We came to Rensselaer in 1962. At that time WRPI had been on the air for about five years. The station we inherited at that time was a really a very technically-oriented station, perhaps more so than what I understand the facility is today, in terms of the fact that most of the people were technical.. Announcing and programming were very much secondary in those days, and quite honestly, I don't think the station was as polished is it is now. We were involved with people who came to the station because they were electrical engineers. The campus was different then, the Rensselaer Union did not have the heavy involvement of student activities it does today. I think things have gotten a lot better, there is a lot more ability and atmosphere for students to relate to the outside world, to learn about each other.
The station built a lot of its own equipment. As a matter of fact, during the period of the initial FM signon to the time we came, everything was constructed home-brew. I think there was a definite bias against commercial equipment. Bob Brown is a name that may or may not have brought up: We had amplifiers in the station, they were known as Brownian amplifiers, not Brownian motion, mind you, but Brownian amplifiers, it was his design. That changed and evolved, but everything was home-made, nothing was labeled. If you didn't know how to run the console blind with no labels on the buttons you weren't an engineer, and in order to go on the air you had to pass a test that showed that in an interesting set of circumstances you could make it run and keep it on. People would pull an amplifier out and you had to figure out where it was. So it was really a rigorous kind of technical environment.
One of my first involvements with WRPI was as an announcer. We had a program on in the '60's called "Music from the Podium." It was on each night at 10 o'clock and ran to 12. It was a program, you might imagine, of classical music. Block programming was really the way the station was being run in those days: There would be a two-hour block of jazz, a two-hour block of folk, typically long enough to get you into an established mode but not really so long that you ever really developed an audience, so the audience was quite fragmented. One of the people that has been very instrumental, in my opinion, to a lot of people in terms of their involvement with WRPI, is a professor, Doug Washburn, who was our faculty advisor while I was a student here. Doug had just the kind of feeling for students and for what students' concerns were, that made you feel he was a friend; and I remember one particular night I was on "Music from the Podium" announcing a classical record that happened to be [Vaughan-Williams's] Greensleeves, subtitled of course, "What Child is This?", and I announced it as, "Whose Child is This?" Doug called me on the phone right away, there was no pause, and he said, "Chuck, I really don't think you should be raising philosophical or religious questions on the air!"
Back then we were a one-thousand watt station operating form the 15th Street Lounge, which was very different from the [renovated] Lounge that is here now. It was an old infirmary, I believe from World War II, initially the RPI Players and WRPI moved in, and the station moved to the Communications Center around 1975, I guess. During that time the organizations were real close, and the RPI Players and WRPI did a lot of cross-pollination, but the station was in the lounge, we had a little antenna on the back of the lounge. By contrast to today's antenna in North Greenbush it was a thousand feet lower. Antenna heights are measured to average terrain, and that was about minus 250, our current antenna is at about plus 890; and instead of 10,000 watts we were running at 720 watts. We could be picked up in Albany certainly, in Schenectady if you had a good receiver. That was pretty much it, because the FM signal was blocked by the mountains, as you say. Of course, when the new tower was switched over, we had a much wider audience.
We had a very short broadcast day. WRPI signed on the air about 5 o'clock in the evening with a program called "Passport," and that was wallpaper music, lots of Percy Faith, lots of Mantovani. That went for two hours until 7, and then we went into blocks of folk music one night, show music another night, a spotlight on a particular entertainer another night, and those shows went until 10 o'clock. 10 o'clock was always "Music from the Podium" until 12, when "Music 'round Midnight" came on, and the station signed off when whoever did "Music 'round Midnight" got tired. I think we had to go to 1 a.m., that was the earliest cutoff, but you could stay on all night if you felt like it, and now we pull all-nighters studying, then we would pull all-nighters playing music.
The block format really continued until the late '60s. It was around 1967 or 1968 when the station switched over to what was then a very radical concept, the idea of playing rock 'n roll, progressive rock, music that wasn't in the classical vein, on FM. Up until that point in time jazz was probably the most exotic form of music that people would ever play of FM radios, so it was really a cutting-edge kind of thing. WOR-FM in New York City was one of the first progressive rock stations, and we had a series of stacked antennas up on top of the towers which were then on the Sage building which were used for WHAZ, RPI's AM station, and we would receive WOR-FM from New York, pipe it back to the station and listen and, dare I say, get ideas? Probably more than a few ideas came from there, and WRPI was one of the first in the country, we were doing it in a matter of months of WOR.
There were really three periods that I was involved with WRPI: There is the period in which it was the one kilowatt station in the Lounge; there was the period in which it was a 10,000 watt-effective station, as it is today, but transmitting from the Lounge; and then of course the station moved here. During that period an interesting little story happened: We had a very small control room, there were two of them in the Lounge. Part of the plan to go to stereo was to build much larger control rooms; we remodeled, we took over some space, that was done mostly by students, by the way. It was a club, it was very much an atmosphere of, let's all get together on a Saturday night, order a pizza and build a radio station, and that's how it was done. Walls were put up, sound-proof windows were not bought, they were built from scratch and it was very much a from-scratch thing. I remember one night another person who is very important in WRPI's past, a gentleman named Joel Levine, who was also involved with the RPI Players, and I did the actual act of taking the old control room off the air. It involved taking some equipment racks that I'm sure had been in place since 1957, bending them backwards, and there were large umbilical cords of cables coming out of the bottom, and taking - it hurts to say it - a hacksaw right through the cable, and I remember Joel looked over at me and said, "Well, Chuck, I guess we're committed now."
Programming is something I know at times throughout WRPI's history has been pretty controversial, and a station like WRPI is at odds with itself in one very important area. The concept of block programming, which to some extent the station still does to this day and very much as its only programming in the early '60s, does not build an audience very well, because you do two hours of jazz, two hours of ethnic programming of one sort or another, two hours of folk, two hours of classical, back to rock - you are everybody's station yet you are nobody's station, and you don't have a big mass appeal. The one hand obviously says that's not good because you don't have a lot of people listening. On the other hand WRPI is a campus activity, is funded through the student activity fee, and it has to serve the need to provide a creative outlet for as broad a base as possible. Those are two things that have always been at odds and I think still are, and I don't think that will ever change. I don't think it is necessarily bad, it's just a fact of life, it's kind of like the weather in Troy could be better but it's what it is. The motivation to go from block programming to a more structured kind of programming was, to be very honest, building an audience. We wanted to be a radio station, and there were a lot of people during that period of the mid to late '60s that ultimately did go on to become broadcasters, probably the largest single number ever in the station's history. So there was something going on, and there was a feeling we wanted to be a radio station. I think the programming decision happened kind of automatically, so we said, let's have an audience.
An interesting aside: I don't know whether they do it today, but Arbitron, the service that rates radio audiences, does not normally consider non-commercial stations, they are listed as "Other." Normally they comprise a small segment of the market. Suddenly, in 1967, I believe, WGY saw some of their audience going away, and the program manager over there commissioned a study and found it was going here. WRPI had about 11% of the entire Capital District Market, and this was with the 720 watt station, not with the kind of station we have today. So I think people said, "Hey, there is an audience out there, this isn't just a club, maybe we can do something with this."
I would like to talk about 1967 to 1969, the building period during which the station as it exists today came into being. In a nutshell, what happened is, the little antenna on the back of the 15th Street Lounge, which looked like a basketball hoop, would ice up every time we had an ice storm, and those are pretty frequent around here. One time it iced-up one time too many, and we said, "Let's not just keep fixing this thing, let's get a new one." So we started to get a new one, and things happened and snowballs start running down mountains, ultimately turning into what it is today. WTEN had a tower in North Greenbush it wasn't using; well, we got them to donate it to us. WHAZ was being sold by RPI, they decided to go out of the AM radio business. They sold it, and decided to put the money from that into WRPI. The Rensselaer Union was approached for additional funding, and what emerged was a station that was built roughly 25% by funds from the RPI administration, 75% from student funds, and was to be run 100% from student funds. That was the period in April 1969 when the station signed on in stereo. I would say that time was the demarcation from the "old" WRPI and today's WRPI, which is much more of a force in the community.
One name that I don't think any discussion would be complete without is Bob Lieberman. Bob Lieberman is a guy with a really deep voice, and Bob did all of the early signons and signoffs, and was pretty instrumental in the background of the station. A wild and crazy guy, he still today has a pony tail, and still today wears jeans, and he was sort of the father of WRPI as I know it. Dennis Jackson is another name, Den is currently a manager of a station in Westport, Connecticut, and has a couple of WRPI people [including Chris Lucas, RPI '69] working for him. Dennis did a show called the "House of Sound" on Saturday nights, and he would turn all the lights off in the studio and dim everything way down, sit there and get into a real gravelly voice, and it was kind of an atmosphere. He was very important in bringing rock n' roll to the Capital District. If that's good or bad, he did it. I think it's good, and he's still in the business, so he must like it. Wendell Putney did "Front Row Center," it was show music. Wendell was a crossover from the RPI Players. Other people my recollections would be incomplete without mentioning: Ed Dague, who is now on WNYT as their anchor. Ed did a program called "Kaleidoscope" when I first came here. Ed was sort of my radio father for a while. When I moved here as a freshman it was in a period of time when freshmen and upper classmen lived together in the same dorms in some areas, and I was lucky enough to have my freshman room assignment across the hall from Ed Dague. Ed, I believe, was rooming with a guy named Bob Yoder at that time, and Bob and Ed were the original architects of "Christmas Special," which was first aired here in 1962, resurrected in 1965 by me; a massive cast of people behind the scenes, Elliot Graham, Joel Levine, and countless others were involved in putting that together. Al Hills is another ex-WRPI person still in broadcasting, he works in a station up in Alaska and has for the last 25 years, so he must like the isolation. Gary Skala, who was very active in WRPI and one of the zaniest and craziest people that I've ever known and still know, and he is still zany and crazy. He is now a management consultant in Chicago, so you can't always tell from what someone does what they are like, I guess.
Elliot Graham is a very, very important person, he is really the technical father of the current station, in a couple of ways. Elliot is one of my partners in the business that I'm in, National TeleConsultants, out in Los Angeles, and Elliot was the guy involved primarily with the technical design of the current station as far as the transmitter goes, and the old Lounge. When he was working at RPI after graduation he was actually the person fully responsible for the current Communications Center studio complex, in terms of the layout of the rooms, the material on the walls, power circuitry, so he really is the technical father of the station as it is today.
There were not a lot of women in WRPI in those days, not a lot of women in RPI in general, but three people I remember fondly: one is Julia MacDonald, who is now married to Rick Hartt, the director of the Union, and I believe involved with something in Albany; Sheila Fields was another of the women announcers, and is now with Procter and Gamble as a research chemist; and Alathea Black is another lady who used to charm the folks in the late '60s.
I think everyone has a tendency to look back to their time as being a golden age. Obviously, we thought it was, and some friendships that have endured to this day on my part were made then, and people that I work with now, people that I stay in touch with were people that I knew then. As far as I was concerned it was a golden age. I'm sure the people in 1957 felt theirs was. As far as an age of transition, it certainly was, the period of 1957 was a big demarcation, probably bigger in technical terms than the demarcation that occurred in 1967 to 1969. But I think that was more formative of what we have today than the earlier one was. So was it a golden age? I don't know. It certainly was a fun age, it was a wonderful time, and I hope it still is.
[Introduction] [Ralph Asher] [Herb Dahm] [Chuck Phelan]