NOTE: This story originally was published the Star Magazine in 2009.Warren Maus has a number in mind."Seventy thousand," he says.It is early May, the end of another pledge drive at KKFI, the 100,000-watt, rabidly independent FM station that bills itself as "Kansas City Community Radio."Maus is the station's director of development and marketing. He is also the de facto leader of KKFI's four-person staff since the departure of the last station manager a few months ago. Before coming out of retirement last fall, Maus raised money for Kansas City Public Television, where he had no trouble creating narratives of crisis. And yet the situation at KCPT seems like a walk in the park compared with KKFI.An electrical failure at the station's transmitter last fall required $15,000 to fix. KKFI derives 70 percent of its budget from listener contributions, but the last pledge drive fell well short of the mark, no thanks to the economy. Things got so tight that at one point KKFI asked another local nonprofit for a three-week loan. Even if the board was inclined to hire another station manager, it couldn't afford one now. So another desperate plea for money went out by direct mail, and the late spring fundraising drive was moved up to early spring. And the phones started to ring in the pledge room, though not as much as they do at KCUR, the public radio station that KKFI diehards regard with a mixture of envy and contempt. In visits to KKFI during its beg-a-thon, I overheard more than one person mention how Bill Shapiro, the longtime host of "Cyprus Avenue" on KCUR, recently raised $17,000 for his station in two hours.Maus stands in the pledge room, next to a table where a couple of volunteers wait for a couple of phones to ring. Looking at the white board on the wall, with the hourly, daily and total giving amounts scribbled on it, the goal Maus has in mind for this pledge drive - $70,000 - appears to be within reach.On the other side of the pledge room's large plate-glass window is the on-air studio. I walk in, pull up a metal folding chair and settle in for the blues show, hosted by Mike Ross, the longtime KPRS personality-turned-KKFI-favorite known as "White Hat Mike."He arrives in a plaid blue long-sleeve shirt, creased blue jeans and blue alligator shoes, tosses his signature white hat aside and puts on headphones, which he turns up so loud that I can hear the show clearly through them when the studio monitors go off. ("I've got to feel it," he says.)Roger Naber, the local promoter who also has a blues show, settles in opposite White Hat at one of three guest microphones. During a break in the music, White Hat turns their mics on and starts an argument with Naber."B.B. King, Albert King, Bobby Bland -- who was the king of the blues?" he asks."I enjoyed Albert King's performances more than B.B. King's," Naber says.White Hat disagrees."B.B. King had to put on a top-notch performance every night!" he said. "He would do 'The Tonight Show' one night, play the White House the next night, and Las Vegas the next."Sitting on either side of Naber are Trampas Whiteman, the station's chief operator, pressed into service reading pledge cards, and another blues host, Dorothy Hawkins, "Lady D" as she's known to listeners. They're here to create an atmosphere of fun and excitement and remind those who are tardy with their pledges that they will get this kind of entertainment only on 90.1 FM.Lady D has invited a gentleman friend to sit in the studio and watch. During the show, he hands $25 in cash to Hawkins in support of the cause. She urges listeners to follow his example."You can walk it in," she says.A few minutes later, Mike and Roger are swapping more stories on the air about blues greats they have known when Lady D becomes full of the spirit.Laughing, she hollers into the microphone, "You will only get this on 90.1 FM!""A radio station should not be just a hole in the universe for making money, or running the world. A radio station should be a live place for live people to sing and dance and talk."Those words, by a cranky nonprofit entrepreneur named Lorenzo W. Milam, appear in the third edition of his classic "Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community." First published in 1971, "Sex and Broadcasting" was both the textbook and inspirational guide used in the founding of dozens of radio stations around the country, including KKFI.Milam had worked at the first postwar community radio station, KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., and was inspired by Lewis Hill, the idiosyncratic genius who ran KPFA. With money from an inheritance, Milam started KRAB-FM in Seattle in 1962 and patterned it on Hill's anarchic-highbrow model, which a listener once described as "an eclectic array of programs ranging from anarchists to Birchers, Jesuits to atheists, bluegrass to raga."In 1977 in Kansas City, Communiversity sponsored a course on starting a radio station along the lines described in "Sex and Broadcasting." Sixty people showed up for that class. A nonprofit was quickly formed and began sending out mimeographed appeals."If each of you sends us $12.00," a newsletter from June 1977 told readers, "Mid-Coast Radio Project will be months and materials ahead on its way to your ears.""We started the engineering," recalls Gil Werner, "and finally realized the mountain we had to overcome."KKFI had to fight a 10-watt college station for the rights to the frequency. Then, just days before an FCC deadline, Kansas City's zoning board refused to grant a permit for KKFI's antenna site, and the group had to scramble to find one outside the city's jurisdiction.Sixty people dwindled down to just a few diehards before the project finally started to pick up steam. There was a grant for an audience study. There were fundraisers. Volunteers. Bingo games. And more struggles.At one point, Mid-Coast could have put up a low-power transmitter but voted to fundraise until it could pay for 100,000 watts. The group was committed to bringing community radio to the entire area, not just midtown.KKFI signed on Feb. 28, 1988, almost 11 years after the Communiversity class. Tom Crane - the last of the founders still involved with the station - keeps a scrapbook of station ephemera dating back 30 years. He pulls out the Radio Wave newsletter from that month. It lists the first KKFI board of directors, and Crane knows something about almost everyone's whereabouts today."I think of all the struggles we went through to get this on the air," Crane says. "Odds that never should have been overcome were overcome. People were willing to work long hours with no pay to make this happen."In 1988, the people of St. Louis were waking up to the new sounds of community radio as well. For the Gateway City, however, this was the second time around.Lorenzo Milam himself started the first grassroots station in St. Louis, KDNA-FM, in 1969, along with his partner, Jeremy Lansman. KDNA became known for the high quality of its music, much of it by local artists, and it gave a generation of community broadcasters a mission they took to other places.However, the frequency KDNA was sitting on was soon worth several times what Milam and Lansman paid for it. In 1973, someone gave them $1.1 million for KDNA, and the two radio rebels went across the country starting more stations with the proceeds. It took 14 years before the Double Helix group could secure another FM frequency in St. Louis. In 1987, KDHX took to the air with an eclectic mix of music, much like its predecessor."I'm not sure that you have KDHX without KDNA," says Beverly Hacker, who walked into the station for the first time as a volunteer in 1993.Hacker was taken by the whole idea of freeform people's radio. She especially loved its amateurish charm, as she illustrates in an example from the mid-1990s, when she lived in Kansas City:"I was listening to KKFI, and the programmer on the air said, 'We're going to listen to my CD,' and she put it in the CD player. And the player didn't work. She said, 'Oh ... that's OK, I have a cassette player.' And the cassette player didn't work. 'That's OK, that's OK! I brought a record. We're going to listen to this record.' She put it on and she said, 'Dammit! Somebody stole the stylus!' That's stellar radio."For years KKFI and KDHX were birds of a feather. Their schedules were wildly unpredictable except to the most dedicated listener. Behind the scenes, both stations were studies in controlled chaos, with the show hosts -- programmers, as they're called -- holding an upper hand on management."We went through a lot of managers," says Hacker, who herself became one in 1998. "Big turmoil. A lot of staff turnover, a lot of volunteer turnover."It was happening at KKFI, too."I dropped out," says Gil Werner, who now sells renewable energy systems in Westport. "There were just these constant political fights and these various groups fighting for control, and I got tired of it."By the mid-1990s, it had become clear to people who monitored community radio across the country that some stations were doing a better job than others. These stations had schedules that were convenient for listeners rather than DJs. They were involved in numerous off-the-air activities that sank their tenterhooks ever deeper into the communities where their signals were heard.Above all, the haves were pulling in larger audiences and more financial support, by a wide margin, than the have-nots. And they had armies of young people volunteering behind the scenes.The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes the dollars Congress assigns to PBS, NPR and other noncommercial stations, decided to tackle this growing disparity with something it called the Healthy Station Project. In 1996, the CPB announced it would begin using radio ratings as one measure of whether a station was really serving its community - and therefore deserved support."It is the most volatile and controversial issue community stations face," says Carol Pierson, president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which supported the Healthy Station Project. "They're granted a license by the FCC to serve the community. That's a really important role that the radio station needs to keep refreshing."KKFI and KDHX both resisted the Healthy Station Project. And they were not alone. One Houston broadcaster accused CPB of trying to "dumb down and destroy community radio." The CPB consultants didn't help matters, with their corporate backgrounds and one-size-fits-all solutions. Hacker recalls, "They were very prescriptive: 'We will tell you what you have to do be successful.' We were all, 'Hm, not so sure about CPB.' "Still, Hacker could see that the suits had a point. A lot of community stations had fallen into ruts, including KDHX.This is where the paths of St. Louis and Kansas City started to diverge.The staff and programmers hammered out the details of a detente and began a year-long schedule review in 2000. The big difference in the new schedule, Hacker says, is "strip" programming, "so that if you listened on a Monday morning you could hear roughly the same kind of music on a Wednesday morning and on a Friday morning." And because research found that most adults 25 and older stop using radio around 7 p.m., the evening shifts emphasized alt-rock, hip-hop and eclectic sounds that would appeal to a new generation of listeners.Over at KKFI, the need for change was also apparent to some, but the station took a very different course.The year was 2002, and Robert Barrientos was leaning back in a chair, smoking a cigarette, telling me about "the club" he was trying to break up.Barrientos, a former American Heartland Theatre spokesman, was in his second drama-filled year as general manager of KKFI. His tactics made the average CPB consultant look like Desmond Tutu. When programmers failed to keep up their required volunteer hours, Barrientos stripped them of their shows. He also shook up the KKFI board and made wholesale changes to the schedule.Those affected did not go quietly. They formed Friends of Community Radio to take back the station from Barrientos. When Amy Goodman, host of the antiwar program "Democracy Now!", came to do a fundraiser for the group, he retaliated by taking her show off KKFI.Barrientos hardly seemed like an out-of-control tyrant when I spent an afternoon with him. But he was frustrated that no one was rallying around his message, which was that KKFI was failing because it had ceased to be a radio stationand had become a radio club."In the club model," he explained, "the first group you serve is the volunteers. Then below that, you serve the board. And then at the bottom are the listeners."Unfortunately, by the time he agreed to leave in 2004, Barrientos had pretty much alienated all three groups. After his departure, the leaders of Friends of Community Radio were hailed as heroes for saving KKFI, and they took their rightful places on the board.And proceeded to go through another eight managers in four years."I wasn't here for the Barrientos era, and I understand it was a very nasty time," said Donna Ross, who was hired in late 2006. "But at some point you need to move on. This was two years later, and a lot of people there were still carrying around the scars."Ross brought experience in both commercial and public radio, and she knew community radio could be a tad chaotic. That didn't prepare her for what she found at KKFI. No budget. No process for getting things done. The policy manual was under seemingly permanent review. Ross went without a contract for two months until she demanded one be drawn up.Five months in, she quit, having concluded that KKFI's reaction to the Barrientos threat was to take away what little authority the manager had."They empowered everyone and authorized no one," she says."There are some fabulous people there, people of passion, people of purpose, and they are the ones driving that organization. What they need are people of professionalism to complete the package."Dorothy Hawkins - Lady D - was the interim manager before Donna Ross was hired. An hour before White Hat's show, she and I sat in a conference room and out came the raw emotions of that time. She bitterly recounted trying to implement changes at KKFI, only to be thwarted time and again by the board and other insiders."It's their playground, it's their kingdom," she said. "If you don't play by their rules, they will marginalize you." She told me she would not help KKFI with its fundraising: "As long as these people are here, I do not want to ask people for money."And yet an hour later, to my surprise, she did just that.This is why KKFI is more than a story about another troubled nonprofit. Those who love it dearly go back to it, even when it breaks their heart. The volunteers who walk through its doors - white Johnson County Republicans, African-Americans, aging midtown lefties - all believe local radio is vital to the soul of a community.Countless smart, dedicated people have thrown themselves into the station, often getting their spouses involved as well. Two generous landlords have extended favorable terms to KKFI because they believe in community radio. The new one, Brent Lambi, even paid for the gorgeous neon sign that hangs outside its offices at 39th and Main streets."I am a rather big fan of KKFI and Main Street, and they both needed each other," Lambi says. "KKFI's strength is also its weakness. I call it the multiple personality radio channel."There also are a lot of jocks who are dedicated to KKFI but think that its troubles are of its own making."We have very low funds, and management has not stepped up to the level we need," says Chuck Pisano, host of the popular "Blues Kitchen" on Saturday mornings.The president of the KKFI board is Charles Ferruzza, the Pitch restaurant critic (who, ironically, was brought into KKFI by Robert Barrientos). Ferruzza hosts a Friday noontime show, "Anything Goes," where I dropped in on him just in time for a stellar KKFI moment.The station went $70,000 into debt buying new equipment for its move, because the old gear was so decrepit. Now there's a fancy Telos panel in the on-air studio for patching in phone calls. But Ferruzza isn't trained on it. So when a screener in the pledge room holds up a piece of paper telling him that Howard is on Line 1, he presses a button on the Telos and disconnects Howard. Who calls back in - and is again cut off. Ferruzza doesn't get too worked up over the snafu. It's what KKFI listeners expect when they tune in, and in his mind, that's not a bad thing."I know I'm in the minority here," Ferruzza says afterward. "But there are shows that I personally think are very low-quality, yet they have a weird existential charm."I ask him why he has just agreed to another term as board president."No one else was really interested in doing it," he says. "And my Catholic guilt couldn't stand foisting the current financial crisis on new board members."Regarding the crisis, I ask if KKFI should try to get back in the good graces of the CPB, which stopped giving grants years ago on the grounds that the station no longer attains "significant and measurable listening" levels. Using the CPB formula, KKFI would need to have only about 2,900 people listening at any given time. It averages, instead, about 1,000 listeners, according to Arbitron radio research, putting KKFI dead last in the Kansas City ratings for stations broadcasting in English. (KCUR averages 9,000 listeners.) KKFI also pays more for the rights to broadcast music because it is not entitled to the rate that CPB negotiated with the industry. All told, being in CPB jail probably costs KKFI $80,000 to $90,000 a year."We're never going to meet their criteria, whatever it is," Ferruzza says with a sigh.I challenge that, pointing out how KDHX has begun to meet the CPB minimums after trailing them for years. He tries another tack."Do I think we're serving the community? Yes, because we're offering programming that no other radio station is offering. Even if five people are listening, by offering our unique and distinctive programming, we're serving the community.""The guy who wrote 'Sex and Broadcasting,' Lorenzo Milam, has a line in there that says, 'As long as one person is listening to a show and likes it, you're doing your job,' and I just don't agree with that," Rob Lorei says.In 1978, Lorei answered an ad in Mother Jones magazine for WMNF, a new community radio station being built in Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. Today he is WMNF's news director. In a market 1.6 times the size of Kansas City, WMNF draws four times the listeners of KKFI and raises four times the revenue. WMNF built its audience around news and public affairs programs, which air five hours every weekday, are mostly local and progressive, and sound professional."A big audience isn't bad," Lorei says. "I think our views represent a lot of people. And the knowledge that radio professionals bring? That's good, too."There are lots of community radio success stories like WMNF. In New Orleans, WWOZ connects with listeners through music instead of news, and authenticity instead of spit-and-polish. Many of the OZ hosts are musicians themselves, and their love of the Crescent City sound bleeds through every minute.What they all have in common is a large and active volunteer base. Unpaid labor is the one thing community radio can rely on that commercial and public radio can't, and it may be the truest indicator of whether the station is really serving the community.Take WORT in Madison, Wis. In a market less than half the size of Kansas City's, WORT has 300 active volunteers who contribute every week to the multitude of chores needed for a quality-sounding station.KKFI has fewer than 100 active volunteers, and they're spread thin. At a three-hour programmers' meeting last month, eight people were assigned to nine subcommittees. "The sad fact is we can hardly work through the agenda we have as a committee," said programmer Mark Andruss.More troubling is the fact that the vast majority of KKFI's most committed volunteers have radio shows. These are the people who vote for the board of directors. Not surprisingly, then, most board members traditionally have had radio shows. It's a situation that makes meaningful on-air change at KKFI almost impossible."It is wrought with all kinds of conflicts of interest, in my opinion," says Gary Baker, a senior fellow at the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership at UMKC. "Many people around that table have their dog in the fight."By contrast, only a small number of those 300 volunteers at WORT have radio shows, and their role in the station's governance is proportionate. Scott Herrick, an attorney in Madison who hosts a classical music show, is the only programmer on WORT's board of directors. Herrick says he was elected to represent all 300 volunteers, not just the ones with shows."The constituency wouldn't elect programmers as directors who were too narrow in their view," Herrick says. "I do a pretty reasonable job of not forming my director-hat decisions based on my interests as a programmer."Programmers do not define WORT -- those 300 volunteers do. Maybe that's why they have 300 volunteers."You have to accumulate a reasonable number of people who want this thing to exist - not simply to do what they want, but just to make sure it exists," says Herrick. "Our success over time depends on a large number of people sharing that idea."KDHX wanted to be a success, too, but just streamlining its schedule wasn't enough. The station was still struggling to reach the community it purported to serve. Hacker - now in her 11th year managing KDHX - realized the governing body of the station was "still inward-focused, still made up of programmers instead of people from the community." That led to a process, which she describes as "extraordinarily rocky," in which the volunteers and staff of KDHX pondered a hard choice for their future: "Were we going to be a grassroots radio station, or were we going to be a long-term community asset?"In the end, major changes were made to KDHX board. "We went out into the community and looked for people that were interested in what we did more than for just a show they had," says Hacker.By 2007, they were ready to move to the next level. CPB, which had learned a few lessons as well, was willing to help without dictating terms. It gave KDHX a $237,500 grant to build its audience. That paid for a "media sociologist" to come in and conduct focus groups with all the "stakeholders" in KDHX, including listeners, the board, the program committee, and 1,000 randomly sampled St. Louisans. The report identified six "values" that KDHX stakeholders believe the station stands for and should work on strengthening in the future: localism, diversity, entertainment, community, independence and "creative expression."Hacker says she's about to spend the last of the grant money hiring a marketing director and major gifts coordinator.That all sounds so NPR, I say."Doesn't it, though?" she says. "But this model of community radio that Lewis Hill invented 60 years ago of, 'If you build it, they will come,' and 'Ten percent of the audience will pay for the cost of the station' - it's not working anymore. People have too many choices, especially with the Internet."It's the last day of the drive, and Maus can see the goal in sight. If another $5,000 comes in from direct-mail pleas, and he feels sure it will, that's $70,000. Crisis averted. Now what?"We'll do this two more times," Maus says.He is committing his volunteer corps to spending 30 days this year asking for money on the air. Including special events, he says, that should yield about $300,000 from KKFI's listeners.In St. Louis, KDHX - which was scraping by on KKFI levels of support just a few years ago - went to its listeners and major donors in 2008 and raised $881,000. That will be used to build and train staff and do more community outreach, which in turn should boost listenership and revenues. Whatever the opposite of a death spiral is, that's it.Using directions from Tom Crane, I find it in unincorporated Blue Summit, in the crotch of a V-shaped trailer park near Charlie Parker's gravesite: An old Colonial Trucking trailer sits in a ring of wire atop concrete pylons, right where they set it down 21 years ago."We needed a building we could erect very quickly, secure, weatherproof and all that," Gil Werner says. "And I started thinking, 'Well, when's a building not a building?' When it's a truck."It cost them $2,000.Next to the trailer and shooting into the Missouri sky is a 500-foot tower with KKFI's antenna mounted on it. The founders all signed it, their signatures now hidden under orange tower paint.Inside the trailer is a wheezy transmitter, the original candle that Gil and Tom and David and Rachel and Barb and all the others helped light 21 years ago. The one that KKFI will have to keep shoveling money into until Maus can raise the capital to replace it.The tower represents the muscular promise of a locally owned, commercial-free radio station for the community. The trailer represents the fragility of that promise. And with each passing year, the failure to fulfill it.

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Singing the blues; Independent FM station KKFI struggles to stay alive

By AARON BARNHART

The Kansas City Star

More News

NOTE: This story originally was published the Star Magazine in 2009.

Warren Maus has a number in mind.

"Seventy thousand," he says.

It is early May, the end of another pledge drive at KKFI, the 100,000-watt, rabidly independent FM station that bills itself as "Kansas City Community Radio."

Maus is the station's director of development and marketing. He is also the de facto leader of KKFI's four-person staff since the departure of the last station manager a few months ago. Before coming out of retirement last fall, Maus raised money for Kansas City Public Television, where he had no trouble creating narratives of crisis. And yet the situation at KCPT seems like a walk in the park compared with KKFI.

An electrical failure at the station's transmitter last fall required $15,000 to fix. KKFI derives 70 percent of its budget from listener contributions, but the last pledge drive fell well short of the mark, no thanks to the economy. Things got so tight that at one point KKFI asked another local nonprofit for a three-week loan. Even if the board was inclined to hire another station manager, it couldn't afford one now.

So another desperate plea for money went out by direct mail, and the late spring fundraising drive was moved up to early spring. And the phones started to ring in the pledge room, though not as much as they do at KCUR, the public radio station that KKFI diehards regard with a mixture of envy and contempt. In visits to KKFI during its beg-a-thon, I overheard more than one person mention how Bill Shapiro, the longtime host of "Cyprus Avenue" on KCUR, recently raised $17,000 for his station in two hours.

Maus stands in the pledge room, next to a table where a couple of volunteers wait for a couple of phones to ring. Looking at the white board on the wall, with the hourly, daily and total giving amounts scribbled on it, the goal Maus has in mind for this pledge drive - $70,000 - appears to be within reach.

On the other side of the pledge room's large plate-glass window is the on-air studio. I walk in, pull up a metal folding chair and settle in for the blues show, hosted by Mike Ross, the longtime KPRS personality-turned-KKFI-favorite known as "White Hat Mike."

He arrives in a plaid blue long-sleeve shirt, creased blue jeans and blue alligator shoes, tosses his signature white hat aside and puts on headphones, which he turns up so loud that I can hear the show clearly through them when the studio monitors go off. ("I've got to feel it," he says.)

Roger Naber, the local promoter who also has a blues show, settles in opposite White Hat at one of three guest microphones. During a break in the music, White Hat turns their mics on and starts an argument with Naber.

"B.B. King, Albert King, Bobby Bland -- who was the king of the blues?" he asks.

"I enjoyed Albert King's performances more than B.B. King's," Naber says.

White Hat disagrees.

"B.B. King had to put on a top-notch performance every night!" he said. "He would do 'The Tonight Show' one night, play the White House the next night, and Las Vegas the next."

Sitting on either side of Naber are Trampas Whiteman, the station's chief operator, pressed into service reading pledge cards, and another blues host, Dorothy Hawkins, "Lady D" as she's known to listeners. They're here to create an atmosphere of fun and excitement and remind those who are tardy with their pledges that they will get this kind of entertainment only on 90.1 FM.

Lady D has invited a gentleman friend to sit in the studio and watch. During the show, he hands $25 in cash to Hawkins in support of the cause. She urges listeners to follow his example.

"You can walk it in," she says.

A few minutes later, Mike and Roger are swapping more stories on the air about blues greats they have known when Lady D becomes full of the spirit.

Laughing, she hollers into the microphone, "You will only get this on 90.1 FM!"

"A radio station should not be just a hole in the universe for making money, or running the world. A radio station should be a live place for live people to sing and dance and talk."

Those words, by a cranky nonprofit entrepreneur named Lorenzo W. Milam, appear in the third edition of his classic "Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community." First published in 1971, "Sex and Broadcasting" was both the textbook and inspirational guide used in the founding of dozens of radio stations around the country, including KKFI.

Milam had worked at the first postwar community radio station, KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., and was inspired by Lewis Hill, the idiosyncratic genius who ran KPFA. With money from an inheritance, Milam started KRAB-FM in Seattle in 1962 and patterned it on Hill's anarchic-highbrow model, which a listener once described as "an eclectic array of programs ranging from anarchists to Birchers, Jesuits to atheists, bluegrass to raga."

In 1977 in Kansas City, Communiversity sponsored a course on starting a radio station along the lines described in "Sex and Broadcasting." Sixty people showed up for that class. A nonprofit was quickly formed and began sending out mimeographed appeals.

"If each of you sends us $12.00," a newsletter from June 1977 told readers, "Mid-Coast Radio Project will be months and materials ahead on its way to your ears."

"We started the engineering," recalls Gil Werner, "and finally realized the mountain we had to overcome."

KKFI had to fight a 10-watt college station for the rights to the frequency. Then, just days before an FCC deadline, Kansas City's zoning board refused to grant a permit for KKFI's antenna site, and the group had to scramble to find one outside the city's jurisdiction.

Sixty people dwindled down to just a few diehards before the project finally started to pick up steam. There was a grant for an audience study. There were fundraisers. Volunteers. Bingo games. And more struggles.

At one point, Mid-Coast could have put up a low-power transmitter but voted to fundraise until it could pay for 100,000 watts. The group was committed to bringing community radio to the entire area, not just midtown.

KKFI signed on Feb. 28, 1988, almost 11 years after the Communiversity class. Tom Crane - the last of the founders still involved with the station - keeps a scrapbook of station ephemera dating back 30 years. He pulls out the Radio Wave newsletter from that month. It lists the first KKFI board of directors, and Crane knows something about almost everyone's whereabouts today.

"I think of all the struggles we went through to get this on the air," Crane says. "Odds that never should have been overcome were overcome. People were willing to work long hours with no pay to make this happen."

In 1988, the people of St. Louis were waking up to the new sounds of community radio as well. For the Gateway City, however, this was the second time around.

Lorenzo Milam himself started the first grassroots station in St. Louis, KDNA-FM, in 1969, along with his partner, Jeremy Lansman. KDNA became known for the high quality of its music, much of it by local artists, and it gave a generation of community broadcasters a mission they took to other places.

However, the frequency KDNA was sitting on was soon worth several times what Milam and Lansman paid for it. In 1973, someone gave them $1.1 million for KDNA, and the two radio rebels went across the country starting more stations with the proceeds. It took 14 years before the Double Helix group could secure another FM frequency in St. Louis. In 1987, KDHX took to the air with an eclectic mix of music, much like its predecessor.

"I'm not sure that you have KDHX without KDNA," says Beverly Hacker, who walked into the station for the first time as a volunteer in 1993.

Hacker was taken by the whole idea of freeform people's radio. She especially loved its amateurish charm, as she illustrates in an example from the mid-1990s, when she lived in Kansas City:

"I was listening to KKFI, and the programmer on the air said, 'We're going to listen to my CD,' and she put it in the CD player. And the player didn't work. She said, 'Oh ... that's OK, I have a cassette player.' And the cassette player didn't work. 'That's OK, that's OK! I brought a record. We're going to listen to this record.' She put it on and she said, 'Dammit! Somebody stole the stylus!' That's stellar radio."

For years KKFI and KDHX were birds of a feather. Their schedules were wildly unpredictable except to the most dedicated listener. Behind the scenes, both stations were studies in controlled chaos, with the show hosts -- programmers, as they're called -- holding an upper hand on management.

"We went through a lot of managers," says Hacker, who herself became one in 1998. "Big turmoil. A lot of staff turnover, a lot of volunteer turnover."

It was happening at KKFI, too.

"I dropped out," says Gil Werner, who now sells renewable energy systems in Westport. "There were just these constant political fights and these various groups fighting for control, and I got tired of it."

By the mid-1990s, it had become clear to people who monitored community radio across the country that some stations were doing a better job than others. These stations had schedules that were convenient for listeners rather than DJs. They were involved in numerous off-the-air activities that sank their tenterhooks ever deeper into the communities where their signals were heard.

Above all, the haves were pulling in larger audiences and more financial support, by a wide margin, than the have-nots. And they had armies of young people volunteering behind the scenes.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes the dollars Congress assigns to PBS, NPR and other noncommercial stations, decided to tackle this growing disparity with something it called the Healthy Station Project. In 1996, the CPB announced it would begin using radio ratings as one measure of whether a station was really serving its community - and therefore deserved support.

"It is the most volatile and controversial issue community stations face," says Carol Pierson, president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which supported the Healthy Station Project. "They're granted a license by the FCC to serve the community. That's a really important role that the radio station needs to keep refreshing."

KKFI and KDHX both resisted the Healthy Station Project. And they were not alone. One Houston broadcaster accused CPB of trying to "dumb down and destroy community radio." The CPB consultants didn't help matters, with their corporate backgrounds and one-size-fits-all solutions. Hacker recalls, "They were very prescriptive: 'We will tell you what you have to do be successful.' We were all, 'Hm, not so sure about CPB.' "

Still, Hacker could see that the suits had a point. A lot of community stations had fallen into ruts, including KDHX.

This is where the paths of St. Louis and Kansas City started to diverge.

The staff and programmers hammered out the details of a detente and began a year-long schedule review in 2000. The big difference in the new schedule, Hacker says, is "strip" programming, "so that if you listened on a Monday morning you could hear roughly the same kind of music on a Wednesday morning and on a Friday morning." And because research found that most adults 25 and older stop using radio around 7 p.m., the evening shifts emphasized alt-rock, hip-hop and eclectic sounds that would appeal to a new generation of listeners.

Over at KKFI, the need for change was also apparent to some, but the station took a very different course.

The year was 2002, and Robert Barrientos was leaning back in a chair, smoking a cigarette, telling me about "the club" he was trying to break up.

Barrientos, a former American Heartland Theatre spokesman, was in his second drama-filled year as general manager of KKFI. His tactics made the average CPB consultant look like Desmond Tutu. When programmers failed to keep up their required volunteer hours, Barrientos stripped them of their shows. He also shook up the KKFI board and made wholesale changes to the schedule.

Those affected did not go quietly. They formed Friends of Community Radio to take back the station from Barrientos. When Amy Goodman, host of the antiwar program "Democracy Now!", came to do a fundraiser for the group, he retaliated by taking her show off KKFI.

Barrientos hardly seemed like an out-of-control tyrant when I spent an afternoon with him. But he was frustrated that no one was rallying around his message, which was that KKFI was failing because it had ceased to be a radio stationand had become a radio club.

"In the club model," he explained, "the first group you serve is the volunteers. Then below that, you serve the board. And then at the bottom are the listeners."

Unfortunately, by the time he agreed to leave in 2004, Barrientos had pretty much alienated all three groups. After his departure, the leaders of Friends of Community Radio were hailed as heroes for saving KKFI, and they took their rightful places on the board.

And proceeded to go through another eight managers in four years.

"I wasn't here for the Barrientos era, and I understand it was a very nasty time," said Donna Ross, who was hired in late 2006. "But at some point you need to move on. This was two years later, and a lot of people there were still carrying around the scars."

Ross brought experience in both commercial and public radio, and she knew community radio could be a tad chaotic. That didn't prepare her for what she found at KKFI. No budget. No process for getting things done. The policy manual was under seemingly permanent review. Ross went without a contract for two months until she demanded one be drawn up.

Five months in, she quit, having concluded that KKFI's reaction to the Barrientos threat was to take away what little authority the manager had.

"They empowered everyone and authorized no one," she says.

"There are some fabulous people there, people of passion, people of purpose, and they are the ones driving that organization. What they need are people of professionalism to complete the package."

Dorothy Hawkins - Lady D - was the interim manager before Donna Ross was hired. An hour before White Hat's show, she and I sat in a conference room and out came the raw emotions of that time. She bitterly recounted trying to implement changes at KKFI, only to be thwarted time and again by the board and other insiders.

"It's their playground, it's their kingdom," she said. "If you don't play by their rules, they will marginalize you." She told me she would not help KKFI with its fundraising: "As long as these people are here, I do not want to ask people for money."

And yet an hour later, to my surprise, she did just that.

This is why KKFI is more than a story about another troubled nonprofit. Those who love it dearly go back to it, even when it breaks their heart. The volunteers who walk through its doors - white Johnson County Republicans, African-Americans, aging midtown lefties - all believe local radio is vital to the soul of a community.

Countless smart, dedicated people have thrown themselves into the station, often getting their spouses involved as well. Two generous landlords have extended favorable terms to KKFI because they believe in community radio. The new one, Brent Lambi, even paid for the gorgeous neon sign that hangs outside its offices at 39th and Main streets.

"I am a rather big fan of KKFI and Main Street, and they both needed each other," Lambi says. "KKFI's strength is also its weakness. I call it the multiple personality radio channel."

There also are a lot of jocks who are dedicated to KKFI but think that its troubles are of its own making.

"We have very low funds, and management has not stepped up to the level we need," says Chuck Pisano, host of the popular "Blues Kitchen" on Saturday mornings.

The president of the KKFI board is Charles Ferruzza, the Pitch restaurant critic (who, ironically, was brought into KKFI by Robert Barrientos). Ferruzza hosts a Friday noontime show, "Anything Goes," where I dropped in on him just in time for a stellar KKFI moment.

The station went $70,000 into debt buying new equipment for its move, because the old gear was so decrepit. Now there's a fancy Telos panel in the on-air studio for patching in phone calls. But Ferruzza isn't trained on it. So when a screener in the pledge room holds up a piece of paper telling him that Howard is on Line 1, he presses a button on the Telos and disconnects Howard. Who calls back in - and is again cut off. Ferruzza doesn't get too worked up over the snafu. It's what KKFI listeners expect when they tune in, and in his mind, that's not a bad thing.

"I know I'm in the minority here," Ferruzza says afterward. "But there are shows that I personally think are very low-quality, yet they have a weird existential charm."

I ask him why he has just agreed to another term as board president.

"No one else was really interested in doing it," he says. "And my Catholic guilt couldn't stand foisting the current financial crisis on new board members."

Regarding the crisis, I ask if KKFI should try to get back in the good graces of the CPB, which stopped giving grants years ago on the grounds that the station no longer attains "significant and measurable listening" levels. Using the CPB formula, KKFI would need to have only about 2,900 people listening at any given time. It averages, instead, about 1,000 listeners, according to Arbitron radio research, putting KKFI dead last in the Kansas City ratings for stations broadcasting in English. (KCUR averages 9,000 listeners.) KKFI also pays more for the rights to broadcast music because it is not entitled to the rate that CPB negotiated with the industry. All told, being in CPB jail probably costs KKFI $80,000 to $90,000 a year.

"We're never going to meet their criteria, whatever it is," Ferruzza says with a sigh.

I challenge that, pointing out how KDHX has begun to meet the CPB minimums after trailing them for years. He tries another tack.

"Do I think we're serving the community? Yes, because we're offering programming that no other radio station is offering. Even if five people are listening, by offering our unique and distinctive programming, we're serving the community."

"The guy who wrote 'Sex and Broadcasting,' Lorenzo Milam, has a line in there that says, 'As long as one person is listening to a show and likes it, you're doing your job,' and I just don't agree with that," Rob Lorei says.

In 1978, Lorei answered an ad in Mother Jones magazine for WMNF, a new community radio station being built in Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. Today he is WMNF's news director. In a market 1.6 times the size of Kansas City, WMNF draws four times the listeners of KKFI and raises four times the revenue. WMNF built its audience around news and public affairs programs, which air five hours every weekday, are mostly local and progressive, and sound professional.

"A big audience isn't bad," Lorei says. "I think our views represent a lot of people. And the knowledge that radio professionals bring? That's good, too."

There are lots of community radio success stories like WMNF. In New Orleans, WWOZ connects with listeners through music instead of news, and authenticity instead of spit-and-polish. Many of the OZ hosts are musicians themselves, and their love of the Crescent City sound bleeds through every minute.

What they all have in common is a large and active volunteer base. Unpaid labor is the one thing community radio can rely on that commercial and public radio can't, and it may be the truest indicator of whether the station is really serving the community.

Take WORT in Madison, Wis. In a market less than half the size of Kansas City's, WORT has 300 active volunteers who contribute every week to the multitude of chores needed for a quality-sounding station.

KKFI has fewer than 100 active volunteers, and they're spread thin. At a three-hour programmers' meeting last month, eight people were assigned to nine subcommittees. "The sad fact is we can hardly work through the agenda we have as a committee," said programmer Mark Andruss.

More troubling is the fact that the vast majority of KKFI's most committed volunteers have radio shows. These are the people who vote for the board of directors. Not surprisingly, then, most board members traditionally have had radio shows. It's a situation that makes meaningful on-air change at KKFI almost impossible.

"It is wrought with all kinds of conflicts of interest, in my opinion," says Gary Baker, a senior fellow at the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership at UMKC. "Many people around that table have their dog in the fight."

By contrast, only a small number of those 300 volunteers at WORT have radio shows, and their role in the station's governance is proportionate. Scott Herrick, an attorney in Madison who hosts a classical music show, is the only programmer on WORT's board of directors. Herrick says he was elected to represent all 300 volunteers, not just the ones with shows.

"The constituency wouldn't elect programmers as directors who were too narrow in their view," Herrick says. "I do a pretty reasonable job of not forming my director-hat decisions based on my interests as a programmer."

Programmers do not define WORT -- those 300 volunteers do. Maybe that's why they have 300 volunteers.

"You have to accumulate a reasonable number of people who want this thing to exist - not simply to do what they want, but just to make sure it exists," says Herrick. "Our success over time depends on a large number of people sharing that idea."

KDHX wanted to be a success, too, but just streamlining its schedule wasn't enough. The station was still struggling to reach the community it purported to serve. Hacker - now in her 11th year managing KDHX - realized the governing body of the station was "still inward-focused, still made up of programmers instead of people from the community." That led to a process, which she describes as "extraordinarily rocky," in which the volunteers and staff of KDHX pondered a hard choice for their future: "Were we going to be a grassroots radio station, or were we going to be a long-term community asset?"

In the end, major changes were made to KDHX board. "We went out into the community and looked for people that were interested in what we did more than for just a show they had," says Hacker.

By 2007, they were ready to move to the next level. CPB, which had learned a few lessons as well, was willing to help without dictating terms. It gave KDHX a $237,500 grant to build its audience. That paid for a "media sociologist" to come in and conduct focus groups with all the "stakeholders" in KDHX, including listeners, the board, the program committee, and 1,000 randomly sampled St. Louisans. The report identified six "values" that KDHX stakeholders believe the station stands for and should work on strengthening in the future: localism, diversity, entertainment, community, independence and "creative expression."

Hacker says she's about to spend the last of the grant money hiring a marketing director and major gifts coordinator.

That all sounds so NPR, I say.

"Doesn't it, though?" she says. "But this model of community radio that Lewis Hill invented 60 years ago of, 'If you build it, they will come,' and 'Ten percent of the audience will pay for the cost of the station' - it's not working anymore. People have too many choices, especially with the Internet."

It's the last day of the drive, and Maus can see the goal in sight. If another $5,000 comes in from direct-mail pleas, and he feels sure it will, that's $70,000. Crisis averted. Now what?

"We'll do this two more times," Maus says.

He is committing his volunteer corps to spending 30 days this year asking for money on the air. Including special events, he says, that should yield about $300,000 from KKFI's listeners.

In St. Louis, KDHX - which was scraping by on KKFI levels of support just a few years ago - went to its listeners and major donors in 2008 and raised $881,000. That will be used to build and train staff and do more community outreach, which in turn should boost listenership and revenues. Whatever the opposite of a death spiral is, that's it.

Using directions from Tom Crane, I find it in unincorporated Blue Summit, in the crotch of a V-shaped trailer park near Charlie Parker's gravesite: An old Colonial Trucking trailer sits in a ring of wire atop concrete pylons, right where they set it down 21 years ago.

"We needed a building we could erect very quickly, secure, weatherproof and all that," Gil Werner says. "And I started thinking, 'Well, when's a building not a building?' When it's a truck."

It cost them $2,000.

Next to the trailer and shooting into the Missouri sky is a 500-foot tower with KKFI's antenna mounted on it. The founders all signed it, their signatures now hidden under orange tower paint.

Inside the trailer is a wheezy transmitter, the original candle that Gil and Tom and David and Rachel and Barb and all the others helped light 21 years ago. The one that KKFI will have to keep shoveling money into until Maus can raise the capital to replace it.

The tower represents the muscular promise of a locally owned, commercial-free radio station for the community. The trailer represents the fragility of that promise. And with each passing year, the failure to fulfill it.