During my high school years in Richmond, there was only one FM station worth listening to, WFMV/103.7. It played classical music almost all of the time, which was good, but once a week, it went off-format and featured Richmond’s first progressive music show, “Veronica Lake“. But one evil day, the station was sold to “Functional Broadcasting”, who wanted to change the format to “beautiful music”. There was a listener revolt, and the company agreed to maintain the classical format for a while, until WRFK/106.5 (the radio station of the Union Theological Seminary) could go on the air full-time and pick up the classical collection and format.

Sadly, however, Veronica Lake didn’t move to WRFK; in fact, it was almost the first thing to vanish from WEZS (the new call-letters). Fortunately, though, WGOE/1590 had also started to play progressive music (and many other interesting things), and that’s where most of my listening time went (daytimes, anyway; WGOE was a daytime-only station).

WEZS did go all-beautiful-music, of course, joining the majority of the stations on Richmond’s FM dial in that format. For a while, anyway — eventually, FM stations realized that they could make money with more diverse programming, though that diversity seems to have vanished with the onslaught of the megacompanies like Clear Channel.

These days, there aren’t many FM stations which play “beautiful music”, so Sunny probably fills a need. For somebody, anyway. But not for anyone living in our house — one hour was more than enough. It’s back to The Village for us!

Listening to XM Kids brought me back a few years, back to the time when Jeff was still Jeffrey and video meant tapes, not DVDs or TiVo.

I thought I’d feel silly playing kids’ music in my office, but I kept the volume down, and I think I got away with it this time. So far, anyway.

I didn’t particularly like the morning zoo show (but I don’t like that format on regular radio, either), and I was surprised when I heard rap music (and I liked it just about as little as my other exposures to more…um…adult rap), but most of what I heard during the day was OK and much of it was awfully familiar.

I especially enjoyed “Sesame Sounds”, though I would have been even happier if they’d played my favorite Sesame Street tune, Put Down the Ducky.

I don’t think I’ll spend much time on XM Kids, but I might stop by again during Sesame Sounds! It was sure better than Radio Disney — and I didn’t hear any Hilary Duff!