…at six o’clock sharp, I flipped it on, leaned into the microphone, and said the only words I know how to say at that hour: “Good morning, neighbors. It’s six a.m., it’s thirty-nine degrees, and I’m still here.”
That’s what my late wife’s brother and I had built in the garage. A little low-power community station — a modest tower on the roof, a license I’d spent two weeks filling out, all of it legal and all of it mine. A hundred watts. Enough to cover the county that matters to me.
Six blocks away, the new corporate feed launched its jingle to nobody.
I read the farm prices. I read the lost dogs. I read three birthdays and the school delay slow, twice, so the mamas could write it down. And then the phone I’d wired to the wall started ringing, and it did not stop. Folks had gone hunting up and down the dial that morning looking for me, and they’d found me down at the far left end where the little stations live.
“Nobody under fifty listens to local,” the man from Dallas said. Maybe. But it turns out the county he called “dying off” is very much alive, and it would rather hear a neighbor read the closings than a computer in another state read nothing at all.
Local shops sponsor me now — the feed store, the diner, the funeral home, God love them. I’m back to six-to-ten. And when the ice comes again, and it will, I’ve got a generator in the garage and no intention of going quiet.
The corporate station asked me back last month. I thanked them and said no. I already have a tower. It’s small, but it’s mine, and it knows exactly whose voice goes up it.
A man from Dallas said a tower doesn’t care whose voice goes up it — never once understanding that a whole county cared, and would follow that voice clear to a garage just to hear it say good morning.