Doctor takes over KDAN
For months, KDAN, the lilliputian radio station on the eastern shore of Tomales Bay, appeared destined to vanish from the airwaves. Its owner, Jeff Cotton, a radio aficionado who has built small-town stations across the West, was scaling down his operation. He had spent nearly a year trying to offload it to the right buyer—someone who would preserve its eccentric spirit at a time when stations like his were routinely gobbled up by goliath religious broadcasters. No one had come forward.
The 10-watt station, whose signal reaches only a peanut-sized pocket of West Marin that includes Marshall, Inverness, and Inverness Park, was approaching a deadline with the Federal Communications Commission. If its license lapsed, the signal might not be available again for years, at least until the F.C.C. opened another filing window, something it does only sporadically.
Then came an improbable dénouement in the eleventh hour. Mr. Cotton heard from Colin Hamblin, a 58-year-old physician from Inverness who believed he had found the cure for the ailing station.
“I was sitting at the dining room table, probably in my underwear on a Saturday morning reading an old Point Reyes Light, and I came across an article about how KDAN was going to basically no longer exist,” Dr. Hamblin told KWMR in February. “The station was going to go dark in like a week, so I just emailed him and said, ‘Hey man, any chance I could help keep this radio station going?’”
Mr. Cotton, who moved from California to Maine last fall, was elated. “Colin’s got his heart in radio, and that’s pretty rare these days,” he told the Light. “We were happy the signal didn’t just evaporate.”
Dr. Hamblin is not a disc jockey. But in an earlier life, he spent nearly a decade in news, first attending Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism before working for a small handful of newspapers and magazines and a NBC affiliate in Savannah, Ga. Later, he became a doctor, specializing in family medicine, gerontology, hospice, and palliative care. Since 2010, he has owned and operated the West Marin Medical Center, while also seeing patients in nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and psychiatric facilities across Marin and Sonoma Counties.
Earlier this year, he paid Mr. Cotton $5,000, mostly to cover the cost of KDAN’s equipment, which was stored in a pump shed on the Barinaga Ranch, in Marshall.
The setup, he said, has a certain battered charm, and he appreciates the jumble of electronic gear. “The stuff is great—it’s like the Millennium Falcon,” he said. “It’s all old wires and dials, and it’s kind of crazy.”
The pump shed lies in the footprint of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi’s old receiving station, where seven 300-foot-tall towers once stood, receiving telegrams from Asia.
KDAN’s fans may be relieved that Dr. Hamblin plans to keep much of the station as it was. It will continue carrying Mr. Cotton’s 24-hour, genre-hopping music stream, Jive Radio, with its mix of folk, rockabilly, Dixieland, and bossa nova. Tossed in are Marin-related musicians—the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Elvin Bishop, Bob Weir, and, of course, Dan Hicks, the station’s eponymous singer-songwriter.
Dr. Hamblin is also keeping the call letters. “I really like why it’s called KDAN,” he said. “It’s super Marin. It’s neat to keep that Marin connection, because I am a Marin boy.”
Dr. Hamblin has, however, changed the tagline and logo. KDAN now bills itself as “Broadcasting to more bivalves and ungulates than people.” Its new logo features an anthropomorphized sheep and oyster dancing to jivey tunes.
Dr. Hamblin has larger ambitions for 91.5 FM. Eventually, he wants to turn it into a home for plainspoken medical programming: a mixture of live and prerecorded conversations covering dry-but-practical topics for geriatrics, such as how to maintain strength, balance, and independence; how to improve treatment for high blood pressure; what should a doctor be checking during a routine visit; and which medications can affect memory and brain function.
“I really want to use it to get information, medical programming, medical podcasts out to people,” he said. “People always have a lot of questions, and I think docs are stretched these days. It’s hard to answer people’s questions in a timely fashion, in the whopping 15 minutes we have.”
There is no shortage of medical talk in American life. Much of it, he said, is dominated by celebrity doctors, wellness influencers, and so-called biohackers offering health advice, exercise regimes, and supplements that promise to lead to years of healthy life.
“There is so much chatter out there about medicine 3.0,” he said, using a term coined by longevity evangelist Dr. Peter Attia. “I think this is an opportunity to just talk candidly with people.”
Amanda Eichstaedt, KWMR’s station manager, admired Dr. Hamblin’s impulse to rescue KDAN from oblivion, though she wondered whether a full-time physician would be able to find enough hours in the day for the demanding work of running a radio station.
“Colin is a savior guy,” she said. “He’s a doctor, he saves people, and now he’s saved the radio station.”