Dialed in to its listeners

Breaking news found its way to the KAHI studios one recent morning. A power outage, a big one, had hit Auburn, though the radio station itself had been spared. For confirmation, morning DJ Barry Stigers looked out the window and across Lincoln Way.

Yup. Lights out.

The town was all atwitter.

Local business owner Cheryl Maki tuned in to KAHI (950 AM) and called Stigers because, as she would later say, "the dispatcher at the police station usually doesn't know."

Stigers, though, reported the heck out of the story. He determined that 2,700 homes, roughly half of Auburn, were affected, but that the outage followed no pattern. City Hall was dark, but the police station next door was lit. So Stigers mused about the labyrinthine wiring of the town.

"We didn't want to scare people," Stigers says, "and tell them it was something major until we knew."

The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. apparently wasn't talking, but finally City Manager Bob Richardson wandered over, popped his head into the studio and helped Stigers suss out the reason.

Turned out a squirrel's gnawing caused a transformer to malfunction.

Laugh if you must, but this was a big deal in Auburn, and KAHI gave it much more airtime than the other big stories of the day – the Bay Area oil spill or martial law in Pakistan.

As it should, perhaps.

After all, KAHI, which earlier in the month celebrated its 50th anniversary, calls itself "The Voice of the Foothills" for a reason. It's proudly provincial. And in a shrinking commercial radio landscape, where local voices are gobbled up by major corporations, KAHI is one of the last remaining locally controlled stations – 85 percent of the company's shareholders live in the region.

"This place is totally 'Northern Exposure,' " says operations manager and afternoon host Dave Rosenthal, referring to the 1990s TV show about a small Alaska town with a funky radio station. (Full disclosure: Rosenthal's wife, Traja, is a Bee copy editor.)

True, KAHI may be quaint and quirky and all that. But there's a reason it has lasted 50 years – it's professionally run.

The equipment may be decades old (the office workers use a DOS computer program and a dot-matrix printer) and the office cramped (about the size of a Granite Bay kitchen), but that hasn't been too much of an obstacle.

"We are operating in the black," says Jerry Henry, KAHI's president and general manager – and one of the shareholders.

But Henry says it's a challenge.

"I've made a commitment that (KAHI) is going to fly on its own," he says. "If we were to turn over the operation to some network, then it would probably operate better financially, but it would no longer be a community-focused station."

Other than public radio stations – and low- powered FM signals – it's hard to find a station as hyper-local as KAHI. In fact, Henry jokes that occasionally people mistake the station for a nonprofit.

"But we have to pay the rent and bills and meet payroll twice a month," he says. "So we're definitely for-profit."

Weekdays, KAHI has local programming from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. except for three hours of the syndicated political talk of the "Jerry Doyle Show" at noon.

Stigers does morning drive time, a rotating community show (concerning seniors, public safety, etc.) is at 9 a.m., then longtime Sacramento radio personality Mary Jane Popp has a magazine show from 10 a.m. to noon. Rosenthal returns in the afternoon with a three-hour news show. Syndicated talk shows round out the evening and overnight hours.

KAHI also is heavily into sports, broadcasting local high school sports, and it picks up the feeds of the Kings, San Jose Sharks and Oakland A's games.

On weekends, the station gets funkier. There's an on-air swap meet, a show for horse lovers, and local couple Don and Chere Yamasaki's "Garden Guru." The rest of the weekend mostly is automated oldies music of the '50s, '60s and '70s.

"We do informal surveys all the time, and oldies music is always at the top for our listeners," Henry says.

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• Call The Bee's Sam McManis, (916) 321-1145.