WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
The history of Bloomington’s community radio station, a continuing series.
In the summer of 1975, Mark Hood and Jeffrey Morris had a few hundred dollars in a bank account. Knowing nothing about the process at first, at least they’d learned they needed money to start their community radio station.
Morris went to the Monroe County Public Library and looked up the phone number of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC. Back home in the garage apartment he shared with Hood, Morris dialed the number and asked what he’d need to do to get a station off the ground. He was connected to two engineers there who took the time to explain things to him. The engineers also mailed him information sheets and forms. Thus armed, Morris went back to the library and looked for available frequencies in the broadcast yearbook the FCC published annually. It was a long, drawn-out exercise, searching for information and keeping up to date without the benefit of the internet. It was a different age indeed.
After the benefit show for community radio at the Bluebird in July, a lot of folks contacted Hood and Morris saying they wanted in on the new station idea. Many of them came from WQAX, a tiny local cable radio station that played a wide range of music genres. Among them was a DJ named Jim Manion. The excitement was growing.
Hood and Morris came across a book written by Lorenzo Milam, a fellow crippled by polio. He’d been a volunteer at KPFA in the San Francisco Bay Area and then cobbled together enough money in 1959 to buy a little FM transmitter. He began the arduous process of getting FCC permits; it would take him three years to launch KRAB in Seattle. Milan would go on to start nine other stations. Milam’s book was called Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community. Milam’s mother had advised him that putting the word sex in the title would boost sales. “There were templates for us,” Hood concluded after reading the book. Hood and Morris filed papers with the State of Indiana to incorporate the nonprofit Community Radio Project in September of ’75.
Milam’s book also tipped Hood and Morris off to the existence of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. The NFCB, they’d learn, would be holding a national conference in June 1976 in Telluride, Colorado. Hood, Manion, and another young radio enthusiast, Robyn Carey, began making plans to attend it. The conference would tie the Community Radio Project into a family of dozens of community radio stations around the country.
NEXT WEEK: TELLURIDE
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.