Bad Radio Press
Stories Worth Carrying Forward
Family history has fascinated Carol Kehner since childhood—although obsessed may be the more accurate word. Her family was filled with characters and storytellers who understood that history is more than names, dates, and carefully pruned family trees. It is also perseverance, suffering, success, questionable decisions, humor, and the stories people keep telling.
Then, one day, Carol’s grandmother Grace told her about the six unexpected minutes she shared with a stranger passing through a small South Dakota town in 1942. The story lit an extra fire in Carol. It was improbable, romantic, funny, and epic—and she knew she wanted to tell it.
That story eventually became 310 Groveland Avenue and inspired Bad Radio Press: a publishing home for stories shaped by history, memory, resilience, and human connection.
Some stories are inherited. The best of them refuse to stay in the past.
Founder & Author
Carol Kehner
Healthcare operator · novelist · family-story obsessive
Carol Kehner writes historical fiction inspired by the lives people lived, the choices they made, and the words they left behind.
Born in Webster, South Dakota, Carol spent her early years in Watertown before moving to Minnesota. Her debut novel, 310 Groveland Avenue, grew from hundreds of letters exchanged by her grandparents during World War II. Their correspondence offered more than a family history—it revealed two distinct, complicated, and often very funny people building a relationship across distance, uncertainty, and war.
Before becoming a novelist and independent publisher, Carol built a career as a healthcare executive, leading organizations through growth, innovation, and transformation. She is also a breast cancer survivor, a wife, a mother, a sister, a painter, and an insatiable collector of family stories.
Carol lives in Minnesota with her husband, Justin, and their three cats. As Ben’s mom, she treasures the close bond they share as she watches him build a life and career of his own. She founded Bad Radio Press to preserve stories that might otherwise disappear—and to carry them forward for a new generation of readers.
The signal started early
An Inheritance of Stories
When Carol was a teenager, a two-volume history of the Ackerman family traced that branch of her ancestry back to the 1500s in Holland, through an ancestor who helped found New Jersey, and to a passenger aboard the Mayflower. It showed her just how far a family’s story could travel.
Decades of genealogical research followed. Along the way, Carol uncovered connections to royalty and plenty of other remarkable history—but famous names were never the heart of it. The more meaningful discoveries were the seemingly ordinary people who persevered through hardship, made consequential choices, achieved unlikely things, occasionally behaved badly, and left stories worth remembering.
History is something of a family preoccupation; all of Carol’s siblings share it. But Grace’s story changed the scale of Carol’s curiosity. Once she began thinking about the lives of Grace and Charlie, she began looking differently at her other grandparents, her parents, and eventually her own life.
Carol has come to believe that an ordinary life can also be an extraordinary one. Her family has always had a way of living big—sometimes quietly and sometimes decidedly not. By asking questions, listening closely, researching the records, and preserving the stories, she hopes to honor the full, complicated lives behind the family tree.