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| Gerald Gaule |
Gerald Gaule once weighed 540 pounds, but he cut that to 246
with gastric bypass surgery three years ago, and now he's started two Internet
radio stations with plans to add a third.
"I have a face for radio," jokes Gaule, 49 tooregonlive.com, a veteran of little AM radio stations from Colorado to Oregon's
Stayton, Sweet Home, Woodburn, Albany, Eugene and Springfield to Longview and
the old KAAR AM 1480 that operated in Vancouver from 1981 to 1987. Gaule lives in Hazle Dell, OR.
He worked for Omni Media, the digital media agency for a
while, but after a 23-year career, mostly in AM radio, he moved back to Vancouver last July.
He is now the owner-manager-engineer of KAARadio-Oldies
(1954-79) (Listen-Line: Click Here) and Country Lovin Radio Classics (1927-89) (Listen-Line: Click Here). KAAR is "a tribute
station," to the job he loved at KAAR AM 1480, he said, operating in his
closet-sized studio in his apartment in Hazel Dell. His third station will be
adult contemporary, perhaps called "The Breeze," he says.
He plays tunes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, peppering the
offerings with old radio shows, news spots and information. He works from his
personal collection of more than 30,000 classic pop and 20,000 country music
songs, all of which he has digitized for his three computers. He says he has
maybe 10,000 easy listening songs. But he has no way of knowing how many
listeners he has beyond the occasional emails he gets from fans.
Gaule's stations are among hundreds of thousands of Internet
stations operating in the United
States , few of them turning a profit.
Joe Kenney, CEO of the profitable Pandora Internet radio
system, says in a recent videotaped online interview that these stations are
intimate and personalized.
Some make money by selling advertising or soliciting
donations. Most make nothing.
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