Popular Topeka radio talk show host Jim Cates will be back on the air in June after parting ways with the station he had called home for the past seven years.

Local listeners protested his treatment by KMAJ-AM, and advertisers pulled their spots in protest.

However, the Topeka Capital-Journal announced last week that Cates had agreed to do a live, two-hour broadcast on a new Capital Journal Internet radio venture. Beginning June 16, Cates will be broadcast from 8 to 10 a.m. weekdays, but the content of the show will be accessible 24 hours a day at cjonline.com.

Cates, who served from 1989 to 1992 in the Kansas House of Representatives, described his sojourn from popular radio show host, to premature retiree and finally to Internet broadcaster during an interview with Kansas Liberty last week.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” the longtime radio talker said.

Cates said he enjoyed a very positive relationship with station management for most of his tenure at KMAJ.

“And we were a very successful show,” he said. “We were the station’s biggest revenue producer and ratings were excellent. In fact, we regularly got higher ratings than either (Sean) Hannity or (Bill) O’Reilly, and there were a few times we even did better than Rush Limbaugh.”

Then, said Cates, “along came manager number four in seven years.”

Cates said he sensed the station’s new manager, Spike Santee, was uncomfortable with either Cates or his show. And indeed, it wasn’t long before the new manager began placing restrictions on the topics that Cates could address and on what callers could say.

Feeling stifled, and believing the restrictions were diminishing the quality of the show, Cates announced May 12 that he planned to retire at the end of the year. “I have a pension from 25 years in the credit union industry, and I knew I would be eligible for Social Security toward the end of the year anyway. I figured I would hang around for seven months and then call it a day.”

Two days later, Cates said, he was called into the manager’s office.

“That’s when our relationship was terminated,” he said.

His abrupt departure caused an outcry among listeners, who staged a rally in front of the station that drew about 70 Cates supporters.

Cates said the rally, and supportive calls, letters, blog entries and news stories were gratifying.

“It was quite a reaction,” Cates said. “We have a really loyal listening audience and we hope they’ll be coming with us to cjonline.com.”

Though Cates is an unabashed and unapologetic conservative (“I was probably too conservative for some when I served in the House,” he said), the show was not a typical conservative talk show program.

“My listeners knew they were generally going to hear a right-of-center opinion from me, but they also knew that if someone wanted to come on and offer another opinion, we’d give them a fair hearing. We weren’t a confrontational show, we didn’t try to embarrass or bash our guests or callers, and I know we had a lot of Democrats in our audience.”

As far as content, Cates said “about 50 percent of the time we talked about local issues; about 25 percent of the time we talked about state issues; and the rest we talked about national issues. And we weren’t all politics all the time. Probably about one-third of the time we got completely off the topic of politics.”

Now, rather than contemplating retirement, Cates said he looks forward to the opportunity that his relationship with the Capital Journal could provide.

Cates said the new platform will contain elements of the old show familiar to fans, along with new features the Internet makes possible.

“We’ll still be taking callers and doing the radio show that our listeners want, but I might be doing some video webcasts and there’s even been some talk of some cable television opportunities,” he said.

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