Radio M celebrates our 16-year M-iversary this month, so this seems like a good time to tell the history of the Wabash Valley's most unlikely radio station.

We went on the air April 1, 1985, but our beginnings go back almost a year earlier. Our founding group -- myself and two others -- were doing shows on Rose-Hulman's WMHD, and I was doing a two-hour morning show every weekday and juggling that with a full-time job in software engineering. Without going into the details, we'd developed a great admiration and respect for Album 88 (WRAS) in Atlanta, the station of Georgia Tech. And we started to wonder: Could the Album 88 format work in commercial radio?

And back then, long before we ever got there, WSDM was just humming along, playing whatever format it decided to have that month and not having very many (any?) listeners. Word got around that management might be interested in some changes, and our group went into action. We produced a demo tape, a format brochure, the whole works, and we -- as they say in L.A. -- "went to meeting" with them. We knew it was a longshot idea -- playing a wide range of album-focused new music without hype, especially here in Terre Haute. But we were all younger then, and we didn't know how preposterous our idea was, so we plowed ahead with way too much confidence and way too little experience.

Then one night, it was almost as if reality itself shifted while we slept ... because the next morning, we got THE CALL: We would be given the chance to remake WSDM but, as they said, "you only get one ratings book." We celebrated, and we turned our lives upside down in the push to make our April 1 on-air date.

April 1, 1985: April Fool's Day, so we figured that would give us some cover in case everything went sideways. 6 AM came, and we were tempted to pull a Dr. Johnny Fever and run the needle across a record of elevator music, but the actual format change was much less exciting. Mantovani faded out, a couple commercials ran, and then one of our new legal IDs -- "98 Radio M is WSDM Brazil-Terre Haute; the music matters, right here on Radio M" -- and the opening bars of "Change" by Tears for Fears went out via 5,000 watts to radios across the Wabash Valley. Radio M was real!

Three months later, the Arbitron book came out. We were in a dismal 11th place ... but we had DOUBLED the station's ratings, and I finally got a long-term contract to stay on board as program director.

The early years weren't easy. Our first hire, Alison -- now our legendary late-night radio goddess -- almost ended her career prematurely when she played a new Sigue Sigue Sputnik song without noticing an especially provocative lyric. The station's old sponsors didn't have much interest in advertising to, as one put it in a letter to the owners, "a bunch of punks, hippies, and homosexuals," and new sponsors were slow to come on board. The other two members of our founding team were lured to the then-budding Silicon Valley with high-paying jobs. But through it all, Radio M continued to grow and mature -- slowly at first, but as we gained more experience, things started to come together more often than they didn't.

As Radio M went into the 1990s, our format slowly evolved to better reflect our evolving (and, yes, aging) audience. The great new music of the mid-80s that got us going was still there, but there were new artists, new musical styles, and a growing awareness of "world music." And as many of our listeners -- including us -- got into their 30s, they were rediscovering many of the bands from the 70s that had the same foundational DNA as our "core" artists. What we were playing defied easy description -- back then, just as it does now. It wasn't "new wave," but it also wasn't AOR, or middle-of-the-road, or pop, or anything else. It was, as we started to say on the air, "three decades of music that matters." That gave us the freedom to play music that "worked," regardless of who or where it came from.

We always knew that our limited 5,000-watt signal was a problem, and there wasn't much we could do about THAT. But one thing we did in 1999 vastly improved our coverage of the entire Wabash Valley: Our owners signed an agreement to rebroadcast Radio M on 98.5 FM at WACF over in Paris. Now, Radio M is heard all the way from Danville to Sullivan, Mattoon to Crawfordsville. And we moved our offices from the little two-room shack at our transmitter site in Brazil to our current location in downtown Terre Haute. Now we don't have to drive 15 minutes to find food!

Now as we enter the 21st century, it's FOUR decades of music that matters, and our format is one you'll find on hardly any other stations -- commercial or college -- anywhere in America. The radio trade journals occasionally take notice of us: a "crazy little station in Indiana" that nobody can pigeonhole, but still does enough billing to keep the owners happy. And while our ratings certainly aren't #1 (or #2, or #3, for that matter), the ratings consistently show that Radio M has by far the highest "TSL" (time spent listening) in the entire Terre Haute market. This means that we don't have the most listeners, but once you find us, chances are you're going to stick with us for a long time. And that's the advertiser message that keeps us afloat here in 2001.

The industry is changing quickly, though -- brought on by ownership consolidation, the new technology of the World Wide Web, the new portable music players, and the growing use of increasingly sophisticated automation. Yes, we let our very own computer called "Otto" run our overnights, but we're firmly committed to giving you live and local DJs from 6 AM to 2 AM every weekday and during the day on weekends too. No "voice-tracked" shows out of Chicago or Nashville; our DJs live here and are part of the communities we serve.