The Loved One and I spent a delightful evening with some of the best people in town yesterday.
No, let me amend that: most of the best people in town. I’ll resist the urge to come right out and say all the best people in town because one or two of them might not have been in attendance. Maybe.
The event was Jeffrey “Sundog” Morris’s 80th birthday party at the I Fell Gallery. Funny thing: I’m now chummy with an 80-year-old (Sundog) and a 90-year-old (Charlotte Zietlow) and, between the two of them, they have 23 times the energy and ambition that I do, and I’m not anywhere near their vintage.
I feel a sense of accomplishment simply by stepping out of the shower each day. Those two — Jeffrey and Charlotte — both are active, dynamic, contributing, eager, and all the rest of the characteristics that I used to possess back in the Jurassic Period of my life. I have no idea how they do it.
Having written this thus far, I need to lie down for a nap.
…
Okay, I’m back.
Anyway, Jeffrey was one of the founders of Bloomington radio station WFHB. The road to FCC licensure was awfully rocky. From the day in 1975 when he and his roommate Mark Hood (or should I say garagemate — the two lived in a converted garage) conceived of the idea for the station until WFHB finally went on the air, nearly two decades passed. The gang that comprised what eventually would become known as Bloomington Community Radio, Inc. (BCR) experienced two crushing denials for an FCC license. At one point in the early 1980s, the radio station idea was on life support, kept alive only by Sundog’s doggedness (pardon the near-pun).
Sundog drew up all the necessary plotting of antenna height and location, power, surrounding terrain and elevations, and any possible overlap with the dozen or so other licensed broadcasters serving our little corner of Indiana on his kitchen table. This, of course, was well before the internet, laptops, and smartphones, all of which could have allowed him to do his calculations with the click of a screen button. Sundog had to buy big maps from the Indiana University geosurvey office (now known as the Indiana Geological and Water Survey) and piece them together to form a composite image of the broadcast radius of the proposed station. He then got to work with straightedge, slide rule, pencil, and eraser.
He had to draw lines out ten miles in ten different radiants from the exact spot on Earth where the proposed broadcast tower would be located, determine the progressive elevation through the length of each line, and draw graphs of those rolling elevations. And cross his fingers that his calculations were precise.
“It was really hard,” Sundog says.
No doubt.
He did that three times for three different FCC applications. The first application was rejected because a Louisville radio station had received permission to boost its power, reaching deep into South Central Indiana — something Morris couldn’t have known before doing all his hard work because the internet wasn’t available to him yet. The second rejection came when a pirate broadcaster sweet-talked the FCC into granting him the license to operate a station on a frequency Morris had plotted and calculated. After either of those rejections, the core group, including Sundog, Jim Manion, Richard Fish and a few other dreamers, could have throw up their hands and said to hell with it.
The third application was the charm and in December 1991, the FCC notified BCR it could build its broadcast tower and begin broadcasting over 91.3 FM. Jim Manion, one of the core group — he got himself involved in the summer of 1975 — got a phone call from the then-president of BCR, Brian Kearney. “He told me we got the frequency,” Manion says, “and…,” he pauses here, still choked up, “I went to tears.”
Sundog doesn’t recall if he went to tears that day, but if he did, they would have been, like Manion’s, tears of joy. And relief. And vindication.
Not that Jeffrey “Sundog” Morris is vindictive. Quite the contrary; he’s one of the sweetest people in town.
And, last night, he was surrounded by all the best people in town. There, I’ve said it.
Here are some pix — unfocused, shaky, and amateurish, because I shot most of them — of the festivities.