Long Live College Radio!

Friends/DJs, past and present:

• WTBU, Boston University. Julian M.
• KDVS, UC Davis. Ramon S.
• KALX, UC Berkeley. Anna V.

Other:

• KUSF, University of San Francisco.

Personally, I've listened the most to KUSF, either at home or in the car. Driving through San Francisco, the strength of their signal seems to undulate with the City's hills. I'm pretty sure the transmitter is on-campus. It always comes in clearer around Turk and Masonic.

At a certain point, eclectic becomes its own genre, but KUSF still finds ways to surprise me from time to time. For a while I enjoyed opera on Sunday nights, and occasionally, I'd bump into the news being read in Chinese.

But one time KUSF really threw me a curveball. It was about a week after Thanksgiving and I was lying on my bed, listening to my clock radio. I noodled around. Static. Mexican cowboys singing. More static. And then I heard it.

It was the familiar sound of college-age voices, but with an unusual extra stiffness. You see, KUSF's DJs tend to make a self-conscious trade-off between clearer diction and a slower speaking cadence. But the voices weren't there to alert me of the next spontaneous drum circle in Dolores Park or inform me that I had just listened to a half hour of Ravi Shankar. Instead, interspersed with their over-enunciated words were the half-pauses that come from reading a script for the first time.

From what I could piece together from having read Dickens in the fourth grade, I was listening to nothing less than a radio broadcast of A Christmas Carol, as adapted and performed by the staff of KUSF.

It was painfully delicious. The fake British accents. The dialogue as exposition ("Hello good sir, what brings you to this snowy alley in London towne at Christmas-time?"). If I just closed my eyes, and imagined hard enough, I could see the cast of players, clad in their hoodies, standing among the street urchins and ragamuffins of industrial England.

Thank you, college radio.