WXPN Kids Corner, the Peabody Award-winning after-school radio show, aired its final episode on Monday, June 23 — nearly four decades after Kathy O’Connell first sat down behind the microphone to host an after-school radio program for the children of Philadelphia. The show ran Monday through Friday for generations, becoming one of those rare Philadelphia institutions that left a mark on people who didn’t realize at the time they were being marked.
On Friday, June 26 at noon, the WXPN Kids Corner farewell goes public. The weekly Free At Noon concert series brings Trout Fishing in America — the duo of Keith Grimwood and Ezra Idlet, longtime Kids Corner regulars and personal friends of O’Connell — to The Music Hall at World Stage at 3025 Walnut Street. WXPN Kids Corner producer and on-air host Robert Drake will be there too. Free tickets are available on Eventbrite.
Kathy O’Connell and the WXPN Kids Corner That Gave Philadelphia a Year
O’Connell launched Kids Corner at WXPN in 1988, after the nationally syndicated WNYC children’s program Kids America ended its run on Christmas Eve 1987. WXPN’s then-station manager Mark Fuerst reached out, recognizing immediately that O’Connell herself was the show. “I said, ‘I’ll give Philly a year,’” O’Connell recalled. Nearly four decades later, she’s still here. Robert Drake joined as producer from the beginning and has spent those four decades doing one thing: making sure Kathy O’Connell could be Kathy O’Connell.
The show reached people in ways that are difficult to quantify. In the late 1980s, one of WXPN Kids Corner’s most devoted callers was a North Philadelphia boy named Desmond whose mother, a single working parent, kept him inside after school with the door locked because of gang violence in their neighborhood. He couldn’t see friends, couldn’t go outside. Kids Corner was one of his few connections to other children. He called nightly. O’Connell listened, acknowledged him, made sure he felt welcomed. That was the show’s particular gift — it guided children through national tragedies, family deaths, and the ordinary crises of growing up in a way that most radio doesn’t attempt.
Trout Fishing in America — Keith Grimwood and Ezra Idlet — have been performing together since 1979, when they formed the duo after a Texas band tour dissolved and left them busking on the streets of Santa Cruz with an acoustic guitar and an upright bass. The name came from a contest that required them to have one; Keith chose it as a nod to writer Richard Brautigan.
Over 25 albums, four Grammy nominations (2001, 2004, 2006, and 2008), and nearly five decades of road work later, their following built the way durable ones do: word of mouth, parent to child. It is not unusual for three or four generations of a family to show up at a Trout performance, which is exactly why they and WXPN Kids Corner made sense together for as long as they did.
Why the WXPN Kids Corner Farewell Belongs on Your Friday
Can’t make it to University City by noon? WXPN will livestream the entire performance and broadcast it on the airwaves simultaneously.
WXPN General Manager Roger LaMay has watched what Kids Corner built in person at station events — families who grew up listening now bringing their own children, the thread of the show running across two generations in the same household. Robert Drake once compared it to what Fred Rogers understood about his own program: that a children’s show can mean something when you’re twelve and still mean something when you’re forty-five. WXPN Kids Corner meant something. Friday at noon is for everyone it ever meant something to.
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