Widow of Valley broadcast pioneer Chester Smith harnessing the power of talk

Ann Lesley Smith is a good talker. She has to be, to do 45 to 55 minutes of “Ann Lesley Live” each Saturday on Power Talk 1360 radio.

She’s a good listener, too. Not a psychiatrist, not a psychologist, but someone who’s lived a lot, seen a lot in her six-plus decades of life and wants to use her experiences to help others, she said.

“The things I talk about usually are things I’ve been through,” she said one morning last month at a favorite coffee shop and bakery in Modesto. “I’m not ivory-towering it. … A lot of people haven’t gone through a lot, and they pontificate on stuff they’ve read in a book. Like my late husband used to say, ‘Would you rather go down the Amazon River with someone who’s been doing it 35 years, was born into it, or someone who’s a college professor at Stanford who’s studied it in books?’ So that’s the basis of my program.”

The late husband she referred to is Chester Smith, who knew a thing or two about broadcasting.

Smith started his career as a country music singer and radio broadcaster, and built a television station empire based in the Modesto area that earned him millions.

After launching at country station KTRB, he put his own KCEY on the air in 1963. He then opened the first UHF television station in Northern California in 1966, offering Spanish-language programming. A few years later, he went in with a group to form the Spanish-speaking network Univision.

Smith, a man of strong faith, met Ann Lesley when she was a prison chaplain. His efforts to improve people’s lives were among many things she admired about her husband, she said.

“He did help a lot of people. He was a wise man and he was a quiet man, but boy, did he make some breakthroughs.”

Ann Lesley Smith, who as a young woman married into the Huntington railroad family in San Francisco, said she’s been on both sides of the coin – “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, rich and then poor.”

A graduate of Idaho State University, she’s also been a runway model, songwriter and recording artist (she and Chester recorded a 2005 CD, “Captured by Love”) and San Francisco Bay Area radio personality and journalist. She’s lived the high life, she said, and still could, but chose to stay in Modesto after her husband died in August 2008. She leads a relatively quiet life on her ranch here.

“When Chester was dying, he said, ‘Honey, you’re now me.’ And it took some time to figure that out,” Smith said. “I’m a person who can make things happen for other people.”

Doing her show is part of that. She’s not an employee of Power Talk 1360, which is an iHeartMedia station, but rather buys the airtime for her 1 p.m. Saturday slot.

There’s no narrow focus such as careers or relationships to her show, she said.

“My show is about people, about lives. I’m sort of like the guru of the components of life.”

As she talked about stories she shares and advice she offers, Smith uses the words “loneliness,” “hopelessness” and “turmoil.” Callers to her show often talk about symptoms rather than root causes of whatever problems they’re going through, she said.

“I told Greg Cobb (senior vice president of sales at iHeartMedia) when I started this: ‘You know, everybody’s got turmoil, and turmoil is the reason for financial problems, relationship problems, wrong marriages, working in dead-end jobs, not being able to get along with people. The turmoil started and never got healed. If it doesn’t get any light or sunshine, it will never get healed – it will keep on going and festering and growing.’ ”

On Smith’s Facebook page, Modesto resident Melissa Chiangi recently commented that she’d just discovered “Ann Lesley Live.”

“Your program was music to my ears,” Chiangi wrote. “Your content, let’s just say everything you said was amazing! … You are possibly filling the huge void that exists in this area.”

Smith said she believes she is filling a void – that no one else locally is interacting with his or her audience the way she does. She learned from her husband that when one thinks about it, radio is the original social media. She’s using it to build her audience, too, she said, and regularly live-streams her show on her Facebook page using her smartphone as she’s on the air.

Sean Lovelady, owner of Cue 3 Productions in Waterford, said he’s listened to about eight of Smith’s shows. He met her a couple of years back, he said, when they did some video production work together. Lovelady said he also produced a video on Chester Smith and his ministry.

A teacher for 14 years, Lovelady said the key to getting through to people is being engaging and being a good storyteller, and “she brings that into the mix.”

A self-described optimist who’s a fan of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” author Stephen Covey and “See You at the Top” author Zig Ziglar, Lovelady said he sees a kindred spirit in Smith.

The message of a recent show – if life’s not going the way you want it to go, look for ways to change it – reminded him of the 1959 self-help book “The Magic of Thinking Big,” by David Schwartz.

“The same content was there that changed my life early on: You can change, start building the pieces of the puzzle. When you’re doing something like that, what Ann is doing, it pulls me in.”

To listen: “Ann Lesley Live” airs at 1 p.m. Saturdays on Power Talk 1360. Podcasts of the show are archived at powertalk1360.iheart.com/media/podcast-kfivam-podcast-AnnLesleyLive.

This story was originally published March 2, 2017 at 8:05 AM with the headline "Widow of Valley broadcast pioneer Chester Smith harnessing the power of talk."