April 23, 2026: KAXE Turns 50 today. It was one of the happiest and one of the scariest days of my life. We had been working for 5 ½ years for this with no idea how long it would last. Sustainability was not a catch phrase at the time but folks asked if it could possibly last. Frankly I didn’t know, no one had tried to run a stand-alone listener sponsored, non-commercial station in such sparsely settled area before, especially not one with such ambitious programming goals. But when asked I said I hoped the station would stay on the air for a long time but no human institutions lasted forever. What matters is the lives we touch while we’re around. In the last 50 years KAXE has touched many lives. It has built community.
One of our goals was to reverse the one way traffic of media content coming from urban centers and to allow our communities to express their unique voices. It worked better than we could have hoped. KAXE is still on the air, touching lives and giving voice to Northern Minnesota. And the idea has spread.
People interested in starting stations in their own rural communities visited us, not so much to see how it was done, we made every mistake possible in those early years, but to see that it can be done. Those first years were difficult. We needed to be on the air 18 hours a day with 5 full time staff for one full year before we got our first Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)Community Service Grant. A strike on the Iron Range stunted the economy in our second year, listener support and underwriting plummeted. We kept the station going by getting a tree planting contract and having out of work volunteers plant the trees. That was Russ Miller’s idea and it kept us going.
Now, not just KAXE/KBXE but all of community radio face the future with no CPB funding in a media rich environment where listeners have a many choices. But as channels of communication increase fact based coverage of local news withers as local newspapers decrease their reporting strength and coverage. The need for community radio is as great as ever. Perhaps I should say community media as we expand beyond FM to serve our mission online.
I am lucky to have lived long enough to see an institution I helped foster reach its half century. Please indulge me in this bit of nostalgia but remember our focus always needs to be toward the future. How do you build community in a changing and uncertain world? Keep it going friends.
What follows is a post I wrote 5 years ago for KAXE’s 45th anniversary.
April 23, 2021: Forty nine years ago today, Dave Molvik threw a switch at Itasca Community College putting a transmitter on the air. Three miles away Jon Newstrom took some transmitter readings, he had to be there because we discovered, at the last minute, that our reverse telemetry didn’t work, and we could not monitor the transmitter from the college. After a signal relayed from Suzi on the phone with Jon, I opened a microphone and said, “This is KAXE Grand Rapids, Minnesota signing on” and played a Charlie Maguire tape from the Ashland Folk Festival.
This moment came after five and a half years of planning, speech making, fundraising, grant writing, application filling, nailing, wiring and testing. Including building the transmitter building on county tax forfeit land and raising the tower in one weekend.
We signed on with an “all local” weekend. We recorded every high school music ensemble, church choir, folk musician and poet we could find to put on the air. We wanted to get as many voices from our listening area on air as possible. We figured everyone would tune in to hear themselves, their kid or their great aunt and it would, at least, help people find KAXE, 91.7 on the unfamiliar to most of our listening area, FM band. (See article from the Herald Review at the bottom of the page.)
Most of the tapes we made for that broadcast were played back on old Ampex 300 tape machines. They went into service in 1949 and we bought them at least third hand. They were good and serviceable. The history of the Ampex 300 said the last machines went out of service in about 1977 but KAXE kept its machines going for far longer than that.
We expected phone calls with congratulations, good wishes and love. And we did get phone calls, lots of phone calls, lots of angry phone calls. We signed on during the State High School Hockey tournament and Grand Rapids was playing. It was televised on Channel 6 from Duluth, 81 miles away. Technically we were outside channel 6’s protected area but, as we discovered, channel 6 had viewers. Since we had announcements of our going to air all over the place people knew who to call.
So instead of complements and well wishes we got complaints, curses and one bomb threat. The FBI heard about that and paid us a visit a few weeks later wanting to know why I didn’t report it. I replied that I didn’t take it seriously since the caller identified herself. She called from a bar with a TV set that, at 7 PM, had lots of wiggly lines on the screen and the sound of frying eggs coming from the speakers. Half of Bovey heard her call.
We worked it out over the next month or so. Senator Humphry intervened, on the side of the hockey viewers. The FCC inspected us and found we were “clean” but suggested that we help the local cable systems ground their equipment, which never had to deal with a high-powered FM station before. So, after a rocky start KAXE was off and running, and has been running ever since.
That first week someone asked me if the station was sustainable, whether it could last. My reply is that no human institution, except perhaps The Church, is eternal, and that someday the station would not be around. What matters is the lives it touches now. In 45 years KAXE/KBXE has touched many lives and will continue to do so in the future.
Congratulations to the listeners, volunteers and staff in Grand Rapids, Bagley and everywhere in between and beyond. Happy Birthday KAXE.
KAXE Mobile Unit A, Suzi’s Model A, painted white with green fenders that we took around to events to publicize the station. We filled it with antique radio equipment that we found in WCAL’s basement. Dave Molvik, Dale Constantine, Suzi and I all had worked there. Some of the antiques we got running again and used on the air, especially some great old RCA 44 ribbon mics.
