WRBH marks 30 years of educating, entertaining visually impaired on New Orleans radio airwaves

When I pulled in to park at WRBH a week ago, Natalia Gonzalez was outside sweeping leaves off the sidewalk. The yard at the big old white house at 3606 Magazine St. was littered with branches, reminders of Hurricane Isaac. And a roofer was there.

“I just found out we need a whole new roof,” Gonzalez said. “But it could be worse.”

We went inside, she wrote a check to the roofing company, and we sat down to talk. This week marks the 30th anniversary of Radio for the Blind and Print Handicapped, 88.3FM, the 24-hour-a-day nonprofit station that keeps chugging along with the help of reading volunteers, supporters and boundless faith.

“I really feel like we have a guardian angel watching over us,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez needed a guardian angel in 2005 when she became executive director three days after Hurricane Katrina knocked the station’s transmitter in Chalmette off its foundation and scattered her staff and volunteers.

“That first day I felt completely overwhelmed and underqualified and scared,” she said. “I said, ‘I can’t do this.’”

But her husband, Guy, told her she could do anything she set her mind to, and by October, she was feeling optimistic. She had received a $20,000 emergency grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to buy a small transmitter, and National Guardsmen offered to get the station up and running if she let them do daily public service announcements as people began to move back into the city.

Seven weeks after the hurricane, the station was back on the air.

“The right things happened,” she said. “I could come back, and the studio engineer could come back, and it was so fortuitous that the National Guard was here.”

Seven years later, WRBH is thriving. It has a state-of-the-art Apple recording studio, two full-time employees, five part-time employees and 150 dedicated reading volunteers.

“We’re nothing without them,” Gonzalez said. “Hands down, WRBH has the best volunteers.”

WWL news anchor Angela Hill is a reader. Baseball great Ron Swoboda was reading the day I was there. Constance McEnaney, easily recognized by her British accent, has been a favorite of listeners for 30 years.

“We have at least five readers who have been here 20 years or longer. I’m just amazed by that,” Gonzalez said.

Tim Vogel, the studio engineer, loves the variety of characters who show up to read.

“They’re old, young, Uptown, lower 9th Ward, male, female. It’s really this cool little family we have,” he said.

Vogel calls himself “the button-pusher guy.” He’s the one who keeps the studio humming while volunteers read “The Times-Picayune Newspaper of the Air,” best-sellers, grocery ads, stories for kids, mysteries, the Wall Street Journal, young adult novels and much more.

The station also has shows in Vietnamese and Spanish, a Haitian show, “The Chef Show,” hosted by Mary Sonnier, “The Writers’ Forum,” and a show about public affairs. Its most recent addition is former Times-Picayune and current SportsNola.com sportswriter Brian Allee-Walsh’s “Talkin’ Saints” call-in show.

“The morning after every Saints game, he’ll do a show at 8:30,” Gonzales said. “We’re really excited about it. He’s been a reader here for years.”

The roots of WRBH go back to 1975 when Robert McClean, a blind mathematician, envisioned a reading radio station that would inform, educate and entertain blind and visually impaired people in the New Orleans area. At first he leased airtime from WWNO FM-89.9 and read the news. In 1982, he bought the 88.3 signal, and WRBH became broadcasting on Sept. 12 from a rented space at the Lighthouse for the Blind on Front Street.

The first time I wrote about WRBH was in 1990, when it was honored as one of President George Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light,” a program that recognized exemplary volunteer efforts.

It is something New Orleans should celebrate. It’s the only station of its kind in the United States and one of only three in the world.

“There’s one in New Zealand and Australia,” Gonzalez said. “There was one in Memphis (Tenn.), but it went off the air in 2004 for lack of funding.”

WRBH has had its share of money woes, most notably when riverboat gambling and video poker wiped out the bingo games that used to keep it going.

When I visited the station on Magazine Street in 1996, it was down to its last $5,000. The day I went to talk to the station manager, I met Diana Ahern, a volunteer, who was there composing a letter to send to area pastors, asking them to publicize her plight.

She had become blind 14 years earlier. She woke up one day and couldn’t see because of an extremely rare eye disease. She had three sons, and suddenly she could no longer drive them places or go to work. She had to learn to make her way in a strange new world. She called WRBH her lifeline.

“Who’s going to get up and read the newspaper to me? Who’s going to spend two hours on Sunday night reading the classifieds?” she asked.

She talked about old Burns & Allen shows that made her laugh and grocery store ads that saved her money,

“I couldn’t live without WRBH,” she said.

Members of the Rotary Club of Metairie were touched by her words. They held a gala to benefit WRBH that summer and then three more after that. By 1999, they had donated $275,000 to the station, allowing it to get back on its feet, expand services and pay off the mortgage on the Magazine Street building.

After that, other civic groups took over. Now, WRBH has one annual fund-raiser, the Pat Browne Golf Tournament, and is supported by grants, foundations, several local businesses, and “a very generous local foundation,” Gonzales said.

She always worries about the checks coming in, but she says that’s just her nature.

“We weathered Katrina. We weathered the economy. I feel like we’re on solid footing,” she said.

Gonzalez and Vogel want listeners to know that when The Times-Picayune begins publishing only three days a week in October, the "Newspaper of the Air" will still be on every day — from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. on weekday mornings (except on "Talkin' Saints" mornings when it will run until 8:30 a.m.) and from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

“We want listeners to not notice that much of a difference,” Vogel said.

On days when the paper isn’t printed, he’ll gather news from NOLA.com and other news sources, and readers will read it from iPads. So for those craving the daily news who don’t have computers or prefer not to get it from the Internet, WRBH will offer an alternative.

In an Aug. 3 letter to the editor in The Times-Picayune, WRBH program director Jackie Bullock wrote: "Our mission has always been to provide information for those who cannot read for themselves, but the broadcast is readily available to anyone who wishes to hear it."

Her words are a reminder that the station provides a service for everyone: Commuters on their way to the office, children who want to listen to a story after school, folks recovering from an illness, artists working in studios. Listeners can also tune in to the live stream and podcasts at Wrbh.org.

Gonzales was reminded of that one day when she called her younger sister in Houston and discovered she was listening to the station.

“She said, ‘”You’re calling me in the middle of the Steve Jobs book,’” Gonzales said.

As they celebrate 30 years on the air, staff members, supporters and volunteers can take pride in their wonderful one-of-a-kind station that means so much to listeners.

For Vogel, who followed his girlfriend to New Orleans and found his way to WRBH in 2009, the city and the station are the right place to be.

“I like what I do, I like the people here, and we’re doing something good in the world,” he said. “It’s an awesome slice of New Orleans.”

Columnist Sheila Stroup can be reached at 985.898.4831 or [email protected]. Read her columns at Nola.com/living.