The Razor Sharp Mind of WPRB’s Jeff Meyers
Photo: Jeff Meyers (aka Rod St. John) with Jean Shepherd
Text: Gregg Lange
The late 1960s was a highly active and diverse era for WPRB. News staffers aggressively covered coeducation, plus anti-war and civil rights demonstrations; the sports department traveled with Ivy champion football and nationally-ranked basketball teams; classical music was beginning to assert itself seriously; and the earlier preponderance of middle-of-the-road music was blown away by underground rock and a fabulous jazz department that appeared almost overnight, experimental specialty programs and even a highly popular Top-40 show, all by students. Meanwhile, the station sponsored concerts of all sorts, and its annual presentation of raconteur Jean Shepherd at Alexander Hall became the stuff of radio legend.
Much of this activity peaked in the 1969-70 academic year, with the first Princeton women students matriculating, the 100th anniversary college football game between Rutgers and Princeton, continuing through mass protest and ending with the American invasion of Cambodia and the campus strike of 1970. WPRB’s irrepressible station manager in that turmoil was Jeffrey W. Meyers ’70 of Omaha, Nebraska.
Jeff was hardly Warren Buffet. An honors debater and campus politician in high school, his great gifts were a razor-sharp mind and a fine, mellifluous radio voice, in the great tradition of Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Dave Letterman, Chet Huntley, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jonathan Winters, Garrison Keillor and, significantly, the great Shepherd himself.
Jeff was a philosophy major, but his focus was the WPRB microphone in the basement of Holder Hall (along with many of his contemporaries). He created the Saturday night Top-40 show at the station, and it played host to a great range of unique guests among its breakneck intros and outros, uncannily channeling the reigning king of rock radio, WABC’s Dan Ingram. Later, Jeff went for the holy grail itself, and developed a long-form monologue program on the topics of the day, a gigantic paean to Shepherd, whose nightly show at WOR in New York was at its zenith (with A Christmas Story and other classics to come later). When Shep came to do his stage show at Princeton, he and Meyers adjourned to the station afterward and conducted an on-air, live free-for-all that was as good as American culture gets (one edition even featured a guest jug band from Fairleigh Dickinson).
To pull all this off, Jeff had to be, and was, a personality magnet; there was no way to engage in a five-minute conversation with him, without leaving with a smile. As the inescapable glue and cheerleader for the organization, he was a natural choice for station manager his senior year, making sure that everyone was at their ease during turbulent times, and that the entire group functioned harmoniously, or at least with a grin. His great gift with people became the stuff of station legend.
And astoundingly, this great showman returned to Nebraska, graduating at the top of his law school class and becoming a principal of one of the state’s preeminent firms. He died in 1999 at 51 years old, tragically young and deeply mourned by everyone he had ever met. He asked his wife Jean to make provision for the station from his estate. Accordingly, her donation and those of his friends and classmates were matched by the Trustees of WPRB and the resulting endowment is called the Jeffrey W. Meyers ’70 Fund, which explicitly sponsors projects proposed by the station’s student officers to enhance management skills and organization development within the station staff. These activities run the gamut from team-building to industry meetings, and each project, freshly developed by the undergraduates, is a concrete tribute to WPRB’s educational mission, and to the spirit of Jeff Meyers.
[Download] one of Jeff’s epic WPRB monlogues. (51 minutes, 49MB MP3)