Postcards From Alaska introduces KNLS listeners to America's last frontier and is a daily feature of the New Life Station.

A postcard from Alaska for you now. Today’s postcard takes us to visit a community radio station in the southeast panhandle town of Haines.

Haines is unusual by southeast Alaska standards. It’s actually connected to the rest of North America by road. Most communities in the Alaska panhandle can be reached only by sea or air. Still, when winter storms close the highway and shut down the airport, Haines is a long way from anywhere.

Surrounded by steep mountains on all sides, the town is also cut off from the regional radio and television broadcasts most Americans take for granted. To complicate matters further, many residents live outside town in remote, primitive cabins without basic utilities.

Michelle Glass is a Haines resident and listens daily to the community radio station KHNS. She says of the station, "It is a basic service in our community, especially for those people without telephones. It is important in getting out community information and specific information. We have listener personals. If you can’t find your friend, you’ve tried to reach them on the phone. You can’t find them anywhere around town. You call up the radio station and you leave a listener personal, ‘Joe call Michelle,’ and that’s all you have to say. Joe knows where to find you. Or for people who live out of town where there isn’t phone service."

KHNS Program Director Burn Power says trying to puzzle out who these personal messages are intended for is a popular pastime in many small Alaska towns. He says, "People will leave all sorts of encrypted messages. There’s one right now, a whole series, ‘To Mountain man from Boo Boo:’ or there was one for a while from ‘Fireweed’ to some other flower name. So that stuff is the kind of thing that makes Alaskan radio kind of peculiar."

Personal messages aren’t the station’s only unique feature. Typically, American radio stations adhere to a narrowly defined format; a specific type of music, for example, or the station might broadcast only news. But Program Director Burn Power has to meet the needs of a diverse community with a single station.

He explains, "It’s not like in the lower forty eight where you’re…you know, if you don’t like this station you switch to another station. There are a couple of other signals picked up here, not very well, but ours is the primary radio signal. We have to have something for the people who are eighty years old, the people in their teens and something for the people in their forties, and something for everyone. We try too. Of course, it’s hard."

KHNS is a genuine community radio station. The funding and labor required to operate the facility are donated for the most part by local residents. Burn Power is especially proud of a volunteer announcer severely handicapped by a childhood accident.

He notes, "It was actually quite challenging at first for him to just work the equipment. And now he’s just a pro. He does it, you know, just as well as anybody. But he also does these kind of quirky country shows where he spent a lot of time just looking for country artists that no one else had ever heard of. We weren’t all sure that we wanted to hear them, but…"

Haines resident Michelle Glass is sure – she does not like country music - but she points out that you don’t have to listen to KHNS long to hear something that you do like.

She lists some of the offerings, saying, "Jazz, Soul, Funk, to Blues to the Reggae Hour. There’s a Grateful Dead show on the weekends. Then the Folk Show and the Rock Show. You know, once a week you can definitely find something that you absolutely love. But most of the time throughout the week it’s very palatable to someone who might not listen to a certain genre of music."

Beyond the music, community volunteers also routinely prepare spoken word programs that range from discussion groups, to instructional programs, to avant guard poetry.

KHNS News Director Doug Fine hosts a weekly discussion forum dealing with issues important to the community. He notes that one of the perennially divisive issues is land management. Should Alaska remain a pristine wilderness, or should it be commercially developed?

He explains, "The issues that we’re talking about are issues that every other place in the world is either dealing with now – if they’re lucky – or wish they could have dealt with fifty or a hundred years ago. Because now, for instance, they’re deforested or over populated or their water quality is bad or they’ve given too much to tourism so that their community doesn’t have its own face anymore."

Even more so than most Americans, Alaskans tend to hold strong opinions and express them passionately. Doug Fine believes the community radio station provides a healthy outlet for those feelings, explaining, "There’s a role in it of allowing steam to escape, a venting role for people to express their opinions so that we all recognize that we are a community. Cause you get really strong opinions when people are worked up and then you see them, they’re on the same dance floor Saturday night or something like that. But, very, very fundamentally different opinions about how folks would like to see society here."

Visiting station KHNS in Haines, Alaska, looking at the role of community radio in America’s last frontier, today’s postcard from Alaska.

Would you like to:

• ...visit the KHNS website?
• ...visit the City of Haines website?
• ...see a picture of KHNS Program Director Burn Power?
• ...see a photo of the KHNS studio building?
• ...see a photo of downtown Haines?

Would you like to review more Alaska Postcard transcripts, or would you like to return to the page containing all KNLS transcripts?

The New Life Station is pleased to provide transcripts online for a number of KNLS programs.  Please note that all scripts are the property of World Christian Broadcasting and/or SeedSower Productions.  They are provided here for your personal enjoyment only and may not be disseminated in any fashion without prior written permission.

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