“If You Ever Want To Gauge What Is Valuable in a Community, Tune In to Tradio."

WSKV's Tradio ("trade radio") program allows listeners to buy, sell, trade and barter—all while feeling a little less lonely.

“Ethan! Did you know they’re saying it’s National Hot Dog Month right now? I just wish I’d be National Soup Bean Month already,” Angela Osborne, program director at WSKV-FM in Stanton, laugh-hollers to her coworker as she shows me around their diminutive log cabin studio.

Tucked down a blink-and-you-miss-it alley, the familial atmosphere at this “listen like a local” radio station bearhugs anyone who walks in the front door, and makes even an out-and-out stranger (read: me) feel like it would be perfectly normal to sit a spell between the display of old-timey handheld radios and miniature banjos on chairs upholstered with Roy Rogers-themed fabric and shoot the breeze while gospel hour or the “bluegrass to the bone” show plays in the background.

“No one ever really leaves after they start working here,” Angela muses, and as we chat under the watchful eye of a black-and-white “Kentucky country legends” collage, it realize it wouldn’t take even three chords and the truth to convince me to stick around.

But I’m not here for the music today: I’m at WSKV to watch their Tradio program in action. Tradio—a portmanteau of “trade” and “radio” for those who haven’t guessed—is a throwback hour-and-a-half of programming, six days a week, where individuals call in to the radio station with items they want to buy, sell, trade, barter or give away. Like an audible Craigslist or classified ads, the community in and around Stanton has embraced Tradio with increased enthusiasm over the past few years, and through WSKV’s livestream, listeners as far away as Washington and New Jersey tune in regularly. (“Sometimes I wonder if they’re just listening to make fun of us or our accents, but I don’t think so. I think they want to hear people helping each other,” says Angela.)

Below, Angela describes how Tradio has become “a whole lot more than just buying and selling” for listeners and their families. So set your dial to the right frequency, and don’t be surprised if you’re soon pulling out your phone, ready to try and trade out your old microwave for some ATV parts.

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Angela Osborne

Program Director, WSKV-FM

I’ve been here about 10 years, and Tradio has been part of the station for over 40 years. I grew up in the county over, Montgomery County, and their local station—WMST—did something similar when I was a kid called Trading Post. There are still several that go on in the area. It's always been an hour, and we've always done it five days a week, but then we picked up Saturdays. And in the last three years, we've added another half hour to Tradio because it's just so busy. People were coming in the [studio] door and saying, “I've been trying for three weeks on the phone lines to get on Tradio!”

Adding that extra half hour has helped tremendously. If you ever want to gauge what is valuable in a community, you can tune in to Tradio. Certain times of the year, it's seasoned firewood; other times of the year it's garden plants. You really see what is important to people. One of the things that we've come to realize is you don't know why people are selling or buying, but mostly it's basic needs. Oftentimes, you'll hear people calling [and they’re] looking for a hospital bed for a loved one, or a walker, or something like that. Or someone who has lost someone will come on and say, “I've got all of these items. If you have need for them, just come get them. I'll give them away.”

It's really become something so vital to the community that there's no reason for us to ever pull it back. When I started, it was probably the one thing I was most intimidated to do—to host it—because you have to be very focused. You've got a lot of things going on at once, and I have terrible attention issues. I thought, “I will never be able to read back phone numbers, ever!” But it's ended up being my favorite thing. You know that you're helping, and a lot of times, the callers are older people who are lonely, and Tradio makes them feel connected to the community, even if they don't leave their home.

And we get those people who will call in and have the same thing to advertise forever! They just want to talk; they want to hear; they want to be part of something. And that's cool, too. We’ve got people that I recognize their phone number and their voice as soon as they come on. I know them by name because they've been participating in Tradio ever since I've been here.

We have a fellow out of Waco who calls in all the time—and he may have an item for sale or not—but a lot of times he'll call in and mention what's going on, or say something like, “Y'all be careful, there's a road shut down over here.” He's one of those people, I think, that just likes to feel like he's part of it. We've got another lady here pretty locally named Joanne who calls in almost every day with something going on, and she always makes sure to call whoever is hosting by name. It really is a relationship. And people who upon closing will say, “God bless you!” or “Be safe out there!” I mean, I don't ever take that for granted.

There have been several people over the years that we have, believe it or not, grown close to over the phone and through the radio experience that have passed away. You never know when the last time is that they're going to call. That weighs heavy sometimes.

We had one fellow in particular who lived here close—I turned 51 this year and I understand he was two years younger than me—who was a really severe alcoholic and had totally isolated himself from his family and friends. But we were his connection. And he called sometimes six, eight, 10 times a day. He would often be intoxicated, and he tried to be jovial, but you could tell he was lonely and that was part of why he would call. He would start out in the mornings listening during the gospel hour, and when we would do the obituaries, he would call right after and say, “I tried to take a drink for every one of them, but you had too many today and I had to stop!” It was 7:50 in the morning.

And he'd say, “OK, I'm not going to bother you anymore today.” But he would! He'd call back several times wanting to request songs and things like that. When we got word that he had passed away through a friend of the station, I think all of us were just devastated. Because we'd all talk to him. Some days he'd call crying, lonely. Other days he'd call in mad, “Why don't my family want anything to do with me?” We can't answer these things—we just do radio. But when he stopped calling and we found out why, we were all just like we'd lost a family member. But I never laid eyes on him.

When it comes to what people are selling, at the start of the year, people are looking for seeds. A lot of folks still save the seeds from their gardens around here, so they're already starting to talk about trading seeds or buying seeds while there’s snow on the ground. Livestock is a constant: chickens, goats, pigs, cattle—any of that stuff. In the spring, with people starting to gear up toward mowing, there are lots of mowers and weed eaters. Midsummer brings out the motorcycles, dirt bikes, ATVs and boats. Through the summer that kind of winds down, and then in the fall people are looking for canning jars and lids—I think last year especially people had trouble finding them. In the winter, it’s all about firewood, straw and hay. Hay is a huge one.

People have a nostalgia for Tradio—most of our listeners are over 40—but once younger people in the 18-40 age group know that it’s a service available, they’re hooked. And we tell them, “Tell your friends, this works.” Because it really does—it works!

We say that you can buy, sell, swap or give away, and it’s interesting when you hear people call in who are looking to trade or barter their skills for something. I think that’s a result of people's mindsets moving toward being more sustainable: looking at what they have or what they can do and trading it for what they need. That's a facet of Tradio that surprises me. It always does. And it shouldn't, but it always does.

We've had people looking for something so specific, like a certain piece for their tractor, that we’ve read the ad for three, four, five months before they got a bite. But when they find it, they'll call in and say, “Thank you for helping me find this...” And that's exciting, because you feel like you’re a part of something that helps.

Other times, you get some strange situations. One that stands out in particular is when a guy called in and was telling me about a bag of “body parts” that he had. And he's describing the size of the bag, and how many gallons it could hold, and I am mortified on live radio. I'm like, “Do I need to be calling 911 on my cellphone?” This went on for five minutes, and he's just rattling on and on. The whole time I'm getting more and more weirded out, like, this is going to be on the news. When I got him to finally stop, I said, “Wait a minute—what kind of parts are these?” He said, "Oh, Kawasaki!” Turns out, it was a bag full of dirt bike “body” parts. I was like, “Thank you, Jesus.”

While we're taking phone calls, we are also reading texts. I think that may be another reason why folks are using it so much, because they don't have to necessarily be tuned in. They know if it's between 10:00 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., they can shoot a text. Also, where we stream online and promote on social media, it's really easy to just click and pull up our stream. I think being accessible that way and having the app that people can carry on their phone has made it to where younger people—younger audiences—are tuning in to Tradio.

But we’ve actually had to put as part of our rules not to call in and discuss political views. Especially leading up to the [2020] election and right after, we got a lot of people who would want to call in and bash one side or the other. I mean, they're calling for Tradio, so they did have something to buy or sell, but then wanted to add on, “I just want to tell you…” about a certain candidate or elected official. We want Tradio to be accessible and enjoyable, and everybody to feel welcome to participate, so we’ve had to make “no politics” a rule.

But we do have some people who like to preach a little, or ask for prayer—we've had that pretty often. And another thing that we get from time-to-time is if there’s somebody who has had a fire or some kind of personal tragedy, a family member will call up and say, “Hey, if y'all can help out with this situation, I'll come pick up. If you have furniture, clothing—this is what sizes we need…” And I've watched, as a community, folks pull together and meet those needs.

Just this Wednesday when I hosted Tradio, there was an older gentleman who called in with a table and six chairs he was going to give away. And a gentleman called in maybe two calls later and said, "My neighbor next door just moved in and she has almost no furniture. I'll come and get that table and six chairs if he'll call me. Or if anybody's got anything else—small appliances, dishes—this girl's starting over with nothing. I'll come get it.” I'm always moved by that, because you see it sometimes on social media, but when you hear somebody's voice pleading the case for somebody else, well, that’s a different feeling.

Not long after I started here—I think it was 2012—we had a tornado that hit and devastated West Liberty and Salyersville. We put out a call during Tradio that we would be a point of collection and take loads of anything that people wanted to donate up there. Within hours, Tradio listeners completely overwhelmed us. For a solid week, as quick as they would bring it in and load us up to where we couldn't walk through the studio, we would take it on a trailer to West Liberty.

There was this little couple who showed up, and they had their entire trunk full of green beans and tomato juice that they had personally canned to donate. Joanne, one of the ladies I told you about who calls in every day, she made baby quilts. People brought in all kinds of things, and we also auctioned items off and raised another $3,500. At that moment, I thought, “This is so much bigger than buying and selling on the radio. This is huge.”

We live in an economically distressed region, and the amount of stuff that we were able to give to people in a totally separate community—they can barely pick us up on the radio in West Liberty!—it was an amazing thing that people did. Tradio is a lot more than just buying and selling. It really is.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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We’ll be back tomorrow with some behind-the-scenes footage from Tradio, as well as a recorded Tradio episode (!) for paid subscribers only. You definitely don’t want to miss what people are selling and seeking—or the cast of characters that phone in. (One man is convinced that his cell phone service is cutting in and out because there are “too many minerals in the mountains”!) Trust me, this is better than whatever podcast you’re listening to on your morning commute: