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KDHX St. Louis in turmoil

S

Steel Nerves

Community radio station KDHX, which is staffed almost entirely by volunteers, is going through a cascade of resignations and dismissals following the departure of long-time air personality Tom "Papa" Ray. So far 13 on air hosts have been dismissed by the stations, a number of others have either resigned or are staying off the air in protest. With the station beginning its fall fundraising drive, its website went down temporarily this week.

www.stltoday.com

Two more KDHX DJs quit; volunteer association votes in new directors

Turbulence continues at the community radio station after 10 DJs were fired Friday.
www.stltoday.com www.stltoday.com
 
b-turner said:
What a mess. This happens with all volunteer stations. I've seen hostile board takeovers and kicking out the founders that actually were covering part of the bills. Maybe they can come back from the ashes. Maybe the ones 'let go' can grab a position at Pacifica!
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My hometown (Columbia, Mo.) has one of those stations, KOPN. It's been around for more than 50 years, but has had its ups and downs. Notably, sometimes in the 1980s, the local anarchist collective (yes, Columbia had one) managed to get organized and took over the station for a while.

Of course, Lorenzo Milam wrote a whole book on the subject, Sex and Broadcasting (which has very little to do with sex, by the way). Appropriately enough, he had a hand in KDHX's predecessor, KDNA.

These stations were modeled on Berkeley's KPFA, which goes through its own turmoil periodically. I don't know who or what keeps KPFA afloat, but they manage to do it.
 
Mark Roberts said:
My hometown (Columbia, Mo.) has one of those stations, KOPN. It's been around for more than 50 years, but has had its ups and downs. Notably, sometimes in the 1980s, the local anarchist collective (yes, Columbia had one) managed to get organized and took over the station for a while.

Of course, Lorenzo Milam wrote a whole book on the subject, Sex and Broadcasting (which has very little to do with sex, by the way). Appropriately enough, he had a hand in KDHX's predecessor, KDNA.

These stations were modeled on Berkeley's KPFA, which goes through its own turmoil periodically. I don't know who or what keeps KPFA afloat, but they manage to do it.
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Precisely why the notion of a dangerous, highly organized Antifa is a canard. To compare organizing the far left to herding cats underestimates the difficulty of herding cats. When the far right puts its mind to organizing, the result is an efficient, disciplined Panzer division. When the far left tries to do the same, you get clowns driving tiny cars in circles.
 
b-turner said:
What a mess. This happens with all volunteer stations. I've seen hostile board takeovers and kicking out the founders that actually were covering part of the bills. Maybe they can come back from the ashes.
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Very true. KDHX isn't the first time something like this has happened at a community radio station. Vintage Vinyl on the Delmar Loop was decidedly pessimistic about the situation last week. Its marquee read, "Goodbye, KDHX."

Mark Roberts said:
My hometown (Columbia, Mo.) has one of those stations, KOPN. It's been around for more than 50 years, but has had its ups and downs. Notably, sometimes in the 1980s, the local anarchist collective (yes, Columbia had one) managed to get organized and took over the station for a while.
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KOPN has often referred to itself as a sister station to KDHX, even though they're not really co-owned, because of all the help it received from KDNA 102.5 to get started. It has had its share of issues lately, too. It hasn't been able to hold onto an executive director since David Owens left a few years ago. The last two non-interim directors didn't last one year. I'm not sure either even made it six months. The one who replaced Owens changed the schedule around quite-a-bit and pushed a few long time volunteers out as well. KOPN, though, would seem seem to have had at least a few wins, including moving to a new studio near the mall that's fully accessible, unlike the one downtown, and moving its library to fully digital sources. The executive director position has a low salary relative to other area nonprofits, and about the only benefits it offers are sick and vacation days. That's a lot of stress, and finding the exact right person for that job doesn't sound like it will be easy.
 
b-turner said:
Funny you mention Lorenzo Milam. I had a volunteer weekly show of a station Milam started called KCHU in Dallas back in the mid 1970s.
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I was living in DFW at that time and well remember KCHU. Seems they had infighting and fundraising problems from day one, and that was almost 50 years ago. A lot of unique programming on KCHU, including perhaps the first LGBTQ+ show in that market (called “Just Before Dawn” IIRC) along with Iranian anti-Shah activists and other politically oriented groups. One guy hosted a theatre organ music show. KCHU only lasted a couple of years before going dark, but from its ashes would rise KNON, which continues to this day.

Bill, what show did you host/produce on KCHU?
 
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Kent said:
Very true. KDHX isn't the first time something like this has happened at a community radio station. Vintage Vinyl on the Delmar Loop was decidedly pessimistic about the situation last week. Its marquee read, "Goodbye, KDHX."
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Well, that's the Delmar Loop. It's kind of crunchy over there, especially on the University City side.

Kent said:
KOPN has often referred to itself as a sister station to KDHX, even though they're not really co-owned, because of all the help it received from KDNA 102.5 to get started.
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Including the transmitter and antenna. KOPN also had to move from 89.7 to 89.5 to get that power increase to 40 kw (it's different now). Then they had to fight the physics department at the University of Missouri over interference problems.

Kent said:
It has had its share of issues lately, too. It hasn't been able to hold onto an executive director since David Owens left a few years ago. The last two non-interim directors didn't last one year. I'm not sure either even made it six months. The one who replaced Owens changed the schedule around quite-a-bit and pushed a few long time volunteers out as well. KOPN, though, would seem seem to have had at least a few wins, including moving to a new studio near the mall that's fully accessible, unlike the one downtown, and moving its library to fully digital sources. The executive director position has a low salary relative to other area nonprofits, and about the only benefits it offers are sick and vacation days. That's a lot of stress, and finding the exact right person for that job doesn't sound like it will be easy.
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As I say, they've had their ups and downs. I kind of wish they could have stayed downtown, but I'm sure that has gotten costlier, at least by mid-Missouri standards. At least at one time, Columbia had an earthly-folky cohort living in the neighborhoods adjacent to downtown, often grad students who lingered after completing their degrees, that KOPN appealed to, but I'm not sure how much of that still exists.
 
Mark Roberts said:
Including the transmitter and antenna. KOPN also had to move from 89.7 to 89.5 to get that power increase to 40 kw (it's different now).
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I seem to remember hearing KOPN started as a 10 watt station with the transmitter downtown. The current transmitter is the shortest FM tower I've ever seen. It's pretty much the part of the tower that holds the FM bays planted into the ground.

Mark Roberts said:
As I say, they've had their ups and downs. I kind of wish they could have stayed downtown, but I'm sure that has gotten costlier, at least by mid-Missouri standards. At least at one time, Columbia had an earthly-folky cohort living in the neighborhoods adjacent to downtown, often grad students who lingered after completing their degrees, that KOPN appealed to, but I'm not sure how much of that still exists.
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The Chinese restaurant across the hall from KOPN, which seemed to have been there forever, became a ghost kitchen during COVID and has never returned. KOPN also didn't like that its studios weren't accessible since you had to climb a pretty steep flight of stairs to get there. Columbia has at least one communal group affiliated with the East Wind Community in Southwest Missouri. It doesn't quite occupy a city block, and, when property on the same street goes up for sale, it generally tries to get people friendly to its cause to buy it and move in. Don't know what the community's members listen to, but KOPN is definitely targeting people who fit that profile.
 
Kent said:
I seem to remember hearing KOPN started as a 10 watt station with the transmitter downtown.
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Yes, in 1972, at 89.7.

I spent the summer of 1973 at the family farm north of Columbia. I got a hold of a few KOPN program guides and followed the instructions for making a folded dipole. I still couldn't get much of it; there was a ridge south of us by Prathersville that blocked reception.

The upgrade was applied for in 1973, with transmitter moving to the Paquin Tower, then the tallest building in Columbia, and essentially a housing project. That was on the northeast edge of the University of Missouri campus, which set up the years-long conflict with the University's physics department, with complaints that RF from the station was adversely affecting the calibration of equipment needed for experiments. Things looked dicey for KOPN in 1981 after the July storm of that year, which I think we would now call a "derecho", totally mangled the old KDNA antenna. That was horizontally polarized; KOPN fairly quickly procured a circularly polarized antenna and had to cut power to 20 kw for the time being. There were a few weeks when it was off the air and the University pointed to the suddenly improved quality of physics experiments in those weeks as a reason to deny the license. Finally, the University offered some land well away from campus for a tower and that's where KOPN is today. KOPN got a small height increase (from 60m to 72m) and a power increase (from 20 to 36.4 kw) out of it.

Kent said:
The Chinese restaurant across the hall from KOPN, which seemed to have been there forever, became a ghost kitchen during COVID and has never returned. KOPN also didn't like that its studios weren't accessible since you had to climb a pretty steep flight of stairs to get there.
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That was a lonnnnnnng staircase. I would occasionally appear there on public-affairs shows. And, for a while, KFRU funded the local loop from the city council chambers to KOPN so that KOPN could broadcasting council meetings live. The cost at the time was only $10 a month, and KFRU had several other local loops on a sustaining basis, so why not? We actually cooperated quite a bit over the years, because we saw that KOPN had the time to do the types of public-service programs that would be hard for a commercial station to replicate.
 
I was on KCHU Midnight to 3am Wednesday night/Thursday morning following the Big Band Show by Trish 'la dish' and Brandy Pruitt that played mostly UK Rock album tracks. She was a very kind person and had this incredible voice and was always getting calls from guys looking to meet her. My show always included some reggae, new rock and jazz releases record reps at the record store gave me (I ordered product so I got tons of albums free) and anything else I found interesting in the vast KCHU library including some bizarre stuff like Charles Dodge's Earth's Magnetic Field courtesy of Steve Stokes that did the weekend overnight shows. I had a live band one week and they said the F word. Then the head guy comes in the studio while I'm on the microphone and says did so and so say F word go on the air. With two F words in mere seconds, I was told my volunteer shift was done about 6 months in. After me was a couple of Hispanic guys that played Mexican beer drinking music. Usually they were pretty drunk and about every 4th week they'd never show, so I'd stay until 6 when the PD came in to play classical music. One show I sat in on moved the subject to the price of pot around the country. You just never knew with KCHU what you'd get.
 
b-turner said:
My show always included some reggae, new rock and jazz releases record reps at the record store gave me (I ordered product so I got tons of albums free) and anything else I found interesting in the vast KCHU library including some bizarre stuff like Charles Dodge's Earth's Magnetic Field
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And for your listening pleasure, here is the Charles Dodge piece, really gets going around 2:00 in:

About what you’d expect from a Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center compilation. My Dad had their noted 1961 concert album, which is one of the most unusual recordings I’ve ever heard.
 
Kent said:
I seem to remember hearing KOPN started as a 10 watt station with the transmitter downtown. The current transmitter is the shortest FM tower I've ever seen. It's pretty much the part of the tower that holds the FM bays planted into the ground.
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@Kent : The State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia is giving a talk for KOPN's 50th anniversary on October 10: KOPN 89.5 FM: 50 Years of Independent Community Media in Mid Missouri | The State Historical Society of Missouri
 
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