By Lori Evans
Homer Independent Press

Cristy Fry can be forgiven if she doesn’t remember the first song she ever played as a KBBI volunteer. After all, it was 46 years ago — and she was just 17.

Homer’s public radio station was in its infancy, and Fry had stopped by to say “hi” to her mom, Randi Somers, who was the station’s first news director, and Pete Carran, a family friend and station manager.

Carran was playing music for the station’s first show of the morning and not happy about it, Fry remembers. He was grumpy, probably hung over, and in need of coffee and breakfast. The year was 1980 and KBBI was housed in the little brown cabins on Lake Street across from Spenard Builders Supply. Nearby was a diner where the Ulmer’s paint section is today.

Before heading out the door, Carran showed Fry how to cue a record. “Play music until I get back,” he told her.

“He threw me into the deep end. That’s how I got into radio,” said Fry in a recent telephone interview. 

For the next 10 years in between commercial fishing, building crab pots, and doing some sailboat chartering in the Caribbean during the winters, Fry was a KBBI volunteer on-air host. During that first year, she was behind the mic from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., five days a week. Then, she did shows weekly, sometimes more.

In 1990, she met David Fry, another Homer commercial fisherman. “This was a love-at-first-sight story,” she said. They soon married, moved to King Cove at the tip of the Alaska Peninsula, and worked together doing just about every job there is in commercial fishing.

In 1996, when the couple returned to Homer, Fry dropped by KBBI with a “Hey, I’m back. What’s a time slot that’s available?”

Susan Kernes, then KBBI’s general manager, had an idea for a country and folk music show to be called West of Nashville. Fry countered with East of Adak. The name stuck and the show, featuring music that Fry thought listeners would enjoy, was hers.

“I always knew what song I was going to start with,” she said. An event during the week might inspire her playlist; other times it was a song she had heard — maybe new to her, maybe not — that she wanted to share.

She relished having the studio all to herself, playing music as loud as she liked. Unlike her paying jobs in fishing and sailing, volunteering at KBBI relieved Fry of worrying about a crew or disasters at sea. 

“East of Adak Saturdays became my happy place,” she said.

More than radio kept Fry busy in Homer. While she continued to commercial fish and build crab pots, she also worked for the Homer News, writing Seawatch, a fishing column, delivering papers, and doing whatever needed to be done.

“She’s a work horse,” said former KBBI senior producer Kathleen Gustafson. “Cris is this terrific combination of practical and fun. … She’s always ready to chat, always ready with some snacks to share, but never not ready to get to work.”

Gustafson joined KBBI as the “Morning Edition” host in 2002, the same time Fry was organizing community members to join the radio station’s board of directors so that listeners had a strong voice in decision-making.

“She was part of the brain trust of the place,” said Gustafson.

And East of Adak was one of KBBI’s most listened to show, she said. During fundraising drives, people would wait until Fry was on the air to call in a pledge.

Fry never kept track of how many Saturday afternoons she spent in the KBBI studio, or the number of songs she played, or the number of pledges or requests she took. All she knows it was her safe harbor, the place she returned to within days of David’s death in 2023 to play all his favorite songs. 

“It was exactly what I wanted to do,” she said. “It was exactly what he would have wanted me to do.”

Fry signed off the air Nov. 1, 2025, two days before boarding a plane to Hawaii and the start of a new life. “I have an avocado tree outside my front door,” she said. “I have a place where I can sunbathe naked if I want.”

Although Alaska has begun to lose its allure, returning to Homer to help with KBBI’s annual Concert on the Lawn remains a possibility.

While she no longer recalls the title of that first vinyl record she played for KBBI listeners, Fry’s farewell song, the alt-country hit “I Gotta Go” by Robert Earl Keens is memorable. “Wastin’ time standin’ here,” Keen sings, “I gotta go.”