Thursday, Seven to Nine
KVRB 88.1 broadcasts from a room above a hardware store on Main Street in Butte, Montana. Dmitri Kalugin and Colm Ferris built the station in 1989 out of borrowed equipment and one very good antenna, and they have been on the air ever since: six days a week, two old men, one microphone that picks up the hardware store's freight elevator every afternoon at four.
In March, a regional network from Billings offered to buy them.
The deal is a good one. Money, first, and enough of it that neither of them would have to keep doing the winter shifts at seventy-one. A stronger signal, second: the network would move KVRB onto a transmitter that reaches three more counties, which is about forty thousand people who cannot hear it today. And two seats on the network's board, so that the founders keep a voice.
What the network wants is what it calls the brand. In the offer letter, that word means the name, the frequency, and what the letter describes as “a real independent local sound.”
Dmitri and Colm know exactly what that sound is, because they read it out loud every week.
It is the names of the people who died that week, on Tuesday mornings, read slowly, with the middle names included. It is the lost-dog notices. It is the two hours on Thursday night when Colm plays whatever people call in and ask for, which in Butte means Irish ballads, Serbian brass bands, and, from one caller every single week, the same Merle Haggard song. None of that appears in a listener survey. All of it is why the station has listeners at all.
The network's programming director was honest about it. Thursday nights would go to a show out of Denver that already plays in forty other towns. The names would move to the website. The impact on the numbers, she said, would be positive.
They signed anyway, in June, because the other choice was closing in two years and both of them knew it. But they added one paragraph to the contract first. Thursday, seven to nine, stays local, stays live, and is read by whoever is sitting in that room above the hardware store. Not transferable. Not for sale.
The network's lawyer asked what they wanted to call that paragraph, for the file.
Dmitri looked at Colm, who was already reaching for the microphone.
“Call it the brand,” he said.