WPKN-FM is a free-form radio station in Bridgeport, Connecticut; it is, to be honest, the greatest radio station in the world. Its broadcast signal, at 89.5, can be picked up in parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York State, including almost all of Long Island, and it can be streamed by anyone who has an Internet connection.
The station’s programming is the work of roughly a hundred volunteer hosts, who typically spend hours researching and assembling their shows. “Some are on weekly, some are on once a month, some are on the first and third weeks of the month, some are on the second and fourth weeks, and some are on the fifth week,” Valerie Richardson, WPKN’s (volunteer) program director, said not long ago. Depending on when you tune in, you might hear a Stevie Wonder song performed by an all-women jazz septet, or a dozen different covers of the same Bob Marley song, or twenty minutes of Tuvan throat singing, or a totally addictive cut by the group that the founder of Morphine founded before he founded Morphine. (As Richardson spoke, another host, in the adjacent studio, played “Turtles All the Way Down,” by Sturgill Simpson.) Because the shifts are staggered and the playlists are not generated by a corporate algorithm, you can be reasonably certain that, if you hear a song you don’t like, you’ll never have to hear it again. The station also has talk shows that no one would mistake for “Fox & Friends.”
WPKN began, in 1963, as an extracurricular activity for students at the University of Bridgeport. It has survived disco, a roof fire that briefly threatened to turn its immense LP library into a lake of molten vinyl, and the takeover of the university, between 1992 and 2002, by the Professors World Peace Academy, an affiliate of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The station became independent in 1989, although the university continued to give it free studio space, on the second floor of the student center. That relationship ended a couple of weeks ago, largely because the university grounds had been acquired by two other institutions.
“Our position became a little tenuous,” Jim Motavalli, who has been a WPKN host for almost fifty years, said shortly before the move. “We couldn’t even be sure that the power wouldn’t suddenly go off.” The station’s new home is in downtown Bridgeport, next door to the Bijou Theatre. “I remember when the Bijou was a porn theatre—and also when it was a family-movie theatre, after it was a porn theatre,” Motavalli said. Phil Kuchma, a community-minded developer, has attractively renovated the Bijou, WPKN’s building, and a number of other addresses in the neighborhood, which is now known as Bijou Square. He gave the station a huge break on the rent.
Back in 1963, WPKN’s staff made the unusual decision to keep all the records they received and to organize them not thematically but in the order of their acquisition. The result is a quirkily dendrochronological register of new and old music during the past six decades or so. (LP No. 1 is “A Star Is Born,” by Judy Garland.) Ten or fifteen years ago, an alarmed building inspector made the station put a significant fraction of the collection into storage; the move downtown has necessitated a further cull. “We’ve installed some really high-tech archival shelving in the new studio, but the total space is smaller,” Richardson said. The new storage units are also more expensive than the wooden boxes that used to hold many of the CDs. Donors can endow individual shelves, for eighty-nine dollars and fifty cents each.
WPKN is an important resource for people in radio-dependent occupations: house painters, carpenters, kitchen workers, artists, procrastinating freelance writers, and others who can be driven mad by stations that seem to play nothing but the same six songs by Aerosmith, Journey, Bob Seger, and Yes. Steve di Costanza, the general manager, said, “We get a lot of calls from truck drivers who have discovered us in the late-night radio wasteland around here. Also early-morning delivery people and gardeners in the Hamptons.”
Another fan is Richard Kitchener, a car mechanic, who owns Imported Automotive, in Trumbull. He recently repaired the muffler and air-conditioner of Motavalli’s twenty-eight-year-old Saab 900 Turbo convertible. “This was the first time he had worked on my car, and the bill was four hundred and seventy-five dollars,” Motavalli said. “But he recognized my name from the radio, and he told me, ‘I only want three-seventy-five, and I don’t want you to give it to me—I want you to donate it to the station.’ ” When Kitchener repairs cars, he leaves the radios tuned to WPKN. ♦
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