Philip Gracia was getting a haircut when a friend asked if he wanted to start a radio show.

Besides the fact that Gracia had no radio experience, he recalls saying, what would they even discuss?

This, the friend replied — what we talk about at the barber shop.

So in 2015, “Real Talk with Real Brothers” debuted on Frogtown Community Radio, which at the time was an online-only platform run by the Frogtown Neighborhood Association.

Ultimately, the show only lasted a few episodes, but within that time, Gracia had become all-in on local radio. He began hosting a weekly show called “The Midday Escape,” and in 2016, when the station got federal approval to begin broadcasting over the airwaves as WFNU-LP, Gracia was one of several volunteers who helped build the antenna.

In 2019, Gracia, Charles Moss Jr and Katey DeCelle, the station manager — who also all cohosted the show “Funk To Your Ears” — formally took over the station as a nonprofit called Frogtown Tuned-In, independent from the neighborhood association. Today, Gracia is president and CEO and DeCelle is executive director.

“We were energized by community,” Gracia said. “We wanted the community to have some ownership in it.”

The station broadcasts from the top of the Capitol Ridge building on Rondo Avenue, also home to the Radisson St. Paul hotel, and can be heard at 94.1 FM in about a five-mile radius or online at wfnu.org.

Low-power FM radio stations like WFNU, so called because they transmit a signal at a lower wattage than other commercial and community stations, are a somewhat recent development; the Federal Communications Commission first authorized low-power broadcasting in 2000 but most low-power stations, including WFNU, have only received licenses within the past decade or so. Currently, St. Paul appears to be home to two operational low-power stations, WFNU in Frogtown and WEQY on the East Side, which is operated by the local Center for Broadcast Journalism as Power 104.7.

Frogtown Tuned-In is powered by several dozen volunteer hosts that generally also produce their own shows, whether pre-recorded or broadcast live from the studio. Programming on the station includes both talk shows and music, and since most shows are weekly, every day is different, DeCelle said.

For example, on Thursdays, Karen J. ­Larson hosts the long-running community advocacy show “Living Loud with Karen J.” Conor O’Meara and Scott Applebaum go live most Friday mornings for “Conor’s Corner,” about sports and life with autism. Wesley Wright talks food systems and culture Saturdays on “The Un-Bougie Foodie,” and chef Lachelle Cunningham, who also leads Frogtown Farm and the Healthy Roots Institute, hosts “Community Roots” on Wednesdays.

And for many of the station’s volunteers, the premiere day of their show was also the first day they’d ever been on the radio, DeCelle said, which is “exactly what the station is there for.” Gracia and DeCelle provide technical training and support, so it doesn’t matter if someone starts out with no knowledge of working a soundboard, Gracia said — it’s more about their personality and connection to the neighborhood.

We’ve got their backs,” Gracia said. “And when they sit behind the mic, you can tell if they’ve got it or not. You can tell if they’ll be able to carry a conversation, be able to play music that’ll resonate with somebody; if they’re going to hang in there and do it for a period of time.”

This is the core of community radio, Gracia and DeCelle said: Amplifying the voices of people who have hyper-local stories to tell, but who might not otherwise have had the resources to reach an audience.

To that end, besides always considering proposals for new shows on the station, Frogtown Tuned-In also holds workshops for people with disabilities to learn radio skills and produce their own short radio pieces to air on the station. (The next workshop is scheduled for May 17, participation costs $20.) DeCelle and Gracia are also in the process of developing a news program that would produce original reporting focused on Frogtown and train community members as journalists.

“There are all these restaurants and businesses here that maybe people don’t want to visit because they’re not sure if it’ll be (their) cup of tea — but you just have to take the step,” DeCelle said. “Go into this business. Go into this theater. There’s an abundance of things happening here and great people, and I hope this station will be able to uplift them.”

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(Courtesy of the author)

Our family pretended its way through the meeting. No one told the truth, not fully, but we all ‘behaved.’ No one said, ‘Dad drinks too much and gets mean, Mom no longer makes sense much of the time, and the kids are suffering and probably shouldn’t be at this therapy session.’ — from “You’re Too Young to Understand”

Liz Fiedorow Sjaastad (Courtesy of the author)

When Liz Fiedorow Sjaastad was a girl, she’d ask why her parents didn’t get along and about other confusing things in her young life. The answer was always: “You’re too young to understand.”

She didn’t understand until her mother was 30 and diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and depression that led to delusions and paranoia. Besides living with a mother who frequently wasn’t available emotionally, Sjaasad’s father was an alcoholic. But everyone, including Liz, her sister and brother, pretended everything was fine.

Published by Wise Ink Media ($20) in observance of Mental Health Awareness month, Sjaastad’s debut is heartbreaking but the chaos in her parents’ household will be familiar to anyone living with a mentally disturbed loved one.

Sjaastad’s father was a Russian immigrant and language professor. When he died, Sjaastad began writing her memoir to process years of grief and family drama. She eventually realized she was writing for everyone who has lived with similar circumstances.

The worst of the family’s crises began when they were spending a year in France while her father taught there. Far from being a great cultural experience, their time abroad brought relationships to a head. Liz’s mother took her and her siblings back home to Illinois, leaving husband/dad alone to attempt suicide.

Sjaastad’s father gained sobriety but had a stroke and her mother cared for him despite her mental challenges. And when her mother deteriorated her father became the caretaker. So although Sjaastad’s childhood was hard, her parents’ lives were a kind of love story. After Sjaastad’s father’s death, her mother’s mental illness worsened and Liz and her sister Kate were responsible for her welfare for four years.

“Those years taught me a lot about my relationship to my mom and my own family, and it opened my eyes to the staggering toll schizophrenia takes on close to a million families in the United States,” she writes.

Working on this book fueled Sjaastad’s advocacy. She spent 20 years on the board of Minneapolis-based Touchstone Mental Health and continues to share her voice to build awareness of schizophrenia. A resident of St. Paul, she had a career in organizational development before turning to writing.

Sjaastad will launch her book May 20 at Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Mpls. A social hour begins at 6:30 p.m. followed by a 7:15 p.m. reading and book signing. Reservations appreciated but not mandatory. Go to lizsjaastad.com.

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Dear President Donald Trump,

There are very few initiatives that you’ve undertaken since coming to office that I agree with — except in the Middle East. The fact that you are traveling there next week and meeting the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — and that you have no plans to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel — suggests to me that you are starting to understand a vital truth: that this Israeli government is behaving in ways that threaten hard-core U.S. interests in the region. Netanyahu is not our friend.

He did think he could make you his chump, though. Which is why I am impressed by how you have signaled to him through your independent negotiations with Hamas, Iran and the Houthis that he has no purchase on you — that you will not be his patsy. It clearly has him in a panic.

I have no doubt that, generally speaking, the Israeli people continue to see themselves as steadfast allies of the American people — and vice versa. But this ultranationalist, messianic Israeli government is not America’s ally. Because this is the first government in Israel’s history whose priority is not peace with more of its Arab neighbors and the benefits that greater security and coexistence would bring. Its priority is the annexation of the West Bank, the expulsion of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the re-establishment there of Israeli settlements.

The notion that Israel has a government that is no longer behaving as an American ally, and should not be considered as such, is a shocking and bitter pill for Israel’s friends in Washington to swallow — but swallow it they must.

Undermining our interests

Because in pursuit of its extremist agenda this Netanyahu government is undermining our interests. The fact that you are not letting Netanyahu run over you the way he has other U.S. presidents is a credit to you. It is also vital to defend the U.S. security architecture your predecessors have built in the region.

The structure of the current U.S.-Arab-Israel alliance was established by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after the 1973 October War, to push out Russia and make America the dominant global power in the region, which has served our geopolitical and economic interests ever since. The Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy forged the 1974 disengagement agreements between Israel, Syria and Egypt. Those laid the foundations for the Camp David peace treaty. Camp David laid the groundwork for the Oslo Peace Accords. The result was a region dominated by America, its Arab allies and Israel.

But this whole structure depended to a large degree on a U.S.-Israeli commitment to a two-state solution of some kind — a commitment that you yourself tried to advance in your first term with your own plan for a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank next to Israel — on the condition that the Palestinians agreed to recognize Israel and accept that their state would be demilitarized.

This Netanyahu government, however, made annexation of the West Bank its priority when it came to power in late 2022 — well before Hamas’ vicious invasion on Oct. 7, 2023 — rather than the U.S. security-peace architecture for the region.

For almost a year, the Biden administration beseeched Netanyahu to do one thing for America and for Israel: agree to open a dialogue with the Palestinian Authority about a two-state solution one day with a reformed authority — in return for Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel. That would then pave the way for passage in Congress of a U.S.-Saudi security treaty to counterbalance Iran and freeze out China.

Netanyahu put his own interests ahead of Israel’s and America’s

Netanyahu refused to do it, because the Jewish supremacists in his Cabinet said if he did so they would topple his government — and with Netanyahu on trial on multiple charges of corruption, he could not afford to give up the protection of being prime minister to drag out his trial and forestall a possible jail term.

So, Netanyahu put his personal interests ahead of Israel’s and America’s. Normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the most important Muslim power — built on an effort to forge a two-state solution with moderate Palestinians — would have opened the whole Muslim world to Israeli tourists, investors and innovators, eased tensions between Jews and Muslims the world over and consolidated U.S. advantages in the Middle East set in motion by Nixon and Kissinger for another decade or more.

After Netanyahu’s spinning everyone for two years, both the Americans and Saudis have reportedly decided to give up on Israel’s involvement in the deal — a true loss for both Israelis and the Jewish people. Reuters reported Thursday that “the United States is no longer demanding Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel as a condition for progress on civil nuclear cooperation talks.”

And now it may get worse. Netanyahu is preparing to re-invade Gaza with a plan to herd the Palestinian population there into a tiny corner, with the Mediterranean Sea one side and the Egyptian border on the other — while also advancing de facto annexation at ever greater speed and breadth in the West Bank. In doing so it will be courting more war crimes charges against Israel (and particularly against its new army chief of staff, Eyal Zamir) that Bibi will expect your administration to protect him from.

Zero sympathy for Hamas

I have zero sympathy for Hamas. I think it is a sick organization that has done enormous damage to the Palestinian cause. It is hugely responsible for the human tragedy that is Gaza today. Hamas’s leadership should have released its hostages and left Gaza a long time ago, removing any excuse for Israel to resume the fighting. But Netanyahu’s plan to reinvade Gaza is not to stand up a moderate alternative to Hamas, led by the Palestinian Authority. It is for a permanent Israeli military occupation, whose unstated goal will be to pressure all Palestinians to leave. That is a prescription for a permanent insurgency — Vietnam on the Mediterranean.

Addressing a conference on May 5 sponsored by the religious Zionist newspaper B’Sheva, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, spoke like a man who couldn’t care less what you think: “We’re occupying Gaza to stay,” he said. “There will be no more entering and leaving.” The local population will be squeezed into a less than a quarter of the Gaza Strip.

As the Haaretz military expert Amos Harel noted: “Since the army will try to minimize casualties, analysts expect it to use particularly aggressive force that will lead to extensive damage to Gaza’s remaining civilian infrastructure. The displacement of the population to the areas of the humanitarian camps, combined with the ongoing shortage of food and medicine, could lead to further mass deaths of civilians. … More Israeli leaders and officers could face personal legal proceedings against them.”

Indeed, this strategy, if executed, may not only trigger more war crime accusations against Israel, but will also inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt. Those two pillars of America’s Middle East alliance structure both fear that Netanyahu aims to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into their countries, which would surely foment instability that would spill over their borders even if Palestinians themselves did not.

This hurts us in other ways. As Hans Wechsel, a former senior policy adviser to U.S. Central Command, put it to me: “The more hopeless things seem for Palestinian aspirations, the less readiness there will be in the region to expand the U.S.-Arab-Israeli security integration that could have nailed down long-term advantages over Iran and China — and without requiring nearly as many U.S. military resources in the region to sustain.”

Follow your good instincts

On the Middle East, you have some good independent instincts, Mr. President. Follow them. Otherwise you need to prepare yourself for this looming reality: Your Jewish grandchildren will be the first generation of Jewish children who will grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.

I will leave you with the words of the May 7 Haaretz editorial:

“On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14. …The Israeli military said that the target was a ‘Hamas command and control center’ and that ‘steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians.’… We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed — more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.”

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

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A little over 240 years ago, birds were the only things that could fly above the ground untethered without eventually falling. That all changed in 1783 when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes made the first successful hot-air balloon flight over Paris. Just think about what must have been going through their heads when they saw the Earth from above. No humans had ever had a bird’s-eye view like that before and lived to tell about it!

It took until 1903 for the next major aviation feat to be accomplished when the Wright brothers flew the first airplane in the skies just south of Kitty Hawk, N.C. Fifty-four years later, the Soviet Union put the first human-made satellite, Sputnik 1, in orbit around the Earth, and four years after that, the Russians launched the first human-occupied satellite, Vostok 1, with astronaut Yuri Gagarin aboard.

Since that time over 11,000 satellites have been launched into orbit, with and without people aboard. Many of those satellites have long since burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere because of orbital decay. Others, mainly occupied by humans, have successfully re-entered the atmosphere to either land on the ground or splash down in the ocean.  There is a fantastic website, www.N2YO.com, that tracks objects in the sky. If you go to their search engine and type in Vanguard 1, you can see that it is in the first position of one of the first U.S. satellites launched in 1958 and is still in orbit 67 years later! When you explore N2YO, you can get orbital data on thousands in orbit. However, many of those satellites have stopped functioning, and many are actually spent rocket stages that boosted satellites into orbit. It’s crowded above the Earth, but there’s still a lot of room left.

The really cool thing is that stargazers can see many of these satellites. If you’re intently studying the night sky looking for constellations and observing with binoculars or a telescope, it’s hard to go more than a half-hour without seeing a satellite zipping along. Most satellites move from west to east, but some are in polar orbits. The best time to see them is in the early evening for a couple of hours after evening twilight or a couple of hours before the start of morning twilight. That’s because satellites have to reflect sunlight to be visible. Even if satellites had huge spotlights mounted on them, you’d never see them. They’re just too high up. Just before morning twilight, and for a little while after evening twilight, there’s no direct sunlight available to us on the ground, but high in space there’s still enough sunlight to bathe satellites, sending secondhand sunshine our way. During the middle of the night the sun is entirely behind the Earth, so all satellites pass over in total darkness.

By far, the easiest satellite to spot is the International Space Station. It’s as bright as a jetliner passing over. Because of that many people see it all the time and figure it’s a jet. Its first component or module was launched in 1998, and the station was completed in 2011. It’s longer than a football field! What makes it so bright are the eight solar panels that are over 100 feet long and nearly 40 feet wide! They bounce a heck of a lot of secondhand sunshine our way!

The ISS orbits the Earth about every 90 minutes, traveling at almost 5 miles a second. It moves in a general direction from west to east across the dome of the sky. The ISS doesn’t pass over the same location each orbit. That’s because of the nature of its orbit and the fact that Earth is rotating. There can be stretches of nights when it doesn’t pass over at all. That’s why you need to have an app or a website that will let you know where and when to look. Some apps will even alert you when the ISS is expected to pass over your location on Earth.

My favorite website for keeping up with the travels of the ISS is www.heavensabove.com. With Heavens-Above all you have to do is configure it for your location with their massive database. Among many of its features, it’ll provide a schedule for ISS flyovers and even a sky map to track it. You can also find out when other bright satellites will be passing over. My favorite free app for tracking the ISS is ISS Tracker. Allow that app to know your location, and you’re good to go.

A sample map from Heavens Above (Mike Lynch)

Depending on where it’s crossing your sky, the ISS can take up to around five minutes to pass. It resembles a super bright star. Depending on when you’re watching it, in the early morning or early evening, it can suddenly disappear in the sky as it enters the Earth’s shadow, or it can pop into view coming out of the shadow in the early morning.

As much fun as it can be to observe satellites in the night sky, I’m afraid that in the future the skies may become too crowded. I’m worried that it’s already beginning to happen. In particular I’m referring to Starlink satellites launched by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, otherwise known as SpaceX, a private space transportation enterprise founded in 2002 by South African native Elon Musk.

Starlink satellites can provide much more available access to the internet throughout the world, even in remote areas. Already, there are hundreds and hundreds of Starlinks in orbit, and it’s very easy to see them, sometimes in groups or lines, especially after they are first launched. As it is with the International Space Station, you can keep up with all of them on the Heavens-Above website, as well as other sites and apps.

A Starlink satellite chain. (Mike Lynch)

The big fear is that the natural beauty of the night sky could be ruined with too many satellites. Earth-based astronomical observations, both done by professionals and by amateur astronomers, are going to be interfered with significantly. I believe, and so do many others, that there must be some international regulations to keep this from happening. I can tell you as an astrophotographer that it’s getting tougher and tougher to get time-exposure images that aren’t marred by satellite streaks.

Watching satellites is a lot of fun but let’s not get the heavens too congested!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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