St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 6

cMf engesthe palty of life ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH April 10, 1973 I wf Radio Station Struggling To Stay Alive By PAUL WAGMAN Of the Post-Dispatch Staff THE ACID BLUEPRINT for life serves as inspiration for the call letters of radio station KDNA. Even so just four years after it was born the innovative station is facing the possibility of oblivion. Although the chances of a premature demise appear unlikely, the fact remains that in about three months KDNA will almost certainly leave the air. Right now, no one knows for certain when or even if it will return.

Since KDNA began to broadcast (at 102.5 on the FM dial), it has offered an approach and format that are unique in the St. Louis area. While most stations, A STATION UP IN THE AIR: Staff members of radio station KDNA broadcasting a weather report from the roof of the Continental Building in 1972 after its studio power was shut off because of an overdue electric bill. (Post-Dispatch Photo) lapers: Plastic Health Hazard? 1973, New Vork Time Service 10 NEW YORK, April I HIS IS lHb S10KY OF Pampers and how they grew. Once upon a time, near a town named Ivorydale in far-off Ohio at the Procter Gamble Co.

went to work to make better disposable (long ago in 1956), an equation of research and development trolls diapers, for, as they were to say later, "The future President of the United States deserves a drier bottom." If all went well, 9,000,000 babies could say bye-bye to droopy, saggy cloth diapers. Mommies would be liberated to that of another small station would create space on the FM dial for a station of major transmitting power (that is, KDNA). Without such a move, KDNA would drown out whatever small station it med near; therefore, it could not make the move at all the FCC would not approve it. KDNA has approached the owners of several of these small stations, which are operated by high schools and small colleges, and has been encouraged about the possibiliUes for an arrangement with at least one. In return for the small station's co-operation, KDNA would offer to help it with its broadcast service.

In its other approach, however, KDNA's chances for success appear negligible. Since last fall, the station has been attempting to persuade St. Louis school officials to set up some type of co-operative arrangement between KDNA and the radio station of the city's public schools, KSLH. But the school officials are not interested. THE BASIS of KDNA's interest is the fact that KSLH, which is used mainly for instruction, and which broadcasts at 91.5 FM, is on the air just six hours a day, and on school days only.

According to KDNA computations, this means that KSLH is not broadcasting 88 per cent of the time. Last fall, KDNA asked school officials if it could use KSLH's frequency during empty air time. The school officials were not interested, however, so when, at about the same time, KDNA petitioned the FCC for this share-time agreement it did so without an endorsement from the Board of Education. In January, the FCC turned down KDNA's proposal on the ground, KDNA's Thomas said, that the consent of the Board of Education was needed. Shortly thereafter, Thomas met with David J.

Mahan, assistant to the superintendent of schools, to expand on KDNA's ideas for a co-operative venture. Thomas suggested two major proposals, both of which, he asserted, would maintain or improve the school system's audio services at a savings to taxpayers. Contending that KSLH was no longer needed, Thomas suggested that the school phase out the station and replace it with a tape system. Meanwhile, KDNA would buy KSLH, and for situations in which the schools felt that radio was still required, KDNA would provide free of charge an auxiliary channel. This auxiliary channel is the type that can be received only by special radios.

Supermarkets and other institutions use them to play piped-in music. KDNA would provide the special equipment. ALTERNATIVELY, Thomas suggested that KSLH allow KDNA to use its 88 per cent unused air time and receive in return the right to utilize KDNA's superior transmitting equipment at no cost. The higher power transmitting equipment, Thomas said, would allow the use of less sensitive, less expensive receiving equip for example, play one style of music, KDNA has offered all kinds, and at any time, with the intention of expanding the listener's appreciation. Listening to KDNA, one can expect Frank Sinatra to be followed, with equal likelihood, by Bob Dylan, Antonio Vivaldi, or Japanese folk music.

Then again, one may hear an interview with a dog catcher, or the poetry of John Donne. Even in its weather reports, KDNA has managed to be creative and unusual it broadcast information on pollution levels before any other staation. IN SHORT, KDNA has been challenging, surprising and daring. But it has always been deficient in one major area: money. This has led to its present crisis.

Again and again, the listener-supported station has been placed in the position of either paying some vital bill such as telephone or electric or going off the air. The crisis has been weathered each time, but only because KDNA treats each dollar as if Washington's portrait were a Picasso original. About $30,000 a year not only pays for all the station's broadcasting services, but clothes, feeds and shelters the 15 members of its young, zealous staff. None of this scrimping, however, has altered the basic financial plight of the station. KDNA was founded with $100,000 supplied by Lorenzo Milam, a Californi-an who spent his inherited fortune promoting stations like KDNA.

Now Milam is in debt. AS A RESULT, Milam and the station's co-owner, Jeremy Lansman of St. Louis, have agreed to sell the station for $1,100,000 to Cecil and Joyce Heftel, commercial broadcasters from Hawaii. Since KDNA's staff dreaded the loss of their station, they attempted to raise $250,000 to buy it for themselves, but they failed rather miserably. Their fund-raising campaign netted only $20,000.

Milam and Lansman, therefore, agreed to sell the station to the Heftels. About six weeks ago, KDNA expected to hear that this transfer had met with the required approval of the Federal Communications Commission; instead there was a surprise. A St. Louis broadcast engineer had submitted a petition for denial of the transfer. KDNA says the engineer maintained that KDNA was superior to the station that would replace it.

KDNA's operations manager, Tom Thomas, does not think the petition will result in an FCC denial, but he does believe that the commission will need a few months to rule on it. Since the actual transfer would take place about 30 days after an FCC ruling, Thomas thinks tint the station will be leaving the air In about three months. When that time comes, KDNA will be silent, but it will not disappear. Heftel does not want the station's battered broadcasting equipment, or, for that matter, any of its facilities. Thus KDNA will be intact.

It will just need a frequency. TO GET A FREQUENCY, KDNA is pursuing two main approaches. The more promising one involves taking a frequency now used by one of the several small 10-watt educational stations in the area. The strategy behind this plan involves a kind of musical chairs. Moving one of the small stations to a frequency closer I Si fill It IS V'-rfi fi 'J tf 5 I -v i ut, riw-Lci oc vjaiuuic in itot-jw yean after it started to develop the product-began to expand Pampers to markets across the country.

While Pampers are nothing but happy news for executives and shareholders, environmentalists view with dismay the introduction of a partly plastic product that adds to solid-waste management problems. When asked whether there was any adverse impact on the environment from the use of disposable diapers, Lustik of replied: "PAMPERS ALLOW the mother to flush the waste products contained in the used diaper plus the bulk of the diaper the absorptive pad in the waterborne sewage system designed to handle these wastes. "The rinsed liner is wrapped in the waterproof backsheet for disposal with the trash. The liner and backsheet will not contribute to pollution when burned in a properly operated incinerator or buried in a landfill." But a study at the University of Pittsburgh graduate school of public health in mid-1971 warned that "there is considerable evidence that many, if not most, such diapers are disposed of improperly." For the Boy Scouts of Troop 30 in Oakland Township in western Pennsylvania the problem was more than academic. After policing 23 miles of roads in an annual cleanup that produced about 50 bagfuls of refuse, the troop found disposable diapers the second biggest problem after beer cans.

The Pittsburgh study, noting that putting human fecal matter in the garbage is generally illegal, warned that "if the soiled disposable diaper enters the solid-waste stream without any cleansing at all, then the potential hazards of com-municiable diseases become serious." from the washing machine. And, best of all, G's 91,500 shareholders would see their company dominate what seemed certain to become a billion-dollar business. The story has a happy ending, although it is still too early to tell if everyone will live happily ever after because some environmental groups find Pampers an ecological problem. Disposable diapers have become one of America's fastest growing consumer products and Procter Gamble makes at least 80 per cent of them. G's success has not gone unnoticed.

Both Kimberly-Clark whose "baby-shaped" Kimbies recently hit the New York market, and Johnson Johnson, which is test-marketing Johnson Disposable Diapers in Fort Wayne, and Denver, aim to get major parts of the diaper business. G's SUCCESS also has caused some corporate setbacks. Pampers knocked out the Scott Paper babyScotts in mid-1971, and International Paper Co. last November stopped selling its Freshabyes, a diaper that had started as Flushabyes. More than 20 companies have ventured into disposable diapers a market that boggles the corporate imagination.

Picture, if you will, 9,000,000 babies in diapers, each getting his pants changed eight times a day, 56 times a week 25 billion diaper changes a year, each costing 6 cents. The bill comes to 1.5 billion dollars. According to a trade publication, 20 to 25 per cent of these babies are swathed in disposable diapers, and the percentage is growing rapidly. Probably, $200,000,000 worth of throw-away diapers was sold last year PAMPERS, as describes it, is a diaper-and-pants-in-one made of three parts: an inner liner of smooth nonwoven rayon that is designed to let what the company euphemistically refers to as moisture flow one way; a middle pad of fibers, and an outer waterproof sheet of polyethylene. These modern diapers do not need safety pins.

They are held in place by sticky tabs a recent addition. "Pampers keep an infant drier than a cloth diaper does," declared Ron Lustik, a spokesman, and he is backed up by Consumer Reports, the product-testing magazine. The United States Testing working for the Stork Diaper Service in Philadelphia, came to the opposite conclusion, however. Pampers, the only one-piece disposable diaper now sold nationwide, is marketed through grocery chains and drug stores. It comes in several sizes.

THE PRICE varies widely, with a box of 12 overnight Pampers selling for between 69 and 99 cents in the New York area. A Wall Street authority on Procter Gamble figures Pampers will approach 5 per cent of total volume for the fiscal year ending June 30, which he estimates at 3.85 billion dollars. He said Pampers were extremely profitable. To develop Pampers, Procter Gamble set to work in 1956 and experimented for five years. Peoria, 111., mothers got a look at -mpers first and they didn't like the jice tag 10 cents apiece.

engineers worked five more years to develop a wondrously complicated machine that takes rayon and wadding and polyethylene and cuts and shreds and glues and folds and twists them into finished Pampers at a marvelous rate. AFTER MORE market testing in St. Louis, Sacramento, and Indianapo- IN THE STUDIO of station KDNA. Environmentalists Bracing For Siege ment in the classrooms. But Mahan and other school officials remain uninterested in KDNA's ideas.

"Our position," Mahan told the Post-Dispatch, "has not changed We feel it would be best not to share time with any other station." Mahan said that many persons, despite explanations to the contrary, would identify the broadcasts of KDNA with the school system, and that many of these broadcasts would not be suitable for children. This problem, he said, would arise not only with KDNA, but with any station. "We have conducted an evaluation of our radio station and our first consideration is this," Mahan said. "Regardless of which route we might follow, we just don't feel that the wisest route would be to share our frequency with another station." IF NOTHING ELSE works out, KDNA may take unilateral action against KSLH. This could involve a request to the FCC to restrict KSLH's license to operate during limited hours, with the remaining time open to KDNA.

(In its petition last fall, KDNA simply asked to be allowed to use KSLH's unused time, without requesting that the school station be specifically restricted.) More drastically, KDNA may challenge KSLH's entire license when it comes before the FCC for renewal next February. In this procedure, KDNA would ask for a hearing in which it would contend that its own broadcasts are more in the public interest than those of KSLH. Even if none of these plans pay off, KDNA's staff will continue to search for a frequency. Indeed, Lansman disclosed recently that the station would try to branch out to television; besides seeking a radio frequency, KDNA will file for a license to broadcast on a currently unused ultra high frequency channel, he said. The staff members at KDNA know that its broadcasts give St.

Louis a needed voice one of variety, concern, whimsy, spontaneity and irreverance. They don't want to let it vanish. have been reduced to meet federal standards, though automobiles remain a problem. Water quality has improved considerably in several areas, though "we still have a long ways to go," said Jack Smith, director of the Missouri Clean Water Commission. Holding up progress at this point, he said, is President Nixon's tight grip on federal clean water funds appropriated last fall.

Even after the President announced impoundment plans, Missouri expected to receive $49,600,000 for fiscal year 1974 projects, which are being considered now. So far, only $1,900,000 in federal funds has been released, Smith said. The funding cutbacks combined wtth an industry campaign to weaken federal standards are bringing the biggest challenge to environmental goals since Earth Day brought them into prominence, many environmentalists believe. "The National Environmental Policy Act is under assault, the Clean Air Act of 1970 is under assault. It's happening in the courts, in the administrative agencies and in Congress," Love said.

"The industry has highly paid experts available every day of the year. We have to focus on a crisis, and while we're focusing on one area, they may be making Inroads somewhere else." Two major showdowns the Environmental Protection Agency's ruling on extending the pollution control deadline for automobiles and Congress's vote on opening the Highway Trust Fund are expected to come during Earth Week, Love said. "We've been working on these things for three years," he said. "There could be no better way to commemorate Earth Day than to win them." By MARGIE FREIVOGEL Of the Posl-Dispatrh Staff IT IS EARTH WEEK 1973 at least according to a proclamation issued by President Richard M. Nixon.

St. Louis area environmetal groups and public officials, who once planned weeks ahead to celebrate the occasion, were surprised to learn the news. Earth Day 1970 was different. Three years ago this month, in the first full flush of spring and a new environmental awareness, architecture students inflated a 300-foot long plastic bubble in Forest Park. It was the focus of more than 20 exhibits in an Eco-Fair, which opened to responsive crowds at noon.

By 1:30 p.m. the bubble, wafting in the breeze, had pulled its moorings from the soft ground and collapsed to earth like a used dry cleaning bag. The crowds remained. So it is with the environmental movement, environmentalists say. Over the last three year's, bubble of a new cause has burst.

Highly visible, publicity oriented activities have largely disappeared, but interest remains and in a more effective form. That effectiveness will meet its most severe test in coming months, environmentalists believe, as they try to withstand an industry backlash against key federal environmental laws dating from 1969. Environmental Teach-in, the leanly staffed Wash ington organization that co-ordinated the first Earth Day, has matured into Environmental Action, equally lean but hardened by three years of experience. "We've moved from the vague battle cry of Stop Pollution to some specific areas the clean water amendments which passed Congress last fall and opening the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit, for example," said Sam Love, who was Southern co-ordinator for the first Earth Day and now is over-all co-ordinator of Environmental Action. "There's still a lot of excitement.

The momentum is still with us," he said. In St. Louis, environmental activities have taken a similar turn. The Sierra Club chapter, virtually nonexistent here at the time of Earth Day, has become the national organization's fastest growing unit. Moreover, the club has broadened its scope from strict conservation to more general environmental interests, particularly the question of how to use flood plain land here.

Since 1989 environmental legislation has flowered. Congress passed major air and water pollution standards and appropriations to see they are met. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which requires that environmental impact statements be prepared for major Government projects, gave critics a toehold which they have used to mount a major assault on plans they oppose, particularly highways and dams. In Missouri, federal and state pollution control programs have begun to take hold. Thumbnail assessments by state officials indicate that pollution emissions from power plants and large industries.