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WBAI

       
                                   January 8, 1995 


Listener sponsored radio in New York. 99.5 FM. 
       
A great influence on my intellectual
development, for good or for ill.  

I spent much of my young teen-age years
with this station playing in the
background, spewing mostly left-wing
anarchist doctrine of one sort or another,
with occasional breaks for music, and lots
of "marathon" pledge drives, frantically
begging for money.

As a kid, I used to camp out on top
of a refrigerator standing outside
the door to my older brother's room
in the basement, while they listened
to WBAI all night.  Later, after
they'd all moved out and I'd taken
over the big room down in the              (I remember one     
basement, I spent many nights on my        summer I knocked off
own, during some of the loneliest          a Carter Dickson     
periods of my life, reading various        mystery novel every 
things while BAI's strange night           night before dawn)  
time programming chattered on.             
   
I deeply resented the barrier that long-distance    
charges posed to my joining in the call-in chat    
sessions.  I really wanted to head in to the city    
to become volunteer to work for the station (they    
always needed people to work the phones during    
pledge drives).  For some reason, I wouldn't go    
there by myself, and didn't succeed in talking      
anyone else into going there with me.            
                              
Steve Post, 
Bob Fass, 
Mickey Waldeman,
Larry Josephson,
Julius Lester,
Margo Adler....

Techy-Time, by David Rapkin and Peter Zanger.

Paul McIssac, and his very earnest 
anti-tech (or at least anti-nuke)  
screeds. 

Some great radio drama, like
the production of Delany's
"The Star Pit".

           
When I was a kid I deeply resented
that there were other Pacifica
stations around the country with
their own programming that I
couldn't hear in New York.  I used
to dream about driving around the
country just to check out the
radio.
          
But when I finally got to the
West coast, it was after I'd
become addicted to the college
station ghetto at the bottom of
the dial, and it was years
before I developed the habit of
tuning up as high as 94.1 FM
where KPFA resides.

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