Amid the headlines and ad reads of a typical morning newscast, KSL’s Andy Farnsworth surprised co-host Amanda Dickson on Wednesday with a little music: A snippet of “One Day More” from “Les Misérables.”

Dickson put down her crochet work, raised a triumphant hand and sang along for a moment, her smile matching the one KSL listeners have said they have heard in her voice for decades.

The song cue marked an imminent end to Dickson’s nearly 40 years in radio — 36 of them at KSL Newsradio and 34 as the station’s morning host. Thursday will be her last day on the air before retirement.

Dickson reassured Farnsworth in the studio, and her KSL audience across Utah and online, that she’s looking forward to the transition.

“Change is good,” Dickson said. “It enlivens you.”

In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Dickson, 62, acknowledged that not being on the air from 5 to 9 a.m. every weekday will be an adjustment.

Noting that she’s been setting her alarm for 2:15 a.m., Dickson asked, “What’s it going to be like not to have a bedtime?”

“I don’t know how to say goodbye to the listeners — they’ve been so kind and generous to me all these years,” said Dickson, adding that she probably delayed the decision to retire for years “because I couldn’t grapple with saying goodbye.”

An accidental radio star

Being on the radio wasn’t the original plan for Dickson. After growing up in Pennsylvania and briefly attending Brigham Young University, she was a law student at the University of Utah in the mid-1980s. When she dropped out of law school from the workload, she needed a job.

Dickson said a guy she was dating at the time worked in radio and told her she had a great voice. She put in an application at KTKK, known as K-Talk, where owner Starley Bush hired her. Dickson read news and hosted a talk show on K-Talk, and worked as a DJ on its sister FM station.

“It was the most fantastic place to start a career, since they didn’t have any money and didn’t have very many resources,” she said. “I got to do everything. The learning curve was ‘here’s the on button. Go do it.’”

In 1990, Dickson was hired as a weekend host at KSL — the flagship of Bonneville International, the broadcast entity owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“This was the coolest thing ever — it was in a big fancy downtown building. K-Talk was in the middle of a trailer park in West Valley,” Dickson recalled. “When I saw the [control] board, I thought, ‘I am not a pilot.’ I had no idea how to handle this massive [board].”

She caught on quickly, and learned to fill the time from noon to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

“I just interviewed people throughout the week, and piled up those interviews and played them back on the weekends,” she said. “I interviewed celebrities who came through town, and a lot of politicians. … I’d have roundtable reporter shows. I did a show called ‘Making a Living,’ where I would just invite three people from different professions every weekend and ask them what it’s like to be a prison guard or a hotel concierge or whatever.”

While working weekends, Dickson said she also went back to the U. and finished her law degree.

“Grantandamanda”

In 1992, Dickson said she was in a studio listening to one of her recorded segments when station manager Rod Arquette and a consultant came in with someone auditioning for an on-air job. They asked Dickson to sit opposite the potential hire, Grant Nielsen, “just to lay some tape down of him interacting with someone,” she said.

“Grant and I read a little news together, and bantered back and forth,” said Dickson. “We were brother and sister in each other’s face that first day.”

According to Dickson, recounting a story she’s told many times, the consultant turned to Arquette and said, “That’s your morning team right there.”

“Grant & Amanda” — often said as one word, “Grantandamanda” — became KSL’s morning mainstay, a fixture for morning listeners until Nielsen retired in 2015.

The pairing worked, Dickson said, because “Grant was my best friend, and we’re still good friends. Working with him, it truly didn’t feel like work for 20 years. I loved being with him. We laughed, we shared our life experiences.”

When Nielsen retired, Dickson was paired with Brian Martin, then Tim Hughes and then with her current co-host, Andy Farnsworth. While each of those pairings has been fulfilling, she said, “I feel guilty that I have not been fair to [them], since Grant sort of ruined me. … I had no idea how rare it was.”

Influencing other journalists

With her retirement announcement, Dickson’s admirers in the industry have offered their testimonials.

Holly Rowe, the ESPN sportscaster and sideline reporter, interned at KSL at the start of her career. When her professor at the University of Utah told her to emulate a broadcast journalist she liked, she said she picked two at KSL: Dickson and Maria Shilaos.

“Amanda has just the most beautiful, elegant diction — an incredible voice,” Rowe told The Tribune on Wednesday. “She always sounds like she’s got a smile in her voice.”

Dickson, Rowe said, “was always very diligent. She would really research, and get to know the people she was going to interview. She was always very pleasant, but then she was also hard-hitting when she needed to be.”

Later, Rowe said Dickson became “a great advocate of mine, and will constantly send me sweet messages and be a big cheerleader for me.”

Sheryl Worsley, Dickson’s boss and vice president of KSL Newsradio, said in a statement that “Amanda has a remarkable ability to make people feel heard, whether they’re sitting across from her in the studio or listening on their morning commute. She brings joy and professionalism to the airwaves and does it every day.”

Since about 2002, with a few interruptions, Dickson has been teaching at the University of Utah — starting with a media law class, and currently classes in public speaking and in media and society.

Her love of teaching, Dickson said, factored into the decision to retire. She talked it over with her husband, Aaron Wilhelm — a former producer at KSL who transitioned to being a stay-at-home dad — and “I thought, ‘Can we afford to have me stop doing this job? Because I think I’m ready to step away.’ And we decided, yeah, I could just focus on the students, which is something I really love doing.”

It took some time to come to peace with retirement, she said.

“I knew in my heart it was time to go, but I couldn’t,” Dickson said. “I didn’t know how to walk away from something I’d done for two-thirds of my life. … Too many of us define ourselves by our work. I’m that girl on KSL. But now I’m ready to be someone else.”