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King's College's 'Radio Home Visitor' marks 50 years of reading for the visually impaired

Cindy Szumigla, Pat Fadden and Scott Alexander talk about the history of 'Radio Home Visitor' at King's College. Alexander is the current host of the program, and Fadden and Szumigla have participated since they were students at King's.
Aimee Dilger
/
WVIA News
Cindy Szumigla, Pat Fadden and Scott Alexander talk about the history of 'Radio Home Visitor' at King's College. Alexander is the current host of the program, and Fadden and Szumigla have participated since they were students at King's.

In the early years of the "Radio Home Visitor," Rev. Tom Carten often repeated the same phrase to encourage the students helping him with the program.

“We’ll keep doing this until we get it right,” recalled Pat Fadden, one of the earliest students to read for the program on King’s College’s radio station, WRKC.

"Radio Home Visitor" turned 50 this month.

What started as Carten’s service project for college credit is now the oldest radio reading service for the blind, visually impaired and homebound in the country, said WRKC General Manager Sue Henry.

“It is the oldest over-the-air radio reading service in the United States. Some programming for the blind is on a subcarrier, so it’s not over the air,” she said. “Ours is on a traditional radio station. Everybody can hear it, you don’t need any special equipment to hear it. That’s where ours is a little bit different.”

"Radio Home Visitor," or the RHV, is a daily reading of Wyoming Valley newspapers broadcast daily on WRKC at 88.5 FM from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

It debuted on Sept. 2, 1974 and Fadden says Carten thought it might last for one year.

In his words - Rev. Tom Carten
Rev. Tom Carten on how the RHV serves the visually impaired and blind community in this recording from WRKC's archives.
Fr. Tom Carten reads the news for the Radio Home Visitor on 88.5 WRKC.

Cindy Szumigla started reading for the RHV in 1979. She remembers Carten doing extensive research when trying to come up with a service project that would help the community.

She said he connected with what was then called the Association for the Blind in Wilkes-Barre. They started to talk about a reading service, and Carten learned the association had an employee called a home visitor who would go to people’s homes and assist with whatever they needed.

“So in their collaboration and figuring out what we should call all this, a light bulb went on," she said. "Everybody at the meeting said what about 'Radio Home Visitor?' We will be visiting people in their homes on the radio."

Szumigla says she “stumbled” into the program while she was a student, but she still sees its impact. She works at Wesley Village, a retirement community, and one of the residents is a longtime listener.

“She’s visually impaired, and she still listens,” Szumigla said. “She’ll be 102.”

Henry, another King’s graduate who was there when the RHV was “just a baby,” now ensures it stays on the air every day. She took over when Carten retired in 2013.

“It’s hard to believe,” she said. “It wasn’t even in the double digits when I was a student here.”

Henry says the station staff and volunteers are determined to get it on the air every day, “come Hell or high water” — except, of course, for 2011 when flood waters from the Susquehanna River threatened the radio station.

“We decided for our own safety we would take two days off,” she said. “We have done things to make sure it was on the air. I've lost my temper many times if it's late. I've woken people up out of bed. I've sped down the road to get here in order to put it on a little bit late.”

The broadcast follows the same format every day. The hour-long show starts with a news segment, goes into obituaries and more “community-oriented things,” according to Henry. Then at the halfway point, the volunteers read advice columns.

Henry says when Carten hosted, he enjoyed reading the more “salacious” advice columns because he knew his audience loved them.

“He always got a big kick out of that when he got to read some that were more borderline,” she said.

After advice, typically the show moves on to TV listings, the senior center menu, and a bit more news.

In the early days, Carten would cut articles out of the newspaper, glue them to a paper and mark them up with grease pencil, Henry said. Then he, along with students and volunteers, would record the news stories, TV listings and obituaries of the day.

If you wanted to be on the air at WRKC, first you had to help with the "Radio Home Visitor."

Fadden said reading for the RHV helped him build confidence in his voice. He hosted a show on WRKC and became a lector at church.

“I participated post-graduate also,” he said. “My children … for confirmation they also read, and Father Carten said that they were the first … second-generation readers for the RHV.”

Fadden said Carten had a distinct style that he hoped the students and volunteers would carry on.

"He wanted it to sound like we were sitting at a kitchen table," he said. "Talking to somebody in a casual, conversational way."

In his words - Rev. Tom Carten on the RHV's style
Rev. Carten wanted the Radio Home Visitor to feel like a conversation around a kitchen table.
Fr. Tom Carten at King's College.

Scott Alexander hosts the RHV now. Gone are the days of reel-to-reel tape, cassette tapes or mini-disks that needed to be manually flipped to run the show for its second hour. Alexander does most of the work from home, and the show is entirely digital.

Students, King’s faculty, and community members like Fadden still read the stories and Alexander produces and hosts the final show.

“I hope other students come in and read articles … too, because we need to keep this tradition going,” Alexander said.

Carten retired and moved to Notre Dame, Indiana in 2013. He died on Christmas Eve 2020 at the age of 78.

Henry hears his voice in her head and thinks of him often. She said his homilies could reach anyone from a college student up to a senior citizen, and he would drive to hospitals in the middle of the night to give people last rites, even when he should not have been driving.

“He would show up at funerals of people that had never met him and he was always willing to counsel students … he always did it in a way that came to their level,” she said. “Whether it was with the radio station or if we had a problem in our personal lives, he was always there to help us. He was just a constant presence that you could always rely on.”

Since his passing, Henry and other alumni of the station raised money to name the WRKC studio after him. The plaque now hangs in the small studio space in the lower level of the King’s College campus center.

“We know that he didn’t want anything from us except to succeed and carry on a radio tradition … but to know that his memory will live on through that plaque is really important to us,” she said. “His legacy really is a beautiful thing for this school.”

For 50 years, WRKC has broadcast the 'Radio Home Visitor' on 88.5 FM, reading the newspaper for the blind, visually impaired and homebound.
Aimee Dilger
/
WVIA News
For 50 years, WRKC has broadcast the 'Radio Home Visitor' on 88.5 FM, reading the newspaper for the blind, visually impaired and homebound.

Editor's Note: Sarah Scinto served as station manager of WRKC as a King's College student prior to graduating in 2013.

Sarah Scinto is the local host of Morning Edition on WVIA. She is a Connecticut native and graduate of King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, and has previously covered Northeastern Pennsylvania for The Scranton Times-Tribune, The Citizens’ Voice and Greater Pittston Progress.

You can email Sarah at sarahscinto@wvia.org