He grew up in north suburban Highland Park, where he worked as a parking lot attendant at Ravinia Festival, the oldest outdoor music festival in the United States, held at Ravinia Park.
"My closet brush with history happened while working in the lot taking $5 for parking when Lang Lang, a now-famous pianist made his historic debut, filling in at the last minute," said David Polk. "Unfortunately, I was in the parking lot, so I didn't really hear it. But I was a few hundred feet from stardom."
Then there was the time when a man arrived driving a Jaguar—and got angry when he had to pay $5 to park. He was followed by a man in a beat-up old car with a Chicago car sticker. When Polk said it'd be $5 for parking, the man replied, 'Damn; that's cheap! I can't believe it, only 5 bucks. I'm going to park here all the time!'"
"Ravinia was a great experience," Polk said. "To be able to hear a different concert every night for free as an employee when in high school is a great, formative experience and [an] opportunity that I was very lucky to have. Now when I go back to concerts at Ravinia I have to resist the urge to direct people to the bathrooms, which was the No. 1 question people asked."
Polk, now 31, is still working in the music world—he is the program director at WFMT ( 98.7-FM ), a division of Window to the World Communications, Inc.
"The first response I usually get when someone asks me what I do is, 'What's a program director?' The short answer is, I oversee all programming on WFMT," Polk said. "I'm essentially the listener's representative at the station, always thinking about whether our programming is serving our listeners in the best possible way.
"I don't keep track of 24/7 programming by myself, though. I work with superb colleagues in the programming department to help get it all done. WFMT is the Chicago cultural institution that you can bring with you and we have some of the world's [foremost] experts on classical music, opera and the arts who work here, broadcasting hundreds of years of humanity's greatest artistic achievements, ideas and cultural heritage every day.
"An old station advertising campaign [was], 'WFMT is gonna enrich you.' And that's exactly what we strive to do."
Polk is openly gay, and he lives in Lincoln Square. He has been in the radio world since he was 7 … well, sort of.
"When I was about 7, I had a 'radio show' that consisted of a red playschool tape recorder and I landed 'high profile' interviews [with] my parents. So I've been interested in radio for a while," he said. "Even today, [radio] is still like magic. What are smartphones but fancy radios?"
Polk had a radio show on Saturday nights at Tufts University near Boston until 3 a.m. "I wasn't attached to any genre, mixing Ravel with The Ramones," he said. "I'd have my friends call in when they were coming home from parties and they were allowed to request any song they wanted as long as it was the one I had picked out for them because I didn't feel like pulling CDs from the library."
His first paid radio job was at "Car Talk" on NPR. "It was only two [subway] stops from Tufts and my job was to screen the hundreds of calls that would come in each week," he said. "I [now] think I know of every possible problem that can happen with a car. Unfortunately, I don't know how to fix any of them."
He then landed an internship on Craigslist with critic-at-large Andrew Patner and that helped lead to his current gig.
He was appointed program director in January.
"Radio has the ability to turn laundry, cooking, cleaning and driving into enriching experiences," Polk said. "It's what you listen to while you're doing something else, and because most people listen to radio by themselves, it can be the most intimate medium. On the other end of the signal, because it's a relatively inexpensive medium when compared to TV or cinema, we can be flexible and transmit ideas with great efficiency. We can transmit a concert live from Europe or New York or the Chicago Cultural Center with just a few staff members. We in radio, and especially at WFMT, do a great job of reflecting our communities. We strive to sound like Chicago."
Polk said radio has remained resilient in the battle against the Internet for listeners.
"Over 90 percent of Americans listen to and rely on the radio each week. In fact, the word 'radio' has expanded in many peoples' minds to include smart phones. You want to feel connected to your community, so you turn on the radio while browsing through Facebook," he said. "[As] our late colleague Studs Terkel used to say regularly, unlike a newspaper or magazine, radio transmits the human voice. It makes a huge difference when you can actually hear a person speak or perform live. And you hear them without the visual distraction of seeing what they look like and so many of your biases melt away. And because we can interview people with a single microphone or transmit a live performance with a low-impact setup instead of a camera crew, people generally open up with greater ease."
WFMT is driven through classical and fine arts music.
Classical music, Polk said, is certainly here to stay.
"There hasn't been a better time to be a classical music lover," he said.
Polk noted that there are no Beyoncé-like stars of classical music. "But e have the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and their music director Riccardo Muti right here at home. Muti is our Beyoncé. And he conducts, too. Between the CSO and Lyric and the myriad of smaller, creative organizations that exist in here and the people and institutions that support them, there are few better places to be for classical music. And it's affordable, too. Often in Chicago we can hear this music for free."
Classical music definitely has a soft spot in the hearts of many within the LGBT community. After all, "the stereotype of the gay, arts-loving, opera-fanatic has been with us for a long time," Polk said. "I don't have to tell anyone that the arts are important for many members of the LGBT community, whether as artists or appreciators. Perhaps it's because the longing to find something to connect with when one feels closeted and alone early in life is even stronger.
Studs Terkel, who worked at WFMT for 45 years, was an early member of the Mattachine Society, and later a "friend of the community" inductee into the Chicago Gay & Lesbian Hall of Fame, "and he was very proud of [that honor]," Polk said. "In fact, near the end of his life, when one of his last books came out, he mentioned his membership in the Mattachine whenever he gave an interview. I was in the studio with him helping coordinate these interviews and he got very passionate about it.
"Not only did he become a member, but he interviewed the Society's president on WFMT back in the 1960s. That's not just a testament to Studs Terkel, but to WFMT for allowing it. I doubt if most other media outlets would have touched the Mattachine Society with a 50-foot pole. We have a proud history of inclusion at WFMT. Eventually, my colleagues will post that interview and every other interview online at studsterkel.org ."
The Mattachine Society is one of the earliest-known pro-gay organizations, dating back to the early 1950s. There was a long-running Chicago version of the group, Mattachine Midwest, that started in the mid-1960s and ran through the mid-1980s.
