Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

The Postcard Zone, May 28, 1997

On a recorded episode of music show The Postcard Zone labeled as having aired May 28, 1997, host Marti Crouch[1] receives a postcard from a listener featuring the 1982 David Fichter painting Burial at Love Canal. She describes the image on the postcard verbally:

I’ll read the back first. It says, “Hi, Marti, I’ll bet you can find some music for this one. I’d like to know who each of the individuals is meant to represent. They look like caricatures of real people, but look closely at their hands.” Turn it over and it's a color painting called Burial at Love Canal. It's very complex, this painting. There are five men who look like they're probably executives of companies, perhaps the companies that dumped the toxic waste there at Love Canal in New York, and they're holding shovels, the kind that you might use for groundbreaking, but when you look in the background, you notice that they have dug their own graves, and each man, wearing a hard hat and a suit and tie and holding a shovel, is standing in front of their own grave, smiling. And if you look closely at their hands, you can see that there's some kind of oil and ooze on their hands, maybe even a little blood. In the background, you can see a scoop guy with a shovel… automatic… oh, what do you call those things? I'm not very good with my machinery. But you know, you know, one of those great big machines with a scoop on the end, and it looks like it's just about to scoop earth over them and topple them into their own graves that they've dug. Burial at Love Canal. Pretty spooky. Yeah, this is one that is easy to come up with a set for.

In keeping with the conceit of The Postcard Zone, Marti then programs an entire set of environmentalist music. She starts with tracks from nationally known artists: Mem Shannon’s “Wrong People in Charge” (1997), John Hartford’s “In Tall Buildings” (1976), Emmylou Harris’s “Sin City” (1975), Ani DiFranco’s “Coming Up” (1995), and Sweet Honey in the Rock’s “More Than a Paycheck” (1988). Local artist John Dehner’s “Kent Farm” follows. After a break for announcing these songs, Marti resumes the Burial at Love Canal set and includes several tracks from PCB Blues, a local compilation album from 1991. PCB Blues was recorded and produced for a fundraiser in protest of a new incinerator proposed by manufacturing company Westinghouse Electric Corporation (Rice n.d.). Marti wraps up the set with a pointed reference to them:

It’s obvious that there is a lot of music that can be related to this scene here of the executives of the companies that dumped the waste at Love Canal about to be pushed into the graves they dug for themselves with a little oozing oil on their hands. I wonder if it’s PCB oil.

At the time of the PCB Blues protest, Westinghouse was a major local employer—and a major local polluter, having released enough polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the area to necessitate six U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund cleanup sites in and around Bloomington (Pezzullo 2012). By 1997, Westinghouse no longer existed as an independent company, having merged with CBS, but it would not be until 2021 that the work at the three Superfund sites in the city of Bloomington was considered complete enough for the EPA to remove them from the agency’s national priority list (Associated Press 2021). Marti’s comments and music choices, which presume some familiarity with the local disaster on the part of the listener, make clear her feelings on Westinghouse well into the cleanup process.

For either of these programs to have been produced in a different time or place could have changed the meaning of them. Would an informative radio segment on safe abortion care have been less radical in a less stigmatizing part of the world? Would it have been considered subversive or even unlawful if it had been aired before 1973—or after 2022? Listening to this archival Postcard Zone episode was the first time I had heard about Bloomington’s histories of PCB pollution even though its Superfund sites were still active when I moved there and for a decade to come. If a programmer played from PCB Blues now, how much of the Bloomington listening audience would even recognize the titular acronym, much less the compilation? Certainly, some of my WFHB colleagues would have remembered the PCB issue firsthand. At this point, though, it is worth recalling that around half of Bloomington’s population is made up of students and thus is somewhat transitory. Many people living in Bloomington at the time I listened to these tapes in 2024 would not have been in the area during Westinghouse’s reign or even during the final years of Roe v. Wade, meaning they might not have been familiar with the local and regional discourses circulating around each issue during and after the times these tapes were recorded. For that matter, nor was I. Listening to these tapes was a learning experience for me, not only in terms of the specifics of the subject matter but in terms of how WFHB facilitated discourses about healthcare and environmental issues decades earlier.

What combinations of sounds in a broadcast represent protest and which uphold the status quo are always dependent on context. These two tapes make for an interesting contrast in terms of broadcast and archival techniques. The Health Break episode was a pre-produced recording made off the air to be played on the air. Its provenance is murky; I do not know who decided to keep that or any Health Break segment. Marti Crouch’s The Postcard Zone seems to be a recording of a live show, its intended purpose as an object unknown. Whether either were meant to survive or circulate beyond a certain moment is uncertain. As a researcher, I listened to them with an appreciation for the information they contained about Bloomington in very specific temporal moments and the social changes they illuminated. These were also segments with distinct resonances in the 2020s, during the post-Roe v. Wade era and amid continued and escalating climate crisis exacerbated by the acts of major industrial corporations. This was programming that spoke differently yet still significantly across time. Understanding it all in its fullness, though, was in part contingent on access to the objects themselves.

[1] Several years prior to this episode, Marti Crouch, a tenured professor of biology at Indiana University renowned in her field, ended her academic publishing career with an article about the role of industrial agriculture in environmental crisis, written in response to learning that her research was, with government support, being used by corporations like Unilever and Monsanto to increase their profits at the expense of ecosystems across the world (Crouch 1990; Goodman 2005). Refusing to accept any grant money or publish any further research so that it would not fall into the hands of such companies, Crouch was barred by IU from mentoring students and resigned from the university entirely in 2000.