Alumni
A History of Problems
The College radio station has been plagued by equipment problems dating back to its first incarnation as WABA-AM, a 200-watt station founded by two students who built a transmitter and applied for a license in 1923. They did experimental broadcasts as well as entertainment features, but lost the license on October 14, 1925 because, says Art Miller, archivist/librarian for special collections, “[it] was booted off the air by the pro-business Coolidge administration’s FCC.”
The College did not enter a protest, according to an archival report, because “… the expense of maintenance and operation was heavy enough to convince College authorities that it would be unwise to continue the project. Further, because of the quasi-experimental nature of the programs broadcast, the Department of Commerce felt that the station was not serving the public interest as it should.” The archives also include a telegram sent from a staff member to the station manager vacationing in Wisconsin, asking what to do about an equipment failure.
The campus didn’t have a station from 1925 to 1962, but from 1937 to the early 1940s some dedicated students and faculty created and acted in a weekly live program called, “The Varsity Show.” The 25-minute program was the brainchild of the College’s public relations department and aired Thursday nights on WKRS-FM in Waukegan.
In 1962 the College launched WLFC, which used closed-circuit technology and broadcast exclusively to the dorms. It too was plagued by a poor signal and maintenance problems.
New equipment was purchased in 1965. Former Stentor editor Jim Kidney ’69 remembers the station as “pathetic.” “You couldn’t pick it up most of the time,” he recalls. In 1970 the programming focused on music and public affairs, including a lecture series on issues ranging from the politics of the family to Martin Luther King Jr. on conscience, nonviolence, and social change.
The call letters changed to WMXM in 1973, when it became a real broadcast station with 10 watts of power and a radius of nine miles. Even the equipment was new. The station’s 1,200 square feet of space in the basement of Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel included a repair shop, a record library, a listening room, an auxiliary studio, office space, and a lounge.
The antenna was moved to the top of Young Hall in 1975; in those days WMXM was called “the station from innovation” and broadcast 10 hours a day. In 1977 the music selection varied from soul to country to progressive rock. Dean of Student Affairs David Byers hosted a weekly interview show called “Persons Worthy of Note” (the pipes burst during a 1977 on-air interview he did with Woodrow Wilson Fellow Edwin P. Morgan).
The administration closed WMXM in February of 1978, citing a lack of student interest. It was off the air for nearly a year. That was around the time the FCC had decided to get rid of 10-watt stations, and to remain operational the College had to look in to increasing WMXM’s wattage.
Ann Shillinglaw ’81, who became general manager her freshman year and worked as a professional DJ after graduation, agrees that apathy was rampant. “Some student government offices barely had any students running for them, and clubs went begging for members, so the radio station, like other student activities, was hard pressed to fill the roster it needed to be effective,” she recalls.
By the end of the decade the station was back on the air. Then-General Manager Scott Hood ’79 told the Stentor that the station’s biggest problem was a lack of money, and that students were contributing out of their own pockets to help rebuild the studio and bring more records in. He also complained that the administration had a history of turning its back on WMXM, explaining, “nobody even knew where this place was.”
Funding was always an issue for former Director of Campus Activities and Associate Dean of Students Wane Doleski, who remembers that the pipes in the ceiling burst during his tenure as faculty advisor, which lasted on and off from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.
“My primary memories concern how difficult it was to keep the station funded at any reasonable level,” says Doleski. “It was always a battle between the College and the Student Government to determine who was responsible for what. My memory is that in general Student Government felt they were to support programming and that the College was responsible for issues dealing with the license and equipment. It was very difficult to get the funds to do much more than just barely keep the station on the air…. We had a functioning station with no paid staff, just a sometimes-paid part-time engineer. It was amazing it was on the air as much at it was.”
Despite funding issues, radio station membership got a big boost in the early 1980s after the FCC’s creation of a third class operator’s license that didn’t require an engineering background. The station played punk, rock, blues, and classical music, broadcasted football games, announced news items from a $5,000 UP wire machine, and recorded interviews with Eugene McCarthy, Robert Redford, and 1980 Libertarian presidential candidate Ed Clark.
The station successfully went to 300 watts in October of 1981. The following year it moved from Reid to the basement of Commons with the help of Rich Wood ’75, who had run the station during his junior and senior years at the College and at the time headed Skyline Communications in Madison. The antenna was moved from Young Hall to the roof of Commons, which drastically shrunk the station’s listening area as, ultimately, the station lost momentum through the following decade.