I’ve always loved radio.  When I was a child, my brothers and I would gather around the radio to listen to a station in Portland, Oregon that would replay old shows from the 30’s and 40’s: The Shadow, Amos and Andy, The Inner Sanctum and, our favorite, The Lone Ranger.  We would create our own radio shows using a tape recorder; comedy mostly, but other things as well.

Then, sometime in my mid-teen years I discovered that I had a “voice.”  The kind speaking voice that gets a good chest tone and commands attention.  In other words, an announcer’s voice.  In high school, this led to my working as a radio “stringer” for local radio stations. I would write short news pieces about the goings on at our high school and then phone them in, mostly to the news desk at KSLM in Salem, Oregon.  I got to be pretty good at it; usually I could get a thirty-second news report in one take.  My contact at KSLM, Terry Fuller, decided I had potential in the broadcast industry and encouraged me to get my commercial broadcast license (“Radiotelephone Operator 3rd Class”).  This meant studying an manual and taking a test that turned out to be just a little bit harder than the test for a driver’s learner’s permit.

Following graduation, I was hired for the summer of 1977 as a disc jockey at KSLM doing late-night and weekend shifts.  It was fascinating stuff, even if I didn’t quite resonate to the “middle of the road” format of Montavani and 101 Strings. I was also responsible for piping in the news from Mutual Broadcasting that came in on the wire at exactly the top of the hour, which meant that I had to time my records so that the last one ended with about five seconds to spare before the news came it, and then switch over seamlessly.  I got pretty good at that, too.  At the bottom of the hour, I’d read news items I’d pulled off the teletype chugging away in the other room, tearing off the stories that looked interesting.

And along the way, at this and other small radio stations I gained an appreciation for small-scale, local radio.  As more and more radio stations were bought up by large media conglomerates, radio stations grew less and less interesting, less and less relevant.  More recently I’ve been discovering the ham radio community since getting my license a little over a year ago.

But against all odds and expectations (on my part, at least) Congress has passed the Local Community Radio Act. This law removes previous restrictions on small, low-power community radio stations.  Of course, the major broadcasters fought this bill, but a fierce, determined grass-roots efforts won through.  Ostensibly the rules were to prevent signals from small stations interfering with larger stations, but this was a dubious objection at best.  The bottom line is that the way is now open for thousands of community stations to take to the airwaves.  This is a wonderful opportunity not only to counter the talk-radio idiocy that has grown to corner the disinformation market, but to create radio that is creative, quirky, idiomatic, and local.

Radio is one of those things that gets forgotten in this age of cell phones, iPods, cable TV and any of the other many forms of mass communication.  But the invention of the small, cheap transistor radio way back when fueled a minor information revolution.  A single AM station could connect isolated towns and villages in rural America or across  African deserts or south sea islands.

Frankly, I didn’t think this day would come but I’m very excited by the possibilities.  So what do you think?  Anyone out there want to start a radio station?

Seriously.

For more on Community Radio, visit http://www.prometheusradio.org/