1-on-1 with Tom Barnard ahead of departure from KQRS

Love him or hate him, he’s been a staple on Twin Cities airwaves for more than 30 years.

Tom Barnard has spent the past 36 years at KQRS. But in three months, the 2018 Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame inductee is leaving the station.

Ahead of that, he sat down with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Anchor Chris Egert for a rare one-on-one interview, with nothing off limits.

RELATED: Tom Barnard to retire from KQRS after 36 years

“Is there anything you look back on and wish you could have done a little bit different way or regret how it all played out?”

“Only about 90% of it,” Barnard said, laughing.

The radio legend says a conservative format was forced on him years ago.

“I wish in some ways that I would’ve said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that,'” Barnard said. “You know, it’s … I just don’t want to do that because I’m pretty much a centrist. I’m back where I was before now. I never did buy into the whole thing completely.”

He had big guests and a hold-nothing-back format with a cast of characters and a lot of lucky breaks.

“People do need to understand how grateful I am for it,” Barnard said. “I just broke through. I should not have ever broken through it in a big market like, was the number mark No. 14 at the time or whatever, Minneapolis and St. Paul. I’ve worked with some great people over the years … KQRS all the way back to 1500 KSTP.”

While there isn’t any doubting how impressive of a run he’s had on radio, Barnard acknowledged that it “caused a lot of problems throughout the years.”

“There were periods when the show got so big, I had to have an armed guard with me all the time,” he said. “It got that big that literally we would go to dinner with my wife and our two children when they were little, and people would literally walk over and sit at the table. You know, it got really weird, you know? And then, of course, I’d get death threats a lot. I still get them once in a while, but not very often anymore. But I get them all the time. You know, you can’t get that big and survive it.”

He’s made big money and had great career success but described a sad realization he had amid the height of his fame.

“I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this before. Catherine came home, we were living in Maple Grove at the time many, many years ago, and she came home and I was sitting in the living room, crying in a chair,” Barnard explained. “Said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And I said, ‘What am I going to do now? There’s nowhere left to go. I mean, we’re at the top of it. It can only go down from here. And that makes me very sad.’ It’s a true story and that’s what happened. So there you go. It was, you could see it coming because that’s how life works, right? But it did last another 15 years, so that’s good … .”

Barnard has threatened to leave several other times but kept coming back. But on Dec. 23, he’ll hang up the headphones at KQRS for the final time as the station works to attract a younger audience.

“I hope I can do it again,” he said. “I don’t know. We’ll see. We shall see.”