What do Met fans in West Virginia, Virginia, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Arizona have in common?

Aside from being a long way from New York and their beloved Shea … I mean, Metropolitan Opera, Met fans in these five states have won their David vs. Goliath struggle to keep public radio stations from dropping “Live at the Met.” Their success stories should bring a song to the hearts of Met fans in Maine who are locked in battle against Maine Public Broadcasting’s decision to bring down the curtain on the Saturday afternoon institution. And they offer several strategies that could work in Maine, too.

The most dramatic victory, MPB executives may shudder to learn, cost the general manager his job and was the most recent. A year ago February in Virginia, the general manager of Roanoke’s public radio station was fired by Virginia Tech, who is the licensee, several months after the station dropped Live at the Met.

Steve Mills didn’t have a clue that his 25-year career at the station was doomed when he looked at flagging Met ratings, cutbacks in CPB funding, and rising NPR dues, and quietly decided to pass on the Met’s new season in December 1999. CPB no longer allows stations to count the free Met program among the contributions that determine the size of CPB grants, Mills reasoned in an interview with Current, a public broadcasting magazine (Jan. 24, 2000).

That unleashed a “brutally negative response.” Met fans bypassed the station and barraged Virginia Tech vice presidents with angry letters, e-mails and phone calls. In an unprecedented interference with the station, administrators told Mills’ boss at Virginia Tech to get the Met back on the air to “quell the firestorm,” and Mills’ boss asked him to restore the Met to mute the “heat, emotion, and mudslinging of the current letter-writing campaign.”

Mills brought back the Met, but wrote a letter of protest. A month or so later, Mills was fired, Current reported (March 20, 2000). “I used to think ‘opera Nazis’ was harsh,” Mills told Current before the firing. “Not anymore. If anything, it’s a little tame.” After he was fired he reprised with this: “Obviously, if I had to do it over again, I just wouldn’t mess with the opera.”

In Madison, Wis., a well-organized grass-roots movement saved the Met, leaving much the same impression on public radio managers. “It simply was not worth the grief,” Jack Mitchell, director of radio, explained to Current (Sept. 20, 1993). “Any benefit from this was not worth the negatives that were being engendered in the community.”

An ad hoc group called Save the Met Live Broadcasts mustered 3,500 supporters to persuade Wisconsin Public Radio to reverse its decision to drop the Met six months before the scheduled denouement, Current reported. In May 1993, a friend of the leader of an informal opera buffs group, Joanna Overn, got wind of WPR’s plan to discontinue the Met. Overn called the director of the University of Wisconsin Opera and the artistic director of the Madison Opera to form STMLB. Within several months STMLB had 3,500 signatures of support.

STMLB wrote to legislators and university officials – and handed out home phone numbers of the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, which licenses most Wisconsin public broadcasters. The local paper, the Madison Capital-Journal, also took up the cause.

“We were inundated with abuse,” Mitchell told Current. And bowing to the abuse, WPR announced in July 1993 that it would keep the Met for a year. As a result, STMLB became a permanent watchdog, insisting on public hearings before WPR can make major changes like dropping the Met.

Met fans used high-level political connections to defeat attempts to cancel the Met at the state networks in West Virginia and Mississippi in the 1980s, Current wrote. “Some of the people they contacted had some clout, you might say,” Dave Miller, Mississippi program director, told Current. “There was at least the threat or implication that agency funding would be affected.”

In West Virginia, Met fans swung into action and underwriters threatened to pull funding when the state’s network considered dropping the Met. The opera stayed. Program Director Jeanne Fisher told Current in 1993 that building opera may be “part of our mission” instead of assuming the audience is insignificant.

One of the leading villains in the decline of the Met is public broadcasting audience researcher David Giovannoni, whose name sounds like a character from Verdi. He wrote in Current in 1988 that “opera is a certain tune-out for most public radio listeners.” Because of its narrow appeal, he wrote, “the damage it can inflict in a program schedule might very well outweigh its presumed and unproven positioning benefits” as a unique service of public stations.

What Giovannoni’s research fails to take into account that some of the most effective organizers against programming changes are Met fans, Current wrote in 1995.

Despite stations that believe the Met hurts audience-building and researchers who say opera appeals only to a minuscule audience, Met fans worked tirelessly to prevail. “These fans appear to be motivated

by a passionate commitment to high culture and a belief they are among the few plugging the dike that’s stemming a flood of popular-media trash,” Current wrote.

Winning back the opera also will be a Met fan marathon, keeping pressure on legislators, UMaine, Bowdoin, Bates and Colby official, MBP’s community advisory board, and MPB. They curtain rose again in West Virginia, Virginia, Wisconsin, Mississippi. The curtain in Maine is just rising.

Paul Grosswiler, Ph.D., is an associate professor and program coordinator of journalism and mass communication at UMaine. He lives in Bangor.