The area code 719 covers southeastern Colorado and the majority of KRCC's listening area. To mark July 19 this year, also known to us as 719 Day, we wanted to share the backstory of something dear to us here at KRCC: a quilt made of t-shirts.
But these aren't your average t-shirts, and this is more than a quilt, made by a daughter for her father. For many many years, KRCC gave away a different t-shirt as part of each spring and fall membership drive.
Mike Procell, best known as the host of All Things Considered for KRCC, has been with the station in some way or another for 40(ish) years. First, as a listener. Then as a volunteer, and now as the friendly voice keeping us company on the radio.
We also know him as a member of the Southern Colorado community. As you might imagine, for someone who's been at KRCC for more than 30 years like Procell, well, he had a lot of t-shirts.
Ariel Lopez knows him as her dad.
He's been with the station for longer than he'd like to admit, and she's been spending time with him at the station longer than she can remember.
As a teenager, she'd hang out at the station, first in the old bunker at the current site of Colorado College's hockey rink, and then, eventually, at the old Sears kit house on Weber Street.
“As you might guess, me being here as long as I have (since the last millennium), I amassed quite a collection of KRCC t-shirts, actually going back to the decade when I was just a listener, before I got directly involved with KRCC and then as an employee," Procell said. "So I had literally run out of drawer space.”
It was during those years that the idea of making a quilt came up. Lopez learned a few things from her maternal grandmother, a professional seamstress, and Procell had more KRCC shirts than he knew what to do with. They can’t agree on who had the idea, but she had a vision, and he had trust in her. Trust, and a box of shirts.
Ariel Lopez, daughter of KRCC All Things Considered Host Mike Procell, stands in front of the quilt she made using her dad's t-shirts from fundraising drives over the decades. 
KRCC All Things Considered host Mike Procell who is wearing the station's latest fundraising t-shirt at the Southern Colorado Public Media Center studios July 2025.
It took a while to complete–life gets in the way– but during COVID she finally got some serious work done on it. Around the same time, KRCC moved out of the old house and into the fancy new Southern Colorado Public Media Center on Tejon Street. Lopez finished the quilt and gave it to Procell, expecting that he’d maybe drape it over the foot of his bed, or put it over his stairs at home.
“For me, the quilt represents… you," Lopez said to her dad. "I just remember countless fund drives where you were here for a whole week at a time. And we went through ups and downs during those periods. And your dedication to the cause, and the community… in my mind it also kinda encompassed some of my education into the world through music, that I try to pass on in my classroom. Each one, each spring and each fall of your life just kinda was a blip on a t-shirt that kinda got piecemealed together into forty-ish years’ worth of t-shirts.”
The answer of what exactly to do with the quilt came to Mike, as if by fate, as he entered the new building and saw a blank spot on the wall of the foyer. Immediately he knew it was “tailor-made” for the quilt.
The station manager was enamored with it too, as everybody seems to be, and it’s been there ever since.
A full-circle moment, hanging on the wall of KRCC, a testament to decades of dedication, family, community.
