This week, I’m going to share three stories from my radio broadcasting career. Here’s the first…
When I started college in the mid-seventies at Stony Brook University on Long Island, the campus radio station was only available by carrier current — your radio had to be plugged into an electrical outlet on campus and tuned to 820 AM to hear it. While it had some listenership in the dorms, the quality wasn’t very good and most students didn’t even know it existed.
Still, that was where I became obsessed with radio, spending hours every day at the station, learning as much as I could about every aspect from splicing audio tape to creating special effects to engineering sports remotes. I co-anchored a newscast during the station’s debut broadcast, went on to host a morning show two days a week, and was part of a late Saturday night free-for-all and call-in show. I got more of an education in that facility than in any of my classes — mostly because I was too busy doing the former to attend the latter.
For decades afterwards, whenever anyone asked me how to get into the radio business, I told them not to go to some “school of broadcasting” where they would just learn the mechanical aspects. Instead, I always recommended working at a college radio station, where they could absorb so much more and get real on-the-air experience. Those stations always need volunteers, particularly during summer and other breaks in the school year, when students aren’t around.
In my sophomore year, the school got approval from the FCC to broadcast on 90.1 FM, a non-commercial frequency with a powerful enough signal to reach for miles in every direction (even across Long Island Sound into Connecticut). The university’s administration approved the funds to buy and install an FM transmitter and antenna atop the Graduate Chemistry building, with special phone lines which carried the signal from the studios several hundred feet away in the student union.
As you’d expect, everyone on the staff was excited and stepped up their game to make WUSB-FM as much of a big time station as we could. That meant bringing on new personnel to fill the expanded hours as the station broadcast from 7am to 2am. DJs chose their own music (from a library of over 9,000 LPs) and certain parts of the day were dedicated to different types of music.
Most of them were rock focused, but there was also plenty of jazz, folk, oldies, public service/talk/sports shows, as well as a hugely popular Saturday reggae show hosted by an exec from Island Records who took the train from Manhattan every weekend to do his show.
After a couple of months on the air, the engineers — who had worked long hours wiring everything — revealed a little surprise they had rigged. As they were erecting the antenna, they had wrapped some Christmas lights around it from top to bottom. Then they wired one of the buttons on the studio-to-transmitter remote control to turn the lights on.
That night, not long after dark, the DJ on the air announced that something cool was about to happen atop the GradChem building, which was in the center of the campus. Then he pushed the button and wow! The lights were bright enough to be seen from every vantage point on the university’s grounds.
We were on the air and in the air!
Tomorrow: the Mumble Mouth story.