By Jean Ponzi
Community Radio Rises
If you read The Healthy Planet, you’ve surely tuned into Community Radio too. Both fill a vital connective niche in St. Louis: giving local music, perspectives, arts and action a platform in ways that are both cost-efficient and engaging.
I have the privilege of contributing to enviro-awareness through both media, print and broadcasting. And I get to help the voice of both persist and evolve, through this column and my 30 years producing radio interviews – all with wormy names.
From fall 1987 through spring 2025, St. Louis enjoyed Community Radio as a powerful signal on the local FM band and reached a worldwide audience online. Abundant, diverse, and inspiring music, conversations, interviews, reviews and calendars were all presented commercial-free, by regular people, volunteers who know and love our stuff.
This specific entity, like all human works, is now history. But its values, talent, organizational capacity and drive to be of service persist!
Soon, likely within this calendar year, a new Community Radio voice will rise from ashes and resume such service for our St. Louis region and the world online.
The concept of Community Radio – independent from corporate control, democratically person-powered and listener supported – sprouted from visionary roots. Here is some of this origin story.
Community Radio arose in the 1960s, when broadcast access to mass audience was fixed in the grasp of a very few guys. On another scale of control, that was much like the billionaire tech-bro twits of today.
Rebel geeks named Jeremy Lansman and Lorenzo Milam defied this setup. They got an FM license here when Frequency Modulation tech was a cheap, upstart challenge to hugely popular and deeply commercial AM.
On the low-number end of the FM dial, the FCC reserved a limited batch of frequencies for non-commercial, “educational” stations. Lore says Lansman and Milam wrote DNA (Does Not Apply) on many lines of the FCC application form then snagged the call letters KDNA.
They transplanted maverick experience at KPFA, flagship of the progressive (some said radical) Pacifica Network in Berkeley, to St. Louis. The Free-Form Radio digs of KDNA (1969-72) welcomed people off the street to get On-Air, upstairs from the Crystal Palace nightclub in legendary Gaslight Square. Programs came from poets, musicians, community activists, a future symphony maestro, and all manner of creative and vagabond types. Ordinary people had a radio voice!
Briefly. When FM began to be profitable, Milam and Lansman sold KDNA.
But this sad local cutoff nourished Community Radio overall. They gave KDNA’s transmitter to a group in Columbia, MO and helped them launch KOPN (thriving today!), and used the million-buck-plus sale proceeds to jump-start 22 more Community Radio stations across the US.
Three from the “staff” of KDNA, Tom and Bill Thompson and Terry Clifford, founded the National Federation of Community Broadcasters in 1975 to give the peoples’ voice stations a policy-shaping stake in the startup Corporation for Public Broadcasting, alongside early National Public Radio.
So much has transpired, here and around our world, since these fundamental days. This is just Act One of a saga.
Creativity, generosity, manipulation, conflict, greed, determination and loss are all forces weaving through our St. Louis Community Radio story. At a broader scale, radio itself perseveres while online communications boom in multiple forms.
I’m proud to report that local resilient person-power is readying to broadcast again. We who love Community Radio are standing up an online station. Internet tech supports this, DIY with few obstacles, on modest means. Reviving an FM-band presence is our stretch goal.
Work’s in progress. Confidence is high. Connect with this phoenix at www.RadioStLouis.org.
Grateful to say again, in advance, a favorite phrase for decades: THANKS for listening!
Jean Ponzi’s volunteer service on our late, great Community Radio station gave her the opportunity to become a strong local voice for Earth, led to this Healthy Planet column, and immeasurably informed her professional work for Missouri Botanical Garden. Alongside fellow longtime volunteers, she’s tuning up to contribute again, in new forms.