Once unleashed, and buoyed by her indefatigable cheerfulness, her laugh became a raucous thing of wonder.
“It was the kind of laugh where you would stand back and just be amazed someone would have that much in the world to laugh about,” said Art Hooker, one of Holliman’s colleagues at Yellowstone Public Radio in Billings.
It came from a place so deep and genuine, it couldn’t be contained.
“I would hear this mumbling in the studio going on and Leni’s laugh would come right through the double glass and into the control room when she was coaxing the right talent out of a voice-over,” said Michael Marsolek, who worked with Holliman for several years at Montana Public Radio in Missoula.
Her laugh was just one of her many quirks that made Holliman so affable and so well-suited for her work as an arts and humanities producer for public radio.
“She wasn’t a storyteller, she was a teller of stories,” Marsolek said. “Her work was not about her. She viewed it that her job was to get people’s stories out.”
Hooker said he always admired Holliman’s skill at keeping an interview going.
“As an interviewer she had a knack for what to ask and how to keep things interesting,” Hooker said. “She really had a deep knowledge and interest in literature and music and she was able to bring that through in the program and used it to transform that interest in your head, on tape and something somebody else could listen to.
“She was able to keep things moving and keep on topic, and that was always kind of amazing.”
Her other standout trait was an insatiable curiosity about people’s lives. Combined with her liberal arts education, she was the ideal candidate for a career in public radio, said Marvin Granger, Holliman’s first boss in the business and who hired Holliman without any broadcast experience at Yellowstone Public Radio nearly a decade ago.
“She could get people to talk,” said Granger, who first met Holliman while dancing to reggae music in a downtown Billings bar.
Her outgoing personality and her keen intellect charmed Granger, who at the time, was looking to hire an arts and humanities producer.
Holliman, who worked a stint at a fish-processing boat in Alaska, was eager to try her hand in radio.
A close friendship quickly formed between the two very different colleagues - Granger, 28 years Holliman’s senior, with the more scientific, practical mind, and Holliman, who navigated the world more intuitively, asking questions along the way.
Their differences were the basis of their long friendship, Granger said, and - as he shared at Holliman’s memorial service on July 21 - it was probably a rather odd relationship as viewed by the average person.
“It was a friendship between a lesbian and a sexually retired heterosexual,” he quipped, “but there was a trust there that wasn’t based on any other designs.
“We just enjoyed each other’s company.”
As Holliman honed her craft, she branched out in the broadcast world and started her own production company, “At Large with Leni Holliman.”
Her work gave her intimate access to authors, painters, dancers, actors, musicians, politicians and others who enrich Montana’s cultural landscape.
Each year Holliman brought the Festival of the Book and the High Plains Bookfest to the airwaves, and with a team of volunteers, helped bring to life the Journey of the Corps of Discovery with a series called “Day by Day with Lewis and Clark,” Marsolek said.
“She was eager and knew her business,” said Pat Williams.
The former Montana congressman spent 12 months in 2003 working closely with Holliman on a program called “Speaking of That,” which he narrated and she produced.
“Our program was made up of segments of different stories, and Leni’s editing made them seamless,” Williams said. “She was very, very good at her work. Above all she was kind - kind to everybody.”
Even as she stared down ovarian cancer the past year and wrestled with increasing pain, those who knew her best said the disease couldn’t derail Holliman’s passion for her work or her cheerful spirit.
When the cancer took the 42-year-old’s life on July 17, Montana lost an important voice.
“It is a significant loss,” said Lois Bent, current general manager of Yellowstone Public Radio. “Leni was an ideal ambassador for what public radio does best - to hear the qualities of life that make living here so significant and so special - and Leni represented the best of what public radio is able to do.”
Off the many things he will remember and miss when he thinks about Holliman, Marsolek said he will always hold dear one particular memory that became embedded at a Drum Brothers workshop three summers ago.
“I have this vision of Leni in a drum circle with 25 to 30 people gathered around a fire dancing, happy, being joyful, and there’s Leni in the middle of them with her eyes closed, a happy grin on her face, headphones on and a microphone in her hand,” Marsolek explained.
“In my memory, it was just a wonderful sight, to see somebody who loves her work, and loved so much the sound and the voices, especially the voices.”
Missoulian reporter Betsy Cohen had the privilege of being interviewed by Leni Holliman in 2003 and fondly remembers Holliman’s kindness, her patience with a bumbling subject and the laughter that filled the recording studio that day.
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