SPRY BAY – From the streets of New York City to a shipping container atop a hill on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, Mark Krause might agree: What a strange and beautiful trip it has been.
The former production manager for touring Broadway musicals – who happily runs Sheet Harbour Radio (94.7 FM) with local volunteers – wouldn’t have it any other way. “Thirty years ago, my wife and I were on vacation on the Eastern Shore, and two days before we were scheduled to go back to the States we found this gem of a place,” he says. “We’ve been here ever since.”
More recently, the community station he started in 2019 to “give local high school kids something fun to do” has been building a loyal listenership, broadcasting its unique blend of Shore news, views and musical entertainment from a back room in Gammon Home Hardware. Now, he’s relocating his operation to a 53-foot transport box he bought and parked on a one-acre plot of land he owns in the centre of town. With the help of his entirely unpaid staff, the renovations are well underway.
“We’re converting it into a four-room studio,” he explains. “One will be a computer-meeting-all-purpose room. Another will be our broadcast studio. Then, there’ll be a control room for the recording studio. We’re going to make that available for free to the entire community. If you’ve got a little musical group and you want to cut a CD, we’re happy to let you do it in a real recording studio. I really believe in the principle of finding a need and filling it.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, 77-year-old Krause has spent a lifetime pursuing his passions. “From the age of six, I really wanted to be in radio, but I didn't know how to go about it,” he says. “When it was time for me to go to college, I didn't know that ‘School of Communications’ was really radio and television. I just figured it was all part of show business. So, I studied theater and I worked at that for 40 years, mostly as a production manager for touring Broadway musicals.”
In the early 1990s, the peripatetic Krauss and his wife began to think about settling down. “My wife was working at a university in Kentucky,” he says. “I had been on tour with shows for years and years. And, because of that, she had the summers off and I could take the summers off. We decided we wanted a vacation home somewhere. Through our work, we’d been around the world a couple of times. And we kind of looked at a map one day. We really thought of London and Portugal and places like that. But we looked at Nova Scotia and we said, ‘Gosh, lots of water there. Not too overcrowded. Let’s go there.’”
In Spry Bay, after he had formally retired, the radio bug bit him again. “Finally, when I settled down,” he says, “I realized, ‘Now, I can do radio’.”
The idea behind the Sheet Harbour station was simple enough. The community didn’t have a broadcaster. Moreover, he figured, local kids might love the idea. Didn’t he, when he was their age?
“I wanted to give them something fun to do,” he says. “I wanted to give them things to learn easily that they were not going to learn in school – things like commitment, teamwork, responsibility, fiscal responsibility, how to deal with money, a lot of things that they are going to need in real life. I mean, I don’t really know if anybody uses trigonometry. I didn’t.”
Operating with volunteers and on a strict shoe string, Sheet Harbour Radio found its feet and, despite the pandemic, gathered momentum. Krause – who is effusively grateful for the support of Gammon Home Hardware and others – has worked hard to return as much value as he can to the community.
“The amount of support we’ve gotten is extraordinary,” he says.” We have close to 30 yearly sponsors. For a town the size of Sheet Harbour, that’s amazing. For $135, they get three commercial spots every single day for a year, which works out to pennies per spot.”
Last year, Krause managed to score an $8,000 community grant from Halifax Regional Municipality to cover the cost of the shipping container. “Eastern Shore Cartage sold us the actual box for an extraordinarily low price,” he says. “It was something that they were going to decommission anyway. We purchased some building materials.”
Working with him onsite – literally elbow to elbow – is his “indispensable program manager” and on-air host, interviewer and announcer Dan Goodsell, and other volunteers, including Patrick Ruggles. As for a broadcast launch date for the station in its new home? Stay tuned.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Krause says. “We’ve been here for over 30 years.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s averse to adventure.
“Standing still is not a good position to be in … We will do what the businesses need; will do what the residents need. You tell me you need something, I’ll make sure it gets done.”
Even better if that something is as strange and beautiful as a radio station in a shipping container.
