BANGOR — Toby Leboutillier defies the norms of modern radio.

He plays 100-year-old records made of shellac, which can be badly scratched or chipped. He reads 50- or 60-year-old news stories from Maine newspapers on air. He pronounces every word with painstaking precision – Feb-bru-ary for instance – in a distinctive dialect that sprung from his upbringing in Philadelphia and Maine, and a stint at an English boarding school.

And after 40 years of hosting “Down Memory Lane” on the airwaves of Maine’s public radio network, he basically says what he wants. Like when he read a promo recently advising that Maine Public’s classical music stations can also be heard around the state on little-known HD2 channels, but only by people who own an HD radio.

“Does anybody listen to those HD2 channels?” Leboutillier, 78, said on the show, followed by a soft chuckle. “I think that’s one of the big failures of the digital generation. I mean who is going to spend $50 for a new radio? Enough complaining, we’re off to 1969.”

Fridays from 2 to 5 p.m. Leboutillier takes Maine Public listeners on a unique radio journey that spans the hits and headlines from 1919 to 1969, infused with Leboutillier’s quirky sense of humor and love of music, language and information. A self-described Luddite who never touches a computer or a cellphone, Leboutillier uses the tens of thousands of records he’s amassed over the years, as well as books and newspaper clippings, to produce his weekly live show from Maine Public’s Bangor studio. He has survived numerous changes to the network over the years, including a switch to more news and less music in 2012 that forced his show off the air and onto the internet for about four years.

Leboutillier’s format is simple but exacting. Using reference books, he has created chronological lists going back more than 100 years of every song that entered the pop charts on a particular date.  On his show, he plays all the songs that entered the charts on that week for each decade between 50 and 100 years ago. He plays the songs that debuted on that week in 1919, 1929, 1939 and so on. And for many of those years, he reads national and Maine news stories that he got from copying front pages of the Bangor Daily News on file at the University of Maine library.

“Everybody thinks radio is easy to do, but it’s not. What makes Toby stand out, after 40 years, is how you can hear the joy in what he does, whether he’s chuckling about some wacky song or reading a weird story from 1959,” said Mark Vogelzang, the CEO of Maine Public. “He’s real and people feel connected to him.”

Leboutillier’s record collections takes up much of the basement of his modest ranch house in Brewer. He said most have been given to him over the years, either by families getting rid of a collector’s treasures or a radio station shedding inventory, since most radio stations play digital recordings now.

During a recent edition of his Friday show, he rolled his chair over to a turntable playing a scratched and chipped record of 1929’s “Pagan Love Song” with the lilting music of Bob Haring and His Orchestra punctuated by loud pops. Instead of submitting his listeners to much more of the old record’s imperfections, he gingerly slid the needle over the record so the song would come to a merciful end.

“Well, you heard most of it,” said Leboutillier, on the June 14 edition.  “I think somebody dropped a heavy tone arm on that one a few times. ”

A PERSONAL TOUCH

Leboutillier’s “Down Memory Lane” is heard on the seven radio stations of Maine Public Classical, which is Maine Public’s three-year-old classical music radio network and doesn’t yet reach the entire state. Maine Public’s primary radio network, Maine Public Radio, has seven stations that broadcast news and information to the entire state and beyond.

Maine Public Radio first switched to mostly news and information in 2012 and announced then that Leboutillier’s show was going off the air. But Leboutillier did not want to stop doing it, so he volunteered to do the show for the internet, though he barely knew what that meant. When he’s sometimes required on his show to direct listeners to a link or a Facebook page, he’s been known to add, “You can probably find it, but I can’t.” When Maine Public launched its classical music network in 2016, it announced it would put Leboutillier back on the air. Leboutillier had been a full-time employee at Maine Public, doing varied work, beginning in the 1970s, but today his only paid position there is as the host of “Down Memory Lane.”

Maine Public estimates that Leboutillier has about 10,000 listeners a week. And when he was doing his live show for the Maine Public website, many if not most of those listeners found him. Many posted helpful advice to one another on how to find him online, with messages on a Facebook page called Down Memory Lane with Toby LeBoutillier Fan Club.

“When he was booted off the air, he was a little cranky. I’ve always listened because he’s just such a funny and quirky guy, I love all the nuances he tells you about each song,” said Antonina Pelletier of Yarmouth, 49, who has listened to Leboutillier for more than 30 years. “The show has a very personal feeling.”

When public radio networks began 50 or more years ago, there were more personal shows like Leboutillier’s, said Scott Fybush, editor of Northeast Radio Watch and a longtime radio station employee. But as public radio has become “big business” and so many small local commercial stations have become programmed by national companies, unique, local voices like Leboutillier’s are rare.

“It’s exceedingly rare for someone like him to be on for 40 years,” said Fybush. “There’s a huge amount of promotional value for a station in having someone who sounds like they are where the listeners are, who don’t sound generic.”

PLAYING RADIO THEN, AND NOW

Leboutillier was born in Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia. His father owned a bookstore and his mother had taught at girls’ schools. A branch of his family at one time had owned the Boston Transcript newspaper. His parents played show tunes together on side-by-side baby grand pianos in the living room. When Leboutillier was about 6, his family moved to a year-round home in Brooksville, on the Blue Hill peninsula, and the pianos came with them. His father had spent summers in Castine and had a yearning to live in Maine.

After a couple years in Maine, the family moved to England to be near Leboutillier’s mother’s family, and he attended a boarding school there. When he came back to Brooksville for fifth grade, classmates noticed an English accent. Throughout his childhood, he devoured music, including show tunes, classical and, later, the ’50s pop and rock of his teen and college years. He listened to stations from Boston that could carry to Maine over the ocean, at night, and was fascinated by the music and DJs he heard. He “played radio” by composing commercials on his tape recorder and making his own “cut in” recordings, which were popular at the time. He’d pretend to be a reporter asking someone a question and the answer would be snippet of a pop song of the day.

But when it came time to pick a profession, he decided to study physics at the University of Maine because “we were behind the Russians in the space race and America needed scientists,” he said. Since there was a peace-time draft then, he enlisted in the ROTC at UMaine and became an officer upon graduation. He spent about two years helping to manage an Army supply warehouse in Germany, where he listened to a lot of German radio stations and made tapes of the music he heard.

When Leboutillier got back to the U.S. in 1965, he couldn’t see himself pursuing a graduate degree or career in physics. He really wanted to get into radio. He took a job doing promotions for a TV station in Bangor and then got hired at a Waterville radio station, where he ran the electronic equipment and read news, among other duties.

“The first time I went on the air I don’t think I sounded very good, probably something like ‘this is brought to you by W-w-w-waterville S-s-s-savings Bank’,” said Leboutillier, with an exaggerated stutter. “People must have thought, ‘Who the hell is this?’ ”

A few years later, Leboutillier got a chance to work at Maine’s fairly new public – then called “educational” – TV network based at the University of Maine. He quickly moved to the radio side, working in the studio running equipment while classical music played, and hosting his own shows. At one point, he hosted three shows at the same time.  The one that survives, “Down Memory Lane,” began in 1979, after he discovered books detailing pop music chart histories.  He decided he could use the lists as the basis for a pop music history show.

He did the show while working at Maine Public in various capacities, but by the late 1990s, he was only doing the show. As Maine Public faced financial challenges in the early 2000s, he volunteered to do the show without pay, which he did for about a decade until network officials decided they needed to start paying him again. But Leboutillier says he’d keep doing the show for free. He says he’s invested his money wisely over the years, including some inherited family money, and doesn’t have to work.

“I don’t need to do the show for money. I could take it or leave it, really,” said Leboutillier. “But I don’t want to leave it.”

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