And then there was KSQD! A brief history from Sandy Stone

0:00and speaking of supporters. Sandy, you're with us now. Welcome. Hello. Hi. I'm so glad to be here. I am glad to be here. Checking all my plugs and connections. All right. For those people who don't know Sandy Stone, Sandy is our chief engineer among many other accomplishments that are multitudinous and too long to list, except she started the Media Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She was part of the history of consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz. She was once Jimmy Hendrix recording engineer. And the list goes on. But I think the thing I'm most proud of her doing is saying, yes, I want to help you build case grid. And at that moment, I knew it was going to happen. So we're going to talk a bit about some of the ups and downs and weird twists and turns that happened even before this station, well before this station,

1:00went on the air. In case people are curious sort of to peel back the veil of mystery that often shrouds radio stations. You hear us, but you can't see us. And you don't really know how we got here or anything about us except that we're bringing you these programs. But there are some pretty funny stories about how this happened. So maybe we should roll back the old time machine and go back to 2016. OK, I'm turning the levers right now. Since you're our engineer, you could do that. We could get in our little pod there and go back in time. I was in Santa Cruz. Certain people had gotten supposedly elected. And it was a really kind of worrisome moment. And the other thing that was going on was the big community radio station in town. OK, USP had gone dark. They had gone bankrupt. And we won't go into wire how, but it was over.

2:02And they had thrown their licenses up for auction. So maybe I'll start. I don't think you start there. Start there. OK, who's going to tell that part? Sandy, do you want to start there? Oh, I thought you were waving at people in this studio. Who's going to tell that part? That's Christine. She's taking pictures. The story initially of getting the actual license for KSQD was both triumphant tragedy. It was happy and sad. What first happened was the original people who were the engine, the motor, the driving force of our predecessor station tried to buy the license for that station. When it went under, and they had every right to do that, we won't talk about that very much. But it was a group of dedicated people wanted to keep the station on the air.

3:03We're based locally, had money, had everything going for them, and community support, everything. But the board of directors of our predecessor station insisted on what they called fiscal responsibility. So they decided to auction off the license, our license, to the highest bidder. So we, Rachel, largely of the Rachel's efforts, but with a lot of other people participating, we managed to raise 300,000, I don't remember, plus dollars. And went in and put that on the table and said, give us the license. And then behind us, one of the national conglomerates, who is not local, who broadcasts from a basement in Boise, Idaho via satellite, came in behind us

4:04and said, we'll double their offer. And we said, wait, we're local. They're not. The board said, they've got more money. So. Yeah, it was up to the lawyers at that point to pick, and it was really the highest bidder. And KCRW, all the way in Santa Monica, tried to grab the license, too. And they got outbid by EMF, the Educational Media Foundation, which is the conglomerate Sandy's referring to. And so essentially, we got way outbid. We got double outbid. And so we gave all the money back we had raised. It was really complicated. We wrote millions of small checks to people who had put their money down. Some people said, keep it. I know you'll figure something out. And for those people, we wrote contracts. We will give you the money back if we fail it, the next attempt. And so we thought about it. We licked our wounds for a while and said, OK, that was a bummer. That was the big, big broadcast license that reached the whole Monterey Bay plus a bunch of translators.

5:07And then we thought, OK, so that didn't work very well. What else can we do? And we looked around. We said, hey, let's go back to that big conglomerate. See if they have any extra frequencies they don't want. So our lawyer, Ned Herne, called their lawyer and said, hey, do you guys have any spare things you want to sell? And they're like, well, actually, we do. We have 90.7, which is duplicate as now that we bought this big station in Santa Cruz to broadcast Christian pop music over. So if you tune down to that one frequency, that's what you'll get. A lot of happy people playing happy music. But they did make a deal with us that if we raise the money in a certain amount of time, they were going to sell us 90.7. So we went back to those donors. Some of them large, some very small, $25, you know, all the way up to $10,000, $50,000. One person called and said, I just got my dad's inheritance. How much do you need? And they said about $65,000 left to raise.

6:09And he's like, OK, I'm going to write your check and I just started crying. Because he was never going to get that money again, right? That was the end of that. So we managed to raise, again, $300,000 and buy that 90.7 frequency. And I see the phone is ringing. So maybe someone out there will pick it up. Yay. Thank you. So it took a village to put 90.7 on. And that wasn't the end of it. Was it Sandy? Because we thought that was the beginning. But it looked good. It was the beginning. From there, we, well, first we started small with this new, smaller station that we had bought. We actually went on the air with that. Let me jump ahead a little bit. Over the years, several other small stations came available around the edge of the Monterey Bay. And we were able through enormous efforts to raise the capital to do it. We were able to buy two more stations

7:12in Monterey and Salinas. So what this group managed to pull off is this miraculous thing of kind of by the back door recreating the power of our original station with a bunch of small stations. That's like, that's a community miracle that we were able to bring that off. And you know what, Sandy, when you said, I want to be part of that, I knew it was going to happen. Because you get things done and you're that type of person who just pretty much rolls your sleeve up, sleeves up and gets under the console and starts sawing away and wiring things. So there is a funny story I want us to tell Sandy. Because it's one of those weird things that you have to do sometimes when you're committed to something, but you really have to kind of grin and bear it. And that is how we got the equipment that our community bought for KUSP. And then some other guy in bankrupt night. OK, so there was this horrible night when it was New Year's Eve.

8:14And it was Christmas Eve. And I was in this decrepit station that had been dark for like six months. And there was dust everywhere. And there was this repo guy. Like that was his job to sell off the station's assets to try to make up for their $850,000 debt that they've gotten themselves into. So there we were. Like, then he says, all right, if you can get three semi-trucks here by tomorrow, you can have all this for $3,500. I can't do that on Christmas Eve. He's like, OK, fine. He was just over it. He hated his job. He wanted it out of there. He was in a dusty old station trying to sell a bunch of old radio equipment that who wants it, right? So I kind of passed. I got a few things. I got some computers. And I grabbed these consoles that are still here. And these arms, I grabbed those. I grabbed all of these SM7 microphones. And I got those, and I wrote them a small check, right? I grabbed what I could. My son was there with me hauling things into my station wagon.

9:14And then I just put them in my closet and said, well, maybe we'll use these someday for something. But fast forward to now we have a license that's going to be ours. Now we need a studio with equipment that actually were broadcast. And so that's when Sandy and I had I was on a camping trip and we were bargaining with this dude who had bought the rest of KUSP's equipment and stuffed it in his garage, thinking he was going to start a low power FM up near Vallejo. Is this getting two in the weeds? Christine's interesting. No, I don't think so. It's interesting to me because it was such a crazy experience. So why don't you take it from there, Sandy? Because you were there. We were there with this guy who was trying to make a buck off of us who had no money. So this was like a detective story. Rachel tracked this guy down and we went out there. Well, first you bargained with him over the phone and we went out there.

10:15All of the equipment from the other station, almost all of it were sitting in this guy's garage, unheated, no climate control whatsoever. It had been there for like a year. It was a terrible shape. And we were there trying to buy it, trying to hassle him for it. We wanted to use it. He wanted to sit on it and see if he'd make a buck from it. So between the two of us, I had no test equipment there. But as he hauled stuff out of the garage, I would plug it in. And if the power light came on, I said, OK, that probably works. And we piled it into the back of Rachel's car. By the time we were done, we had the whole station inside Rachel's car. But in the form of this rusty pile of junk, and we hauled that back here. And you were kind enough to put it in your garage

11:15and set up basically a test audio studio where you could test each of these pieces and see if they indeed still worked. After all, I think we ended up paying $15,000 for all of it. These boards that we're still using that are still working are worth $20,000 each new. But these were by far not new. They'd been used at the old station next to the ocean, which corrode things. So you had to set it all up. And then we didn't have a station to put it in yet. So you had this kind of quasi station running out of your garage. I actually ran out of my bedroom because it was more comfortable there. And I remember we made a 24-hour loop to run because we didn't have the studio built yet. And that's a whole different story which we don't have time to tell. But I will say that we got David Rhodes, friend of ours, to design a really cool design that was a very small space at the County Office of Education. The lovely trustees voted to give us space, which at a reasonable rate, which we were so grateful for,

12:18they saw the benefit of us being there. And we're so grateful they gave us a place to be. And then we painted, and then Sandy, and all of this console was donated by a friend, Teresa, who works for a countertop company. They gave us all this countertop. So it was really a village that built this place. And the board of directors, Matilda Ran, Ned Hurn, all of the great people who signed on after that have been the ones keeping this thing with spitten glue, and rubber bands, but also really high-tech equipment that still works. And I really don't think without you, Sandy, that we would even be here sitting here today. And I'm so grateful that you did all that. Out of the love of this community, you came back from Texas and gave this place a home. Now I'm going to get all teary-eyed. I'm feeling pretty worthy of this. Literally, I went to Austin, but I came back to Santa Cruz

13:21as quickly as I could. Well, we're glad you're here, and we're so, so very blessed. And so, yeah, I wish we had more time. I just want to say, quickly, I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity of a lifetime to build a radio station essentially, you know, working community radio station out of essentially a tub full of random sized ephemic cables, and a pile of rusty junk. I mean, we did it. We're here online. I will never have an experience like that again. It was once in a lifetime. I think for all of us who was there, who were there, it was once in a lifetime experience. I agree, and that energy carries on. I'm done, sorry. Oh, no, I'm never done. We're never done. Seven years later, we're still here, when we're talking passionately about the station, this is what we're talking about, because it's really been this group effort. And all the voices you hear contribute every day

14:21to keeping it going. So if any of this inspires you, like it inspires us, we hope to hear from you right now. This is our pledge drive. We are going to go to first person singular in just a minute, but Christine is here. Sandy is here. Christine, what'd you give out the numbers on the website that people can go to to make a contribution to this wonderful effort? I would love to. Please give us a call at 831-9005773. That's 900 KSQD. If you're in your car and you want to jump out in 10 minutes, there it is, 905-773. Or you can go to ksqd.org, big donate button there, right front and center, press that, and you'll see all the options that you can choose from to give to this marvelous station that was such a heartwarming, I feel really fuzzy and happy listening to that amazing tale of real people doing whatever they can

15:22to make this happen because it really matters. Well, thank you. And thanks to everybody who has pledged so far, we've got 182 people come on board. We are only $8600 from our goal. We'll reach it by Saturday night. Would you be the next person we think? We'd love to thank you next. And we're going now to first person singular another great community show. And after that, ask Dr. Don. This is KSQD Santa Cruz, KSQG Prune Dale.