Radio Connects Us All

(Airdate: January 11, 2022) COLIN FODEN: MAKING RADIO DREAMS REALITY. Our Town host Maryanne McNellis interviews Colin Foden, KPTZ co-founder and long-time President & Chairman. Colin joined IBM as a young man. Those tech skills turned out to be easily transferable when he left Northern England and headed for New Zealand. Next it was on to California where he worked for financial giant Pacific Life. He hadn’t been on a college track back in England. But Pacific Life financed his MBA at Pepperdine University. The plot digressed when he and his partner had a baby girl. Soon they were in the proverbial VW van headed up to the Pacific Northwest. He had friends in Port Townsend and soon was part of the community here, serving as the key financial guy at Centrum for several years. But before long he was the single parent of two toddlers. That role clashed with full-time employment so he left Centrum to become a consultant. A chance meeting with a friend at Swains (an institution which folded a few years back) resulted in him joining a small band of idealists devoted to starting a community radio station. The rest is history, as they say. They started the ball rolling in 2007 and by 2011 our own community radio station – KPTZ, 91.9 FM – was up and running. Colin was at the helm as President & Chairman of the Board during KPTZ’s first decade. It hasn’t always been easy.