CAMDEN -- Local anti-poverty media walked past a milestone last night at 9:00 when Life-Net Radio (Covering Poverty Widely In A Net Of Many Voices) aired its 300th new weekly episode since the series premiered in February 1998.

"When you tune in to Life-Net Radio, you have a 94 percent chance of hearing a new episode fresh out of post production," bragged series editor-host Jon Paul Sank of Maple Shade, known on the air as Ret Zogreso, to the Courier-Post exclusively.

"When Life-Net News & Radio hits a trouble spot, I say, 'Lord, if you still want this to go on, then You're going to make a way. I don't know how we'll get through this, but I'll just point my blinded self in the general direction and keep putting one foot in front of the other,'" Sank said, explaining his view on how a man who doesn't get paid has managed to crank out 300 fully produced weekly radio shows in less than 6 1/2 years.

"That, plus I have a handful of actively caring people among my subscribers -- and an exceptionally tolerant and supportive wife," Sank confided.

C-P columnist Kevin Riordan in a profile piece called LNR "a quirky, passionate 15-minute radio program" ("Radio show won't let us ignore poor", 1/27/02). In a side conversation with Sank, Riordan said with a grin that LNR was "probably the funkiest show on that station, ... fun to write about."

LNR spun off from Life-Net News, a low-tech two-page monthly newsletter that Sank handed out on the streets in and around Camden starting in May 1997.

Late that year, Sank in a Moorestown Bible study session openly daydreamed about having a radio show. A minister sitting next to him responded by inviting him to take a guest slot on her WTMR broadcast.

A month later, Sank was asking his God whether or not to launch an anti-poverty series.

Sank works Life-Net News & Radio, which solicits no funds from grantmakers or the public, as a full-time volunteer. "I've now given over 10,000 hours to this, but I'm no hero. If God overlooks my many faults and says 'well done,' I'll consider myself plentifully compensated," he said.

Like a convinced telemarketer Sank reaches out to find anyone concerned about poverty or related issues so he can offer them full creative control of a LNR episode in exchange for a reimbursement of the $45 cost of the airtime slot.

The series has shared its air in this manner with a universal variety of individuals and organizations -- charities, synagogues, advocacy groups, minor political parties, churches, protest contingents, mosques, children's clubs, and more -- and promoted their poverty-related messages and events with enthusiasm and editorial neutrality.

TO LISTEN: Wednesdays, 9:00pm, WTMR-AM 800

ON THE WEB: http://www.lifenetradio.org