At least most of the Staff members of your radio station live in a big house all together where they cook and sleep and laugh and learn. The house has a big staircase, lots of bathrooms (most of which don’t work) and a restaurant kitchen which is nice to have as there are always 15 to 20 people sitting down to dinner and lots of hungry folks who wander in and out during the day. There is a big signup sheet in the kitchen. It has boxes which say: Thirsty, Refried, Satiated, Saute, and other days of the week. Next to each box someone who feels like doing it signs their name for cooking that particular night and for cleaning up afterwards too.
There are quite a few bedrooms in the house counting the third floor and the living room, which is a bedroom right now. Almost every bedroom has two people living in it; some of them have three. People sleep at different times because of working off hours at KDNA. Lots of times folks will be working all night fixing electronic equipment or making tapes when it is a little quieter at the station and our equipment is in less demand.
Every Tuesday night is clean-up night. We vacuum, and wash woodwork, and scrub the stove and do all of the things we’re really too busy to get done every day. Since we all work together, it doesn’t take long and it feels good. Somehow, even with mostly men in the house, the dishes get done, homemade bread gets baked and the washing machine gets hard use.
Sometimes there are house meetings to discuss things like how we are all getting along and whether we are eating too many eggs, if you know what I mean. But most of the talk in the house is about radio. How do I make it better? What are we doing wrong? What are we doing? Some people in the house are into politics and meditation, but we’re all together on radio.
(Originally published in Fat Chance 2/1972).