While growing up in Pattersonville, New York, Paul Hitchcock relied on the radio as his vessel for optimism. He listened to Wolfman Jack, Dick Clark and Casey Kasem on his portable AM/FM device and dreamed of being on the other side of the speaker. He longed to connect with an audience in the same manner, wielding clarity, brevity and assuredness. But a large hurdle stood before him: Hitchcock stuttered.
The speech impediment caused him to withdraw. He was shy. He didn’t answer the phone or the door. The radio provided company.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘If I ever get fixed or ever get healed … if they figure out why I can’t talk, I want to be a DJ,’ ” Hitchcock remembers.
He ultimately found relief working with a speech therapist. On his own time, Hitchcock bolstered his growing confidence by pretending to be a radio host. He recorded himself on cassette tapes, asking traditional interview questions to imaginary guests, then borrowing snippets of popular songs to use as the responses. The gag was fresh out of the Rick Dees playbook and served as his first taste of production. He sent the cassettes to his older sister, who was off at college.
Hitchcock’s family moved to Tennessee for his high school years. He chose to attend Kentucky’s Georgetown College “for the sole purpose” of working at the campus radio station, WRVG-FM. He never took a broadcasting class but learned by doing. He served as the station’s music director before becoming the program director. During his senior year at Georgetown and first year out of college, Hitchcock worked professionally for WTKC 1300 in Lexington, then spent a year in Knoxville before moving to Morehead in 1986 to get his master’s degree in communications from Morehead State University. Part of his work-study package was a role as the graduate assistant for sports at the campus radio station, WMKY-FM.
The station’s reputation preceded it. WMKY debuted in 1965 as a four-hour, 10-watt station. Four years later, it became the first station in the country to receive a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare grant to increase its broadcast power to 50,000 watts. In 1980, it became an NPR affiliate station. As Hitchcock walked in on his first day in 1986, he could feel the momentum. All the equipment was new, from the reel-to-reel recorders to the cart machines. Between full-time staff and students, roughly a dozen people buzzed about. The newsroom was active, the Associated Press machine ticking away: duh-duh-duhduhduh-duh.
“It was the big time,” Hitchcock remembers.
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WMKY, also known as Morehead State Public Radio (MSPR), is licensed to operate at 37,000 watts, according to its website.
Now the general manager, Hitchcock says the station’s secret sauce has been the roughly 1,000 students who have passed through the studio since 1965. Included in that number are all three members of the station’s current core team: Hitchcock, News Director Samantha Morrill and Operations Director Greg Jenkins.
On Morrill’s first day as a sophomore in 2013, then-News Director Chuck Mraz handed her a press release from a local hospital about a new clinical service it was rolling out. Mraz told Morrill to write up a “voicer.” Afterward, he sent her into the recording booth to read what she had written.
“I was really shocked,” Morrill remembers. “Day one I was going to get to be on the radio. I was like, ‘This is wild and also very cool.’ I was excited to get in my car later and listen to it, and hear myself on the radio.”
After graduating in 2016, Morrill was hired by WYMT, a commercial television station based in Hazard. Getting internet installed in her Hazard apartment proved to be a lengthy process, during which Morrill resorted to other means of entertainment. First, she ran through her DVDs of episodes of The X-Files and The Office. Then, she turned on her handheld radio, picking up Richmond’s WEKU-FM. The signal provided an unexpected thrill, and it dawned on her that the experience wasn’t isolated.
“There are people out there who, at any point in time, for whatever reason—they can’t get internet or their electricity is out … they can turn on a radio, and they can pick up a public broadcasting signal and their local NPR station to get news, entertainment, music and weather updates,” Morrill says.
Eventually, Morrill switched back to the medium, first working at WEKU in Richmond before returning to Morehead and WMKY. She was named news director in 2023.
“When you talk about audio, it’s very intimate,” Morrill says. “It’s right there in your ears, getting to experience all of the different stories and content, music, commentary—whatever it may be.”
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While Hitchcock and Morrill come from broadcasting backgrounds, Jenkins found radio via his interest in music. He first heard WMKY while studying music as an undergraduate at MSU but didn’t begin helping out until he enrolled in a master’s program at the school and landed a graduate assistantship. He left briefly after graduation for a stint as a high school music and band teacher but returned a few years later when a full-time position came open at WMKY.
Jenkins loves mentoring, learning from, and collaborating with the students.
“We’re producing stuff; we’re having fun doing it; we have deadlines; we have a job to do,” Jenkins says. “We have daily tasks to get done, and everybody on the team is just working together to make those things happen.”
As WMKY celebrates 60 years of public service, one of its principal sources of funding is on the brink. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly voted in favor of a rescissions package that would eliminate more than $1 billion of previously approved funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a primary means of support for local stations such as WMKY. As of this writing, it is pending in the Senate.
Despite the ominous cloud cast by the development, Hitchcock hopes people maintain faith in the work that his team, and others like it, do. Radio can serve as an ally to those who need it, as he did when he was a young boy.
“It’s a trusted companion, through good times and bad,” Hitchcock says of radio. “It’s being in touch with your community … They’re talking to you as you listen. It’s a one-on-one communication, and that’s how it should be. It’s making that connection on a one-on-one basis. As humans, we look for that.”