SALT LAKE CITY — After almost 22 years of early morning radio, Grant Nielsen — one half of KSL Radio’s Grant & Amanda morning team — is leaving the show. He’s leaving behind two decades of early mornings, early bedtimes, breaking news, topics du jour and banter with co-host Amanda Dickson.
On Friday, Nielsen signed off the show for the last time, off to retirement at the age of 65. Finally, he can catch up on his sleep.
“I’ll miss the people, but I won’t miss the 3 a.m. wake-up call,” says Nielsen.
Grant & Amanda have been a staple of the morning radio crowd for more than two decades, 5 a.m. to 9. They talked their listeners through 9/11 and Trolley Square and the Winter Olympics and the search for Elizabeth Smart and The Tornado and Mitt Romney’s Run and four governors and nearly two dozen sessions of the state Legislature.
They have been together so long that for years people assumed they were married.
When Amanda was spotted in public with her husband, Aaron, people would ask her, “Is this Grant?” Her reply: “This is my life partner; Grant is my work partner.”
Grant and Amanda have been together so long that Dickson says, “My first name is Grant And. Our lives and fortunes and names have been tied together for nearly half of my life. I have a difficult time thinking about living and working without him.”
They somehow endured in a business famous for frequent turnover, but maybe the most remarkable thing about their long run is that it ever happened in the first place. The Grant-Amanda pairing — it doesn’t seem right to refer to them as Nielsen and Dickson — was an accident or fate or whatever you want to call it.
Grant, who grew up in Southern California but had family in Utah, came to Salt Lake City in 1993 to look for a job. He had been a disc jockey and music program director with stations in Salt Lake City (at KALL), Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. After losing his job in Seattle, he interviewed at FM100, a music-oriented station in Salt Lake City. After the interview, he walked across the street to the KSL offices simply to say hello to friends who worked there.
Rod Arquette, the program director at the time, told Grant that KSL had a morning opening and would he like to audition? Grant agreed, and Arquette went off to find someone to read with him during the audition. If Grant was an unlikely candidate for a job as a news/talk show host given his DJ background, Amanda was equally unlikely. She had been working weekends for 2½ years and believed she would never be considered for anything more. Arquette asked Dickson to serve as Grant’s audition partner, but the audition wasn’t for her. Arquette simply needed someone for Grant to play off of. But then something happened.
“It was like we were brother and sister from the moment we started the audition,” recalls Amanda. “We started cutting up and giving each other a hard time. I thought, who is this guy? It was magic and a wonderful feeling.”
When the audition was finished, a consultant who had been retained to help the station fill the morning program slot, told Arquette, “That’s your morning team right there.”
“Really?!” said Arquette.
The consultant explained that Grant and Amanda had chemistry and possessed the exuberance and energy necessary for hosts of an early morning show.
As Grant recalls: “We started interacting in the audition and someone said this is the morning show, this is the team. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.”
They have been together ever since. Well, almost. They tried to get along without half of the team briefly. Amanda earned a law degree in her spare time and then dropped out of radio to pursue a law career. She lasted one year and decided it wasn’t for her. She called KSL to ask for a job — any job. “I didn’t think I’d get my old job back,” she says. KSL, it turned out, wasn’t happy with her replacement; she got her old job back.
“We’ve had a good run together,” says Grant. “We have never had a serious argument about anything.”
On Monday they will go their separate ways with Grant’s retirement. “It’s going to be a big change,” he says. Starting with his daily routine, which has consisted of going to bed at 8 p.m. and getting up at 3 a.m., five days a week. For years he went to bed at the same time as his children, but later his children would send him to bed — “Dad,” one of them would say, “it’s time for you to go to bed.”
“It has been a challenge for everybody,” says Grant. “We all had to adjust to it. I’d go to bed and they’d try to be quiet. In the summer I wanted to stay up late to do things with the family, so you pretty much have a certain level of fatigue all the time.”
On the other hand, he returned home by 1 p.m. and was there when his children returned from school (he and his wife, Kay, have four kids). When on one occasion he arrived home late, his daughter was waiting for him in the garage with her hands on her hips — “Where have you been?” she asked.
Looking back on his 22 years at KSL, Grant says: “The main things that stand out are working for a company that has such a positive impact on the community and the response of the community. When you come in here and ask for money (for a charity or a cause), they give you money.”
Grant plans to return to KSL occasionally to do part-time “fill-in” work, but mostly he will spend more time with his family, travel and attend plays, concerts and Jazz games “without constantly looking at my watch.”
He says there will be a seamless transition with his replacement, Brian Martin. Dickson told Martin: “Welcome to the last job you’re ever going to have. You’re going to love it.”
Email: drob@deseretnews.com