Residents of Kauai’s north shore are overwhelmingly opposed to a plan to build a cell tower on a residential lot in Haena. A spokesperson for AT&T told Civil Beat that for a community prone to being cut off by landslides and flood waters from the rest of the island, better cell service for public safety workers would seem to be a clear benefit.
For nearly 30 years, a little radio station started in the cornfields of rural Ohio made a name for itself. Now, more than a decade after it played its last song, it’s doing that again.
At the end of May, WOXY, known to legions of fans as 97X, will resurrect its “Modern Rock 500” one last time. It’s a tribute, organizers said, to a small-town station that rocked the radio world, first locally, then nationally and beyond.
Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, 97X was the modern rock radio station in southwestern Ohio. And it was my radio station from my first days on campus at Miami University. From its first song — U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” — until its last internet broadcast in 2010, the station was the center of the new music universe for a generation of young people, like me, who lived for something different.
Essentially, 97X and I were both freshmen at Miami then. The radio station had previously been WOXR, playing Top 40 hits, and uncensored versions of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” and Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” to appeal to Miami’s college crowd. When Doug and Linda Balogh bought the station in 1981, they asked Miami students what they wanted to hear. The answer was modern rock. So the Baloghs delivered, playing music no one else in the area was giving airtime to.
According to music historian Robin James, WOXY was the sixth modern rock station in the U.S. In her book, “The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence,” she says FCC regulations kept the station small, but what it lacked in strength it made up for in individuality.
“The station started off in ‘83 basically copying L.A.’s KROQ (pronounced Kay-rock) playlist,” James said. “By the ‘90s though, 97X was sort of the place for new and different music.”
I spent my first semester at Miami that year trying to figure out who I was and where I fit in. In my world, you smiled at people you met on the street and “punk” was something you dressed up as on Spirit Day if you wanted to be really edgy. My roommates thought I was a rube. But when I heard 97X for the first time, I realized there was more to life than Journey. 97X didn’t play the big hair bands and southern rock my roommates were listening to. They listened to “Faithfully.” I started listening to “Burning Down the House.”
Listening to 97X set me apart. Suddenly, I had this sense I belonged to a new club of shared interests and ideals that were different from most of the rest on campus.
Oxford back then was just a jumble of concrete amidst miles of cornfields between Dayton and Cincinnati. It was a primarily Republican college in a primarily Republican area in a primarily Republican state.
But 97X was a ministry of liberal ideology in the midst of a campus full of trust fund babies and future country club members. Transmitting to Dayton, Cincinnati, and Northern Kentucky, it broadcast a new sound.
“In high school, I lived in Northern Kentucky at what must have been the very outer edge of their broadcasting radius,” recalled Chris Eddie, now one of the owners of Smiley Pete Publications in Lexington, Kentucky. “I’d have to say my most memorable experience happened at 97Xtra Beats … an all-ages, monthly event held at Bogart’s in Cincinnati … (It) was right as Nirvana‘s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Give it Away’ had recently come out. The usual, gothy/mopey alterna-girls exploded into dance like it was a New Kids on the Block concert. I knew something had changed in the world of music.”
In 1988, the station rose to fame in the Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman film “Rain Man.” Filmed in Cincinnati, the movie featured Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt repeating the station’s tagline “97X, BAM! The Future of Rock and Roll.”
From there its notoriety grew.
“They grew to have a national reputation,” James said. “’Rolling Stone,’ for several years in the ‘90s, named them one of the top radio stations in the country. Then later on, ‘Rolling Stone’ named them the last great independent radio station.”
And it was too. Until it wasn’t.
By ‘88, I had left school and was living in Cincinnati, a single girl listening to alternative tunes, hitting raves and pub crawls when I could. I worked as a reporter for the alternative newsweekly “Cincinnati CityBeat,” and 97X was our media partner. As time went on, though, I moved into more corporate jobs and listened to the station less. Then the ‘90s came, replacing concerts and clubbing with marriage and kids.
But during that time, 97X kept its own unique sound and purpose, even as other stations all started to sound the same, James said.
“Basically, everyone was buying up radio stations then syndicating content nationally,” she said. “It was kind of like the ‘Walmart-ification’ of radio.”
WOXY maintained its modern music focus and its independence. It may have even been the radio station that broke Coldplay into American markets, she said.
Former program director Mike Taylor isn’t too sure about that. But he does know it became harder and harder for independent radio stations like WOXY to compete with the corporate big boys. In 2004, Taylor said, the Baloghs sold the license to 97.7 FM, but kept the WOXY name and the station’s music library. The station went online as WOXY.com, one of the first radio stations in the country to have a primarily online presence. Taylor said the station’s reach was suddenly the world.
“I was looking to try and reach people in New York, L.A., San Francisco, and London,” he said. “If we would get an internet request from somebody from some far reaching location, that’s what really primed my pump.”
Online, the station’s reach was international.
“In the early 2000s, a music critic in Brazil was a really strong advocate for 97X,” James said. “The station had a huge Brazilian audience to the point that when (WOXY) had a Brazilian band called The Mosquitoes in for a lounge act, they had them record [the tagline] ‘97X, The Future of Rock and Roll’ in Brazilian Portuguese.”
The station moved to Austin, Texas, Taylor said, and new investors helped keep it afloat. The station couldn’t sustain itself, though, and in 2010 Taylor played the station’s last song, “Answer to Yourself” by The Soft Pack.
Fans of the station, however, continued to talk about it. A podcast sprung up, Rumblings from the Big Bush, hosted by former WOXY DJs Dave Tellmann and Damian Dotterweich, that recounted the days of 97X. In other online spaces, fans put together 97X Reddit threads, blogs, Facebook groups, and Spotify playlists. Some fans say they continue to listen when they can.
“My first memory of 97X was walking into a store in Tri-County Mall that (was playing) these fun, different tunes that I had never heard before,” Jo Ivey, a former ad rep for “Cincinnati CityBeat” said. “To this day, Morphine’s ‘Cure for Pain’ will stop me in my tracks. Concrete Blonde’s ‘God is a Bullet’ reminds me how little time has changed, and I still find time over the Memorial Day weekend to find the Modern Rock 500 online.”
In recognition of that lasting impact, during this year’s Memorial Day week, WOXY will stream the “97X Modern Rock 500 Countdown” online on Inhailer Radio. The broadcast will be a 40th Anniversary “chef’s kiss” to the station’s beginnings, Taylor said. Featuring five 100-song sets led-in by former WOXY disc jockeys, the countdown will air on Inhailer’s website and apps from May 22 to 26, and will re-air over the Memorial Day weekend, with an archived version available after May 29.
Taylor said it’s like getting the band back together.
“I had over 30 people, myself included, that responded with wild enthusiasm to do this,” he said. “We crafted kind of an all-time 500 if you will. We had to kind of limit things a little bit, so the only songs that would be eligible were songs that had previously appeared on the Modern Rock 500 at least once.”
The result will be a mash-up of 20th century “modern rock” songs put together with 21st century technology, he said.
Times have changed since WOXY was at its prime. Radio isn’t the same now that everyone has the opportunity to be their own DJ, he said. But he hopes, like the original, this 500 will have an impact.
Now that I’m older — much older — I can see the impact the station had on me. I still listen to alternative rock, and routinely share new music with my kids. I introduced them to K-Flay and Shakey Graves. They told me about The Bahamas and Twenty One Pilots. They tell me I’m not like other moms. Apparently, other moms my age are still listening to Journey.
Taylor said he doesn’t know if the station will continue to affect listeners.
“I know once this finally hits there’s going to be some outlet out there that’s going to label this as the most pathetically boomer thing ever,” he said. “But my take away from doing this is that it’s just like anything else — how can you tell the impact of something as it’s happening?”
For many, WOXY was an introduction to a world of music we never would have heard otherwise. And it left indelible memories.
This last Modern Rock 500 may be the last memory 97X creates, Taylor said.
A memory of the future of rock and roll.
The post The Future of Rock ‘n’ Roll – from the middle of rural farmlands appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
As California closes three more prisons and downsizes six others, some prisoners aren’t ready to go. They are worried about the future of their education.
For more than 1,500 prisoners who attend college in these closing facilities, closures mean they could transfer to a new prison where the courses may not line up, leaving some students a few credits short of a degree. Education can offer tangible, real-world benefits to prisoners: They can earn degrees and gain merit credits that chip off time from a sentence. Research shows that prison education also reduces recidivism.
California’s shrinking prison population — the state had 160,000 prisoners in 2011, down to just 96,000 as of May 10 — has also created an unexpected problem for the state’s community college system, which has developed special programs to help prisoners earn degrees. Palo Verde Community College in Blythe, for example, draws almost half of its students from the nearby prison.
As the prisons close down, at least three community colleges stand to lose more than 10 percent of their student enrollment and millions of dollars in state funding, collectively.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has been interested in closing prisons since at least 2019. Since then, the state has closed one in Tracy and nearly finished closing another Susanville.
Last December, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said it would close a prison in Blythe and end the contract with a private prison company in California City. The corrections department also said it would close parts of six other prisons throughout the state.
[READ MORE: When colleges are abortion providers and firefighters]
In a statement to CalMatters, the corrections department said that it is committed to preventing “academic disruption” for students at the closing prisons and pointed to the work of the Rising Scholars Network at the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, which oversees various higher education programs across all of the state’s 34 adult prisons.
But local community college administrators say communication from the corrections department is limited and that they have few resources to help prisoners who fall through the cracks.
Former prisoner David Zemp, a self-described nerd, gets wistful when he talks about prison education.
He spent seven years locked up in the D Yard at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi. By the time he was released in 2022, he said the prison unit looked more like a college campus than a prison.
Prisoners made their own salsa at the nearby garden and covered the white walls with murals: a dinosaur fossil, an astronaut, and at the entrance, the March of Progress in which a monkey evolves into man with a cap and gown.
“It was falling apart, but the people who were investing in it were in love with it,” he said. He earned five degrees while incarcerated, which ultimately knocked off roughly three years of his twelve-year prison sentence.
Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cerro Coso Community College taught over 35 in-person classes inside the D yard of the Tehachapi prison.
In addition to its murals that covered the walls and gardens outside, the college was also working with the prison to build portable classrooms on-site.
In December 2022, that all came to a halt. The college learned that the corrections department planned to close the D yard in Tehachapi this summer as well as the California City Correctional Center, another prison where Cerro Coso also teaches, by next year.
Professors and administrators were in a bind. Almost 20 percent of Cerro Coso’s students were incarcerated at one of the two prisons. At the time, Anna Carlson, the program director for the college’s incarcerated education program, had little information about the timeline for the closures, except a promise from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that students would be able to stay throughout the spring semester.
“That just didn’t happen,” Carlson said. “Some were able to stay, and some were not.” Her office at Cerro Coso, a trailer that abuts the local school, is at the epicenter of the prison closures, fielding calls and sorting files from students and professors who are frantic or frustrated.
Throughout the spring, professors arrived at the prisons only to find that some of their students were gone.
Peter Fulks, a professor at Cerro Coso, spoke to over 100 people who are imprisoned and who told him continuing their education was consistently a top concern. Some men broke into tears because they were so worried about what might happen next, Fulks said.
Over 400 of Cerro Coso’s incarcerated students left prison before they could finish their semester. Of those students, 126 have been paroled; the rest are scattered across at least 27 different state prisons, according to data from Carlson’s department at Cerro Coso Community College.
Others dropped out of school even before they were transferred, said Fulks, resulting in an enrollment dip before the spring semester, right as news got out about the prison closures.
The corrections department said in a statement that it is committed to preventing prison transfers during the semester, but that it does happen. The corrections department also said that the special credits awarded for classes — the ones which can give people who are imprisoned years off of their sentence — will transfer to the new prison, too.
Some students who leave in the middle of a semester strike special agreements with their teachers to finish the rest of the class via mail, but not every professor is willing or able to do that. Unlucky students must withdraw or take an incomplete.
In general, educational options for students vary depending on which prison they are sent to, according to the statement. Some prisons only offer classes via email, known as “correspondence-based” courses; others have partnerships akin to Cerro Coso’s model and focus on in-person instruction.
The statement said it is up to the community colleges, with the state’s help “if needed,” to ensure the students’ credits transfer.
While the corrections department later clarified that it tracks where it moves each prisoner, administrators at two community colleges told CalMatters that they don’t have access to that information and said there’s no coordinated system among community colleges to communicate which students have transferred where.
Moreover, colleges need the written consent of the student before they can communicate with one another due to privacy laws.
Cerro Coso Community College is more vulnerable to the effects of prison closures because its classes are primarily in-person.
Statewide, most college classes in prison are by mail, where students communicate through letters with a community college professor they have never met.
That’s the case at both Palo Verde College on the Colorado River and Lassen College near Northern Nevada, which also face looming prison closures.
Palo Verde College expects to lose about 10 percent of its student body — about 520 people — when nearby Chuckawalla Valley State Prison closes in 2025, but President Don Wallace said the college can easily make up the lost enrollment by gaining correspondence-based students from other colleges around the state.
All told, nearly half of Palo Verde’s current students are incarcerated, a number that has more than doubled since 2016. The vast majority of those students are correspondence-based.
While the college will find other students, Wallace said the transfers will have a “horrific impact” on the current ones, who he worries may never finish their education. “It’s a stop-out point,” he said. “Even among people that are not incarcerated, when they have to change from one college to another or they move from a community college to a four-year university, those are points where people quit.”
Lassen College, whose nearby prison began closing last year, has been able to continue educating about three-quarters of its 200 students at their new prisons via correspondence, said Colleen Baker, interim dean of instruction. She did not respond to questions about the fate of the 50 of students who did not continue their education via correspondence.
To Fulks at Cerro Coso, who recently defended a dissertation about prison education, the difference in prison between in-person instruction and correspondence-based classes is stark. “Correspondence success rates are extremely low, about 68 percent compared to face-to-face, which was about 81.6 percent,” he said, adding that the performance for correspondence classes may be even lower since some of the remote classes he studied had professors stop by occasionally.
But for colleges, who receive state money based in part on the number of students they enroll, correspondence classes bring in a lot more revenue. “Each one of their students counts the same as a face to face. You don’t have to pay for location, materials for students, they limit how much support they provide to students and that money goes in,” he said.
Once the prison fully closes, Cerro Coso will lose just over 900 students, more than 10 percent of its total enrollment. The college’s vice president of finance, Chad Houck, said the college did not know how much funding would be lost. Palo Verde and Lassen College will each lose an estimated $1.7 million this academic year, according to an estimate by CalMatters using the state’s funding formula. While Lassen College was able to continue educating most of the prison’s students, it lost nearly 1,800 incarcerated students who were studying at the fire training center adjacent to the prison.
But unlike Lassen and Palo Verde colleges, Cerro Coso Community College will not offer any additional correspondence-based classes as a result of the prison closures, said Houck. He said the “quality is not the same” and that neither students nor faculty prefer it. Instead, the college will focus on recruiting more students from the local prison units that will remain.
As for the incarcerated Cerro Coso students who are leaving, they will need to connect with a new college at the prison where they go next.
Carlson has few options to help them and typically must wait for the prisoners to contact her office and request a transcript. As of May 11, roughly 60 students from the D Yard in Tehachapi and the California City prison have reached out to her team to request a transcript, and most people reached out before their transfer, at the moment they knew their destination.
Carlson and her colleagues predict those numbers will go up as more people settle into their next prison, but they also know some may never finish their degrees.
Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.
EXPOSED was first posted on May 18, 2023 at 7:30 am.
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A collared pronghorn took her last breath on Feb. 16. The adult doe’s remains were found on the south end of the Pinedale Mesa.
Another marked-and-tracked doe died a couple days later, just 500 yards away. A week later the third adult female went, her final resting place a mile or so north of her migratory compatriots.
With that, every collared animal that traveled the celebrated Path of the Pronghorn in 2022 was dead.
It was a grim sign for a migratory pronghorn population that has thrived in recent years. Now, following the deadliest winter on record in which a disease outbreak compounded fatalities, the fate of the long-distance travelers that winter in the Green River basin but sojourn for the summer in Grand Teton National Park, the National Elk Refuge and along the Gros Ventre River is unclear. Wildlife scientists aren’t sure how many remain.
“Anything’s possible, right?” Brandon Scurlock, a regional wildlife coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, said. “But I would have to think that some of those animals made it and will make that migration.”
But the outlook is grim, with the large majority of animals from the larger Sublette Herd likely dead, according to Scurlock. Pronghorn in the herd were being closely studied as the state considers whether to recognize and protect a route that remains undesignated due to political pressure from industry groups. The monitoring effort tracked 83 does throughout the herd as recently as December. By Tuesday, when Scurlock spoke to WyoFile, just 21 of them were still alive — including zero of the Jackson Hole migrants.
“We lost 75% of our collared animals,” he said. “It’s erroneous to [extrapolate] that 75% to the entire herd, but that’s our best indication of survival. If we did have 400 or 500 [Jackson Hole migrants], our best guess is that 75% of those might be gone.”
In Jackson Hole pronghorns’ favor is that the migratory population has thrived of late. Counts in 2020 and 2021 were the highest on record.
If the so-called Path of the Pronghorn does live on, it’s all but assured that drastically fewer animals will make the journey, which cuts through gas fields, skirts coming-soon subdivisions and treads over a mountain pass.
An archaeological site along the migration route at Trappers Point holds evidence that humans have hunted pronghorn along the path as long as 6,000 years ago.
But even within that long history, the Path of the Pronghorn has faded before.
Joel Berger, a Wildlife Conservation Society researcher and former Jackson Hole resident, was part of the multi-agency research team around the turn of the century that first mapped the route. The science led to the Bridger-Teton National Forest amending its management plan, in essence creating the first federally designated migration corridor in the United States. The southern reaches remain undesignated — to the chagrin of some wildlife advocates.
“Early reports were a couple of thousand around the turn of the century, then they went extinct locally in Jackson,” Berger said.
The migration route was lost, he estimated, between about 1910 and the 1950s.
“The pronghorn were just all shot out,” Berger said, “because we didn’t have good conservation in those days.”
Green River basin pronghorn evidently learned the ancient route into modern day Teton County again some four decades later. Berger likened them finding their way back to a pinball player’s inevitable outcome.
“What happens? Ultimately, the ball ends up in the hole, right?” Berger said. “From our GPS data we know they were bouncing all over, but the only access into Jackson was the single route.”
Fast forward to the present, and management of the pronghorn herd is much more deliberate and science-based.
Game and Fish and the National Park Service not only survey the Jackson segment annually, the state agency keeps close tabs on numbers within the entire herd, which spans western Wyoming from Green River to northern Grand Teton National Park. The population breached 60,000 in the early 2000s but was last estimated at 43,000, Scurlock said.
In past bad winters over the last couple decades the herd has fared OK.
“We know we did lose some pronghorn in ‘16-’17, but this winter was unprecedented in terms of the number of days below zero and the depth of the snow on the winter range. ” Scurlock said. “We just didn’t see these large foci of carcasses [in ‘16-’17].”
In the wake of winter 2022-’23, there are conspicuous concentrations of death scattered throughout the region. Motorists can see them without leaving their vehicle in places like the East Fork hill, located on the east side of Highway 191 between Farson and Boulder.
“We’re seeing these clusters of animals on the landscape that are now dead,” Scurlock said. “Rock Springs to Boulder, over to Big Piney, down by Kemmerer.”
Outbreaks of mycoplasma bovis, a new affliction in the Green River basin that causes a deadly respiratory disease, have been observed in the hardest-hit areas, he said. The carcass of the first Jackson Hole migrant that died this winter was shipped to a Laramie laboratory and tested positive for the disease.
There are a few bright spots better for survival along the southern fringes of the Sublette Herd’s high desert home, Scurlock said. Those areas, he said, include the Red Desert between the Killpecker Sand Dunes and the town of Superior and the bluffy country overlooking Interstate 80 near James Town.
Although it’s an open question what remains of the Jackson Hole segment, answers should come through in the next couple weeks.
“In a nutshell, we won’t know until they show up in June,” Game and Fish wildlife biologist Aly Courtemanch said.
State and federal agencies will partner to do a more-thorough census of what’s left later in the summer. Game and Fish has drastically reduced hunting opportunities to give the herd its best shot at recovery. Doe and fawn hunting — which has the most impact on populations — has been eliminated in all hunt areas roamed by the herd, Scurlock said.
“They are fairly fecund, and they can bounce back pretty quick just because they have twins as the norm,” he said. “Our plan is to give the herd the maximum opportunity to bounce back by eliminating that reproductive harvest.”
Still, the population’s starting point will likely be significantly lower than wildlife managers have seen in their lifetimes. They’re beginning to see what that looks like.
Game and Fish biologist Gary Fralick’s territory doesn’t cover the Sublette Pronghorn Herd, but he drove through a swath of its habitat on Monday on his way to take a look at what’s left of the Wyoming Range Mule Deer Herd.
“Since I’ve been around, in that country it’s always the pronghorn leading the deer. And they’re not there.”
Gary Fralick
Typically there’d be “several hundred” pronghorn foraging this time of year on pastureland and in the sagebrush from the Hoback Rim down to Daniel Junction, he said.
Fralick, a 30-year veteran at his biologist post, saw only 11 animals. Their absence, he said, isn’t because of a delayed migration. It’s because they’re dead.
“Since I’ve been around, in that country it’s always the pronghorn leading the deer,” Fralick said. “And they’re not there.”
The post Fatal winter puts ‘Path of the Pronghorn’ on shaky ground appeared first on WyoFile.