The heroes on the radio

The Current staff in 2015 (Nate Ryan photo)

Back when I used to be allowed on the radio to explain why public radio was worth your dime as much as your time, I talked too much about an era that had seemingly passed long before: the shared experience of a community listening to someone on the radio.

Most of us oldtimers in the business owe our careers to the person who spoke to us from the radio. For me it was Dave Maynard, Carl DeSuze, Gary Lapierre, Gil Santos,  Larry Glick, and a handful of others on the once legendary WBZ in Boston, a station that the despicable iHeart Media has only recently turned into a repeater frequency, the better to hike profits and the corporate stock price, the community be damned.

Fifty-two years later, I have less an image of Bobby Kennedy lying on a hotel kitchen floor bleeding out, than I do a host on the radio telling me he was dead.  Me and thousands of others sharing a moment together, a single voice separating us from our despair.

There was room for my 1,000 watt local station, too, which played the daily countdown of hits each evening.  Whatever would be #1, we'd all be hearing it together.

Radio was America's glue, and I wanted a piece of it.

I couldn't have been luckier, given the opportunities to read passages from the Old Farmer's Almanac during a blackout and snowstorm, to spending a few minutes talking on the radio each afternoon about the nonsense of news. You know, talking to you.

During the '80s and beyond, the corporate interests and listener wanderlust left that radio behind, mostly.  Satellites and iPods, then the streaming internet, combined with "consultants" -- spit --  who told the people on the radio to shut up and play the music. How, we wondered, could we ever compete with a small device on which someone's entire music library was stored?

Here, have some more Freebird.

Local radio became the land of broken toys, cast into a corner, too old to play with, but still too close to our hearts to completely throw away for good.

And now here we are, shut into our homes for who knows how long, ordered to stay apart, longing for what humans desperately need more than toilet paper itself: human contact.

Each day we wake up to a startling revelation that we are in this alone. A grandchild born today, for example, cannot meet or be held by a grandparent for maybe another year. The loneliness is a wolf nearing the front door.  You feel it. I know you do.

Enter the heroes.

Dave and Carl and Gil and Larry are gone from my life. But now I have Mary, and Jill, and Jade, and John, and Cathy and on the names go, through the employee roster -- for now, anyway -- of  Minnesota Public Radio's Current and Local News Service.

And we're discovering -- or rediscovering -- the glue, holding us together.

All of the nation's local radio stations are somehow staying on the air in an abiding belief that you're important, with employees often in their own homes, unlinked from each other while linkng us. All of them mindful of the most important words on a radio broadcast license, operating in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”

On the news side, the necessity is obvious: the news.

On The Current, the necessity is reminding us that they are there... talking with us.

My friend Mary has always been particularly good at this since the day she convinced a program director to give her a shot.

Let's consider for a moment,  her  Listen to Looch segment from last August.

 I start realizing we live in a world where a lot of people think that everything should be made for them. And that blows my mind. I love living in a world where everything is not for everyone. It makes it a lot more interesting. And anyone walking around with the expectation that, "Hey, this is all gonna be how I like it and how I think and how I —" you're in for like, a complete sh*t ride, you know? It's like once you accept, "No — I can learn something from someone who really does think different things than me" and I realize how impossible that's almost become on social media so, each day I walk in to do my job and put together four hours of music that I think are gonna touch on everything: emotions, thinking — everything.

That, if you didn't realize it, is a person sharing herself with you. That is personality. That is being vulnerable. That is the essence of  being connected to someone else.

That's radio.

The irony of The Current and the Regional News channel once again emerging as a significant  means of holding us together, is it comes amid a heightened disinterest  by American Public Media management in local broadcasting.  The Current has always been the poor stepchild of MPR. The local newsroom has been beset in recent years with budget cutbacks as money was redeployed to bigshot operations in California, projects that will earn it national attention and money, or podcasts, which, for the record, are worthy endeavors but have little ability to connect us to one another through a simultaneously shared experience.

We will grow lonelier still, but for the work of our heroes, who, also for the record, need us too.

It's a dark  building now, with most people sent home.

It would be too easy to just shut up and play the music.

A studio is just you, a microphone, and the assumption that there are people out there who need to hear your voice, who need to share you with thousands of others.

But there is a need to share ourselves with each other, too.

"Oddly enough it's made this job feel important to me," Mary told me yesterday in a Facebook message.

We're out here. Listening. Loving you all. Loving each other.

Emotions. Thinking. Everything.

Together.