RAVE OF THE WEEK
By Eric E. Harrison (Contact)
LITTLE ROCK — Growing up in Philadelphia, I had the good fortune to have access to a 24-hour commercial classical radio station. When I moved to Little Rock, somewhere in the late Cretaceous Period, I went slightly crazy surfing around the lower end of my FM dial looking for a classical music station, not realizingthat KLRE-FM, 90.5, licensed to the Little Rock School District, went off the air at about 4:30 p.m.
Over the next three decades, the school district and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock pooled its licenses and UALR now operates two strong public radio stations: KLRE, which for several years has expanded its classical music broadcasts to 24 hours a day, and KUARFM, 89.1, which airs National Public Radio news and talk programming in the daytime, jazz at night and such publicradio staples as Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, Whad’Ya Know and This American Life on the weekends.
People hereabouts should count their blessings, because most public radio stations, like KUAF-FM in Fayetteville, have to mix their programming - NPR’s Morning Edition andAll Things Considered in drive time, a couple of hours of this, a couple of hours of that.
Oh, by the way, Philadelphia no longer has a full-time classical station - WFLN-FM was sold andits new owners changed the format: urban contemporary or some such thing. A university radio station manages to squeeze in a few hours of classical programming on weekday afternoons.
This article was published Friday, September 12, 2008.
Weekend, Pages 66 on 09/12/2008
