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Community Radio’s Caretaker

Nico Leone, KDHX Manager

“Everything I know about how organizations work tells me this shouldn’t work in any way, shape or form—but clearly something’s happening here.”

The memory of that confession by a management consultant makes Nico Leone smile when he quotes it. As manager and music director of community radio station KDHX (88.1 FM), Leone takes pride in its idiosyncrasies—and particularly in the people who power it.

The Byronic 30-year-old oversees operations from a CD-strewn office at the top of a creaky staircase in the station’s Magnolia HQ, a former bakery two blocks east of South Grand. He estimates that roughly 1,000 volunteers of all stripes support the station and its TV affiliates. “We have doctors, we have lawyers, we get musicians, we practically get the unemployed, we have record-store clerks, record-store owners, club owners,” he says. “It’s an incredible cross-section of people.”

Those volunteers, with the station’s small staff and board, embrace KDHX’s creative freedom to share their passions and perspectives with St. Louis at large. In doing so, quite literally, they define the local vox populi.

Moreover, in Leone’s three-plus years there, KDHX not only has suffered remarkably little turnover but also has heightened its profile markedly by way of podcasts, regularly sponsored events and a website upgrade. “Our strength as a station has always been the degree to which we’ve been rooted in the community,” he notes, “but we weren’t always systematic about the way we went about that.”

His own savoir-vivre, meanwhile, Leone dismisses completely: “Whatever coolness or hipness I have with regard to KDHX is derived from the greater pool or population of volunteers who come in the door every day.” With that dismissal, he caps an impressive personal playlist: articulate, handsome, youthful ... and impeccably modest.