‘Go do it, try this, do that,’ and it was amazing.”
She recalled covering severe flash flooding while in Lubbock, circa 1984.
“It was just one of those really weird early spring storms and nobody was prepared for it. It was a one-day flood and everyone was talking about, “Man, it never rains like this.” Instead of having dust this year, we had rain, and that had a big impact,” Miller said. “I ended up doing a miniseries about what the city learned as a result of that flood, and I won a state award for that.”
From Lubbock, Miller moved to Houston’s 50,000-watt KTRH-AM, working part-time on the weekend desk. She worked her way up to morning editor — she was on shift when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 — and less than four years after starting at KTRH, she was promoted to news director.
At KTRH, Miller oversaw a 32-person newsroom and seven outside news bureaus, and under her leadership the station topped the Arbitron ratings for news radio stations nationally.
“The foundation that the Panhandle and the South Plains gave me, with the people there that were willing to work with me and give me a chance, absolutely set the foundation and made it really strong, solid,” Miller said. “So I could jump into the big market to a station that really had a reputation.”
From 2022: Sharon Maines retired after a pioneering career as a Lubbock television anchor
Miller’s journey to the top of America’s news radio industry was fraught with misogyny, she said, but she continued to prove herself as a skilled broadcaster to break barriers and become the first female news director at more than half the stations she worked at .
“In the late ’70s and early ’80s, there weren’t many women in radio and television,” Miller said. “I kept coming across, I hate to say it, but men saying, ‘No, we don’t let women or girls on our radio station.’
“I kept pushing. I kept getting interviews. I kept talking. And I always found a guy who would say, ‘Yeah, come in, let’s talk,’ and then hire me,” Miller said. “It happened not only in Pampa, but in Amarillo, Lubbock and Houston.”
After leaving radio in 1991, Miller became president of Media Consultants, a Sugar Land-based crisis communications firm. She and her husband, Chuck Wolf, a former news director at KIKK Radio in Houston, sold the company in 2018.
Today, Miller continues to live in Sugar Land and spends her time writing fiction and nonfiction under the pen name Melanie Ormand. Her debut novel is nearing completion.