Harger: A community college radio station gave me a career, a newsroom full of colleagues, and a wife

National Radio Day was yesterday.

I talk for a living, on a medium that talks about itself constantly, and I found out about National Radio Day after the show ended yesterday.

Which is on brand for a guy who started in college radio.

Then I did the math on something else.

30 years ago this month at KGRG in Auburn

It has been 30 years since I first sat behind a microphone at Green River Community College and read the news on KGRG.

August 1, 1996 was my second newscast ever. I had just figured out how to tape myself on a cassette, which is the only reason it survived. Every young broadcaster goes through this. You discover the record button and become convinced the world needs a permanent copy of you saying the word “Tukwila.”

KGRG then was a machine. Students on the air 24 hours a day, all year. A waiting list for shows. Classes filled the day registration opened. Kids took 3 a.m. morning shifts for an audience of insomniacs and long-haul drivers. Nobody was paid, and everybody acted like they were auditioning for the network.

What a 21-year-old said about TWA Flight 800 and Richard Jewell

That newscast aired two weeks after two events the country was certain it understood.

TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island on July 17, killing all 230 aboard. Witnesses saw something streak toward the plane, and within hours everybody knew it was a missile or a bomb.

Ten days later, a pipe bomb went off in Centennial Olympic Park during the Atlanta Games. Two died, more than a hundred were hurt, and everybody knew that one too.

I opened the newscast this way: “Well, the question today is whether or not the media are jumping the gun in the two big news events of the past couple weeks.”

Twenty-one years old, in a booth in Auburn, and the first thing out of my mouth is asking whether my own industry is getting ahead of the facts.

Then Atlanta: “FBI Director Louis Freeh also says that even though the bureau has searched the apartment of security guard Richard Jewell in relation to the Atlanta Olympic bombing, it certainly doesn’t mean that the person is guilty of anything.”

And the closer: “So it’s sounding like the FBI is kind of backing off from having any clear evidence either way in those two major events.”

That did not make me a star.

In August 1996, you could get any answer you wanted about Flight 800. A missile. A bomb. A Navy test gone wrong. All of it delivered with total confidence by people with much better microphones than mine.

I had “the FBI is kind of backing off.”

You cannot promo that. Nobody has ever teased a newscast with “Details at 11, there are no details.” No station ever won a ratings book by being the one that waited.

The exciting version wins the hour. The careful version wins eventually, and eventually is a terrible time slot. It took the NTSB four years and $40 million to rule out the missile and the bomb and land on an electrical short in a fuel tank.

Atlanta hurt worse.

Richard Jewell found the backpack. Jewell called it in. Jewell helped clear that park, which is why two people died instead of a number nobody wants to imagine. He was a hero for three days. Then the FBI leaked that he fit a profile, the press descended, and for 88 days a man who saved lives was tried on television for a murder he didn’t commit.

He was cleared that October. He died in 2007 at 44. The real bomber, Eric Rudolph, bombed three more times before he was caught in 2003.

The careful version was the accurate one and the decent one at the same time.

What one community college radio program produced

I was 21 and mostly reading wire copy, so let’s not oversell it. A kid picked the careful quote out of the stack instead of the thrilling one. But somebody taught him to do that. A program did.

I ended up teaching there myself for more than 20 years, inflicting my opinions on two decades of 19-year-olds who were contractually unable to leave the room.

And I can show you what that place built without leaving my building.

This morning on “Seattle’s Morning News,” Mike Seibert is filling in as our producer. Nick Creasia is running the board and picking the music. Both were my students. Down the hall, Curtis Rogers is producing “The Bump and Stacy Show,” and if you tune in for the Seahawks this weekend, that’s him on the NFL Scoreboard Update.

There’s one more thing that place produced.

I took Journalism 101 at Green River. I sat in the back row with the other radio kids, because that’s where radio kids sit, and because we were loud.

There was a cute blonde girl in the front row who thought I was loud and annoying.

She was right.

We’ve been married 24 years. We have two kids.

Green River College is selling the KGRG license

KGRG went dark in June of 2024. Enrollment dried up, budgets got cut, and the AM license went back to the FCC.

Green River College is now selling the FM license, and reading the listing on the college’s own website is strange for somebody who used to work there.

Facility ID 25168. Strictly the FCC license. No transmitter. No antenna. No tower. No studio.

What’s for sale is permission. The legal right to broadcast, if somebody wants to build the rest from nothing.

So far, nobody’s buying.

Where dead air is a top 10 hit

One of our old station liners went like this: “KGRG, where dead air is a top 10 hit.”

That was a joke about us. Students fumbling carts and leaving five seconds of nothing hanging in the air while they found the right button.

At 89.9 in Auburn, dead air is the whole format now.

But the tower was always the least important part. Mike, Nick and Curtis are in the building this morning doing what that place taught them. The cute blonde from the front row is still putting up with the loud kid from the back.

The signal is gone. Many of the people it made are still on the air.

Dead air is a top 10 hit at 89.9. Not at 97.3. Not this morning. Not with Nick at the board.

Happy belated National Radio Day.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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