Chris Allinger, QCountry morning host, announces his retirement

Chris Allinger, host of the morning show on WQNY for more than 30 years, announced recently that he will retire in August.

As operations manager for Cayuga Radio Group as well as an on-air personality, Allinger has played an integral role at QCountry 103.7.

Reading the comments that he has been receiving all week long has been a testament to the impact Allinger has had on his audience, said Chet Osadchey, president of Cayuga Radio Group.

“Nobody is mad about it,” Osadchey said. “We’re all genuinely happy for Chris, and that goes for the listeners, too. He’s done more than his fair share for the community and the broadcast industry.”

“It feels pretty good, and the response has been pretty kind,” Allinger said of announcing his retirement. “I’ve heard from a lot of people I haven’t heard from in some time. It’s been very gratifying.”

What will he do with his free time? “I do like getting on the boat,” he said. “I know I’m going to do something, but for right now it seems I’ll be gardening and boating and sleeping in and making my wife’s coffee.”

He said one of the things he’s looking forward to most in retirement is the ability to sleep in later every day. In his current role, Allinger gets up around 3:15 a.m. on work days to prepare for the morning show.

He said he enjoys the spontaneity of live radio.

“I don’t dislike the operations at all, but the centerpiece of the day is that show in the morning,” he said.

Allinger grew up in Utica. His mother and father both worked in radio; his father was a morning show host and the voice of the Clinton Comets, and his mother was a speech teacher who did radio plays with her students.

Allinger lived in New York City for a time. “I set out to be an actor, and then I started a family and said, ‘I don’t want to raise my daughter here in New York City,’ and my brother had just moved [to Tompkins County], so I said, ‘Why don’t I do that?’”

People were very welcoming. “It’s a good town. It’s a great place to raise children, without a question,” Allinger said.

Allinger arrived in Ithaca in 1988 and followed in his parents’ footsteps, beginning his radio career in 1990 at WQNY. He started part-time and quickly found himself waking up early to host the morning show. In 1996, the station was bought by another company and switched from rock to country music.

“I had the choice to stay or go,” Allinger said. “I didn’t really know much about country music, much less how to build a country station, and I opted to stay.”

Some of his fans were not happy. “Some of them are still mad at me about the switch,” he said. But he grew to love country, gaining an appreciation for the music of artists like Marty Stuart and Brooks & Dunn. “I just got into their music and really enjoyed their musicianship,” he said.

But it was the station’s listeners who really gave Allinger his enthusiasm for the job.

“The audience in country music is so welcoming, so active,” Allinger said. “They just have an affection for the music — and if they love you, you are a member of the family.”

Allinger has held countless fundraisers over the years, and he said the listeners never failed to show up, dedicating their time and money and coming out for the various stunts that Allinger dreamed up.

In the rock days, he sat for two days in an “ice cube” that was essentially a coffin made out of ice. “That was bizarre,” Allinger said.

“It was a company that went through town,” he explained. “They would travel around, and they would ask if anyone there wants to get inside the block.” Naturally, Allinger volunteered.

Every two years or so Allinger would devise a wacky stunt. “I would walk into the general manager’s office and say, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ and he would say, ‘Oh, no,’” Allinger said with a laugh.

One time, he sat 50 feet in the air in a bucket truck for a fundraising effort to fill the middle of the Commons with canned goods.

Another time, he called on people to show up at a Groton gas station in an effort to break the world record for the most line dancers in one place and wound up with 5,000 people who came to participate. Allinger and a few dance teachers danced on the roof while the thousands of people line danced below. They would have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, he said, if it weren’t for a group in Australia that broke the record with 10,000 dancers just a couple of weeks later.

Over the years, Allinger swam the lake, walked for miles and upstaged his original bucket truck stunt with an even more extreme version, swaying overnight in an F150 pickup truck lifted by a crane 100 feet in the air.

Allinger walked all over the county from town to town carrying a backpack with a flag on it, collecting money to feed children over the weekend, which costs about $3 per child. He collected donations in that amount for three years, wearing the backpack to every party or event he attended, and he ended up collecting a total of $100,000 for the program.

“I always said, ‘I’ve got a big megaphone, let’s do something with it,’” he said.

Allinger said that none of it would have been possible without his team at WQNY. “Fortunately, we have the greatest engineer in the world, Ben VanPatten,” he said. “The guy is smart. If there’s something going on, it is never a problem. I’ve never seen him lose his cool. He’s just rock solid.”

“He’s definitely the best OM [operations manager] that I’ve worked with,” VanPatten said. “It’s going to be real sad to see him go. It’s bittersweet, but I’m very happy for him.”

“He’s definitely a great friend and mentor,” VanPatten added. “He’s always quick with a joke, and has a humor all of his own. … He is as genuine off the air as he was on. It was a true example of who he was.”

Osadchey agrees. “His ability to be seen as a real person, with good days and bad days, to have observations about the community and conversations with people that other people would know … it does feel like a giant party where everyone is listening to him, but they all identify with him,” Osadchey said. “He has that human element. He’s not afraid of being authentic.”

Allinger will wind down his time at the morning show at the end of August and stay on as operations manager as long as needed to find his replacement and help the station through the transition.

“We’re trying to run on a really lean staff, and Chris has so much historical knowledge,” Osadchey said, adding that Allinger’s successor will have big shoes to fill. “It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but there becomes a strategic element about it.”

As Allinger’s retirement approaches, the radio station will hold a series of events throughout the summer, “everything from on-air elements to single events highlighting Chris,” Osadchey said, adding that listeners should check the station’s website, 1037qcountry.com, for updates as more details become available. 

Though he was not a fan initially, Allinger said that he now enjoys country music and appreciates the way it has evolved over the years, sometimes in surprising ways.

“It’s different,” he said of today’s country music industry. Introducing country megastar Jelly Roll for the first time, for example, was an interesting experience, Allinger said. The general reaction from many listeners was, “What are you talking about?” But, Allinger said, listeners came to enjoy Jelly Roll’s music.

The older country sound from the 1990s is coming back around in terms of popularity, he observed. Zach Topp and Laney Wilson, two musicians who are high on the charts right now, are “very traditional-sounding,” he said, adding, “even Jelly Roll has more of a traditional outlaw-style presentation.” He sees similarities between Jelly Roll and Waylen Jennings, Willy Nelson and other artists who pushed the envelope in their time.

“I think the future is bright for country music,” Allinger said, “as it is for radio.”