ELBERTA – A new low-power FM station broadcasts at 100.1 FM and reaches about a 20-mile radius around Elberta and Frankfort. It’s been on the air for a little more than three weeks.
Co-founder Arlene Sweeting likes to picture its listeners across Benzie County “tuning in to the morning show to get their information with their cup of coffee, enjoying the local content we provide.”
Sweeting said their neighbors across the street, a group of younger artists, “really got excited about WUWU and they went out and, at all the local thrift stores, bought radios they could put in every room of the house — including the bathroom.”
The goal is to eventually have mostly local hosts. But for now, Sweeting and her partner and co-founder David Beaton are covering most of the shifts.
The station itself is set up in the backyard of the house they bought in 2019: They’re running the show out of an RV trailer. It was donated by a retired schoolteacher from Benzie County and retrofitted into a fully functioning radio studio.
From the outside, it looks like any other RV, except for the wooden sign pinned to its front with the call letters. Inside, there are three microphones, a sound board, CD players, a couple of laptops — everything a radio producer could want or need.
But if you look closely, you can see some signs of the trailer’s past life.
“We have the turntable sitting on the top of the stove, and over the sink we have our automation computer,” Beaton said.
Sweeting added that, since they’re running off an extension cord from the house to the trailer, they have to be careful with how much power they use, to avoid tripping the circuit.
“So if we’re off the air, it’s because we turned on the heater in our trailer,” Beaton said. “That’s why it’s a little chilly in here this morning.”
Most mornings, they host the show looking out over trees in their backyard while seated at a long, smooth wooden table that holds their recording equipment.
The table was originally a lunch counter in East Shore market, where Beaton said workers in Frankfort’s harbor took their breaks long ago.
Part of the station’s mission is to honor the history of labor in Elberta. The region was a hub for manufacturing, shipping and the rail industry.
The FM call letters themselves are meant to mimic the “woo-woo” of a steam train.
Their schedule right now includes various syndicated news and historical programs with a liberal bent. They’re also planning to interview Elberta’s older residents for an oral history segment on the town’s past.
One recent morning, they had scheduled a live interview with a farmer nearby. They called her live on the air. It rang a few times, then they reached the farmer’s voicemail.
“She must be out in the field,” Beaton told listeners, and queued up a song.
They eventually did get hold of her a couple minutes later. She didn’t pick up the first time because she and others were setting up the farm’s hoop house for the winter.
“That’s a good story,” Beaton said later. “People came together to help a local business survive, because last night was the first frost.”
Sweeting and Beaton are no strangers to community radio. They ran a station in Sarasota, Florida, for 20 years.
And even though people have all kinds of ways to get news these days, they say community radio stands out because it’s personal: You know the people you’re hearing from.
“You get to know them better, really,” Sweeting said, “because they’re telling their stories as they’re playing their music.”
Beaton chimed in: “Radio supplies that intimacy where you feel like that person is talking to you and is sharing something important to you, so you pay attention. It creates a feeling of belonging among people.”
As he’s running the soundboard, David steps away every so often to attend to a growing stack of CDs. They’ve been taking in donations from friends in Florida and neighbors here in northern Michigan. In their collection, there’s folk, jazz, rock music, and some more unique options.
“One of the chairman of our board donated a whole collection of Japanese drumming CDs,” Beaton said. “We’re not sure what to do with those.”
Beaton is burning all the CDs, one by one, into a database that can auto-shuffle during their music shows.
Sweeting and Beaton plan to grow their station just like that — step by step, disc by disc, show by show, and neighbor by neighbor.