Rusty Benson
AFA Journal associate editor
July 2010 – Crane Durham could have stumped the panel on What’s My Line?, the popular game show during the early days of television. The show featured a celebrity panel that questioned contestants to determine their occupation or identity.
His quiet demeanor, deferential manner and reserved personality might have pegged Durham as a doctor, an accountant or maybe a college professor – but never an impassioned conservative talk show host.
“I’m a lot quieter outside the studio,” admits the host of Nothing But Truth on the AFR Talk radio network. “But there’s no difference in my beliefs on or off air.”
Durham describes his daily metamorphosis from mild-mannered reporter to super advocate in athletic terms. “I go into the studio, it’s like walking onto the tennis court or into the boxing ring,” he said. “I just get pumped up. It’s a celebration of all my preparation, because I love talking to people, especially those who disagree with me.”
The 38-year-old St. Louis native came to American Family Radio in 2008. He brought with him a bumpy ride of experiences in the radio business, the trademarked Nothing But Truth name and a desire to do talk radio in a way that honors Christ.
But by his own confession, his early broadcasting ambitions were a mixed bag of high and low aspirations that began in an unlikely place: Russia.
In 1993 Durham was a tennis player for the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). “A scrub on a really good team,” is how he describes his college athletic career.
The spring before his junior year, Durham traveled to the former Soviet Union to do part of his Russian studies at Moscow State University. While living in Moscow with a Russian family, he also taught English and American history and culture to Russian youngsters.
“I saw something in that culture that disturbed me,” he said. “People there had a great distrust of their government and didn’t understand the concept of freedom, particularly that freedom comes from the Almighty.”
Durham considered himself a Christian at the time, but, in his own words, “I really didn’t get it. I was a nice guy, but there were certainly no major life changes going on.”
He returned to Ole Miss with a new appreciation for America’s freedoms and a deep desire to challenge those who wanted to move the country leftward. The result was Breaking the Silence, an hour-long show on the campus radio station.
He was hooked.
Returning to St. Louis after graduation, Durham found jobs in radio production and coaching tennis, but his first love was on-air broadcasting.
“I couldn’t get away from it. I loved it,” he said. By 1999 he was making a good living coaching college tennis at Washington University and directing a junior tennis program. Meanwhile, he sought out opportunities to keep his hand in the broadcasting game, even doing a stint reading obituaries on a small station outside St. Louis. But that wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy his radio habit.
Durham says the usual way to work into broadcasting is to move through the radio ranks and hopefully end up on air. However, he took a different route.
“By this time, I was in graduate school working on my master’s degree in media communications and teaching tennis to make ends meet,” he said. “I heard the voice of God leading me to begin Nothing but Truth.”
By living very frugally, Durham was able to purchase time on WGNU, a local radio station. Nothing But Truth aired from midnight Saturday to 2 a.m. on Sunday. Over the months he earned a spot as a conservative voice on an urban talk station aimed at the African American community. Durham says that experience taught him how to have a debate without becoming contentious.
“I got lots of callers who disagreed with me, but would faithfully listen because I let them speak,” he said.
Through a number of career twists and turns over the next few years, Durham finally landed the coveted morning slot on KFTK 97.1 FM talk, one of the major talk stations in St. Louis. But while he grabbed for notoriety and money, God had other plans.
Durham says a deep sense of fear and anxiety descended upon his life and climaxed in a series of dark, hellish dreams. He even lost his confidence behind the microphone. Through this spiritual crisis, God began to show Durham that his tepid faith was built on sand.
“I began to see that I had never really surrendered my life to Christ,” he said. But as God changed Durham’s heart, his desires and motives followed, and his on-air confidence returned.
“That person I was, he’s not me anymore,” he said. God had done His work. He was now ready to open the next chapter in Durham’s life.
That happened in 2006 when AFA staffer Don Cobb was driving through Missouri and heard Nothing But Truth. He wrote Durham’s name on a scrap of paper. Two years later, Crane was offered a position on AFA’s new talk radio network.
“It was nothing but God,” Durham says, “nothing but God.” 
