Community rallies for local radio

Bill Knight column for Mon., Tues. or Wed., August 20, 21 or 22, 2018

Western Illinois is sometimes called Forgottonia because of government’s lack of attention, but the rural area’s main radio station is getting attention – moving from “walking dead” to “running live.”

The station, Hancock County’s WCAZ-AM 990, fell silent Dec. 31 after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cancelled its license following a decade of an unpaid $3,500 fine stemming from its owner, Ralla Broadcasting, failing to renew its license on time. Now, a local station could go back on the air as soon as this week – and it may regain its original call letters, if the FCC agrees.

The FCC reports that Hancock County Broadcasting, LLC is buying Macomb’s “NewsTalk” WYEC-AM 1510 and “Positive” 93.1 FM from Virden Broadcasting Corp. for $75,000 and a time brokerage agreement.

The Radio Resuscitation has been a months-long community effort.

“When the radio station went off the air, I immediately received several phone calls from concerned citizens,” says Jim Nightingale, mayor of Carthage, the county seat where WCAZ was based. “They wanted to know how we could get our radio station back and how they could help.”

Days after the shutdown, area residents started meeting.

“We almost had to start from scratch,” said veteran broadcaster Mike Seaver, a Carthage native. “It took a lot of work, brainstorming and phone calls.”

With help from the Hancock County Economic Development Corp., which awarded the effort a $500 grant, the group wrote a business plan and retained consultant John Scheper of Scheper Communications in St. Louis to facilitate the process of re-starting a local station.

“Our story is unique in the respect that WCAZ was part of the fabric of Hancock County,” says Amy Graham, the director of Carthage Community Development (who as a child was featured on the station via commercials for her father’s insurance agency).

Seaver, 73, started his long broadcasting career at WCAZ while in high school, and will be the initial president until the limited-liability corporation can hire a general manager.

“I just want to help us get to that stage,” he says.

Although Seaver’s worked at larger markets, such as Cincinnati, Peoria and Quincy, where he lives in retirement, Seaver loves smaller markets – an appreciation he learned from the late Jerry Nutt, who owned and operated WCAZ for decades.

“Jerry was a genius,” he says. “He was dedicated to small-market radio. He had success because of localism. He gave up instant money to serve the community, and people supported the station – and it was profitable in the long term.”

Launched in May of 1922 by the Quincy Herald-Whig newspaper and businessman Robert Compton, the station soon was bought and run by Carthage College, a church-supported liberal-arts school in Carthage until relocating to Wisconsin in 1964. One of the first radio stations in Illinois, it also was one of the first to broadcast a college football game live, during the 1922-23 season, months after the first, by KDKA in Pittsburgh.

Compton bought it back from the college in 1930, and it was taken over by his daughter Betty and her husband Jerry in 1950.

“For years, residents relied on the radio station to be their lifeline to their communities, their schools and their neighbors,” Graham says. “When it went off the air, it was like losing a family member. I think the lesson to other small-town challenges is that if it's worth fighting for, you pull out all the stops.”

All eight investors in the company are from Hancock County – with a population of 18,020 (60^th out of Illinois’ 102 counties). Two key participants and Carthage high school alums are Phil Alexander, who’ll be vice president and acting sales manager, and Steve Harrell, project manager. Hopefully, the group will resume using the broadcast tower on the north side of U.S. Route 136 west of Carthage, so the signal will still blanket the area. Certainly, the station broadcasting on 1510 AM and 91.3 FM will feature farm news and market updates, area obituaries and birthdays, church services and interviews with folks from local organizations, school-lunch menus, public-service announcements, “classic country” music, and local sports – a popular hallmark of its programming for years.

“The new station will continue to be a part of the daily routine for people living and working in the area by providing news, weather, sports and agricultural information to the citizens of Hancock County,” said Seaver.

“My philosophy, like Jerry and, hopefully, the listeners, is that we’re in it for the long haul,” he adds. “We’re not expecting to get rich on it.”