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I hope you caught this week’s Radio Survivor Podcast (episode #51), in which I talk about the history of carrier current college radio. Dating back to 1936, college radio carrier current stations starting popping up on campuses in earnest throughout the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond. At one point there were rumored to be […]
After visiting WCUA at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. on February 24, I made my way to Georgetown in order to check out college radio station WGTB at Georgetown University. Since it’s a bit more difficult to get to via the Metro system, I opted for a long walk to campus, with a break mid-way […]
Thanks to Matthew Lasar for pointing out that this year marks the 80th anniversary of carrier current broadcasting on college campuses. According to Louis Bloch’s 1980 tome, Gas Pipe Networks, the first carrier current college radio station launched at Brown University in 1936. The technology caught on and by the late 1970s there were purportedly […]
I own a lot of books about the history of radio. Unique among them is Louis M. Bloch Jr.’s charming and strange volume titled The Gas Pipe Networks: A History of College Radio, 1936-1946. Every now and then I open its pages and am transported to a distant world of struggling collegiate stations. The tome chronicles lads and […]
It’s summertime in college radio, which means that many stations are working with skeleton crews or are off-the-air (or off-the-net) for a few months. This became all the more clear to me this week, as my attempts to visit a few Southern California college radio stations were thwarted due to post-graduation closures. For many stations, […]
Editor’s Note: This is part two of Fred Krock’s three-part series on San Francisco Bay Area radio in the early 1950s. In part one he gave an overview of what the radio dial sounded like then. Fred got his start at Stanford University’s station in Palo Alto, which is where the story picks up. When […]
The next stop on my radio journey is to college radio station WCUA at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. After arriving in D.C. on Wednesday, February 24, 2016, I took the Metro to the university’s stop at Brookland. Rain was in the forecast, but I enjoyed my walk to the edge of campus […]
Editor’s Note: Fred Krock is a retired broadcaster who worked in commercial broadcasting in San Francisco and New York City. An electrical engineer, he got his start in radio at KZSU at Stanford University in 1950. Fred offered to share his memories of KZSU and radio in the Bay Area from that time, and we […]
It’s been fun reminiscing about my tours of 100 radio stations in 8 years. My 100th field trip, WPRB at Princeton University, was just posted on Wednesday and that marks my 69th radio station visit. If you count up revisits and stations that I have yet to write up, the number gets even higher. And […]
Are you ready? Drum roll… It’s time for my 100th radio station field trip post. Eight years after my first radio station field trip, I’ve traveled to various pockets of the United States (covering 14 states, plus District of Columbia) and Ireland in order to feast my eyes on a wide range of radio stations, […]
