A first time for everything: Moving KOPN

For nearly 50 years, the community radio station KOPN lived at the top of a steep, narrow set of stairs at 915 E. Broadway in downtown Columbia.

Starting in a closet-like room at the front of the property, KOPN eventually expanded to fill the second floor of the building with its offices, library, on-air studio, production studio, living space and several storage spaces.

At the end of June, the station finished its move to a new location at 401 Bernadette Drive. Although there is much to be unpacked, the studio is complete with a large parking lot, fresh flooring and, most importantly, no stairs.

The station decided to move for several reasons, including accessibility issues, high rent costs and lack of parking.

The new building was purchased in December, and board member Joy Rushing began sorting and thinning the music collection in February. Rushing volunteered around 20 hours each week to the project, with help from her fellow board member Margot McMillen, the KOPN staff and around 60 volunteers.

“We had a vision of not only just packing for the move, but improving our collection, making indexes and making things available,” Rushing said.

Together, they sorted, sold and moved an estimated 35,000 LPs and 34,000 CDs in addition to the furniture, equipment and other objects in the space. The clearing out produced several quirky finds, including a collection of gospel rock records by artists dressed like the band Kiss and a desk drawer filled entirely with small wheels.

During the moving process, KOPN also discovered several boxes of reel-to-reel tapes with recordings of some of the station’s earliest shows, which it is working to digitize.

The collection of music was sorted by genre and divided into boxes “to keep” and boxes “to sell,” then moved to the new studio or one of several storage facilities, based on Rushing and McMillen’s methodical system.

“There is not a step-by-step way to go through, archive or thin a collection like this,” McMillen said. “We just had to make it up as we were going along.”

While volunteers were going through the library, operations manager Dylan Martin set-up the technical infrastructure in the new studio, with the help of a week of pre-recorded shows from June 13 through June 19. Martin is excited for increased possibilities for community events in the new space as well as its reliable network. However, there are many aspects of the old space that he will miss.

“There was a very particular smell there too, which is really, really hard to describe,” Martin said. “But if you ask anybody, they know what you’re talking about.”

The move was time consuming and demanding, but it uncovered a slew of community support, said former interim-director Sarah Catlin.

“It verified for me how beloved KOPN has been over almost five decades,” Catlin said. “People were so invested in helping and our plans for the library.”

KOPN will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year in the new space.