WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
The history of Bloomington’s community radio station, a continuing series.
The motley crew hoping to start a community radio station in Bloomington almost perfectly represented the mid-1970s subculture. The original idea people, Mark Hood and Jeffrey Morris, along with eager WQAX veterans Jim Manion, Richard Fish, Robyn Carey, and Nick Brubaker, could, many of them, be described as late-age-hippies. Manion, for one, was itching to embark on the ultimate freak road trip at the beginning of the summer of 1976. He’d carve a path through 8000 miles of the American West
Perfect. Manion would be able to swing over to Telluride, Colorado for the second annual National Alternative Radio Conference sponsored by the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) in June, 1976. He asked Hood and Carey to join him there. Hood and Carey motored out to the Rockies in Hood’s fire engine red Rambler American that’d cost him $300. “We had camping gear,” Hood remembers, “it was all Carey’s because I didn’t own anything except my car. We drove non-stop, we didn’t stay in any hotels. We drove over the mountains, which was a challenge for the Rambler. We get there and, sure enough, Jim shows up.”
The Telluride conference opened up the community radio world to the three. They made contacts with people who operated KPFA in the San Francisco Bay Area; WORT in Madison, Wisconsin; WAIF in Champaign, Illinois; and many, many others. “When we got the idea to do this station, we didn’t know about anybody else doing community radio,” Manion says. Hood adds: “We went from our own little fantasy island of, ‘Hey, we’re gonna make a radio station all by ourselves!’ to being in this community of stations dedicated to underserved populations. They weren’t in it to play Top 40. Nobody mentioned making any money.”
WFHB remains an integral part of that community to this day.
The connections the three made in Telluride would be invaluable as the Community Radio Project struggled to make its station a reality
NEXT WEEK: TV GETS IN THE WAY
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.