Connie died Monday after a car accident. She was 84.
The final broadcasts of LSU School of Music Presents that she recorded will be heard Sunday evenings at 7 p.m. throughout the month of October on WRKF.
To her mother, Constance Navratil’s English accent sounded Southern.
Connie was raised in England, but she spent most of her life in Louisiana.
An accomplished soprano and musical scholar, she earned her master’s in music at LSU.
And for more than 34 years, since the day the signal was switched on in 1980, she hosted classical music programming on WRKF.
“Well, if I said she was the voice of WRKF, Lew Carter’s going to get his feelings hurt. But Connie was definitely a recognizable voice of public radio and often what someone would expect of public radio – someone with a British accent and classical music," said Gwen Fairchild, who worked with Connie at WRKF in its early days.
Along with Lew Carter, Connie was one of the founders of WRKF.
She was the station’s first program director, and as founding general manager Eric Deweese remembers it, Connie spent long hours as a volunteer putting together the initial schedule and hiring an announcing staff.
Deweese had met Connie in 1976 at some meeting that he had gone to to drum up support to start the public radio station in Baton Rouge.
“I really couldn’t tell you which one,” Deweese said.
Maybe that’s because Connie was involved, at one time or another, with so many arts organizations in Baton Rouge: as a singer, she performed with the Baton Rouge Symphony, the Baton Rouge Opera, the Baton Rouge Little Theater… She directed musicals at Baton Rouge High, and served on boards of numerous music organizations. In 2001, she was presented with the East Baton Rouge Mayor-President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
“Anybody who had any contact at all with an artistic event in Baton Rouge knew of Constance,” he said.
WRKF was for Connie, Deweese says, an opportunity to preserve a space for classical music on the radio at a time when stations were learning rock music was more commercially viable.
Malcolm Robinson, now with the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, was once a colleague of Connie’s at WRKF too. And for 25 years, she was his next door neighbor.
“She was a very accomplished soprano. And we always considered ourselves very blessed when she would let loose. The Navratils have come for holiday meals before and after a bit she would just feel like tuning up and it was just gorgeous,” Robinson remembered.
Robinson says it was through Connie that he came to appreciate the soprano voice.
“She introduced me to a number of different performers, and I’m grateful to this day.”
“I remember she commented one time how nice it was to come home in the afternoon – she said, what a pleasure it was to hear Mozart coming out of your house.”