Do me a favor and rewind your memory back two Fridays ago. Stop the clock at 2 p.m. It was raining. (Well, the more recent Friday was also raining. What’s up with the weather this year?) The air had a chilly effect on the body, but it was still humid and felt like we were all in Taiwan or something. You might have just gotten out of a class or were on your way to one like myself. At 2:05 p.m. I pressed the play button to begin the playlist of personal favorites that I meticulously selected from my iTunes library. As I was texting my roommate to let him know when it was alright to stop increasing the volume, I saw a girl stop in her tracks and turn around in the direction of our room. She smiled and started head-banging to the Foo Fighters’ “The Pretender.”
That moment is what my roommates and I are aiming for all of you to have sometime this semester. The light bulb, “ding,” smile-because-your-happy moment when you recognize your all-time favorite song to come on, which puts a smile on your face. My name is David “Pinky” Li; my roommates are Mark “Sweaterback” Peterson and David ‘‘Snake’’ Green. This year, we’re in charge of Heemstra Radio, and we intend to rekindle the tradition.
Typically, h* radio plays music from the 3-man room up on the 3rd floor of Coly after Chapel every Friday and then again in the afternoon from 2-5 p.m. This is our air time for the semester until more time is otherwise granted by the faculty. In the past, we used to enjoy the liberty of playing music more often during the week after classes or even on weekends. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case anymore due to past complaints made by faculty and staff regarding high volume and less-accepted genres of music.
Initially, h* radio was far from professional or organized. Like how most Heemstra traditions began and continued, a couple of guys had simply decided to play some music out of their dorm windows from time to time just for fun. Eventually, it became a timely event which the NW community could enjoy regularly.
After hearing community concerns, we recognize that we’ve been too casual in the past with our efforts. So, to combat past issues, we’d like to extend some of the involvement to you this year and the rest of the student body. We’re really hoping that people in this community will give us a bigger and better reason to keep this tradition of ours going on. If it wasn’t for you guys, our peers, classmates and friends, in the end we’d just go back to being a few guys sticking our speakers out the window.
To be more involved and to see what we’re up to follow our Twitter feed @heemstra_radio and tweet us what songs you’d like us to play on Fridays. I’d also invite anyone and everyone to come up and visit us to get to know us or to just hang out. So help spread the word, follow us and tweet us your suggestions. If we can quantify how much we matter to this campus with the number of followers or tweets we get, it could potentially allow more air time.
