AFTER more than two decades of wrangling radio presenters as and 30 years doing two weekly shows of her own, Portland community station 3RPC stalwart Jenny ‘JB’ Brydson has recently retired as station manager.

Ms Brydson moved to town in 1989 as a single mother with five young children in tow, and it was through one of those children that she first connected with the station that has since become such an enormous part of her life.

“My son David was doing a program they had with the secondary school, and we were at a deb ball where someone connected to the radio asked me for a dance,” she said.

“While I was dancing with me, he ‘conned’ me into doing a radio show.

“When I did my first program by myself after training, we are supposed to talk at least every 20 minutes to call the time, give the station ID, but I think I played 13 tracks before I got up the courage to speak.

“Every time I went to turn the mic on, I froze, but eventually I got there.”

As well as tapes and records to play, she also needed to find a new moniker, with two other Jenny’s already at the station Ms Brydson was told three would be two many so she settled with her initials ‘JB’, which she has stuck with ever since.

“At the time, there we had a very young, a group of young presenters, we're talking under 21 or there abouts. it was good fun, I enjoyed it,” she said.

The youngest among them though were some of Ms Brydson’s sons who also took to presenting radio.

“One of my sons, John, he trained when he was six years old, he used to come down with me so I thought I’d show what to do him instead of just letting him play with the knobs.

“My sons David and Robert were also both on the radio, so that’s three out of five.”

That first show was in 1992, when 3RPC was based at the old post office building on the corner of Bentinck Street and Cliff Street, and not long into her time there, the station moved up to its current home in the Ruth Martin memorial building on Julia Street.

“Our studios were a lot smaller than we’ve got now, and back at that time we had our overnight music was actually played off big 12 inch reels,” she said.

“We officially opened the studios in 98, and I think it was 96 when we moved.

“I was just a presenter at the time and when we first moved up here, we started off with a studio upstairs and the flat upstairs and then they built the studio's downstairs.”

After a few years at 3RPC, Ms Brydson started helping out in the office, and eventually was handed the reins as station manager, which she gave up briefly when she had to leave town for a while, before returning in 2003 and taking it over again for 20 years straight, all as an unpaid volunteer.

“It's been a hard job at times, you make 99% of the decisions, for the day to day running. Some of those decisions have been hard, I've had to hold people over the coals, but I’ve also had some great times here.”

The job involves day to day tasks of taking calls from presenters at all hours of the day, organising the daily log sheets, sorting out memberships and station sponsors, all while keeping an eye on everything going on.

It has been a long process, but she has just about finished digitising all 11,000 CD’s that the station owns.

“That was a big undertaking as you could imagine, it's probably one of my best achievements,” she said.

With its combinations of delicate and sophisticated technology, music lovers enjoying themselves, and lots of people broadcasting through all hours of the day, her decades of community radio have given Ms Brydson plenty of stories with a common theme of just surviving from the brink of disaster.

She’s had presenters locking themselves out of the studio, with only a minute or two to climb through a window in time to put on the next song or setting off fire extinguishers in the studios, among plenty of other stories.

All the while, Ms Brydson was presenting her own shows.

“I did ‘JB’s Potluck’, which is has done different times throughout the throughout the years, and I did Saturday morning ‘Six O'clock Rock’ up until February, which I started doing in 1993.

“The six o'clock program was for an hour and a half. And JBS potluck was two hours, so it was three and a half hours a week.”

“And I’ve done do a Christmas day program every year for the past 20 years as well.”

Ms Brydson is still doing a weekly ‘JB’s Potluck’ for now, while she figures out what the next stage of her life looks like.

Training people to work the desk and produce their shows on 3rpc is another part of the job (She thinks she has trained at least 100 people) which she said is one of her favourite things to do at the station.

“The way I train them is, ‘you've asked to learn, so you're getting on the mic right now and giving it a go’, but really I try and make it as fun for them as what I'm having,” she said.

While it is a lot of work, there are some benefits to be had from being station manager.

“When you’re presenting you don't get to see a lot of people, you see the person before you see the person after you but you don't get to meet many of the other presenters very often,” she said.

 “But being in the office, I got to meet everyone and I've formed some great friendships.”

A lot has changed in the world of community radio in her time.

“20 years ago the office was open five days a week. Now we open for four hours a week because people are pay the membership by internet banking rather than coming in off the street, so you don’t see as many people as you used to in here,” Ms Brydson said.

“But also in that time, you know, one of the sad things about it is that our presenters have dropped we used to have around about the 50 presenters on the air and we're now down to 24 or 22, which is quite sad, really

there's so many radio stations now that they can listen to at one time. You only had a couple that would come to Portland and but now, who knows how many stations are out there that you can tune into that we've got to compete with.

Now, Ms Brydson said, it’s time to hand over the reins hopefully to someone younger who will carry the station into the future.

“After 20 years as a volunteer station manager, I think I've done my share,” she said.

“It’s time, they’ve got fresher ideas, like you know, obviously over 20 years as stage manager, my ideas have just about worn out.”