NPR Does KEOM

It’s been around since forever — not quite since the ’70s, but close enough. But just yesterday, National Public Radio’s Wade Goodwyn got around to profiling for All Things Considered none other than Mesquite ISD’s KEOM-FM (88.5), our once-upon-a-time favorite blast from the past where, Goodwyn reports, the sound of high school students playing the soundtrack to their parents’ lives “might make you say, ‘What is this, bring your kid to work day?'”

For grins and the occasional gem, I used to listen with some regularity — then again, I think my story on the station appeared in the paper version of Unfair Park well before the Internet, iPods and, um, reliable and affordable in-dash CD players? Maybe I’ll jog the memory on the drive in with a listen to the station with the prettiest broadcast tower in town. But someone needs to do a study on the toll DJ’ing for KEOM has taken on generations of Mesquite school children:

The music is a cornucopia of the 1970s. Motown, rock, folk, disco — everything from Karen Carpenter to Parliament Funkadelic, a mishmash that ironically would never have been played together on a single station back in the ’70s. The student DJs say they absolutely would not listen to this stuff of their own volition. But being forced to day after day, Wilson describes its insidious effect on her musical tastes.

“Some of it’s like, ‘Oh, I know this song,’ ” Wilson says. “Then you’re singing it, and pretty soon you like most of the stuff on here.”