This is a scrappy story of young folks bum-rushing the airwaves through sheer force of will.
With humble origins that can be traced back to a University of Iowa dormitory broom closet, KRUI is now celebrating 40 years of FM radio broadcasting thanks to the passion of students and other community members.
In the beginning there was KWAD, named for the Quadrangle dorm, which closed its doors in 2016 and has since been demolished. Back in 1952, the station’s first DJs played Dixieland jazz and current popular music from the Quad’s closet studio, which transmitted signals through an AM radio carrier current that flowed through the dorm’s electrical system. KWAD slowly expanded its electrified network to other dorms by installing more transmitters and, in 1968, the station changed its name to KICR, which stood for Iowa Campus Radio.
Four years later, the station changed its name to KRUI, after a Cedar Rapids station began angling to use the KICR call letters. Even though it was an AM station, KRUI adopted what was referred to at the time as an underground FM radio format — DJs were given much more leeway than Top 40 stations to launch into extended “raps” about social issues and spin freeform rock, soul, blues and jazz.
Throughout the early 1970s, KRUI was the only station in the area that was dedicated to playing rock and roll. Because it had a captive audience of about 5,000 dorm residents, this student radio operation raked in roughly $10,000 per year in advertising revenues until 1974, when KRNA debuted as Iowa City’s first commercial rock station. Ad sales plummeted, and with no other funding streams to sustain KRUI, it ceased operating from 1976 to 1978.
But the kids refused to let their on-air dreams die, and by the end of the decade, KRUI had been folded into an arm of the university’s student government, which gave it a second life.
Momentum kept building, and at 7:03 p.m. on March 28, 1984, the station began broadcasting as a 100-watt FM radio station after a lot of heavy lifting by former KRUI general manager Peter Koenig and a core group of other student volunteers.
“[Koenig] had the vision, was able to rally the support for it, and handled the complex 93-page-long Federal Communication Commission application,” Joe Reagan told the Daily Iowan in 1984, when the Communication Studies major was serving as the station’s general manager. “A professional could have come in and done it, but that’s not what KRUI is about. KRUI is about students doing it.”
Blanketing Iowa City with its 89.7 megahertz signal, its expanded reach couldn’t have come at a better time for the surrounding community. College radio was transforming into a major cultural force in America, and the next phase in KRUI’s history coincided with the formation of a national network of independent music labels, record stores, zines, venues and college radio stations. That network made it possible for underground musicians to promote cross-country tours in a pre-internet age — which in turn planted the seeds for the Nirvana-led alternative rock explosion in the 1990s.
During this time, KRUI adopted its long-running tagline, “Iowa City’s Sound Alternative,” which emphasized the station’s commitment to promoting obscure sounds that could only be found left of the dial, where lower-frequency noncommercial stations could be found on old school analog radio sets. Fittingly, in 1991, KRUI’s T-shirts were branded with the slogan “Just a little to the left, honey.”
Iowa City’s relative proximity to several major Midwestern cities, combined with KRUI’s reputation as a thriving college radio station, ensured that a head-spinning array of national talent played in town on any given week — Nirvana, L7, Babes In Toyland, Los Lobos, Mudhoney, Uncle Tupelo, Meat Puppets, Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth, to name a few — many of whom stopped by the station to promote their gigs on air.
During radio’s early 20th century days as a new mass medium, the term broadcasting was coined as an agricultural metaphor: broadly casting sonic seeds across the land. This is what KRUI and other college stations did during an era that was dominated by corporate media outlets that made little room for the kinds of outsider voices that eventually found more accommodating spaces on the internet.
Throughout the 1990s, KRUI invested in this online future by upgrading its equipment, and in doing so it became America’s first all-digital college radio station. Then-general manager John Barker wrote in a 1995 station newsletter, “Digital has made a big impact at KRUI. From the way the DJs are able to do their show, how the listeners perceive the station, how the station is managed, and the foundation being laid for future improvements.”
With that solid foundation in place, KRUI was one of the earliest college radio stations to stream its broadcasts online, and today it is a 360-degree media operation that encompasses FM radio broadcasting, a website that publishes music news and reviews, play-by-plays of Iowa sporting events, internet streaming, podcasting and more.
Over the decades, KRUI kept its head above water as the university moved its studios from location to location, finally settling in a somewhat dumpy house near the Field House. The station’s studios remained in that building until 2002, when the next critical chapter in its history unfolded. After decades of treating KRUI like an unwanted stepchild relegated to the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) basement, school administrators planned to move its operations into an even dumpier barn-like building.
These events occurred during my first two years serving as KRUI’s faculty advisor, and I remain impressed to this day with the way that the station’s young staff rallied the troops and used their own broadcasts as a megaphone to pressure the university to change course. During a rally in 2002, KRUI staff handed out leaflets featuring a drawing of Herky driving a bulldozer accompanied by an all-caps headline, “DON’T LET THE U OF I TEAR DOWN KRUI AND MOVE US TO A BARN!”
The campaign worked, and KRUI found a home in the Iowa Memorial Union, where it thrived with new state-of-the-art facilities — that is, until the 2008 floods closed the IMU for a year, and its studios were temporarily moved back into a dorm. After a decade-long return to the IMU, COVID shut KRUI’s doors in 2020, something that posed existential questions about what it means to be a radio station without a studio serving as its physical hub and social lifeblood.
KRUI bounced back in the years following the pandemic under the steady hands of general managers Abbie Eastman and Daniela Rybarczyk, who steered the ship through uncharted waters into a brighter future. Once again, it was a group of teenagers and 20-somethings who resurrected this radio station from the ashes (to paraphrase the Who, the kids are still alright).
Looking over the horizon towards the station’s next 40 years, current general manager Tiger Slowinski waxes philosophical. “Radio, especially college radio,” he said, “has never fundamentally been about the format, or technology used, artists played, or DJs on air.”
“Radio, in its essence, is simply a platform to elevate the voices of a community. As long as we hold this to be true, it doesn’t matter how the technology, people, or even the community itself change. Radio will, and radio does, continue to serve our communities by elevating the voices within it.”
Ride the Airwaves
Bored on the road? Tune into the nearest student-run radio station.
KALA 88.5 FM
St. Ambrose University, Quad Cities
First air date: Nov. 4, 1967
Range: 10,000 watts
KBVU-FM 97.5 FM “The Edge”
Buena Vista University, Storm Lake
First air date: November 1997
Range: 6000 watts
KDPS 88.1 FM “Edge 88.1”
Des Moines Public Schools and Grand View University
First air date: 1953
Range: 5,200 watts
KICB 88.1 FM “The Point”
Iowa Central Community College, Fort Dodge
First air date: 1971
Range: 200 watts
KMSC 92.9 FM “Fusion 93”
Morningside University, Sioux City
First air date: 1978
Range: 13 watts
KRUI-FM 89.7 FM “Iowa City’s Sound Alternative”
University of Iowa, Iowa City
First air date: March 28, 1984
Range: 100 watts
KSTM 88.9 FM
Simpson College, Indianola
Range: 100 watts
KULT-LP 94.5 FM “The Kult”
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls
First air date: Oct. 17, 2003
Range: 100 watts
KURE 88.5 FM “Iowa State’s Student-Run Radio Station”
Iowa State University, Ames
First air date: 1949 as KMRA; Aug. 12, 1996 as KURE
Range: 630 watts
KWAR 89.9 FM “Your Sound”
Wartburg College, Waverly
First air date: 2008
Range: 1000 watts
KWLC 1240 AM “Luther College Radio”
Luther College, Decorah
First air date: Dec. 18, 1926
Range: 1000 watts daytime, 540 watts nighttime
KWPU 90.5 FM “The Ladder”
William Penn University, Oskaloosa
First air date: 1976 as KIGC 88.7
Range: 1000 watts
Kembrew has served as KRUI’s faculty advisor for the past twenty-four years, and he first got involved with college radio in 1989. This article was originally published in Little Village’s April 2024 issue.
