An interesting byline is that somewhere along the line, someone had gotten to know someone over at WGY in Schenectady, and they had given us a whole lot of castoff stuff which included a dozen of so Daven Pots [potentiometers], volume controls which were incorporated into our main control board. Later we learned that those were the same pots that WGY had in its main board when it went on the air as, I believe, the second clear-channel station in the country, after KDKA, many years ago. These were handsome old beasts: The pot was about the size of a tuna fish can, and there were beautiful copper wipers back there, and every couple of weeks, you would have to unscrew the back and clean it up with alcohol. They worked beautifully, and I hope someone remembered there was a little bit of history there and perhaps they still exist in a closet. It was one of the interesting bits of help we got from other stations in the area.
The most significant assistance we got from commercial stations was WROW, 590. In our spare time, we would pop into local stations and talk to the engineers and announcers. One day we were visiting what was then the [WROW-AM] transmitter's location across the [Hudson] river, just as you come into Albany south on the Thruway, on your left side is a Niagara Mohawk storage yard and a helluva good cheese distribution center, and just down the road to the south of there was an old building sitting in the middle of a field, and they had their AM transmitter there. So we visited that one day and, lo and behold, in a side room was a perfectly beautiful FM rig. In the early and mid '50's FM had gone into a decline when it was predicted to be one of the great technical advances; but after World War II it just didn't take off, and many stations had invested in FM equipment and actually gone on the air only to later shut them down. WROW had indeed done that, so we looked in there and realized here was here was a way to pull WRPI up by the bootstraps. At that time we were broadcasting on carrier current through the transformers in the dormitories. The carrier current, of course, permitted you to send an AM signal through the transformer forward, and the transformer effectively prevented the transmission of the signal backward in the electric lines. It was far from the best, but it was adequate and it did get us not on the air but through the carrier current in our dorm. In any case we got to know some of the folks at WROW and we were very proud that they let us tape some segment of a hockey game or some music shows and ferry the tapes over to them, so they were kind enough to give us credit on the air, which was real big stuff in those days. Anyway, John Murray, who was quite a politician, with a good head on his shoulders said, "Look, you have this perfectly good FM rig sitting over there at your transmitter. Why don't you think about giving it to RPI for WRPI's use and the college will give you a nice little tax write off and we'll be happy to acknowledge you publicly, and we'll put the thing on the air." They thought about it and to our amazement said, "Gee, that's a pretty good idea." All of a sudden, over a period of a year of two, we ourselves owned a legitimate FM rig. It was a legitimate transmitter and the FM channels were far more available than were AM slots.
WHAZ [RPI's own over-the-air AM station from 1922 to 1967] was a total non-entity. It went on the air once a week on Monday evenings; a fellow named Carl Kuntz, who was an EE professor, would climb up to the top deck of Sage Labs and throw the switch once a week. It had great equipment, and we look through the door and marvel at this wonderful stuff in there [that] we were totally forbidden to touch. We got no help at all from WHAZ, and we felt we were the only radio force and that was just an anachronism they kept going to keep the history cooking. The real attraction [in FM] was that it was a legitimate over-the-air signal that we could broadcast to the whole world. And then the question was the budget of $1,000 per year: Out of that had to come all of our technical supplies, our wiring, our solder and cord for the turntables, the whole nine yards. How were we going to put this thing on the air? The big problem was the engineering, which in those days cost $10,000 or $20,000; well, we decided that this was something that if a bunch of engineers couldn't do it, then who could? We undertook the Herculean task of doing the field engineering to satisfy FCC requirements, to put what we call the modern WRPI on the air. The antenna site we had to choose was dictated by the fact that we couldn't afford very much coax [cable] than buy a good solid site for an antenna. We finally chose a 20-foot steel mast with a simple antenna which was located on the top of a hill right behind Church 6 and also behind the 15th Street Lounge and the knob of rock overlooking '86 Field. We had to give an exact location for the antenna - well, that was pretty good, because generations of civil engineers had been surveying the heck out of that little hill there, and boy, they had that locked up, so we reported the location of our antenna site to the FCC to the tenth of a second, which works out to be a couple of feet one way or the other in latitude and longitude and got the whole thing completed after my time, but it was a real effort, and very interesting, I might add.
I don't think the institute was very much aware of our presence at all, no. The crummy budgets: We were not high on their list. I remember walking into the Field House one night to do a hockey game and finding out that some brilliant person down in the finance office didn't think we really needed that telephone line, so they ordered it disconnected. And there we were, very embarrassed, with no phone line to feed into. We would pick up pieces all over the place and beg, borrow and occasionally steal stuff to put the thing on the air. Some of the prominent [WRPI-AM] people who came to mind: John Murray; Ralph Asher, who followed me as Chief Engineer; Ken Goldstein, Ken was probably the only amateur radio tie-in, although we spoke to a couple of their people and helped each other out with some technical effort; Dan Strassberg, Dan was part of the early fiber of building WRPI. He was the aristocrat., he has a very prominent nose and he kind of sticks that out there pointing at the microphone, and has a lovely radio voice. I guess he was as close to an announcer as opposed to a techie [technical person] as we had. There was never a real division between the announcers and the techies. I guess we were all half-and-half. The only reason I mentioned Dan was that Dan obviously enjoyed the presentation form, while others of us enjoyed putting the station together. It was kind of pitiful at the time I was first with WRPI in 1954, and it was obvious that every bit of talent you had was needed.
Most of the early evening was news and popular music, and only by default did I end up as the announcer of "Music from the Podium," and we would start with Bach's Air on the G String, and I would come in and announce "Music from the Podium, a program of the finest music brought to you by the world's greatest artists through the magic of RCA Red Seal Recordings," and you could almost see the little dog barking in the distance. Then we would have one hour of intellectual effort, followed again by more popular music, and occasionally we would put on something called "Bedtime Bandwagon," which was a lot of fun. At that time we had a thing called the Inter-Collegiate Broadcasting System., and after midnight it became the Inter-Collegiate Broad-Chasing System, and got into some wild music which was causing a lot of raising of eyebrows. There were no great statements to be made, we had no news department. The news came off an AP machine that we got because we carried some cigarette advertising.
I was introduced to an era or and interest that I would not have otherwise developed, and found very intriguing. I remember one Christmas time we went down to New York City, 485 Madison Avenue, which was the former headquarters of CBS, and were welcomed - I mean really welcomed - down there and shown around, and we met Douglas Edwards and actually stood in the studio while Alan Jackson put on what was then the premier radio news broadcast of the day, the 6 o'clock news. I remember we were sitting right next to him and we saw people peering through the windows and moving away, and after the show was over I asked what those people were doing out there. He said, "You are professionals, so you got to stand inside while those were the tourists and they got to watch from outside." We felt very, very good at that point, and we had a few experiences like this which I think were very moving. I think that the organizational effort required to take an emerging kind of thing like an old radio station and make it work was very important. Some of the interpersonal relationships that were formed there were very strong. All these things came together, and it was something which I think is a necessary adjunct, particularly in an engineering school. I would say good old RPI and WRPI have stood me in very good stead.
One quick story: I was doing a studio remote, which is the deadliest part of a hockey game, where you sit in a studio and watch the needles jump and it was awfully boring; and the phone in the 15th Street Lounge rang and rang, and finally I ran out there , and in total disgust, I picked it up and said, "WTRY!" There was a dead silence on the other end and the guy said, "That's funny, THIS is WTRY! We're just trying to find out what the score is!"
[Introduction] [Ralph Asher] [Herb Dahm] [Chuck Phelan]