60 Years Left of the Dial

Out of the static somewhere between NPR and K92, you'll find the self-touted "Greatest Radio Station in the World" 90.7FM.

2008 marks the 60th anniversary of Virginia Tech's student-run campus radio station, WUVT. It's a romantic story of youthful rebellion that first began with so-called "bootleg" stations. According to popular legend, student radio arrived in a blast of wild horns and pounding drums, when three cadets, Joe Ayers, Tom Blaisdell and Ed Talmadge sent out a pirate signal of big-band music in 1947 over an illegal 500-watt transmitter.

A scrapbook stored in the station's archive documents the first step towards legitimacy for WUVT. In a note to the commandant of the VT Corps of Cadets, Private Thomas M. Blaisdell asks permission to leave campus to do a field study of the transmitters at two Roanoke radio stations. Blaisdell eventually became WUVT's first Program Director. Meanwhile, his colleague in bootleg broadcasting, Edward Talmadge, is credited in an article by WUVT staff in the October 1948 edition of The Virginia Tech Engineer ("WUVT: The Voice of the Techmen") for helping build much of the new AM station's equipment himself.

WUVT's first official home was on the top floor of War Memorial Hall. The transmission circuited the campus through carrier current over the electrical system on a 640 kilocycle modulated signal. The wiring inside the buildings itself served as an antenna, and because of bleedthrough signals, people who lived in neighborhoods close to campus could also tune in on 640 AM.

From the beginning, WUVT was student-run and self-supporting. Local merchants as well as bigger corporate sponsors paid to have their advertisements read on the air. According to longtime Chief Engineer and former Station Manager Josh Arritt's perusing of the archives, "Budweiser beer poured a ton of money into this station." WUVT was also one of the first college radio stations to feature a call jingle composed by a professional ad agency. Some of these vintage identification spots can still be heard between sets on the air today.

An article in the Montgomery News Messenger announced on May 10, 1951, that the Blacksburg Town Council and the FCC approved a 10-watt broadcast station, expanding WUVT's signal to a 2-mile radius. Mere months later, though, on August 30th, 1951, a three-alarm fire gutted the station and did $10,000 in damage. Station staff spent the next school year putting WUVT back together again.

Before the television age, and well into it, WUVT was a source for news. On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, freshman disc jockey Charlie Boswell's top-40 broadcast was interrupted by a story that had the phones ringing. Boswell recalls, "Little old ladies would call us up when we were on the air, we were 'their boys.'" That day he had to let the neighborhood ladies know that unfortunately the station's fast-breaking report on the assassination of President Kennedy was not a practical joke.

Up through the 1970's, the station picked up 24-hour updates from the United Press that would print out onto long rolls of yellow teletape paper. According to former General Manager David Splitt [full disclosure: Mr. Splitt is my father], the United Press was chosen over the Associated Press for its superior coverage of state and local news. News and weather were read on the air every hour on the half hour. Used teletape paper also reportedly came in handy for frugal students, who sometimes typed their term papers on the other side.

By the mid-1960's, the station itself had to be frugal—WUVT hadn't made money in years. Splitt and Boswell both recall that the station saved itself through technical ingenuity and salesmanship. In 1964, one of the engineers built a cartridge tape machine, which Business Manager Nick DeVoles carried into town to show potential clients how easy it could be to create and play back radio ad spots to their specifications. This beat the time-consuming system of cuing up a reel to reel.

The station's presence in greater Blacksburg also grew when WUVT started sending "remotes" out on location in 1965. These were FM relay networks that sent signals out over phone lines to a Roanoke FM station, which in turn broadcast live to other stations along the East Coast. This technique allowed the station to broadcast bands and sports events. Music shows were very popular, of course, and record companies sent hundreds of promotional albums and 45's to the station, from jazz to Motown to Bob Dylan.

Between 1977 and 1984, "This campus saw some of the most dynamic changes" since the 1960's, according to former WUVT General Manager and current kids-show DJ Linda DeVito. "The school started to get larger: ...the population ballooned. And we still had no parking and no public transit. We negotiated for coed dorms, a student on the Board of Visitors, a graduate student assembly, even the BT!" All this creative energy was matched by contentious energy. Heads butted over student positions, "And that was kind of cool," says DeVito.

The station itself has gone through several moves, on and off campus. Asbestos removal closed Squires Student Center after graduation in 1987, but WUVT was not offered swing space. Instead, the crew of DJs, including Mike Blau, Jeff Bevis, George Bready and Kathleen Eaton-Robb, moved the station in boxes over to 100 North Main Street, the bank building at the corner of East Roanoke Street.

In 1984 a new FM transmitter (see below) increased the station's broadcast capacity to 3500 watts. The transmitter itself was designed by a former Wooviteer, John Lyles, and paid for by a grant written by Chief Engineer Dave Cowan.Although the location of the studios and offices has changed, the AM and FM transmitters have been housed in Lee Hall since the 1970's. By the mid-1990's the station studio was well settled in what remains its crow's-nest home atop Squires Student Center. Program Director, Andy Arnett experimented with format, creating the Day Art and Night Art slots, which featured free form sets of the alternative and obscure. The weekly "Local Zone" show began in the late 1990's as well. Station librarian and longtime DJ Len Comaratta championed jazz programming. "Jazz will never leave WUVT," he says, "WUVT is older than rock and roll."

When WUVT sound engineer Kevin Sterne was wounded in the April 16th tragedy, the media attention resulted in much needed donations to the station from Clear Channel and the American Society of Broadcast Engineers, among others. This year the FM station will expand to 8000 watts, broadcasting from a new transmitter housed in a small building atop Price's Mountain. The old transmitter, "Harriet," will remain working in Lee Hall. Broadcasts are also simulcast over the internet, so listeners can tune in online from anywhere.

WUVT's biannual fundraising broadcast event, Radiothon, runs from March 31 to April 6, with special theme shows put together by each DJ. The following week, Virginia Tech celebrates the 60th Anniversary of WUVT with an alumni reunion. Event organizers are still accepting reservations. Wooviteers from decades past are invited to sign up for guest radio slots. Tune in to hear the old guard spin their favorite tunes and share stories of their glory days, starting April 11th.

DJ and alumna Linda DeVito says, "Some people look back on their WUVT years and say 'That was my past," but I find that's a small minority."

A wealth of history and current information can be found at wuvt.vt.edu and also on VT alum Tom Twine's website, www.tomtwine.com/wuvt.

The Ballad of Harriet

When Josh Arritt first came to WUVT in 1999, he found a cryptic artifact: a poster listing the top 10 reasons to be a WUVT engineer. The #1 reason was, "Unlimited free canned hams." Number 4 was, "You get to meet Harriet." No one really knew who "Harriet" was supposed to be, and the engineers decided to assume that she was the transmitter.

Several pieces of equipment in WUVT's inventory bear the lowercase letters JTML. These are the initials of former WUVT Chief Engineer, John T. M. Lyles, who designed Harriet, the 3500-watt FM transmitter that went on the air in 1984 and is still in use to date. The Broadcast Electronics 3.5A single-tube transmitter was the most advanced of its kind in the world at the time.

Just cutting his teeth as a station engineer, Arritt spent two years learning the quirks of manually tuning the tube transmitter along with colleague Chris Kreutzer. "Sometimes something would break and we'd be at a loss," Arritt remembers, "We'd be sitting on the steps of what we called the East Penthouse of Lee Hall, and Kreutzer would say, 'You know, if we run away now, maybe no one will know.'"

Harriet, also known as "The Old Blue Beast," replaced a box donated by RCA in the 1970's. The device, in Arritt's words, "needed to be put out to pasture. It was 'vintage,' built in nineteen-froze-to-death. WUVT ran it for five years." With the setup of the new transmitter in 1984, WUVT's electronics moved out of an unventilated closet. "We now call that 'the museum," says Arritt.

Life hasn't been easy for Harriet. The temperature in Lee Hall is impossible to control on the top floor, and a cold water condensing tank installed nearby helps drive the heat and humidity to extremes that are not ideal for electronics. Harriet also shares quarters with the control center for a 480-volt elevator motor. Arritt reports that "you go in there to work on stuff and come out looking like a coal miner because of all that elevator grease. It turns to dust." WUVT's engineers have been on emergency life-support duty against the sound of static for the past couple of years.

Relief is on its way for the Old Blue Beast this year, though, when she gets a boost from the new 8000-watt transmitter to be installed on Price's Mountain. Meanwhile Harriet will stay in operation as long as she lasts in the East Penthouse of Lee Hall.