At Dania Jai-Alai, where 100 fans rattle around in stands built for 3,000, a teenage announcer dreams of being the next star in a sport that calls South Florida one of its few remaining homes.

Off U.S. 1 on Card Sound Road -- past the mangrove swamps and before Key Largo -- cloggers and buck dancers converge on Sundays at an open-air shack of a bar called Alabama Jacks.

In a small work space above a floral shop on South Beach, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor spent 40 years carving some of the world's most-coveted pool cues.

``There's a certain richness to this place,'' says Dan Grech, co-producer of Under the Sun, a 6-month-old show on WLRN-FM (91.3) that has featured these stories and a two-dozen others in its quest to catch the hidden people and places of South Florida.

Since the show debuted in February, Grech, co-producer Alicia Zuckerman and a team of freelance reporters -- many of them radio novices -- have put three hour-long broadcasts on the air, each of them themed.

One told stories from the perspective of South Florida as the ``end of the line'' -- from Henry Flagler's train tracks to a cat retirement home in Hollywood and to a reporter's quest to make it past the velvet rope at a downtown Miami nightclub. Another showcased ``literary South Florida'' and featured Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan, author Edwidge Danticat and other local booksellers, novelists and poets.

``We're trying to home-grow a public radio community,'' says Zuckerman, 36, who notes that most WLRN radio programming is news, arts or interview-based. On Under the Sun, the focus is on characters, sound, local music and stories that are reported over months to convey a distinct sense of place.

In Southwest Ranches, retired postal worker Curtis Mozie grows and sells ``miracle fruit'' -- tart, almond-size berries that make acidic and sour foods seem sweet. It makes vinegar tastes like apple juice and limes like candied oranges.

In Miami Gardens, a woman named Queen Brown became an activist after the unsolved murder of her 24-year-old son in 2006, starting a radio program called What's Going On? with her three surviving kids on WINZ-AM (940) to discuss youth violence.

``This can sometimes be a dark place,'' says Grech, 32, ``but we're not trying to gloss over those stories.''

Grech, who until a few weeks ago was a full-time reporter for American Public Media's Marketplace, has spent nights and weekends editing and reporting for the show. This fall he'll contribute long-distance as he teaches a radio journalism course at Princeton, his alma mater. Zuckerman, a former writer for New York magazine, works on Under the Sun in addition to her full schedule as producer of WLRN's Jazz Roots and Florida Roundup.

``We explore the unsung voices. We want to avoid speaking with pundits and political figures and celebrities,'' says Peter J. Maerz, the show's executive producer and the programming and operations manager at WLRN.

Maerz says the show was born out of something rather mundane: a Public Radio Program Directors Association study that found that ``listeners wanted stories told that reflected the feeling of where they lived more than the specific geography.''

To catch those listeners, Under the Sun periodically takes over the station's most popular Saturday time slot: noon, which is usually reserved for the initial airing of Chicago-based radio host Ira Glass' This American Life. (The time period had an average audience of 29,000 in June.)

As popular as This American Life is, listeners have seemed copacetic with the change.

``In my job, I usually get nothing but complaints, but got no complaints via e-mail or phone each time we aired Under the Sun in that slot,'' says Maerz.

The next hour-long episode of the show is scheduled for February. In the meantime, 8- to 12-minute segments will air twice a month.

The show is produced on a barebones budget. Many of its stories originated with listeners through e-mails, phone calls and open story meetings before the initial broadcast. Grech and Zuckerman have hosted An Evening Under the Sun retellings at Books & Books and the Hollywood Library and plan more live events.

``It's ultimately about what regular people, people who are not in the business, what they think sounds good,'' says Zuckerman. ``We try to incorporate the sounds of South Florida, the interesting people here just talking about their lives.''

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