Ames community radio beats the odds

Three years ago a group of upstanding citizens of Ames – well educated, highly functioning grown-ups – huddled under a tent made of old blankets inside an old dry-cleaning shop just off Main Street.

The quilt hut, as they called it, looked like the sort of makeshift fort their kids could have made from couch cushions back home in the living room. But its sound-muffling properties did the trick: It was the first studio of the fledgling community radio station KHOI-FM 89.1.

"It was like something out of 'Lawrence of Arabia,' " station host Carole Horowitz said. "There were just two microphones, two chairs and a table."

Now, as the station celebrates its third anniversary, it does so from the relative luxury of a real studio suite with fancy gear and foam-padded walls. Its the buzzing, bustling hub for a totally homegrown operation – the sort of station that has flourished in other states but is still rare here in Iowa.

"In a lot of places" – especially Colorado and California – "the older community radio stations are a substantial cultural force," said station manager Ursula Ruedenberg, one of two paid staffers among an army of KHOI volunteers. "The stations set the tone and really lead the conversation for the whole town."

KHOI isn't there yet. It's still "a diamond in the rough," Ruedenberg said, but it has already outlasted the odds.

In a keynote talk during last weekend's anniversary shindig, University of Iowa cyberlaw expert and former Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, pointed out that 8 out of 10 entrepreneurial projects fail within 18 months.

"That's why even mere survival for three years is worth a birthday party," he said. "It's truly a remarkable accomplishment."

The station's story, in fact, started much earlier than three years ago.

Following a freeze on any new FM station licenses for several years, the FCC announced that it would accept new applications for a single week in October 2007. The decision prompted a frenzy for the remaining frequencies, especially on the lower end of the dial reserved for religious groups and nonprofits.

Ruedenberg, who grew up in Ames, works for the Pacifica Radio Network and was living in New York at the time of the FFC's big news. She studied a map of open channels – about 3,000 nationwide – and spotted a few up for grabs in her hometown.

She wondered: Would it be possible to start a community radio station in Ames? The short answer was "yes." Ruedenberg recruited a few key players to submit a successful application for the license to 89.1 FM.

But the long answer was more complicated. The FCC required the new station to start broadcasting within three years, a deadline that arrived more quickly than anyone had predicted.

The team had to find a space (in the old Pantorium dry cleaners) and connect it to a tower (through a circuitous route west and then north to Story City) and then recruit a whole bunch of on- and off-air volunteers.

"We argued for a year and half (about the studio floorplans), but it worked out," Ruedenberg said. "Everybody kept the mission in sight."

When the signal was finally up and running – in the nick of time – the sounds of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" rocked out on the airwaves, an ironic nod to the out-of-state religious station that had been using the frequency, through a translator, for the past few years.

"We couldn't resist," Ruedenberg said.

But after that first giddy moment, she and studio engineer Rick Morrison looked at each other and thought, Well, now what? Now that they had all this airtime, how should they fill it?

"It was all very abstract," she recalled. "It hadn't registered yet. It was just unheard of in this community that people could get together and have a real radio station."

At the time, Ames' popular WOI radio station was being swallowed up by the statewide Iowa Public Radio network, so folks around town were looking for a new place to hear local voices and local news. WOI's longtime jazz and classical music host Hollis Monroe signed on to the new station, as did dozens of others with far less experience.

One of the engineers is a senior in high school. His mom stopped by the studio earlier this week to make sure he made it to class.

The program schedule, like that old quilt hut, is a patchwork of creative ideas. It's about half talk and half music, with a smattering of quirky surprises. "Blue Collar Philosopher" Lance Sumpter has two hours every Friday night. ""Planetrary Radio" explores questions about outer space during a half-hour slot on Saturday morning.

Morrison, the studio engineer, spins electronic and new-wave music in the hours after midnight.

"We get feedback from insomniacs that he's very comforting," Ruedenberg said.

There are still a few slots to fill, but nothing is set in stone. It's not even set in permanent marker, judging from the master schedule on the whiteboard by the coffee machine.

"That's the most important thing: It belongs to us. It's our community radio station," said Horowitz, who co-hosts a program about Broadway musicals on Tuesday mornings. "It's easy. Just come in the door, bring in an idea, and your'e going to go on the air."

The station's board of directors is still figuring out a long-term funding plan, especially now that most federal grants have dried up. This year's projected budget is $140,000, funded almost entirely by private donors and a few local businesses.

But the board hopes that fundraising will be easier now that the station is up and running.

"We're a service to the community as much as a public park or a public libraru," Monroe said.

He was shopping at the Fareway meat counter the other day when one of the butchers recognized his voice and said he'd stumbled accidentally onto 89.1 and was happy to hear Monroe spinning music again.

"Thank you so much," Monroe replied. "Is there something you'd like to hear?"

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Community radio in Iowa

Compared to other states, Iowa has relatively few community radio stations, which are nonprofit organizations run mostly by local volunteers (as opposed to the pros at Iowa Public Radio). But the FM dial has a few here and there, including: KPVL 89.1 in Decorah, KSOI 91.9 in Murray, KFMG 99.1 in Des Moines, KRUU 100.1 in Fairfield and KICI 105.3 in Iowa City.