At any time on the Internet, and on a good day between Cocoa and Vero Beach, listeners can find a rare gem in the radio world: WFIT-FM in Palm Bay, a proudly old-school radio station with live deejays and progressive playlists.
Fanatical about their genres, they broadcast at 89.5 FM from the campus of Florida Institute of Technology. Multiple times a week, musicians from both local and nationally-known bands touring the area are featured in interviews or play live in a state-of-the-art studio.
The dozen or so deejays are wrangled by program director Todd Kennedy, who doubles as a deejay himself. When Kennedy graduated from college, he came to Cocoa Beach to surf. He ended up finding another kind of wave – radio – and he has ridden it for the last 20 years.
For all of that time, he says, people have been predicting that his profession would go extinct. Instead, Kennedy has watched his tiny, community-supported NPR station steadily increase its audience – including in Vero – even as it clings to the traditional model of locally produced music shows.
Kennedy’s own four-hour midday show, Sound Waves, recently featured an 11-minute interview with George Clinton, founder of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic and the headliner for the lagoon fund-raiser LagoonFest. In the same show, Kennedy aired a concert in the WFIT studios of another artist at the music festival, Beebs of Beebs and Her Money Makers.
The mix of deejays, concerts and interviews has been a foundation of the station’s success since it first went on the air in 1975.
Melbourne was still a small town, small enough that when the antenna needed to be hoisted onto the top of the seven-story dorm, Roberts Hall, the fire department sent a truck out to help.
That stick is still in use today. But the broadcast studios long since moved out of the basement. Four years ago, they moved into a new, 5,000-square-foot complex next to the Gleason Performing Arts Center. The university provided the property and an architect, and the station, with help from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, raised the funding for the building. Along with grants, they survive now through donations raised during two annual fund-raising drives.
Programming continues to evolve as its devoted audience ages and new listeners are recruited.
By the late 1980s, the station ranked in the top five college radio stations in the nation. In 1993, to the horror of some fans, the station dropped its alt-rock format for jazz. Two years later, it signed on with NPR. The students who ran the station through the 1970s and ’80s were slowly replaced with salaried professionals.
Kennedy, meanwhile, was forging a career path in the record business. Born in 1959 and raised in the Boston area, he laughs about his first deejaying experience – spinning records and reading the announcements in his elementary school cafeteria. At 14, he got his first paying job in a record store.
Later, at Springfield College, he got involved in the college radio station that teamed with talent from nearby Boston, which fully embraced London’s punk bands. “It was really exciting,” recalls Kennedy.
After graduation, with savings from his record store jobs, he came south to Florida with his future wife Robin for that three-month surfing vacation that never ended. He got a job at the Record Bar in the Melbourne Mall and eventually opened his own record store in downtown Melbourne. Called Jazz Waves, it focused on independent music – blues, rock and folk. With his baby boy parked in a bassinet by the cash register, Kennedy would counsel music buffs pawing through the albums, or special ordering from Kennedy’s vast catalogues. “This was before Amazon,” he notes wryly.
In 1997, he started volunteering at WFIT, hosting a late-night jazz show. The next year, when the station’s program director left for California, Kennedy got the job.
Within a few years later, the station officially changed from a jazz format to Triple-A – Adult Album Alternative, a format that grew out of album-oriented rock.
While its fans are rabid, growth has been thwarted by FCC limits. Still, WFIT’s tiny 8,000-watt transmitter manages to reach not only Sebastian and Wabasso, but south to Central Beach on the island and State Road 60 on the mainland. (And it is broadcast in HD, the first Brevard County radio station to do so.)
By contrast, WQCS, the NPR affiliate in Fort Pierce, is more than 100 times that size. At 100,000 watts, its signal extends from northern Palm Beach County to Melbourne.
The programming on WQCS is almost entirely syndicated news shows and classical music. While WFIT also airs NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” its music programming includes not only public radio standards like blues and jazz, but reggae, roots, world beat, doo-wop and indie rock. One show offers nothing but great guitar music; another explores emerging trends like synthpop and nu-disco.
“We still have deejays coming in with shipping crates of CDs,” Kennedy says.
He encourages a logical flow to his deejays’ playlists, mixing the better known with the less known. “A lot of Triple-A stations do that, and record companies are putting more emphasis there to get new artists heard. If you like Tom Petty, you might like this band called Band of Horses. Or if you like the Allman Brothers, you might like the Alabama Shakes.”
One of the longest running shows on WFIT is Sunday morning’s “FM Odyssey” with Joe Migliore. It began in Melbourne in 1991 and is now syndicated nationally. His interview subjects include Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Rita Coolidge and Arlo Guthrie.
Longtime residents pack the daily schedule.
Wednesday’s “On the Latin Side” is hosted by Panama-born Anselmo Baldonado, who has lived in Brevard for three decades. That follows “Christoph’s Vault,” hosted by longtime King Center staffer Chris Hauck; he describes his show, which only started last year, as a “heavily funkified Americana retro-roots rock jam.”
One deejay, Mary Elwood, known as Sister Mary, has a blues show and is the self-appointed “den mother” of the blues show deejays; Kennedy says she “keeps them pointed in the right direction,” making sure they record their promos and put their playlists together.
Another deejay, Gary Zajac, or Mr. Z, with a Friday night jazz show Kennedy declares “the finest blues show you will hear on the radio,” is taking the summer off, “a sabbatical,” Kennedy calls it jokingly; Mr. Z, like the rest, is a volunteer.
“He said he hadn’t had a Friday night off in 30 years,” says Kennedy.
