Ben Kerr
By Deb Dion

He has a radio voice like hot chocolate—smooth, rich, warm and comforting. Friday nights, Ben Kerr takes over the local airwaves as his radio persona, Jerry Bonafiglio, and plays oldies that are as familiar as his deep mellow voice has become to KOTO listeners over the last quarter of a century. Kerr is also the station’s general manager and has been since 1986. He started his “Jerry Bonafiglio’s Rockin’ Remnants Show” long before that, when the radio station was conceived in 1975. “The first time KOTO went on the air, I had my first show. I don’t know how I got Friday nights,” says Kerr. He is as integral to the culture of KOTO as oldies are to the annals of rock music.

“I grew up listening to Philadelphia and New York radio stations. I gravitated toward stations that played music from the late ’50s, and it was the ’60s then,” laughs Kerr. “I was always a little behind the times.”

Kerr grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and used to fall asleep listening to a transistor radio, something in retrospect he figures “had a subconscious effect” on him. He was a DJ in college (at Davis and Elkins in Elkins, West Virginia) and arrived in Telluride just as the radio station was forming.

Before coming to Telluride, Kerr was a lifeguard at a private lake in the Poconos, and the hotel owners there were also partners in the early days of the resort here. He decided to put his management degree to use and packed up for Telluride, arriving at night. He says he woke up and saw the fairy-tale-like mountains for the first time and thought, “Wow.”

In 1976, just a year after his arrival in Telluride, Kerr suffered the accident that robbed him of his hand. He says he was working for Animas Aggregates, running some cable, when the overhead grounding wire arced. Kerr and co-worker Jim Frackleton suffered identical injuries and became close friends in the aftermath. Kerr was in Montrose Memorial Hospital for two months before the head prosthetic doctor at the University of Pennsylvania fitted him with the metal hook that has become as iconic around Telluride as Kerr himself.

It would have been a tragedy and a hardship for most, but Kerr took it in stride, with dignity and a sense of humor. He says he had “no trouble adapting.” He admits, “It certainly takes your life in a different direction. Personality-wise, I can’t remember ever being fazed by it—it’s one of those, Well, what’re you going to do now?, types of things.”

Later in the ’70s, he married and had a son, Ryan, and a daughter, Kelly. He did a stint back east in New Hampshire before returning here. “I decided to come back to Telluride. There was nothing going on here at that time, but I thought it was a really cool place,” says Kerr.

Soon after, Kerr, with his Tom Selleck good looks, caught the eye of his current wife, Susan. She is the statuesque redheaded proprietress of the local lingerie shop, who, in a past musical era, might have been referred to as a “brick house.” She scouted him out at one of the sock hops that Kerr used to host at the old Roma restaurant and bar. “I’d seen her from afar. I mean, how could you not notice her?” reminisces Kerr. “I thought: There’s a beautiful woman, but way out of my league.” Whatever league they were playing in, Kerr didn’t drop the ball. The two were married in 1989 on a 90-foot schooner off the coast of Key West.

Kerr is as interested in other types of relics as he is old music. He has a penchant for railroads and steam trains, at one time sporting a “Galloping Goose” patch on his denim jacket. When he moved to the San Juans, he finally learned that this is the home of the Goose’s rail line. When he isn’t tinkering around the radio station and its towers, he likes to fix up classic vehicles, such as the reddish-orange ’57 Dodge truck that’s parked in front of his house. It’s one of the early four-wheel drive models and was his first car in Telluride. “We live in a town where you don’t drive, but we have seven vehicles in various stages of repair,” grins Kerr.

He gives the same loving care to KOTO as he does to aging cars. Kerr has been the station’s guardian since the days when local radio comedians Buzz and Buck used to moon him through the window of the DJ booth, when it was not unusual to find DJs passed out on the KOTO couch in the morning, through years of parties, noise complaints and even fights, to its current stature as the town’s longest surviving and best-loved medium. He says he relishes that the airwaves are accessible to everyone, and that the station is such an important forum in the community for music, news and public comment. “I think we’re fortunate to have a radio station like KOTO,” says Kerr. “Not all community radio stations are like that. We have an open-door policy.”

Kerr’s future is also an open door. He is non-committal about his plans, saying only that he is in Telluride for the “indefinite future.” “I wouldn’t rule anything out, but there’s no place I like quite as much as here,” he says. “I just have a history of staying with things for a long time. If I like something and it works, why change it?”