MY 3 YEARS
in Public Radio in Mendocino County



In 1999 I moved to the country, partly as a Y2Ker who foresaw unpleasant futures in city life. While the SF Bay Area is a very liveable urban environment, my sensitivity to pollution and traffic was high. Riding a bicycle in Berkeley began to feel suicidal with all the diesel fumes emitted by AC Transit buses. I moved north to Anderson Valley partly because I'd subscribed for a while to a crazy local paper: The Anderson Valley Advertiser, which familiarized me with the place. Meeting people in the area, making new friends, was not too difficult. I am a bit of a refugee who every few years moves on to find a new home; I've had difficulty settling down. The health food shop in Boonville, Boont Berry Farms, was a welcoming center of civilisation.

Because of my background in radio I was drawn into the small local public station and proposed to do a show there on antique and avant-garde music. The show went on the air pretty quickly and was first called The Worst Is Yet To Come, after an early Billy Jones Edison record about World War 1. Soon thereafter there was a mass quitting of several members of the station staff, including one person who was taking off to pursue a sex change in a less confined, small-townish environment. I began working at KZYX in March of 2001, as half of the Operations Director position and early morning NPR shifts on Thursday and Friday. My time at KZYX was at turns wonderful and miserable; I learned a lot about the technical aspects of radio being operated on a shoestring, and I quickly met almost everyone "of consequence" in the area and so was thrust into the middle of some long-standing arguments.

KZYX had been a central mouthpiece for EarthFirst! activists who tried to save the redwood groves in Northern California from rapacious timber companies throughout the 80's and 90's and continue today. Judi Bari did a show there for some time and several current environmental programmers were her friends. I met some very interesting people and befriended them. There is a type of person who moves to Mendocino, often a lover of nature who has some problems communicating with other humans; I know being one of those. Not surprisingly, the relative isolation lived by inhabitants of the county makes public radio a meeting place for all discussion. KZYX is a wonderful little radio station plagued by recurring problems that grow on the rocky, mountainous landscape there.

One of KZYX's great attributes is its daily playback of Democracy Now, a progressive news and current events show produced by Amy Goodman in NYC. This is singularly the most important work being done by the station, which accounts for democracy Now being the most pledged for show by far come fundraising time. Democracy Now has more recently gone from being simply an audiocast to a fully produced TV show as well, that is: there is live video to the radio show and this is carried by dishTV and other video outlets. Amy has visited Anderson Valley several times on book and fundraising tours, giving talks at the Mendocino County Fair Apple Hall and doing Democracy Now live from the KZYX studios during my first week with the station. We broadcast her talk live using a Codec Buddy, a device we often used to send an improved audio signal over a standard phone line (the box shifts the frequency of the spoken word to a higher frequency where phone lines carry less noise and then shifts it back on the reciving end). Democracy Now was normally downlinked from a live satellite feed from the Pacifica Network and recorded to MiniDisc for playback later that day, but we often had problems with capturing that recording and so would resort to asking for special re-feeds from KPFA using ISDN technology (which, like the Codec Buddy used phone lines to send audio programs but with much higher quality encoding techniques).

The job of Operations Director involved overseeing all of the programming coming into the station via satellite feeds, most or all of these originating with National Public radio or Pacifica. KZYX was interesting in its combination of NPR and Pacifica programming, as well as the many locally produced public affairs and music shows. We also ("we" because i shared the job with someone) did a lot of "air time", announcing between changes in programs, station identification etc. While none of these were particularly difficult tasks, they all took place in a social environment that became competitive, the hours stretched out longer as people were needed to fill in, help out, keep things going, and relationships got fraught with tension. The first 5 months of my being there coincided with great upheavals at Pacifica, in which democracy Now was bullied out of the WBAI studios and certain MOR factions (allied with the Clinton Administration at least nominally) tried to take control of the precious Pacifica stations and transmitters by coup. This climaxed with a lockout at KPFA in Berkeley and a large number of civil disoberdiance arrests I witnessed. There were months where Pacifica, held by imposter leadership, tried to pawn off archived Democracy Now programs on the satellite while we were getting direct ISDN feeds of Amy's new show produced at the firehouse in Chinatown NY. Eventually Pacifica was wrested fromthose hands and resumed its purpose, being a voice for the community against big money interests and being a voice for Peace. One remarkable aspect of KZYX's balance of NPR and Pacifica programming is that NPR listeners become slowly radicalized as they are exposed to the stories coming through Pacifica and some of the very good community generated programs. And then there are members of the KZYX community who constantly agitate for removing NPR entirely from the schedule, believeing the station should be community-based entirely. Some of these people were the most regularly abusive in the interactions with others. KZYX actually owes its existence to a Federal PTFP grant which established funds for new NPR stations in areas beyond major urban station reach.