In the turbulent world of radio, there are but a handful of people who've endured for decades to consistently fill our lives with music, information and conversation that gets us through our day. And ya-ya Milwaukee, one standout is Bob Reitman.

Listeners to eclectic and alternative radio in the late 1960s, rock radio in the 1970s and contemporary radio since 1980 know Bob Reitman as one of Milwaukee's most visible, popular and long-standing broadcasting personalities. Reitman's path -- as we near the 20th anniversary of the Reitman & Mueller morning show on WKTI -- includes 30-plus years of radio, broadcasting from the U.S.S.R., poetry, a world record, DJ of OMC owner Andy Tarnoff's Bar Mitzvah, a few marriages and a successful battle with prostate cancer.

The last few years have been busy for Reitman and we caught up with him at a Riverwest restaurant and cornered him for a Milwaukee Talks interview.

OMC: Let's go way back for starters. Tell us how and where you grew up.

BR: It all began 10 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. I was born in Enid, Oklahoma. My dad was an FBI agent and was working an assignment down there. We also lived in Detroit and Chicago when I was little but by the time I was in kindergarten in 1946, we were back in Milwaukee. My dad is from Milwaukee and my mom grew up in Chilton, so it was inevitable we’d end up back home. Basically, I grew up in Whitefish Bay. Went to grade school and high school in Whitefish Bay before receiving an English degree from Marquette and a graduate degree in Urban Education from UWM. By that time, it was the late '60s and everything was pretty open in the community. I was doing poetry readings, finishing graduate school, starting radio, getting out in the community. I also worked in the cemetery business during that time to help pay the bills.

OMC: You turned 60 in December, right? Happy Birthday.

BR: Yeah, it's kind of funny. A friend of mine I ran into a few months back told me that turning 25, 30, 40, even 50 didn't bother him, but that turning 60 was terrible ... which really annoyed me. Well, actually it surprised me. My biggest one was 25 ... that was like, let's get serious here. And now that's almost 35 years ago.

OMC: You began in Milwaukee radio, and in radio in general, right around that time ... in 1967, to be exact. How did you get started in radio after college?

BR: Actually, I was still in school at the time. I've always been passionate about poetry and I used to hang out all the time at this place called the Avant Garde Coffee House. It was a great place on Prospect, just south of that bridge as you approach North Avenue. It was on the second floor. That bridge goes over a bike path now, but at the time it was still a railroad line and when trains would roar by you'd have to stop reading and wait for the noise to go away and the building to stop shaking. We had poetry readings and all kinds of things going on there and it was a terrific place. I also started working for an underground newspaper called the Kaleidoscope, where I was poetry editor. About that time I was asked to do a poetry show on WUWM called Sense Waves. We read poetry on the air and then I started playing records for a few hours after that. That's what moved me toward music-oriented radio. Eventually, once a week we had a show called "It's Alright, Ma, It's Only Music" on WUWM.

OMC: I assume working at WUWM didn't pay the bills. How did radio become a career?

BR: I moved to a new station, WZMF, about 1968, '69, somewhere in there. It was my first full-time radio job. The station was pretty much free-form radio, and we broadcast out of this house in Menomonee Falls -- it was way, way out there at the time. We only had 3,000 watts of power, and we were hard to get in. People used to stack up their stereos, put up rabbit ears ... one of our best ads featured a guy with all this equipment trying to pick us up, and the slogan said, "WZMF ... We're Hard To Get, But It's Worth It" or something like that. The station was privately owned, and we could pretty much play what we wanted, within reason. I'd try to use the music that was coming out to weave a theme. We had all these great cuts from Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Quicksilver Messenger Service and on and on. We weren't "personalities" on the air that much; we barely talked. WZMF was purely about the music. Between full- and part-time, I was there for about six years.

OMC: You also worked at a few others before getting to WKTI ...

BR: Yes. I worked for a new station called WTOS in 1970 and '71. Then I went back to WZMF as a part-timer until 1974, when I went to WQFM. I stayed there until 1980, when I moved to WKTI.

OMC: So what's a typical day like now with WKTI versus a typical day working at, say, WZMF back in 1969?

BR: Wow, it's literally night and day. Now I get up at 2:30 in the morning, into work by 4, on the air from 5 to 10 a.m., and the rest of the day, depending on what I want to do, I do. I have my kids a couple of days a week and love to do things with them. I play golf when it's warm, and I listen to a lot of music. I have all these road tapes, like 125 tapes, that I'm burning onto CDs. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I do watch The Sopranos religiously and I like a show on HBO called Six Feet Under, which is about the cemetery business and I used to work in it. I usually go to bed at 7 or 7:30 at night. When I worked for WZMF, I'd work from 8 p.m. until midnight, stay out until 3 or 4 in the morning, get up at noon, and just do so many different things from what I do now. It was a completely different lifestyle. I missed entire series of TV shows from back then because I was working or out and we didn't have VCRs.