It’s almost noon. The “On Air” sign flickers as Julie Norris and Jeremy Seghers, co-hosts for Front Porch Radio, enter the radio studio. Their guest, community developer John Rife, joins them in front of the soundboard.

Between songs by local artists, the three discuss Rife’s new endeavor, Think N’ Drink, a series of roundtable discussions among local business owners in Winter Park and Orlando. Halfway through the hourlong show, local artist Thomas Thorspecken comes in to sketch the scene of the broadcast from the basement studio at Rollins College.

WPRK, 91.5 FM, the student-run radio station at Rollins, has broadcast locally for more than 50 years. The station was begun in 1952 “to really enrich the quality of life for the residents of Winter Park,” says Jerrid Kalakay, the director for the office of student involvement and leadership at Rollins. One of the station’s first broadcasts was an address from then President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower, welcoming the new station and praising its potential to advance great ideas which “keep men and women free,” according to an article from the time in the Winter Park Herald.

The station’s management team always has been made up almost entirely of students — Kalakay and graduate assistant Carla Rivera-Cruz are the two current exceptions — with a mix of students and community members as show hosts. WPRK began as a classical station but by the 1980s had evolved into a more traditional “college radio” format with a broader spectrum of musical genres and talk shows on a variety of topics.

“In general, it’s what you won’t find traditionally on mainstream radio,” Kalakay says of the music the station plays. “A lot of it’s independent, a lot of it’s ‘underground.’ ” WPRK’s music library houses thousands of CDs, each color-coded by genre — from hip-hop to bluegrass to reggae to rock. The station also requires that DJs play a certain amount of “new” music — anything that has come in during the last three months — for shows that play any time between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays. The station receives music from local labels, and artists drop off their albums at the studio in hopes that their songs will get airtime.

The station’s signal broadcasts a 16-mile radius and streams online (wprkdj.org) anywhere in the world — garnering fans across the country and the globe.

Kalakay said they have listeners in most countries, and that a fan from Finland is donating money for the station to update equipment. “He’s an avid listener, and he lives in Finland,” Kalakay says. “So I mean, there’s not really any one type of person who listens.”

While the station’s broadcasts reach around the globe, most involved in the station are interested in zeroing in on Winter Park, building relationships and community.

A community builder

Norris, who owns Dandelion Communitea Café in Thornton Park, sees the station as a tool to bring members of the community together. She started hosting by herself more than two years ago and recruited Seghers, who curates art at her café, to help out when she gave birth to daughter Maya, who now sits with Norris during broadcasts.

“I own Dandelion and I kept meeting incredible people like Jeremy and all of these different people all day long, and I’m like, ‘These people need to know each other!’ ” Norris says. “I felt like I was the only one who knew how awesome [the local area] was.”

Norris says the focus of her show is to use a holistic approach for promoting the local economy. She says she knows how integral being part of a community is to the quality of life. “Teaching people how to be in community with one another — to be friendly, to help each other out, to support each other, to know where your dollars are going, supporting local businesses, local arts, local music — that actually helps to create the kind of place you want to be in,” she said.

Because the station broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it takes a staff of around 100 people to host music and talk shows. While Norris’ show focuses on local involvement, other weekday noon shows are each devoted to a different topic, such as feminist theory, holistic living or gay culture.

“We’re just trying to get some diversity out there,” says station manager and Rollins student Emily Reo. “We really pride our talk shows on giving the facts and having useful information, as well as being interesting.”

A different kind of station

Paul Edward Kemp II, “Tooth” of local band Tooth and the Enamels, and Jon Prestage of So Help Me Rifle are avid WPRK listeners and examples of the give-and-take relationship that makes the station unique.    Prestage has been listening to the station for about seven years, after moving to Orlando in 2002 and finding it on the radio dial. Now, songs from his band are frequently played on the station’s local music shows.

WPRK “is the only radio station that plays stuff that’s worth listening to,” Kemp says. While that statement may seem a bit extreme, Prestage chimes in that “it’s not commercial — there’s no agenda behind it.”

For Rich Pietrzak, host of the Saturday afternoon music show Acoustic Highway, the only agenda is providing good but lesser-known music to the public.

“Commercial radio really doesn’t play much of a variety anymore,” he says. “Then there’s the Internet, but unless you know who the artists are, how do you even go about finding [them]?”

Pietrzak has hosted the show for almost five years, after his friend and previous host Paul Girardi decided to travel around the country. Pietrzak had no background in radio but says he always has been interested in getting involved and is a music lover and collector. He owned a record store in Delaware before moving to Florida.

“I’ve just always been a big believer in trying to get a lot of this music out there,” he says. “Because a lot of this is really, really good, and it just doesn’t have the opportunity to be heard.”

Pietrzak says that he, like the other show hosts, volunteers his time because he thinks WPRK is doing something right. “Everybody cares about it a lot and puts a lot of effort into it,” he says. “I think it’s a big part of the community.”

WPRK DJ marathon made history

WPRK made national history five years ago when then DJ Dave Plotkin stayed on the air for 110 hours straight — from Jan. 17-21, 2005 — to set a world record and raise enough money to stream the station’s broadcasts live on the Internet.

Since then, the station has hosted annual fundraisers to commemorate Plotkin’s ambitious stunt, which accomplished both of his goals. He received a certificate from the Guinness World Records for the longest DJ on-air in the United States and helped finance the Internet stream. Last October’s event was a concert on campus featuring local bands, with proceeds to update the station’s equipment.

While the fundraisers are fun, the 110-hour marathon was a serious matter — the station had to call in EMTs for safety precautions and witnesses to confirm that Plotkin followed the Guinness guidelines. He could be off the air for only three-minute intervals over the five-day period.

As successful as it was, once was enough for station managers. Station manager Emily Reo said, “I think that’s a one-time thing that we can say that we did and not ever have to do it again.”