While there are several ways to grow a radio station’s
audience, not many include fertilizer.
But then, few radio stations use a 70-foot Washingtonian
palm tree planted in back of its studio as an antenna pole. Power 100 watts.
“We try to take good care of that tree,” said Tom Boyhan,
the owner of low-power
WJTW, 100.3 FM, known as “Jupiter’s Home Town Radio
Station.” He tells Barbara Marshall
at pbpulse.com, “Our first one got hit by lightning.”
The palm tree was Boyhan’s workaround of a Town of Jupiter
rule prohibiting antennas more than 50 feet tall near residential areas.
With an extra dose of fertilizer and regular watering, a few
more listeners each year from Palm Beach Gardens to Hobe Sound might be able to
tune in to the station’s mix of local news and nostalgia, with songs that range
from ’50s crooners to ’70s soft rock, salted with plenty of show tunes.
On a local radio dial dominated by homogenized super
stations with corporate formats devised in board rooms, tiny home-grown WJTW is
radio’s artisanal micro-brew.
Instead of “Don’t Touch That Dial” bombast, there’s a
handmade quality to the airwaves emanating from this four-room office suite,
where the transmitter room is the size of a closet and the production studio
doesn’t have soundproofing.
“It’s like college radio for people who graduated 40 years
ago,” said Boyhan.
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| WJTW 60dBU Coverage Map |
Once, almost every town in America had a station like WJTW,
that broadcasts APBs for lost dogs and once, a lost parrot. North county sports
teams, scholarship-winning students and service clubs promoting fundraisers
also get regular shout-outs.
“Radio can be far
more intimate than other forms of media,” said Boyhan, a former real estate
developer who moved to Jupiter in the 1970s.
He started the station because he never forgot how much fun
he had working in college radio, then for a few years in commercial radio.
When it went on the air in 2004, Boyhan’s personal
collection of 1,300 songs, some saved from his days as a college disc jockey,
was the entire music library.
Today, it’s grown to a wildly diverse 3,941-song playlist
that might result in Patti Page segueing into Creedence Clearwater Revival then
careening into Bill Withers and Elvis. A set that begins with Johnny Cash
walkin’ the line might include Neil Diamond, then end with the crooning of one
of Jupiter’s famous former residents, the late Perry Como.
