Miami Herald - Press Release about WAVS 1170 AM Radio

Direct Quote from:- THE MIAMI HERALD

CARIBBEAN SOUNDS

Tuesday, January 16, 2001

Section: Living

Edition: Final

Page: IE

KEVIN BAXTER, Special to the Herald

Memo: TELEVISION / RADIO / AROUND THE DIAL

Caption: HONORARY WEST INDIAN: Ray Hooper started

Caribbean programming on WAV'S in 1987, and DJs like Winston Barnes,

have turned the station into a community billboard for South Florida listeners.

Ray Hooper got his radio baptism under fire. Or, rather, under crossfire.

On one side was the North Korean army, which wasn't above firing a shot or two at the Navy destroyer on which Hooper served as a radio operator. On the other were Hooper's crewmates, who took several figurative shots at the music he piped through the intercom.

"In the afternoon," he apologizes. "1 played Armed Forces Radio Mostly Big Band music."

But when the crew threatened to mutiny if it heard Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy one more time, the captain let Hooper hook up a record player to the intercom and broadcast 45s.

"That got me interested in radio," says Hooper, who enrolled in broadcasting school straight out of the Navy. "But if anybody had told me 30 or 40 years ago that I would wind up in Davie running a Caribbean station, I would have told them they were crazy."

There were a few stops between Davie and the Navy, of course, but that's exactly where Hooper wound up, as general manager of WA KS-AM (1170). It wasn't a format that Hooper chose, mind you. but after failing spectacularly with a mix of international programming, an urban-contemporary format and Spanish-language content, he finally asked the office staff what they'd like to hear "A couple of ladies from the islands were working in the office and they said, 'Why don't you try making it a West Indies station⁹ Nobody's doing that,'" Hooper says. "I'm a big believer in market research, so I looked into it and found out there were 400.000 West Indians living in the area."

That was more than enough to support a small AM station, so in January 1987 WAVS switched to Caribbean programming

"My interest really is to get news and information from the Caribbean," says Wayne Luces, a former party DJ from Trinidad and a voracious consumer of West Indian radio. "Of course the music has something to do with it, too. But it's primarily the news and information about what's going on down there that you can't get anywhere else."

So at WA VS, where much of the programming day is dedicated to an array of West Indian music, it's the news and public-outreach programs that have cemented the station's reputation as a community resource.

SOCIAL WORK'

"We're doing, to a certain degree, social work," says WAVS Winston Barnes, a native Jamaican who hosts three hours of midday airtime "What we have become is a sounding board for the community. It gives something of a focus in a community that, for many people, is still foreign to them."

NEWS FROM HOME

"We don't have enough Caribbean programs to cater to the Caribbean community," Andrews says. '' People get information that they couldn't get anywhere else."

That information includes immigration updates, news flashes from home or advice on how to navigate the Byzantine social service agencies of the U.S. government. And it's information that frequently has a life-changing effect on listeners.

"I hear that virtually every day," Barnes says. "Frankly, it humbles me. For a time, I assumed I was [just] doing work. It stopped being that a long time ago.

"We have become a sounding board. Sometimes we're a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes all people need from us is information they don't have."

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Press Release about WAVS 1170 AM Radio

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