to need props with something like this,” he said. Yang and Kevin Bush sat at a long folding table beside two empty seats, each with a hand-lettered cardboard placard reading “administration official.” Yang explained that President Leebron, Vice President Kirby, and VP for public affairs Thrane all had been invited to attend the event. All declined. “At which point, we extended an open invitation to anyone from the administration to serve as a representative, and, ah…” Rueful laughs from the audience as he gestures towards the devastatingly empty seats. “We’ve tried to tailor this around the administration’s schedule. However, it appears that they just seem uninterested. So I’d like to apologize to everyone who came out expecting that they’d be able to talk to the administration.” “They’re scared!” yells a voice from the back of the room. Applause. Yang and Bush both remark briefly and generally on the situation before several audience members stand and speak. One woman plans to complain to the FCC (which though open to public comment, doesn’t involve itself in format issues). A Rice student who’s clearly sympathetic consoles nobody by postulating that radio is a “dying format.” Another speaker wonders about the formation of a trust to safeguard KTRU in the event that it manages to stay on the air, which seems like it would have been a good idea for someone to have done five years ago. Walking out of Sewell Hall with his rice and his stop sign, Jim Ellinger seemed deflated, somehow having expected more direction, more spunk, more something from the students. “I just got back from Haiti,” he says, sighing and looking out across the leafy, immaculately manicured campus with its palatial brick buildings. “As far as crises go, this is a pretty nice one.” Speaking to him on the phone before he went back to Austin the following afternoon, I mention the live roundtable discussion hosted by several past and present KTRU managers that’ll be broadcast that evening. “Yeah, at eight o’clock on a Saturday night,” says Ellinger. “I’m sure all the Rice students will be listening. Tell those guys good luck with that.” For those of us with a less active social life than the typical 20-year-old Rice student, it was compelling listening, touching on various key issues, from the secrecy that surrounded the sale to the problems inherent in an abruptly un-phased transition from FM to Internet broadcast. Vincent Capurso, a U of H student and current KTRU DJ, talks about how easy it was for him to find a welcoming place on Rice’s airwaves. By contrast, he says, “I called KUHF Friday, and asked as a U of H student how could I be involved, and they said there was no way, that it was not student-run at all.” They referred him to a student booster club being organized by the marketing department, which will represent the station at public functions. “I do that for KTRU all the time,” he says, “but it’s different when you’re really involved.” Rice alumnus and former station manager Johnny So said he’d always looked at Rice as a school that “doesn’t place monetary interest over everything else” and noted that in his role as 2000-2001 station manager, “we were okay with events that would lose money” simply because they felt they would benefit the community on- or off-campus. In a par-
ticularly free-wheeling moment, he compares the university to someone “who runs around town wearing a t-shirt that says ‘#1 Dad,’ then you find out later that dad’s at the bar with women he doesn’t know, instead of at home reading stories to his children.” A question from a caller, again about the translator: “Is the 91.5 FM translator part of the deal with U of H, and will Rice let the students use the lower power frequency after 91.7 gets converted to classical music?” “That’s a difficult question to answer, because the terms of this deal are still confidential,” says Ian Wells, a DJ and co-producer of KTRU’s news program “The Revelry Report,” “so we don’t know exactly if the translator was included in the purchase... From speaking with the only person with insider information of the deal who’s authorized to talk to us, [we think] their method of feeding information to the transmitter is different from ours in a way that might preclude operation of our translator. If I had to give an engineering guess, I’d say that they don’t intend to keep the translator on top of the stadium working.” And then there’s the issue of holding on to a license with which to broadcast. And even if you could, there’s the very limited range. “As a long-term solution, it doesn’t seem likely.” Then, a quick conclusion. “We’d like to stress again that this isn’t over,” says Joey Yang. “Nor will it be over for some time… Just because we may be off the air doesn’t mean it’s over. It’s not over until the fat lady sings. No, it’s not over even after the fat lady sings. There are always things to be done.” At around 9 AM on the morning of Sunday, September 5th, I began the approximately thirty-minute drive north of Houston to the KTRU transmitter and tower in Humble, Texas, a few exits up Route 59 from the George Bush International Airport. Looking past the sprawl on either side of the road I wondered how many older folks in this area who don’t own computers (or probably many CDs for that matter) were about to lose the jazz or blues programming they look forward to all week. Off the highway and past the tidy Kingwood campus of Lone Star College, a left turn takes me into a little suburban neighborhood, fairly nondescript except for an immense red and white metal structure rising 502 feet into the sky that can occasionally be glimpsed through the trees. I pull over, park, and get out to take some pictures. A dirt trail leads north from the road, into and through an overgrown shrubby area (which I note to be completely free of “No Trespassing” signs). Past a picnic table overturned in a large puddle, the short, muddy footpath leads to the base of the tower. There isn’t much to see, really. Behind a chain-link fence are two small enclosures placed side by side, one of them behind a second fence with the tower adjacent. Both structures have a small set of steps leading to a door as an access point. The tower is anchored in three places, with seven cables leading to each metal mount sunk into concrete at ground level. The anchors are protected by short chain-link fences that look like ballfield backstops. I drive back to 59 and south to Houston. My radio dial hasn’t budged from 91.7 since this all began, and a KTRU alumnus named Mike Scott is spinning records and remarking on the professionalism of the current studio WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 23