"We have to stand for something, and if we abandon what we stand for, our supporters will abandon us."
The first sound heard over the WMNF 88.5-FM signal wasn’t much.
The station’s founders had already gone door to door for a year gathering donations. They’d raised the antenna, by hand, using ropes. An engineer tapped on the transmission cable with a wrench, and that tapping sound could be heard over the radio that day in 1979.
It was an inconspicuous first breath of what would be countless hours of eclectic music and local voices over the next 40 years.
To those familiar with it, WMNF is a beacon of community advocacy. It’s a symbol of cool music, funky people and local events.
Four decades in, “the best little radio station on the planet” sounds and feels in many ways the same as those early years. It broadcast from a house where interviews were conducted in a bathroom and records stored in a tub.
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