My Passion for Radio
and Starting WXDR-FM Has Not Gone Away
Pete Simon
I have always carried with me a deep passion
for all kinds of music, storytelling, and politics that started when I became
hooked on the first radio program I remember, twenty years before WXDR
signed-on the air on October 4, 1976. It
was the nightly show on WILM with Mitch Thomas, one of the first
African-American DJs in the country. “The
Big MT” gave me a much-needed education in the world of rhythm and blues,
blues, and jazz recordings. It is where
I first heard Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, The Coasters, Etta
James, Jimmy Smith, Clifford Brown, and other musical greats of the genre. The music fired my imagination, along with
Mitch’s live reading of advertisements for places like “Madame Dora’s”, the
fortune teller down on Route 40. Who was
she? What did her place look like? What did she wear when she was advising her
clients? It was the first time that
radio created pictures for my mind.
Musically, Mitch’s offerings were a joy, but also an essential first
step toward developing a love and appreciation for game-changing modal jazz
introduced by Miles Davis and John Coltrane just a few years later. It was a form of music that became a standard
form for jazz greats, and served as a basic building block for the most
adventurous rock musicians of the day, including groups like The Byrds,
Grateful Dead, and Allman Brothers. The
problem was, when adventurous souls emerged in 1965-66 rock did not have a
platform to display the headier material on the radio. That was about to change.
WXDR came out of what I call the second wave
of the progressive FM revolution. The
first one started in 1967 at KSAN-FM, San Francisco by Tom Donahue and spread
to other “Metro-Media” stations around the country (WMMR, Philadelphia;
WNEW-FM, New York; WMMS-FM, Cleveland; and KMET-FM, Los Angeles). IMHO, Dave Herman’s “The Marconi Experiment”
on WMMR (started in spring 1968) remains the most revolutionary-sounding
program to ever hit the airwaves in the Delaware Valley. It was during the Vietnam protests and
protester harassment. He would dissect events
and tie them to song lyrics, such as Tom Paxton’s “Mr. Blue”, before playing a
very provocative version of the song by the group “Clear Light”. It paints a very clear and dark picture of
the scene, and it gives you an idea of how intense Herman was, as he hosted his
show just a few floors above Rittenhouse Square, where hippies were often
harassed by Philly police. Herman took
chances like that and it worked. There
is no way to overstate the importance of his show hitting the airwaves when it
did. Along with WBCN-FM in Boston, the
five stations mentioned above set the pace for progressive radio in the late
60s. The only station to top them all,
in terms of presenting cutting edge music with a “take no prisoners” attitude
(including well-produced funny and provocative fake commercials), and doing it
all in a very conservative radio market was KDKB in Phoenix, which was started
in 1971 by Bill Compton, an amazing radio visionary who had a great run until
his untimely passing in 1976; his departure came at a time when all commercial FM radio had been drifting into a serious decline. Enter the under-funded and under-staffed (no
full-time professionals) college stations like WXDR, which have done their best
to keep the flame alive.
RADIO-FREE
NEWARK
Newark is located on the signal fringes of
Philadelphia and Baltimore radio and TV.
Couple that with the Iron Hill “mystique” playing with radio waves, and
you have the makings of the Radio-Free Newark theme which existed in Newark
into the 70s, when FM broadcast technologies became more sophisticated, and
students living in dormitories could finally receive FM signals without running
antenna wire up on the roof. Still,
those of us trying to convince the UD administration to allow students to have
an FM station used the old Radio-Free Newark moniker as part of our sales pitch
to them. But we had plenty of help from
other sources to finally get WXDR on the air.
There are many people who passed through the University of Delaware
before me who, in their own indirect-but-significant ways, are responsible for
getting WXDR on the air. I happened to
be there in the mid-1970s following a procession of events at the school which
lead to the beginnings of an FM radio station -- at a school where the
administration had been so steadfast against the idea for about ten years.
Looking back for a moment, the administration
allowed a “radio club” to start in the mid-60s; WHEN, started in part by fellow
Brandywine High alum Greer Firestone.
But the closed circuit/carrier-current station serving dormitories was
as far as the signal could go. Several
efforts to “go FM” were batted down by the administration. Initially, efforts came during the Vietnam
and ROTC protests of the mid-60s, coupled with radical student government
activities. The last thing the
administration wanted was a student mouthpiece over the public’s airwaves.
Enter
the 1970s.
The University administration hit a rough public relations streak to
make the 60s protests seem tame in comparison.
By 1974-75, those of us involved in campus radio just happened to be
there when a once rigid UD administration was most vulnerable. First, there was the suspension of American
Studies students after they camped out on the Mall to protest the loss of
tenure for Arnold Gordenstein a very popular Professor; there was the visit by
author Ken Kesey, which turned into a "be-in" with a canister of
laughing gas on the stage at Mitchell Hall, instead of an expected scholarly
discussion about his writing; we had the firing of Drama/Theater Professor
Richard Aumiller, because he was Gay; the Deer Park streak, which gave the
University a black eye, and sent a loud and clear message that radical anti-war
sentiment had been unseated by a prominent drinking and partying culture; and
last-but-not-least the tuition-by-credit-hour blow-up which disgusted both
students and faculty. With all of this
baggage, University President Edward Arthur Trabant made his comment at a
public gala that a great university should "be open to a marketplace of ideas" when he introduced Sam
Ervin, the chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, a quote that we used to
convince the administration to let us have an FM radio station. We were paying
attention, taking notes, and acted accordingly to the conditions which existed.
The
administration finally relented. I was part of a small group of students, the
one who was a Vietnam-era Veteran, and one with prior job experience at a
commercial radio station. I became the
station’s first Program Director. But
what I think put the administration most at ease was the experience brought by
WXDR’s first Station Manager Ron Krauss, who was instrumental in getting
WMPH-FM on the air at Mount Pleasant High School in 1971. We also had Ron’s friend from WMPH,
Engineering Major Tony Pione, and Business Major Bill Lee on our staff. We had dozens of people chomping at the bit
to get on the air, but I think from the administration’s standpoint they wanted
to see a management team they could live with, and they said okay.
ENTER
THE COMPUTER NERD
With the UD administration on our side there
was one last hurdle to overcome, which required a trip to Trenton. The State of New Jersey had filed
applications for a number of stations for a proposed state-wide educational FM
radio network. One of the applications
was for a station at 91.3 FM in Bridgeton.
The engineering consultant we hired was Ed Perry from Boston, who was
convinced that with a few minor adjustments to their plan the state of New
Jersey did not need the Bridgeton station to cover that part of the state; and
WXDR could have the 91.3 frequency. I
drove Ron Krauss, our Faculty Advisor Douglas
Boyd (who was very instrumental in
getting Faculty Senate support for the FM station), and Assistant Dean of
Students Rick Sline, first to the Trenton Amtrak station to pick-up Ed Perry,
then to New Jersey Public Broadcasting
headquarters. The fate of WXDR
was in the balance, and it all came down to a pocket-sized calculator Ed Perry
carried in his briefcase. It was no
ordinary calculator, and Perry was no ordinary radio engineer. Perry had programmed his device to perform
numerous calculations involving radio signals, which in today’s tech world are
commonplace for a device that size. But
for 40 years ago, what Perry carried with him was way ahead of the curve. Perry
was the stereotypical computer nerd-for-radio, best compared to the character
Harold Finch, played by Michael Emerson on the CBS TV show “Person of
Interest”. With his device, Perry
had an answer for any question involving radio frequency coverage patterns or
related interference issues for non-commercial stations up and down the eastern
seaboard, and he was ready to show the boys from New Jersey how they could do
without their 91.3 signal and still cover all of South Jersey. The meeting was cordial, with New Jersey
officials discussing their two year plan to blanket the state with a public
radio signal. When Ed Perry began speaking, with the help of his specially-programmed
calculator, it took all of about 5 minutes to settle any concerns the New
Jersey people had. They agreed to drop their application for
their 91.3 signal, and we were free and clear to proceed with our plans for
WXDR. Perry may have been an
engineering and computer nerd, but he was also a shrewd businessman. On the way back to Newark, we gave Perry a
lift to Chester, PA, where we dropped him off at Widener College. He was also working there with students and
staff to start an FM station for them.
There are so many people I want to thank who
moved us along. Doug Boyd and Elliot
Schrieber in the Communications Department, students Linda Berryhill, Rob
Stewart, Robyn Bryson, Albert Engberg, Mike Donnelly, Doug Barton, Tim Burke, Marie
Caron, Paul Campbell, the late Jim Godwin, and many others who were there at
our humble beginnings in ’76. But the
two people I have to call out: the
“Crazy College” guy who has been involved in UD radio since it was WHEN, and
he’s still with WVUD; George Stewart
is one of a kind. Both he and Ron
Krauss deserve a seat in the Delaware Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because they
both have/had (Ron has passed on) this trailblazing spirit. Ron blazed the trail with WMPH (albeit with a
high school administration that was far easier to work with than the University
to get an FM station started). In the
late 1970s, George single-handedly blew every radio station in a four state
area (at least 4 states) out of the water when it came to the emerging punk
scene. He kept tabs on Delaware folk
(including the band “Television”) who were making inroads at CBGBs in New York and other
places. The only thing we needed then
were better studio facilities for live broadcasts and music recordings, but
this is no reflection on the knowledge and drive of people like George and
others who have passed thru the walls of WXDR, and now WVUD.
LOOKING
FORWARD: Danger up ahead
The trick today is making sure our UD
administration does not scale back the concept of presenting a “marketplace of ideas” on WVUD, a
higher-powered station than WXDR was in 1976. The trick now is making sure WVUD
does not suffer the fate of many student stations across the country, like the
ones at Vanderbilt in Nashville or Georgia State University in Atlanta, where
they recently were taken over by larger (less adventurous) Public Radio
entities. As with commercial Progressive
FM which waned in the late 1970s, the more established public radio family of
stations became more conservative in approach in the 1980s when funding for the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting became severely threatened, then
scaled-back. Smaller community-based
stations (with shoe string budgets) in the system are the ones still carrying
the flame of progressive approaches to programming, diversity, and inclusion;
keeping “the marketplace of ideas”
alive. Larger stations on the other
hand have often developed a nasty habit of expanding their reach by acquiring
smaller stations, and quite often that means acquiring student-operated or
student-community-based stations. This
is why it is up to all of us to keep
reminding those in positions of power at the University (not only on the
administrative level, but those in the Communications, Political Science,
History, American Studies, and other related fields) of the importance of
keeping WVUD as a unique platform, and a viable community asset; and not sign
it over to become a repeater for a larger, distant radio empire which still
calls itself a “public” entity. Can
WVUD be a better platform for a “marketplace of ideas”? I’m the first one to say, absolutely. But don’t throw out the baby with the bath
water.
Thanks for listening!
FORWARD!!!
Pete Simon
Pfsimon444@gmail.com
