WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
The history of Bloomington’s community radio station, a continuing series.
In September 2021, WFHB hired its first development director, Brooke Turpin. She’d spent a few years doing a similar job at KPFA in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her career path led her from the grandmama of all U.S. community radio stations to Bloomington’s first and only such station
Quaker pacifist Lewis Hill founded KPFA, the nation’s first listener-supported community radio station, in 1949. Hill also started the Pacifica Radio Network, a handful of community radio stations around the country. Hill’s idea, expanded upon and refined by many in the ensuing years, was to bring volunteer-hosted noncommercial stations and alternative programming to underserved listeners. Community radio would serve audiences that often had been ignored or misrepresented by corporate media.
Prior to KPFA, noncommercial radio in the US was limited to educational programming. KPFA was different; it would feature many new genres of music other than Top 40 hits as well as public affairs programs that the big commercial broadcasters shied away from. The station would present programming appealing to anti-war and civil rights activists, the LGBTQI community, ethnic minorities, and the disaffected and marginalized among Americans.
Over the years, Hill’s KPFA would offer Allen Ginsberg reading his controversial poem, “Howl,” and the first gay rights, anti-consumerist, and guerrilla communication radio programs. Virtually every community radio station since its inception has followed Hill’s basic model to reach listeners hungry for alternatives to mass media. Now there are hundreds of community radio stations in the United States.
When Mark Hood and Jeffrey Morris began to think about starting a radio station in Bloomington in 1975, they’d find a proven template for it.
NEXT WEEK: HOOD AND MORRIS DISCOVER SEX AND BROADCASTING
Come back for more tales from the WFHB genesis story in this space. We’ll be posting each week as WFHB celebrates its 31st year as Bloomington’s home of community radio.