I remember we didn't get a tremendous help from the school, people like plant engineering and so on didn't help us very much. We had to learn the electrical codes, and we put our own conduits under the 15th Street Lounge, working in the crawl space between the dirt under the Lounge and wooden floor above us, and we snaked both power cables between the studio, which was in front of the lounge, and the transmitter, which was behind the stage. We put in all kinds of power cables, monitoring cables, quite an engineering project because we were learning as we did it, had very little consultation, but it was really terrific, a lot of fun, and very educational.
During much of this period, it was a feeling that the Institute, while they were not overtly fighting our going into FM broadcasting, were dubious of a student-run station that in fact would radiate throughout the tri-city area. One person in the Institute management was John Morse, who was Vice-President for development for RPI, and he was the one person that did give us support, he was the key guy who agreed to let us go forward with the project, but in terms of the President and the Deans, there was very little support, as I remember . That was the period in which Livingston Houston had announced his retirement and Folsom had not yet taken over as President of Rensselaer. This was pretty much done on our own, and the only Rensselaer official I can remember being at those November 1st ceremonies was John Morse.
[For the opening ceremonies of November 1st 1957] we set out to get the mayors of Albany, Schenectady and Troy. We concocted a scheme in which we would tell each of them that the mayors of the other cities had consented to participate in the ceremonies. That area was quite political, I assume still is, and there was a bit of competition, so as we talked to each mayor and told them the other cities' mayors had planned and committed to participate, each very quickly consented to participate. We divided up the responsibility of who was going to see which mayor. I actually met with Erastus Corning in his office, and he consented to come. [NOTE: Mayor corning evidently did not make it to the broadcast.] I remember Sam Stratton, who was the mayor of Schenectady, impressed me the most at the time, because after he committed to participate he contacted us and, as I remember, he came over to the station before the ceremony to be shown around, and he asked a lot of questions. He seemed to have a real interest in it. Before he became mayor, he may have been connected with Union College or one of the colleges in the area, and impressed me quite a bit. I can't remember much of the mayor of Troy [John Purcell], I did not meet with him prior to November 1st, I know he was there.
The ceremony itself was primarily a bit of speech-making, some music of various types. I think we had the RPI Band or the RPI Orchestra, maybe both. We also had some tapes of a football game that we taped previous to November 1st, we played it for a short period to show our abilities to cover sporting events. It was a smattering of what the station was going to be presenting, what the capabilities were in covering both live and recorded programs intermixed with the speechmaking.
FM was just not very popular. FM in those days had been for the longhairs, if you will. Now we had a great variety of programming that ran from folk music of the '40's and '50's, the big bands, we were perhaps the only FM station to play popular music, and we did have a rigorous schedule that varied day-by-day. Somewhere in the 1950's we introduced this wild thing called rock 'n roll, and I think we were the first people in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy area to broadcast any rock 'n roll on FM. There was very little FM coverage to begin with, perhaps two stations in the area. FLY was all-classical, and GFM broadcast the same as their AM [WGY], both identical services and were primarily talk-oriented, some drama. But we were the wild guys who dared to put rock 'n roll on FM, it was coming onto AM, but we had a smattering of everything. We did broadcast two hours of classical music every night but that wasn't the thing that was novel, it was that we covered everything else, from big band to folk music to rock 'n roll to plain old slow popular music. As a result I don't think we got very much interest, we got a little bit of mail but we got 10 letters a month from the general population outside the student body, it was a lot. Students, the receptivity was good as I recall, and there were some who had FM receivers in the dorms, but of the people in the dorms kept listening to us, in the '57-'58 time frame, with the carrier current. There were a number of fraternity houses that went out and bought FM receivers for the houses. They were off-campus, carrier-current coverage was never feasible for them, and so here was their opportunity to have connections back to the school and with the student body. They really started in earnest , I think, when the hockey season started because there was coverage of the home and, more importantly, the away games. Hockey was big then, as it is now, and everyone wanted to be tied in with RPI and hockey.
What WRPI always attracted was a very aggressive group of students who saw what was possible, and were committed to doing it themselves and achieving it. The time I was there, even when we were strictly carrier-current we were always trying to better the performance, to add more carrier-current transmitters, to build better remote equipment so we could do a better job of covering sporting events. So I would say to add the stereo and go to higher power [ten years later] was a natural follow-on. We were fighting, at least in that time frame, they were really worried about putting this much power in the students' hands, to give us a voice that could get out into the community that they could not censor and monitor very closely. It was a real concern. Could they trust us? would we get out of control? I think what happened to us is we took our responsibilities, once we went on FM, very seriously, and we adopted an attitude of, let's achieve real professionalism here.
[Introduction] [Ralph Asher] [Herb Dahm] [Chuck Phelan]