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The following interview with Jan Collmer was published in the
February 1997 issue of Texas Flyer Magazine:

From snap rolls on takeoff to inverted flight Jan Collmer is an Aerobatic Ace. With the 1996 aerobatic season behind him and the '97 season looming just a few months away, Jan spent a relaxed afternoon talking about his love of aviation.

TEXAS FLYER: What's the most exciting, memorable, or unusual flight you've had?

JAN COLLMER: That's a good question. It was probably one of the last entries in my log book. On October 1st we opened the seventh runway at DFW and I had the pnvilege of doing five minutes of acro before the ribbon cutting. That five minutes of acro over at DFW has to be a high point because there hasn't been an air show at DFW since the day it opened and there will probably never be another one over DFW. So I felt extraordinarily privileged to get to do that. It was very exciting. I was in a holding pattern over North Lake about 3 miles northeast of the airport at a thousand feet and you can see the whole airport every time you come around the orbit. The new runway is particularly conspicuous and I thought, "I don't believe I'm really going to do this. I don't believe I am really going to do this." It was just a tremendous high. The only thing that compares with that was about three years ago when I did the first full acrobatic airshow at Love Field. I lined up for take-off facing downtown Dallas, and knew that I was going to do a snap-roll on take-off. That hasn't been done in 50 years or more at Love Field, maybe never, what a thrill that was. Those are probably my co-highpoints because both of them were so impossible. And particularly the DFW event, impossible. On the day of the ribbon cutting, I had a friend tell me that his son called him on his car phone and said, "Dad, you simply are not going to believe what's going on at DFW Airport. Some idiot is doing acrobatics right over the airport." He told his son, "Well, look at it this way. He can't possibly be doing it without permission and there's only one person I know that could have permission to do that and that is Jan Collmer." I really enjoyed that a lot. There's possibly only one thing that I think would go beyond those two events and that's to fly through the keyhole in the San Jacinto Tower in downtown Dallas.

TEXAS FLYER: Wait a second. You did that?

JAN COLLMER: No! Good Heavens no, but I was approached to do it by some people that were serious about it. When they made the Omnimax film for the new theater at Fair Park, I was asked, "Could you do this? Mount the Omnimax camera on your airplane and fly it though that keyhole?" And I said, "I can, but I'll tell you right now that this is as far as that goes because when we start asking 'May I?' there'd be about 300 different 'NO's' come back, all with big exclamation points. "It's not possible. Please forget that idea." It would be a great stunt, though.

TEXAS FLYER: What's your background in aviation? How did you get started?

JAN COLLMER: Well, it started when I was growing up during World War II. I lived down in south Dallas near Fair Park and we were under the flight path from Love Field. During the war Love Field was a huge ferry base. B-17's and B-24's and P-5l's and B-25's and P-47's and P-40's - every American war plane flew out of Love Field and in great numbers because they were crisscrossing the country and this was one of the stopping points. The school that I went to was a little Catholic parochial school called St. Joseph's down on Swiss Avenue and it was even closer to Love Field. The airplanes flew over a lot and when I was in the third or fourth grade I could identify every single American war plane just by the sound. I built models and drew war pictures of the airplanes and was very much into airplanes. Even the nun I had in the third grade had us all out marching with rifles. Can you believe it, they did blackouts in Dallas and air raid practice and all that? Now, there was no way in the world that the Germans and the Japanese could even bomb the east and the west coast and here we were 1,500 miles inland. It kept everyone motivated to support the war effort. There were three or four other events that pushed me toward aviation. One was reading a book called Dive Bomber that was written during the war. I really enjoyed that book and it had a profound effect on me.

TEXAS FLYER: How old were you at the time?

JAN COLLMER: Probably 11 or 12 years old, near the end of the war. Then the next thing that happened was when I was a junior in high school. A Navy recruiter came to our high school and showed us a movie about Navy flight training at Pensacola. I went to a very small Jesuit high school and since there were only 50 in our class and there were fewer than that in the senior class they decided to include us with the seniors to see the film. Now in four years of high school, this was the only guy that ever came to our school and put on a film. I was already inspired by naval aviation and the film just absolutely captured my mind. In fact, that presentation yielded two naval aviators from 90 kids! At the end of my senior year at Jesuit, we moved to south Oakcliff and I attended college in Arlington. Every day, I had to drive down Jefferson Boulevard right past the Naval air station. There were the FH-I Phantoms and T-28s flying out of there and then later on F9F-6 Cougars. That just really got me. Many days I would sit on the railroad track on Jefferson Blvd and watch the planes takeoff and land. That rail-road track, by the way, has probably accounted for more Naval aviators than any other single thing in the Dallas district (and we're a prolific district for providing Naval aviators). One Saturday I thought, "I think I'll just drive down there and see what it takes to apply." So I drove up to the main gate and I told them I was interested in finding out what it took to apply for the NAVCAD program. At that point, the big arms of the Navy reached out and wrapped themselves around me. The following weekend I took a physical and then spent two or three days taking long written examinations. I did very well on everything and in June I was in Pensacola. A month after that I was checking into preflight. And I had never been in an airplane in my life.

TEXAS FLYER: At that point you'd never been in a plane?

JAN COLLMER: I'd never set foot in an airplane. I was in preflight and that's 16 weeks of organized hell lead by Marine Corps drill instructors who felt it was their job to get the NAVCADs to wash out early if they didn't have the stick-to-it-tiveness. Honestly, I didn't know if I was going to make it. Out of 50 kids in my class I was 49th in physical fitness, but I was second in academics. I managed to get through NAVCADs and then...I still vividly remember my first flight. The first training flight was in a North American SNJ (also known as a AT6 Texan) on a cool winter morning. I went to Pensacola in June so it must have been October when I had my first flight. You know how the ground fog settles in around everything and makes a lace covering over the trees down in that part of the country? Well, that's what we had that morning. It was 7:15 or 7:30 in the morning, the sun was just coming up and the ground fog was out there. We took off and...well that was it.

TEXAS FLYER: You were hooked?

JAN COLLMER: Forever. That was it. That was 42 years ago. If you see the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, it perfectly describes the hell of preflight. Whoever wrote that script must have been through preflight about the same time I was because the same kind of characters, both the Marines and the Cadets were exactly what I faced. It was just so deja vu that I could hardly stand it. After preflight, I did my basic training at Whiting Field and then moved to Saufley Field for formation flying. Each of us had maybe 40 or 50 hours of flight time and there we were flying formation with six aircraft, plus the instructor to make it seven. Very exciting! After we'd flown formation for a few weeks we then went to Bloody Barin Field (the name came from the large number of accidents at that time). First you did bombing practice and then gunnery practice with a little 30-caliber pea shooter. You manually cocked the thing and then had a trigger on the stick to fire it.

TEXAS FLYER: What was your first carrier landing like?

JAN COLLMER: Still at Barin Field, we practiced what's called field carrier landings on a runway that was laid out like a carrier. We'd fly the pattern at 200 feet, just two knots above the stall speed, literally hanging it on the prop. One of my room-mates banged it into the ground and went right through the LSOs position. The LSO jumped the wing without anybody getting hurt, but it took out the airplane. A second classmate destroyed another plane also practicing field carrier landings. But for me, flying was a breeze. I flew the plane well and felt comfortable and never had any problems either flying the airplane or with the field carrier landings. I loved it. I got to where I was able to put the airplane exactly on the spot, no question about it. For the actual ship landings I flew out to the ship, made my six take-offs and landings then stayed on the ship while another pilot flew his carrier landings and then flew back to Pensacola. When I first saw the ship from the air it looked so small and so tiny. I thought, "This is not possible. That's too tiny." I thought the ship was supposed to be bigger, much bigger, because I'd seen the ship at the dock in Pensacola and had even been on it once. But looking at it I said, "This is not the right ship. Somebody has made a mistake. That is not big enough." That thought stayed in my mind until the LSO gave me the cut and then all of a sudden this ship gets so big so quick and then "bang" you're on a wire and then I thought, "Hey, I can do this." It was an exciting experience. I'm sure every student pilot had that same kind of emotional reaction on his first carrier landing. You're ready for it, you think, until you see the ship and then you think, "Oh my God, I don't think I can do this." And then you do it and you say, "Wait a minute, this is easy. I could do this all day."

TEXAS FLYER: How long did you serve in the Navy?

JAN COLLMER: I was in for a total of 12 years. Four active and eight in the reserves.

TEXAS FLYER: You got out of active duty, served your reserve time, but did you stay in flying?

JAN COLLMER: No, actually, when I got out of the reserves I quit flying. I didn't fly for 11 years. At the time I was on the board of the American Electronics Association and had to travel to meetings from Colorado to California. Jack Hamilton, of Teledyne Corporation, who was also on the board was heavily into radio controlled sailplanes. Jack got me psyched up on radio control so I considered getting involved. As I was reading one of the R/C magazines I saw an ad for an airshow at Harlingen. I'd never really focused on the Confederate Air Force before, but I thought it would be fun to go. However, after I'd decided to go I found out about another airshow at Lancaster (near Dallas) where the Red Devils, Art Sholl and the Blue Angels were performing. When I saw those little airplanes doing all that stuff I thought, "This is incredible." I got down to Harlingen a couple of weeks later and decided that I'd simply have to forget about radio control. I was a pilot and I needed to be flying. When I got back home, I dusted off my unused civilian license, went out and found a 19 year old instructor at Dallas Airpark and got checked out in a Cessna 152. I was flying again! That was at the end of 1976. In 1977 I found a Decathalon for rent down at Lancaster and started flying that. In early '78 I bought my own Decathalon and did my first air show in 1980 at El Reno, Oklahoma. I flew the Decathalon at air shows for about three or four years and then bought a Pitts S2A. A couple years later a friend asked me to test fly his Pitts S2B. I did and the same week I ordered one for myself. There was that much difference between the A and the B. I flew the B for a couple of years and then through a series of coincidences got linked up with Fina as a sponsor. After the first year of airshows, I talked them into going forward with more air shows so we bought yet another Pitts S2B painted in the Fina colors. That was in 1991. More recently we've started flying the shows in an Extra 300L and that was delivered in February of '96. The Extra 300L is the most incredible airplane I've ever flown when compared with all the jets I've flown, including the F8 Crusader.

TEXAS FLYER: Why?

JAN COLLMER: It's perfect. It has a very high roll rate (more than 360 degrees/sec) with a plus and minus 10-G capability so you can't possibly break it no matter what you do. The wing spar, as I understand it, was designed so that a single spar is capable of 16 G's but they actually make two spars and then sandwich them so you have a double spar and an incredibly strong airplane. The Extra has a bubble canopy with a low wing so the visibility is as good as an F-16. It handles well on the ground and, for a tail-dragger, it's very easy to land. With it's 300 horsepower engine it goes like a rocket and there's virtually nothing that it doesn't do very, very well with almost no effort on the part of the pilot. It just feels good.

TEXAS FLYER: What are you thinking of when you're flying an airshow?

JAN COLLMER: I want to stay as close as I can get to the 500 foot line, but on my side of it, and then fly everything well. All acrobatics are mental. The airplane does what your mind chooses for it to do and your hands and your feet just automatically follow. If it's not like that you shouldn't fly airshows. It's a mental thing all the way. I perform a sequence of maneuvers that keeps the announcer and me on the same track. The variable that comes in and messes all this up is weather. Strong cross winds toward the crowd require that I be constantly vigilant about my position. Once you pull up to vertical you're drifting with the wind. You can't crab on a vertical. You start drifting, particularly in a maneuver like a torque roll where you're hanging there for quite a while. When you're finished doing the maneuver and you point the airplane at the ground you still have to be on your side of the 500 foot line. That means you have to modify your routine to take the wind into account. I had one show where we had a 40 knot wind straight into the crowd. I had to start vertical maneuvers 2,000 feet from the crowd so I would end up 500 feet from the crowd. One pilot, who's been flying professional airshows far longer than I, ended up over the crowd. Not just past the 500 foot line, but over the crowd. I've never violated the 500 foot line, but I carefully plan my flight to allow for the wind.

TEXAS FLYER: What's the difference between a good aerobatic pilot and a bad one?

JAN COLLMER: First of all you must have the right equipment, then you need to have the right instruction, and then you have to have the right mix of discipline, stamina, positive mental attitude, and spatial coordination. In the air, you must always know where you are and what's going on. Your hands and feet have to operate independent of your conscious thought. In other words, those control inputs just happen. You will the airplane to go where you want it to go. There's a point in flying (and it doesn't happen to all pilots, only to very good pilots) where, all of a sudden, they're flying the airplane without realizing that they are flying an airplane. They are flying a plane as automatically as you drive your car. At some point, the airplane and you become a single unit. For some pilots this never happens. Occasionally you'll see those people trying to do aerobatics and it's frightening because they don't have complete control of the airplane. My concern is that something unexpected may happen and they won't have the foggiest idea how to react to it at low altitude. When you're flying aerobatics at low altitude, you must have all of the contingencies planned out in advance in case the unexpected happens. And if something does happen you must react absolutely right the first time. Unfortunately some pilots try aerobatics without adequate instruction. I know two or three pilots that bought themselves Pitts' and declared themselves show pilots. They didn't know the first thing about what they were doing. Anybody can do a roll in a Pitts but can you do a perfect roll? Can you do a super slow roll at 50 feet off the ground and not vary by more than a very few feet down the length of the runway? In order to minimize the risk of life and limb in the airshow environs, the International Council of Air Shows (ICAS) has established a program entitled: ACE - Aerobatic Certification Evaluator. The ACE program uses experienced air show pilots to review each other and to review new incoming pilots. This ensures that new pilots have had proper instruction and have the right equipment, the right attitude, the right experience and are able to control the airplane. In my mind, that probably is the only way to keep airshows safe. In spite of all of that, we still lose airshow pilots.

TEXAS FLYER: If someone who has an interest in flying tells you that they want to be an aerobatic pilot, what do you tell them?

JAN COLLMER: First I'd refer them to an instructor who has access to the type of airplane that they're interested in flying. I'd also recommend that they first learn basic aerobatics in a Decathlon, Citabria, or a Super Cub or something similar that is extremely difficult to fly. I still can't believe that I was 19 years old and was learning to fly in a T-6. That's still a little bit hard to imagine but thousands of us did it. I guess if you want the one quality that the beginning aerobatic pilot needs, it's humility. The Decathlon and the Citabria will generate a very adequate supply of humility to almost anybody.

TEXAS FLYER: Do airshow pilots keep track of each other? If you saw another performer not flying well would you talk to them about it?

JAN COLLMER: Yes. I've talked to other pilots, and I've been talked to by other pilots. It takes an extremely high level of maturity on both sides to be able to do that and to have it be productive. A lot of people react to criticism in anger. And that's unfortunate because it's awfully hard to talk to a guy when he's angry. I've seen pilots pulled off of a show because of their flying. They're flying was not adequate and sometimes they don't realize what they were getting into. When there's a true issue of safety, somebody has to act and one of the rules under the ICAS program is that there's a process to go through to talk to the pilot. If that's not effective, talk to the show manager. If that's not effective, go to the Feds. Any of us that have been doing airshows for a while, can spot a bad performer this [snapping fingers] fast. There are many examples where pilots talk their way into shows and the show producers, frequently have no idea about a performers capability. If airshows stick with the well-known pros, no problem. But they don't have a budget for that. So they've got to have some cheap acts and it's with the cheap acts where they can get into trouble. The ICAS ACE program is designed to provide a reasonably good safety valve for an airshow producer.

TEXAS FLYER: How long have you been flying air shows and do you still get a kick out of it?

JAN COLLMER: The first was in 1980. So I've just finished my 17th season. I love it. There's no better day than a day at an airshow. That's all there is to it. I really enjoy it.

TEXAS FLYER: How do you balance the weekends flying and the weekdays running your business?

JAN COLLMER: Well, I'll tell you the secret and her name is Sherry Gallagher. Sherry manages my calendar and I apologize to people for having to interface with Sherry but she is in control and she has me organized in a way that I can make things work and fit. We also have a number of very talented executives in our organization. I also do a lot of civic things. I'm vice-chairman of the DFW Airport and I'm a trustee at the University of Dallas where I just finished a year-long project as Chairman of the Search Committee looking for a new president. I'm an artist of sorts. I love art and I create an aviation calendar every year. I love to paint birds. Color pencil, pencil, pens and ink, watercolor, some acrylic, a little bit of oil. I love photography, I love paleontology, I love artifact collecting. In fact, tomorrow I'm going on a field trip collecting artifacts up near Commerce, Texas. I also enjoy geology, and physics. I have an associate degree in mechanical engineenng, a bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics and then 33 hours toward an MBA at SMU. I have a varied background. I worked for a year in a taxidermy shop as a kid and worked in a machine shop for a couple of years while I was going to school. I was a pretty good machinist and, in fact, the little machine shop I worked in built some of the parts for the very first F-8 Crusaders. When I flew that airplane later I thought, "My God, I'm about to get into a machine that an 18 year-old kid built parts for...at night... without supervision!" I was machining hinges that went into the wing system, so it was pretty critical. Of course they got inspected thoroughly when I got done with them. So I have a wide variety of personal backgrounds and experiences.

TEXAS FLYER: Why do you get involved in these different areas?

JAN COLLMER: I have an incredible curiosity. I'm on the trustee board for the Southwest Research Institute so I spent yesterday in San Antonio bathing in the latest and greatest technological developments and I enjoy them all. I read a lot in that area. In my early days I did a lot of inventing and have a lot of inventions to my credit. Many of the early power semiconductor products are things that I developed such as the first computer diode at Texas Instruments and the first silicon high voltage diode for TV sets developed in 1964. At one time we were building enough parts to supply 150,000 color sets a week. In fact at one time we were supplying everybody in the world...Toshiba, Matsushita (Panasonic), TV set makers in Europe, RCA, Sylvania...everybody. Had our little plant in Garland, Texas, blown away we would have shut down the whole color TV industry back in the 70's.

TEXAS FLYER: What are you doing right now at Collmer Semiconductor?

JAN COLLMER: We're a distributor. When I left Varo, more or less explosively in 1978, I had been there 17 years and was president of the company. The chairman and I didn't see eye-to-eye and I ended up out. I had to stop and think, "What the heck am I going to do?" And so I decided that I had four goals. I wanted to stay in Dallas because all of my family is here, my grandparents were even born here, so I wanted to stay here. I had decided that I had better stay in electronics because that was the only thing I really knew much about. I decided that I wanted to run a company that I owned and that somebody else didn't control. So no matter how humble I might start, it was going to be my company, and it still is. In late 1978, I contacted three Japanese companies that were in the same field as I had been working in for 20 years. As a matter of fact, they'd copied our products and had done a very good job. They not only copied our products but had improved them. I wrote them letters and set up appointments and visited Japan and made a hand-shake deal with Fuji Electric. That hand-shake deal is still good now almost 18 years later. We began marketing their products in the United States. We look almost like a manufacturing company to our customers. If it's high voltage, we do it. We also build lightning suppressors. We consider high voltage to be something over 1000 volts and up to about a quarter of a million volts.

TEXAS FLYER: Where did you get your training for that?

JAN COLLMER: I learned most of it on the job. There were no high voltage silicon rectifiers when I went to Varo. We developed high voltage silicon for Varo's night vision equipment. We built the first significant high voltage silicon diodes that worked very well. Then we developed a high frequency high voltage diode for Tektronix, for the first solid state (transistorized) oscilloscopes. Seeing that that worked so well, we thought, how about TV sets? They were going solid state, except for the rectifier tube so we said, "Let's build a solid state rectifier tube for TV." We took the first one that we developed that was adequate for a color set to Zenith and showed it to them. They said, "How much is it going to cost?" And we said, "About $15." The guy then reached into his desk and pulled out a 3A3 vacuum tube and said, "Son, I pay 75 cents for this. When you get your price down to 75 cents, you come back and talk to me." So we went back to work. That was in 1966. In the meantime, X-Ray problems turned up in television sets and it turned out that the primary generator of X-Rays in the TV sets was the high voltage rectifier tube. When they finally realized that the vacuum tube was the problem, the value of the silicon rectifier suddenly went up. By that time we'd worked our price down so we went to Motorola and offered them this thing at a buck forty. They jumped on it, and then announced it as their own creation. And off we went producing those things like crazy. It was really an exciting time, just to be part of that.

TEXAS FLYER: Do you only fly aerobatics?

JAN COLLMER: I have a Cessna 210 and I still have the Pitts and the Extra. I bought my 210 from my mechanic after he'd restored it. It's a 1960 model, which was one of the first years of the 210, but it has none of the fancy stuff and it still has wing struts. It's good and strong, you don't have to worry about anything. I have a grandson in Kansas and that 210 is my "Go to Kansas" airplane. My wife will ride in the 210 but she won't get near the other two. She really doesn't like airplanes, especially flying, even though I've been flying for 42 years and we've only been married 41 years. She hates air shows and feels that I am going to do something wrong and kill myself in an air show but I think it is more likely to get in an accident driving on Central Expressway or the Dallas North Tollway.

TEXAS FLYER: Does the danger of flying in airshows ever cross your mind?

JAN COLLMER: No. I have a lot of friends that have been killed. In fact, eight airshow pilots died in '96. Charlie Hillard was the first one that died last year. I knew Charlie very well. I've had a lot of good friends that have died in air shows and I know it could happen but I think it's more likely that a stroke, heart attack, cancer, or an accident on the freeway will get me. Overall, why airplanes make so much press, I don't know. If I ask somebody if they remember baby Jessica in the well, everybody says, "Yeah, you bet." You can ask people in Japan or Germany or Russia and they all remember baby Jessica in the well. There were 700 media types out there watching the extraction of Jessica from the well. I was in Japan and it was front page on the Japan Times. The whole world stood still for three days watching baby Jessica in the well. Yet every hour seven people in America die in automobile accidents. Another 50 are permanently injured every hour! We shoot two an hour to death. Homicides - two an hour. And we're worried about this baby in the well? Give me a break! Now I understand that Jessica's family and friends should be deeply concerned about getting her out of the well, but the whole Jessica story was absolutely media-generated hype. Media attention is generally focused inversely proportional to the seriousness of the problem. There is a weird thing that goes on between perspective and aviation. For some reason, the media loves airplane crashes. For example, the ValuJet plane crashed in Florida and roughly 100 people were killed. Within 48 hours more people died in cars than in the ValuJet crash, and ten times as many were permanently injured in car wrecks. Yet that one crash still occupies the second or third page of the newspaper on a weekly basis.

TEXAS FLYER: You said you like to read a lot. What do you read?

JAN COLLMER: I read everything. I don't know how many magazines I get, it's probably somewhere around 75. I'm very politically oriented, very involved in Republican party politics. I'm president of the Flight Museum at Love Field and Kay Hutchison, our Senator, is our chairperson. I read National Review, American Spectator, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Popular Photography, Aviation Week, Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Astronomy, Archeology and on and on. In books I read quite a bit of non-fiction on specific subjects. I like to paint and I rarely pass up a good art book and read what other people are doing. I also read an occasional biography. I like Clancy's things and I like the old cold-war spy genre. I've read all the spy guys and have read some of the new aviation stuff, the Dale Brown things, the Koontz books. I also like Michener and his amazingly big books.

TEXAS FLYER: How about movies?

JAN COLLMER: I love movies. I absolutely love movies. Ransom was the last one I saw. Do you know that Glenn Ford made that exact same movie? Not nearly with the flare that Harrison Ford and Ron Howard did it. It was magnificent craftsmanship. Ron Howard has got to be one of the best craftsmen in Hollywood.

TEXAS FLYER: Did you see Apollo 13?

JAN COLLMER: No I have not. And I really don't even care to see it. I've had the opportunity and I've just passed it up, and I don't know why. I remember it vividly when it happened, I lived it then and I just don't feel any need to see that movie. Favorite movies - Searching for Bobby Fisher, incredibly good movie. The first Die Hard ranked a ten. One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest was a ten. The Wizard of Oz clearly a ten - each of the 30 times I have seen it. What's up Doc?, that's a family ten. Dr. Strangelove, that is a ten. Recent tens? Ordinary People - was that Ron Howard again? One of the best things that ever happened in my life was when I was about ten years old. They built a movie theater a block from my house. It was the Lagow Theater. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. They had a double feature every Saturday, and I didn't miss any of them. The serials, Flash Gordon, Buster Crabbe and all those guys - it was great. All the old cowboy movies that they used to make. Roy Rogers, Don Steele and all those great guys. I love the movies! I'd go see a bad movie, it doesn't matter as long as there is popcorn, a dark theater and a big screen. I don't like them on TV. I rarely watch one on TV. Very rarely. It just takes something out of them. Now they're re-releasing Star Wars, the trilogy, on the big screen. I will go see all three of them, again. My other great love is classical music. I have hundreds of CDs and I had hundreds of vinyls before that. You'll see a WRR-FM sticker on the back window of my car and every time the city council discusses selling WRR I write letters and make phone calls to everybody and say, "Are you losing your minds? This is one of the best economic development tools available in the City of Dallas. You talk about wanting to get your high end people in here, your engineers and your top businessmen, these are sophisticated people and WRR-FM is an asset that they appreciate. I enjoy the symphony. I don't care for ballet particularly or opera.

TEXAS FLYER: Thanks, Jan, for allowing us to take a peek inside your exciting life.

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