Entity | KDNA

KDNA (102.5 FM) was a St. Louis, Missouri freeform non-commercial community radio station from February 8, 1969 until sometime in 1972. It billed itself as "Radio Free St. Louis". The KDNA call letters are currently used by a different station, a Spanish language station at 91.9 FM in Yakima, Washington, and the 102.5 FM frequency in St. Louis is currently occupied by a commercial station with the call letters KEZK-FM which broadcasts in the "Adult Contemporary Format". KDNA in St. Louis was founded by Jeremy Lansman and Lorenzo Milam. Lansman met Milam in Seattle, Washington while the two were working at an alternative radio station there called KRAB. Milam provided the initial funding ($50,000) for KDNA, and, after competition for the frequency from the First Christian Fundamentalist Church, eventually the Federal Communications Commission granted Lansman and Milam a license. The radio station broadcast from 4285 Olive in Gaslight Square in the center of St. Louis, an area, according to Leonard Slatkin, where "the majority of nightlife used to be concentrated, but [by] the late ’60s had [been] reduced...to a set of run-down and decrepit buildings". Slatkin was Assistant Conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at the time, and after an on-air interview at the station, he agreed to host his own weekly show called the Slatkin Project, which aired from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM Thursdays.