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Moving
into the Coach House
A
house nowadays will include a garage built into the main
structure. WOBC’s new home did not. It was a
detached building, big enough for two carriages, horseless or
otherwise. “Everyone calls the station a garage,”
Frank said. “I call it a coach house because there was a
second floor to it.” {19}
Fred
Cohen ’57 remembered that at the end
of his freshman year, “we walked over to see where we were going
to be moving in. There was a refrigerator upstairs. The
second floor of the two-car garage was a former faculty
apartment. They eventually cleaned out the upper floor for
us. We built an engineering room, a recording room and a little
record library area. We had a bathtub in the bathroom left over
from the apartment.”
The
windowed triple doors at the front were no longer needed to drive
cars in and out, so they were closed off. A concrete block wall
was erected just inside the doors, visible through the glass.
But before that could be done, said Don, “the piano was the
first entry before we put up the cinder block walls — otherwise
it never would have made it.” {11}
Frank added, “That piano could never be moved short of
demolishing the building.” {15}
On
the left of the above photo taken from the Grey Gables dorm, the
walk-in door to the first floor of the former garage opened into the
radio station's control room. Beyond that, behind a pane of
soundproof glass, was the studio.
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From
the Oberlin College Archives, here are a couple of pictures of that
control room with the studio beyond, dated 1954 and 1956.
Frank
Porath ’58 remembered opening the
outside door and walking in behind the engineer, who had his back to
the door but could see a reflection in the glass. On the far
side of the glass, the announcer could observe the new arrival
directly. “And if someone on the other side was on mike
and the door opened and [the announcer] looked horrified, the
engineer would turn around rapidly.” {19} |
 |
Frank
arrived at the station “the week they were putting it on the
air in 1954. They had just moved. I walked in all full of
pepper because I had already been in commercial radio for six or
seven years. I think I still paid union dues. What I saw
was a shock. I’d been working in Cleveland producing a
weekly program. This wasn’t exactly what I had been
seeing, but I had technical background and I thought it was a very
good sign that the chief engineer’s name was Edison. The
exciter was built by a man named Fermi, which I thought was also a
good sign.” {15}
These
of course were not the inventor Thomas Edison nor the physicist
Enrico Fermi, but rather David Edison ’55 and Giulio Fermi
’56. Craig Richmond ’56
described Edison as “our technical guru at the time, who was one
of those 80- or 90-hour-a-week guys.” {15}
“When something would go wrong,” explained Fred, “and
you wanted it back on the air the next day, you’d stay up trying
to get things working.” {14}
“I
had to be on the air about 6:30 a.m.,” said Frank.
“We had an RCA 45 automatic changer, so I would put three
records on in a row that seemed to have some connection between them,
announce the first one, run over to Grey Gables, get breakfast, run
back — you develop a sense of timing after a while — and
run back just in time to tag the second two
recordings.” {15}
The
access to the upper floor was via outside stairs at the rear of the
building. “We had a lot of fun in bad weather with a
staircase going up the outside,” recalled Clair
Fielder ’58. “You put
your record on, and you had about two and one half minutes to race up
the outside stairs [to the record library] in the ice, rain or
sleet. Jerry Edison put in a dumbwaiter directly over top of
the teletype. It had a really artistic plywood frame [sarcasm].
You pulled the rope to make the thing go up. With any luck,
somebody [in the record library] put something on the top so you
didn’t have to go outside and up the icy stairs.” {22}
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Above:
Clair Fielder, head of the WOBC Board of Directors in 1958, checks
the binder containing “continuity” to be read over “The
Voice and Choice of Oberlin College.” Below: the other
side of the glass, from a photo in the 1960 Hi-O-Hi yearbook.
 |
“At
some point,” Clair recalled, “we got tired of listening to
everybody griping about how noisy the teletype was when you opened
the door to Studio A. Ken Cupery ’59 and I built a
wonderful cabinet around the teletype. Neither of us knew which
end of a hammer to use, but we actually got it done. We put
sound tiles on the inside of this wonderful plywood. It did the
job, although it was worse looking than the dumbwaiter.” {23}
The
two entrances caused problems, according to Ron
Rabenold ’57. “There was
a separate lock, of course, for the doors upstairs and
downstairs. And very often the keys were left upstairs.
The engineer sometimes would come downstairs to start a program and
would be unable to get upstairs where the records were. That
dumbwaiter was scaled by more than one control engineer to get
upstairs to get records.” {22}
Some
years later, Earl Spielman ’64 recalled “the strange hole
between the two floors, through which people had to climb up and down
after hours because the outside doors were locked. It was
interesting that you had to have athletic abilities in order to work
at the station.” {29}
The
Key Club
Fred
Leutner ’65 remembered that when he arrived, “We were
still in the Grey Gables garage, which was quite an experience.
Earl Spielman finally clued me in to why it was such a popular
extracurricular activity. It was a key club. You’d
get a key to the building and you could use it any hour of the day or night.
“Dean
Mary Dolliver’s rules really didn’t apply that much there,
and a lot of people have very fond memories of the old garage, both
the upstairs and the downstairs. It was a great place to be
because it was isolated and you could be very creative.” {30}
A
Distinguished Visitor
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 |
Here's
another photo from the Oberlin College Archives, dated September 1954.
Jerry
Nelson '56 is interviewing Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois. |
Stevenson
had been the Democratic nominee for President of the United States
two years before, and he would be the nominee again two years
later. In between, he was campaigning in support of his party
in the 1954 midterm elections. It was a successful effort, in
that the Democrats gained 18 seats in the house and two in the
Senate; they regained control of both houses of Congress and would
hold those majorities for the next 26 years.
And
why was Adlai visiting Oberlin in particular? The college
president, William Stevenson, was his cousin!
The
Folkies
As
mentioned earlier, Grey Gables — and its garage —
attracted fans of folk music and of performers like Pete Seeger of
the Weavers. Ronald D. Cohen wrote in his book Rainbow Quest:
New
York garnered the most media attention and remained the mecca for
aspiring folkies, but colleges such as Oberlin provided willing,
eager audiences.
Joe
Hickerson ’57 arrived at Oberlin from New Haven, Connecticut,
in 1953. Mainly a pop music fan, he was also familiar with the
Weavers and other prominent folk performers. Grey Gables Co-Op,
an eating club that attracted the campus folksinging crowd, became
his hangout. He inherited from Steve Toller a folk record
distribution service, selling Folkways, Elektra, and Stinson records
on the campus, and he took over Toller’s campus folk radio show.
Seeger
had appeared at Oberlin in February 1954, his first Midwestern small
college performance following the blacklist; he would return each
year, his audience swelling from about two hundred the first year to
one thousand in 1957.
Fred
Leutner remembered Joe Hickerson. “Joe was a physics
major, but he’s now the chief folk music archivist at the
Library of Congress. He stayed in folk music, not
physics.” Just as I stayed in broadcasting, not physics.
Fred
continued, “The weekly folk song hootenanny was held in Grey
Gables lounge, so we just strung the mike cable from the radio
station over to Grey Gables and broadcast the hootenannies live.
Joe was instrumental in bringing a fellow named Pete Seeger to
campus. After the concert, Seeger came behind Grey Gables and
there was a great hootenanny that we recorded.” {21}
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Joe
Hickerson has written elsewhere, “On October 20, 1956 (my 21st
birthday), Pete did afternoon and evening presentations at Hall
Auditorium and Finney Chapel. Again, I was the organizer.
I led a post-concert folk-sing in the backyard of Grey Gables Co-op,
which was recorded and simultaneously aired from the adjacent studio
of WOBC. Pete can be heard playing the washtub bass. Thank you,
Pete, and thank you Oberlin College!”
When
Seeger passed away in 2014, Hickerson was mentioned in an Alumni
Magazine article by Ted Gest '68. Click here
for excerpts. |
Auditions
Seeger
performed in front of WOBC’s building because there wasn’t
much room inside. For some reason, I’m reminded of Moses
standing “in front of the Tent of Meeting” to address the
people of Israel, who obviously wouldn’t all fit inside.
I’m also reminded of “Folk Fest”; when I arrived in
1965, these Friday-night live hootenannies were filling WOBC’s
spacious new indoor Studio A to overflowing. And I'm reminded
of attending a late 1960s Seeger concert in Finney Chapel.
Tony
Musante ’58 had his “first
audition for WOBC during orientation week or shortly thereafter.
I was very excited about the possibility of being part of the radio
station. The audition was held in the back yard of Grey Gables,
just in front of the garage. A very impressive fellow on the
station staff handed me a newspaper article and said, ‘Read
this.’ So I stood there, he stood four feet away in the
outdoors, I read it and he said, ‘You’re
hired.’” {18}
Even
before arriving at Oberlin, Fred had learned that there was a radio
station, and he joined the staff the first week of his freshman
year. “I remember very distinctly the announcer test,
because I failed it. A fellow named Mark Thelin ’55 was
giving it. He gave you a list of things to read and in the
middle of reading a spiel on classical music, he would stick one of
G.G. Casio’s humorous things in front of you. It was
completely out of line from what you were reading, and if you got
through that without breaking up, you would go on to the next
thing. Most people broke up halfway through; they were very
funny. Having failed the announcing test, the only way I could
get on the air was to take a program nobody wanted called
‘Yawn’ from 6:30 to 8:00 AM.” {14}
Mark
Arnold ’58 saved an example from those announcer tests.
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FARMERS,
ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE WITH WOOL YIELD FROM YOUR SHEEP? IS THE
WOOL SHORT AND SCRAGGLY AND LIFELESS, GROWING IN UNEVEN
CLUMPS? YOU NEED “GNU”! YES, NEW
“GNU” FOR YOUR EWE! TRY THIS FEEDING SUPPLEMENT FOR
JUST ONE SEASON AND YOU’LL MARVEL AT THE DIFFERENCE. YOUR
EWE WILL DELIGHT IN NEW “GNU.” WOOL WILL GROW HEAVY
AND THICK — YOUR EWE’S NEW “GNU”ED COAT WILL
ACTUALLY DRAG ON THE GROUND. SHEEP SHEARS WILL CLOG, AND YOUR
WOOL YIELD WILL SURPASS ALL EXPECTATIONS. BUT BE SURE TO ASK
FOR NEW “GNU,” BECAUSE OLD “GNU” FOR YOUR EWE IS
NOT THE SAME AS NEW “GNU” FOR YOUR EWE. AT YOUR
NEIGHBORHOOD FEED STORE TODAY. |
“That
was one of the scripts that ‘Julian’ Casio ’54 had
written, way back when, for his comedy show,” Fred
explained. And Tony gave another example, a pitch for the
“Salmagundi School of Salami Slicing, Sarasota, South
Serbia.” {18}
Bob
Hanson ‘51 and Ralph Winkler ’52 agreed with Roger
Brucker ’51 that “one of the
great things we might do was to move our lips as if talking and to
watch the expression on the audio engineer’s face in the
booth. He suddenly realizes that he’s got dead air, he
can’t figure out why he’s not getting anything and waves
and tries to work the dials. We were rolling on the floor
almost in tears at the effect this produced. I’m sure that
everybody who gets into radio does this at one time or another but
when we discovered it, it was like discovering love in the
afternoon. We also had several female announcers. One
time Jack Welch ’54 stood up on the control console and dropped
his pants. This poor girl, she just lost it.” {12}
Do-It-Yourself
Engineering
“There
was a loose connection of some kind in the console,” Craig
recalled. “A wood block was placed there with an
‘X’ on it and there was a wooden mallet nearby. When
you started to get a very fuzzy sound in the thing, you picked up the
mallet, hit the ‘X,’ and you were fine for about an hour
and a half or two hours.” {17}
Ron
remembered “completely dismantling and tearing apart the
console, down to the last switch and meter, and then crawling around
underneath it trying to string wires and solder over our heads.
That was my introduction to electronics.”
“Most
of that rebuilding,” commented Mel McKeachie ’57, “was
done between the hours of midnight and morning for some reason.”
“What
you didn’t mention,” added Fred, “was the fact that
it took us about three weeks of solid work thereafter to redo all the
connections we had mis-made.” {19}
Bill
Waite '60 “came up through the
technical side. I was chief technician, chief engineer and
finally station manager. One of our big problems was people not
being able to hear us. Of course, one solution was to work on
the lines. We were always climbing the poles, replacing this
and that.” The lines carried the station's signal to
individual dormitories, where enough leaked out to be picked up by an
AM radio. “But another possible solution was to
broadcast. So we came to the idea that maybe we ought to change
the operation a little bit into an FM station that could actually
broadcast. {23}
“It
was a big change. We've been talking about how important it is
to have political support. One thing I did for that was to make
a sign. It was three-fourths inch plywood, about three feet by
four and one half feet.”
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Bill's
sign looked something like this. “Big blue letters:
WOBC, 590 KC AM, blank FM. We mounted that on one of the poles
outside of Grey Gables on the street.
“And
boy, that really set the town on its ear. FM, wow, yes
sir! So we were on our way.” {24-25} |
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It
was in 1961 that FCC approval finally came through for WOBC to
conduct test broadcasting at 88.7 FM, to be followed a year later by
an actual operating license. The low-power transmitter would be
located on a third-story landing at the heating plant of Building
& Grounds. This was a large structure a thousand feet to
the north; coal was burned there to provide steam heat for the campus buildings.
Stan
Robinson ’62 would be the station director his senior
year. In 1961 he “had the exciting job during the summer
of shopping for a new transmitter and for all the materials we
thought we would need to put it together.” Buildings &
Grounds plumbers helped mount a used antenna from Columbia University
onto the B&G chimney. “Two or three years later, it
had been eaten up by the sulfur dioxide.”
“We
wired up control cable from the studio behind Grey Gables,”
Stan continued. “We had a control panel from which we
could start the transmitter and monitor the modulation and so
forth. It was a 10-watt transmitter and had a 16-watt effective
radiated power.” {28}
Off
to Wilder Hall
Fred
Leutner ’65 said, “The move to Wilder Hall was the main
event of my era at WOBC. We moved because it was just time for
the old garage building to go, probably because it couldn’t meet
code anymore. The ivy was growing in through the walls, the
roof leaked, and there was the piano that was walled in. It was
just a great old place. Unfortunately, the bathroom didn’t
work. I don’t know how some people made it through some of
the long shifts, but it was an interesting, fun place to be.
“We
scheduled our last broadcast from Grey Gables back in May 1963 with
great fanfare. It turned out not to be the last show, because
over the summer, Buildings & Grounds did not get the design,
planning and construction in Wilder Hall completed, so we were back
in business in the old garage in the fall of ’63.
“I
know that because I remember that in November 1963, people in the
old garage facilities were doing some work in the afternoon one day
and suddenly the teletype machine started going ding, ding, ding,
ding, ding. Usually five bells
means it’s a priority news bulletin. Well, this time it
started with five and just kept ding, ding, dinging. Of course,
it was the assassination of President Kennedy.
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|
 |
Lynn
Olson ’65 recalls, “One of my lasting memories is hearing
the ‘ding ding ding ding ding’ of the teletype machine,
going to it, and being the first one on campus to know that President
Kennedy had been assassinated.” |
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“The
teletype often was Oberlin’s only link with the outside world,
except for those few people who had New York Times
subscriptions. Nobody paid much attention to the [Cleveland]
Plain Dealer. These yellow sheets from the teletype would
be posted in the Dascomb breakfast hall. Somebody would go over
early on, rip off the morning news and post it on the bulletin board
so people could read what was happening. In the fall of 1963 we
began the first full half-hour nightly news broadcast, called ‘Oberlin
Digest.’
“Bill
Person ’65, the chief engineer, was largely responsible for
finding the Wilder Hall location, drawing up floor plans, and working
with Buildings and Grounds to get it designed. The wall
structure and studio layout has not changed at all. The move to
Wilder occurred in December ’63 or January ’64, probably
over the semester break. We had great fun, working many long
hours, rewiring things, putting it all back together. Perhaps
not so challenging as hooking up the AM transmission in the first
place, but enough of a challenge for us.” {30-31}
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 |
Here
are two photos of the new Wilder Hall studios from the 1965
yearbook. I’ve colorized them.
At
left: An engineer uses a soldering iron at the rear of the
control room. We’re looking through a hole in the rack
where a tape recorder would be installed. In the background is
the control panel and beyond that, looking through the glass, we see
Studio A and its piano.
Below:
A properly attired announcer at the Studio A microphone. (A
more casual scene is here.) |
Postscript
According
to Bob Chamberlain ’51, Roger Brucker’s original proposal
for a campus radio station “contained three objectives: serve
the listeners, provide an outlet for talent, and promote the
College. We thought that the station might become a draw for
new students.” {6}
In
my time, one of my predecessors as station director opined that WOBC
existed to serve the listeners and to serve its staff — in
roughly equal proportions.
But
I tend to agree with Fred Cohen ’57, who said, “The main
function of the station really wasn’t to get programs for
students to hear but for the people who were working at the station
to enjoy themselves.” {14}
And
enjoy themselves they did!
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Pyle
Inn and Grey Gables were unique in that they were Oberlin's first
“co-ops,” dating to 1950 and 1951 respectively. The
men and women bought and prepared their own food, working about five
hours a week, thus saving about 40% over College board rates. 
