Growing up in the Philadelphia area, we had a terrific full-time commercial Classical FM station (WFLN) that simulcast on the AM band during daylight hours.

As a teenager, my Corvair’s crappy radio was AM-only, but one of its 5 pushbuttons was always set to ‘FLN – initially, much to the surprise of my rock-loving contemporaries, but then bemusement would frequently set in, courtesy of Vivaldi, or Mozart, and “you LIKE this stuff?”, would turn to “what IS this stuff?”.

More than one of my friends came to CM because of WFLN, and the tacit “cred” that it received because they knew through my example that one could enjoy both the Yardbirds *and* Beethoven.

Anyway, WFLN has been extinct for well over a decade, with its library and programming going to Temple University’s station (WRTI), which ineptly splits the day between Classical and Jazz, with many, many, many interruptions for self-promotion. I know of no one who truly likes this station, and it’s a sin that they can’t get their act together.

At the bottom of the dial is Penn’s station, WXPN, which used to feature oddball programming (including Classical), with an amusingly amateurish student touch, but is now much more tightly run and glossy, with the exception of the long-standing electronic music program “Stars’ End”, and a fine Saturday night Blues show. God help them both, because they’re waaaay outside the norm.

And then we have the local behemoth, WHYY, home of Terry Gross, a spiffy headquarters with its multi-million dollar “Technology Center”, and the world’s highest-paid public radio/TV chief executive (you can look it up).

WHYY was heavy-duty into Classical music up into the ’90s, and for all the right reasons. But at some point, they decided that Information had become their mandate, and proceeded down the trail that so many Public Radio stations have since followed, leaving Art behind, and betraying all of those who had supported the station for so many years. WHYY is the current paradigm for a Big-Time NPR station, and undoubtedly what your employers have in mind for your local outlet.

Politics aside, I no longer listen to Public Radio, and its self-congratulatory, echo-chamber news programming, or half-assed celebrity interview shows. And the relegation of this important music to marginalized HD sub-channels or the like, is disingenuous, at best, but mostly just insulting – it’s driven me to XM radio and the Pandora I-phone application…these and Princeton’s WPRB, which unabashedly plays everything from rockabilly to ragas, and doesn’t give a *crap* whether you’re ready for it, or not….now *that’s* programming!

To tell you the truth, I don’t think that politics played a big part of this. I think it had more to do with the personal preferences of the people who made the decision. People who don’t like classical music–and that is their prerogative–don’t appreciate that other people do like it.

Moreover, they look at numbers on a page, which might show a 70% decline in audience when the classical music begins at nine o’clock in the morning, and conclude that classical is radio poison. They don’t consider that that is the hour when everyone gets out of their cars to go to work. They think that they’ll be able to sell way more underwriting with talk than they could with classical. They will discover they are all wrong.

In any case, this decision might have been made at high levels within the UF administration, but it certainly doesn’t go any higher than that. Contrary to popular belief, “Public Radio” receives a statistically insignificant sum of money from tax dollars. In a year, less than one of your tax dollars pays for public broadcasting. And for that, I think people get a whole lot.

The public, by and large, still doesn’t know. They waited until right before a long holiday weekend to announce this, and, in many cases, people are out of town for much of the summer anyway. Plus, while the Gainesville newspaper had a story, I don’t know that the Ocala paper, or the papers in all the other places our listeners live, published anything. Everyone may just wake up on the morning of August 3 and find the station completely changed.