— After getting 45 years' worth of news and information from Mankato native Gary Eichten, Minnesota Public Radio listeners are showering him with appreciation. In all fairness, though, they might want to set aside a few of their “thank yous” for local folks who put him on course toward a remarkable radio career.

They could express some gratitude that KYSM general manager Bob DeHaven didn’t think Eichten was as much of a loser as DeHaven’s daughter did.

They could feel indebted to The Free Press sports department for firing Eichten just when he was convinced he was on the brink of greatness as a local sports reporter.

And they should be thankful the people running KNUJ in New Ulm in the 1960s were trusting types who didn’t catch Eichten in the bald-faced lie that got him his first radio gig.

Nearly half a century later, Eichten is being praised by many of the prominent politicians he gently but thoroughly interrogated over the years, is hearing a constant stream of regret from loyal listeners over his impending retirement and is the focus of a sold-out tribute at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul tonight.

“It’s mind-boggling,” he said. “I have no idea how this has come to be. I’m just a kid from Mankato, and I don’t know how this happened.”

Step one: Get fired by The Free Press

By Eichten’s telling, there was no grand plan that led to his award-winning career in journalism or his central role in building MPR into one of the top radio news organizations in America.

As a kid growing up in Mankato, attending Loyola High School in the mid-1960s, he had no particular interest in politics but has probably quizzed more prominent Minnesota political figures than anyone over the last four decades.

“I loved sports,” Eichten said. “I wasn’t too good at it, but I loved to play ball.”

The son of Victor Eichten and Olive Kline, who divorced when he was young, he reminisced about playing with friends from morning until dark throughout the summer, of walking to school, of delivering newspapers.

“It was almost an idyllic boyhood really, when I think about it,” he said. “... It was just a wonderful place to grow up.”

Eichten ran track and played football for the Crusaders, becoming a starting lineman by his senior year. His interest in sports brought him to The Free Press for a part-time job as a high school junior.

The sports editor taught him a bit about writing and gradually gave him more responsibilities.

“I was thumping my chest and thought I was a real big shot. One day, he calls me in and says, ‘You’re one of the best young sports writers I’ve ever met.’ I thought, ‘Whooeee!’ My head was about to explode. But in the next sentence he said, ‘I have to fire you.’”

Eichten’s typing was so lousy that the typesetters were sick of dealing with his mistake-ridden copy, the editor explained. And so ended the possibility of Eichten getting sidetracked by sports reporting or newspaper work.

“I thought, ‘If I go into radio, I’m the only one who has to be able to read it,’” he said of his typing.

Step two: Make concrete plans

Eichten decided he wanted to go away to college after graduating from Loyola but hadn’t settled on where or what he wanted to study.

“I was going to go to the ‘U’ but I chickened out. It was just too big.”

Then St. John’s University in Collegeville made an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“They came up with a $50 scholarship for me. Oh, be still my heart! But it was better than nothing.”

Better than nothing, but something well short of the cost of a private college.

“Having signed up for St. John’s, there was the small problem of how I was going to find money for this.”

North Star Concrete came through with a job the summer after his high school graduation, providing good pay and plenty of physical labor. Eichten liked the money; not so much the labor.

‘It made me realize, ‘You better get up to school and do some serious studying,’” he recalled.

While he’d decided he didn’t want a career in concrete, the next summer Eichten returned to Mankato and went back to North Star hoping for three months of work. They weren’t hiring and Eichten was feeling desperate as he walked from the plant near Poplar Street to his home east of downtown.

Step three: Exploit bad dates, white lies

Eichten was trudging down Second Street by the KYSM studios, and he remembered that he had a connection he might be able to exploit with station general manager Bob DeHaven: He’d gone out with DeHaven’s daughter and she’d dumped him.

“I had dated his daughter a couple of times. She didn’t like me, but he did.”

KYSM was a top-flight radio station for a small town, and DeHaven wasn’t about to hire a kid with no radio experience. But he knew of an opening at KNUJ in New Ulm and put in a word for Eichten.

He got a summer job there and quickly found himself on the air.

“I was scared to death because I’d lied to them and said I had a year’s experience, and I’d never been in a radio studio. Those first few days were a terrifying experience.”

By the end of the summer, Eichten’s future plans began to focus sharply on radio.

“I thought, ‘You’re pretty decent at it, and even if you aren’t, you love doing it.’ And that’s still how I feel.”

Step four: Pick politics over Pachelbel

Eichten returned to St. John’s for his sophomore year and got a student work-study job at Collegeville’s brand new radio station, KSJR, the first station in what would grow into a statewide network that’s the modern Minnesota Public Radio.

The KSJR job paid the same as his previous work-study job, washing pots and pans at the school cafeteria. The work was easier and Eichten’s three months on the air in New Ulm made him a grizzled veteran at KSJR.

Everybody did a little bit of everything at the fledgling station, operating the board, reading the news, playing the classical music recordings. After he graduated in 1969, Eichten was hired to work in the station’s news department.

It wasn’t so much that Eichten had a nose for news at that point, but he knew he didn’t have a mouth for music.

“What I knew about classical music would have fit on the back of a postage stamp. Plus, I couldn’t pronounce the names of the composers or the compositions.”

So he became the news director.

“There was nobody else on the news staff. So while I was nominally the director, I had no one else to direct.”

Step five: Win all of the journalism awards

For all of Eichten’s self-effacing stories and modesty, he has won most of the top awards available to broadcast journalists in Minnesota. Peabody awards for documentaries, a Premack award for his career-long contributions to public affairs reporting, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s award for “Best Local News Program” ... .

The latter award is for Eichten’s “Midday” show, which he has hosted since 1992. Running from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., the first hour has presented interviews and listener call-in questions on topics ranging from the latest movies to the upcoming Twins season to the Minnesota Teacher of the Year winner.

Mostly, though, the focus is government, elections and the issues surrounding them. Rather than quick summaries about conflicts in the Legislature or Congress, listeners get an hour’s worth of in-depth discussion.

“He’s the kind of radio personality, journalist, that I wish would be moderating the presidential debates,” said former Mankato Sen. John Hottinger, who was on “Midday” several times when he served as Democratic leader of the state Senate.

Eichten’s style is “personable, welcoming, but he won’t stray away from the question,” Hottinger said. If a politician dodges the question, Eichten politely mentions that he didn’t hear an answer and asks the question again.

“And he does it so gently,” Hottinger said. “It’s really pretty amazing. You walk out of the interview thinking, ‘He got me to answer the question I didn’t want to answer, and I don’t even feel offended.’”

Step six: Always focus on the audience

Eichten said he’s always tried to remember that his purpose is to provide information to listeners, not to draw attention to himself. That attitude is a key reason for his reputation for pushing political leaders to answer questions rather than letting them get by with scripted talking points.

Too often interviewers are focused on impressing the audience, which causes them to spend more time thinking about what they’re going to say next rather than paying attention to the person being interviewed.

“The interviewer isn’t listening to the answer, they’re so fixated on what they’re going to ask next,” he said.

And Eichten is perfectly comfortable keeping his opinions to himself and letting the audience come to their own conclusions.

“We get criticized, I suppose, for liberal bias,” he said of public radio. “And I’ll argue that till hell freezes over. It’s just not true.”

Republican Dick Day of Owatonna, who guesses he was interviewed by Eichten 30 times during his decade-long run as Senate minority leader, said conservatives are skeptical of MPR.

“If you’re a Republican, you get a little nervous when they call,” Day said.

But he said Eichten always treated him fairly.

“He’s very inquisitive. And I don’t think anybody intimidated him,” Day said. “He wasn’t afraid to ask tough questions of anybody ... . But he never tried to trap me.”

Day’s conservative colleagues never grumbled about Eichten either.

“I never heard ‘He’s really a (jerk), or ‘He’s terrible,’” Day said. “And I didn’t hear anybody say, ‘Oh, he’s a good guy.’

“He just seems to do his job and do it well.”

Step seven: Take a break and sleep in

Eichten would happily accept the dispassionate description provided by Day. Journalists shouldn’t get caught up in a quest for acclaim, nor should they be cowed by critics, according to Eichten.

“The point is you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘By golly, I did it the best I can, and tomorrow I’ll try to do better.”

Doing his best meant getting up in the wee hours of the morning to prepare for that day’s show. On Monday, he won’t be doing that any more.

Eichten, who’s about to turn 65, said he’d like to do some occasional special assignments for MPR after he gets the hang of retirement.

He plans to do some traveling with his wife Joann, but he won’t be moving back to Mankato to see if he finally has enough experience for a part-time job at KYSM or if his typing skills have improved enough to meet Free Press standards.

Eichten will still be heard daily in Mankato, though, even after his retirement. The audience, however, will be even smaller than KSJR’s back in 1967.

His mother Olive lives at Oak Lawn Health Care Center and it will be an audience of one that will continue to hear the distinctive voice that for 45 years put the “Minnesota” in Minnesota Public Radio.

“I talk to her every day,” Eichten said.