KEWU 89.5 FM has already lived several lives on the same frequency. It started as a 10-watt classroom project at what was then Eastern Washington College of Education, spent decades as one of the country's most decorated small-market jazz stations, and as of October 2025 broadcasts as an oldies station under new ownership. Few stations on Radio Shuffle carry that much documented history behind a single call sign.
From a 10-Watt Classroom Signal to 10,000 Watts
The station signed on as KEWC on April 7, 1950, a 10-watt AM outlet built as a hands-on project for students at Eastern Washington College of Education in Cheney. It moved to the FM band on November 11, 1963, becoming KEWU-FM, and spent its first decades as a free-form, student-run outlet mixing classical music with local history programming. The real transformation came in 1986, when the university boosted the transmitter from 10 watts to a full 10,000 and rebuilt the format around classic and contemporary jazz, a shift that would define the station for the next 37 years.
A Nationally Recognized Jazz Station
Under that format, KEWU built more than 150 hours of jazz programming a week, folding in Big Band, Latin jazz and blues around the core sound. The work earned national recognition: JazzWeek magazine named KEWU the Best Small Market Jazz station in both 2005 and 2015, and longtime program director Elizabeth Farriss, who joined in 2004, was individually honored as Best Small Market Jazz Programmer in 2005, 2009 and 2015. For a station broadcasting out of a city of roughly 12,000 people, that run of awards against much larger markets was a genuine achievement, one built by a small, consistent staff over two decades rather than turnover and reinvention.
A Budget Decision, Not a Ratings Failure
In the summer of 2023, Eastern Washington University announced it would stop operating the station at year's end, citing what a university spokesperson called a changing media landscape and an annual operating cost topping $115,000. The spokesperson admitted the university would not see major savings from the move. Students had mixed reactions. One senior who worked at the station called the closure "a real shame" while noting the outlet had struggled to fully recover from pandemic-era disruptions, while an alumna from the class of 1994 described the station as formative to her college experience.
A New Owner and a New Sound
The frequency's future stayed unsettled for over a year before Eastern Washington University reached an agreement with the Spokane-based Oldies Preservation Society in February 2025 to acquire the broadcast license. The new operator took over programming duties on October 1, 2025, rebranding the signal as "Kool 89.5" and shifting from jazz to an oldies format. It is an unusually clean handoff for a college radio frequency, one nonprofit format specialist stepping in for another rather than the license disappearing into a corporate group or going dark entirely, which keeps 89.5 FM active in Cheney and Spokane under a new identity built on the same dial position generations of EWU students once called their own.
75 Years on One Frequency
Whatever plays on 89.5 today, the number of stations that survive three quarters of a century, a full format change, and a change of ownership without ever going silent is small. KEWU's jazz years earned it a reputation well beyond Cheney, and the station's current oldies format inherits a frequency with a genuinely rare broadcasting history behind it.