WPRB: “Eclectic and Schizophrenic”, by Scott Gurvey
I’ve come to accept the fact that WPRB, and all of Princeton, has been doing very well since I left. Part of me was hoping it would all fall apart the moment I graduated. I realize my years with WPRB came about halfway through its life to date. It was already a long way from the beginning as an AM radio signal impressed on the power lines and occasionally picked up by the Pennsylvania Railroad and transmitted a distance long enough to summon the wrath of the FCC. I’m sure the current WPRB has evolved well beyond where we were then.
In my time, 1969-1973, WPRB was a 17,000 watt commercial stereo FM radio station and could be heard from the suburbs of New York City to the suburbs of Philadelphia. The University, then as I believe now provided office space and electricity, two very significant contributions, but nothing else. We had a sales department and operated the station solely on that revenue and whatever else we could scrape up by sponsoring concerts on campus. These ranged from the Beach Boys to Firesign Theatre, Carly Simon to Weather Report.
Our programming was eclectic, schizophrenic some would say. Rock by day, classical in the evening, jazz at night, and a whole host of specialty programs on the weekends. There was a heavy compliment of news, hourly broadcasts, a big dinner hour report and a news magazine style program on Sundays. It resembled 60 Minutes which had begun on CBS television a year or two before and also NPR’s All Things Considered, which began a few years later.
WPRB was clearly the most important element of my Princeton experience. My thesis advisor, the late politics professor Stanley Kelley, always joked that I had really majored in WPRB. He also said that if I decided to make journalism my profession, radio was a great choice because I couldn’t spell worth a damn. Little did he know he was setting me up for a career at CBS, NBC, and for the last 20 years as an on-air reporter for public television.
I think to understand WPRB and Princeton in those days long gone you need to understand the times. We were experiencing great national turmoil with racial tension and the Black Power movement; political tension over the war in Vietnam and the anti-war movement; the Women’s movement; the Cold War and the Space Race. Princeton itself was going through its own series of revolutionary changes. Changes which began after the soldiers returned following the Second World War. What had been an excellent institution which had graduated generations of mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men with what I would describe as a southern gentlemen’s view of society was struggling to diversify. Along with that move to diversity came a dedication to grow into the world-renowned research University we know today. But this revolution did not come easily. There was considerable resistance among alumni and there were places on campus, especially among the eating clubs which were a very important of campus life in those days, where people of color or of a certain religion or social economic background were not welcome. The biggest single element of the revolution was Princeton’s decision to become co-educational.
My class, 1973, will always be remembered as the first to include women among its members. Having always attended co-ed schools, my only reaction was that from my perspective the male-female ratio was ridiculously low. But even the handful of women who were on campus were met with disapproval by many. One place where that demonstrably was NOT true was WPRB. And, on reflection, I realize that this is why WPRB became such an important and positive part of my Princeton experience. Our schizophrenic radio station welcomed everyone and had a place on its roster for everyone. We attracted lovers of rock, country, folk and jazz, sometimes mixed together. This brought kids from all over the country with all racial and ethnic backgrounds into the fold. We attracted music majors who could lecture on the history of every classical work yet written. We attracted the news junkies and the sports fanatics who wanted to do the play-by-play on Princeton football, basketball and hockey broadcasts. We attracted the would-be entrepreneurs who ran the sales department. And added to that weird mix were the electrical engineers who kept the transmitter warm and wired and rewired the studios. There was a place for everybody and everybody was welcome and that made WPRB one of the few activity or social groups on campus where sex, color, religion or social economic background never seemed to get in the way of a group of people, having fun and learning from each other as they learned to keep WPRB on the air, entertaining, and informing the community. I know today the campus is much, much different and all of this probably seems quite archaic to you now. But in those days it meant a great deal and is experience I will always treasure.
-Scott Gurvey ’73, WPRB Station Manager ’72