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Rob Schuman ’74 sifted through The Daily Princetonian‘s extensive archive, looking at all 8,000 unique mentions of WPRB. He’s compiled the most interesting into a series of slideshows. This post documents WPRB’s early years. Beware those kilocycle gremlins.
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Does modulation excite you? Asking for a friend. WPRB has used all sorts of different methods over the years to lure new student DJs. This slideshow documents some of the best from the 1940s-1970s.
Rob Schuman ’74 sifted through The Daily Princetonian‘s extensive archive, looking at all 8,000 unique mentions of WPRB. He’s compiled the most interesting into this series of slideshows.
Here’s the second (and final in our existing archives) WPRU Bulletin. Paul Dunn ’58 was the Bulletin’s managing editor as a Princeton Undergraduate, and continues to play an important role on WPRB’s board of trustees today. You can download the complete bulletin (.PDF) by clicking here.
Below, an important message from Paul about WPRB’s 75th Anniversary Membership Drive.
[By Warren Fales ’43. Pictured: Unknown WPRU Engineers]
I started out with The Daily Princetonian and, in early 1941, part of my news-writing assignment was to cover the new student-operated radio station, WPRU. I became more and more interested in the station’s operations and even began to fill in as an announcer from time to time. My superiors at The Prince, pointing out that WPRU was a competitor to the newspaper, told me to make up my mind who I wanted to work for, so I finally quit the Prince.
[By Nelson Runger ’53]
I drew the job of morning man in September of my freshman year, 1949. I had about an hour’s instruction the day before my debut—all about how to turn the station on in the morning, etc. There was no separate engineer. I was the whole staff on duty.
I cajoled my three suite-mates to get up and listen to my debut (which was a three-hour stint that began at 6:00 a.m., as I recall.) I showed up about a half-hour early, turned on all the switches and gauges I had learned the previous day, selected the records I would play during the first hour, read over the FCC announcement that had to be read aloud at the beginning of the broadcasting day, cued up the Star Spangled Banner, and awaited the magic hour. (Ed note: The routine steps of morning sign-on, then as now, are required to be chronicled on every radio station’s daily programming log. See above for example from roughly the same era referenced in this story.)
At 6:00, I played the national anthem, read the FCC announcement, and launched into my three hours of recorded music, zippy banter, occasional news items, (mostly read from that morning’s Daily Princetonian), and frequent solo work on the Jew’s harp (also called a mouth harp and a jaw harp.) At the end of my three hours, I turned the station off, there being then a period of some hours before the station went on the air again.
I rushed back to my room and found my three suite-mates staring glumly at me. They hadn’t heard a thing, the one switch I had forgotten was the one that turned the transmitter on.
This is one of the oldest original photos we’ve discovered in the station’s archives, but no details as to the subjects, location, or year it was taken have been revealed. The mic setup suggests a remote broadcast, the WPRU banner places it somewhere between 1940 and 1955, and the combo’s setup indicates a live jazz gig at a… University eating club? Some long-shuttered venue in Princeton?
Do you recognize any of the subjects in this photo or have any information on the event it depicts? Please comment below and help us unravel this mystery!
UPDATE: Rob Schuman says: “I don’t, of course, recognize the group, but the station aired live jazz from very early on in its existence. I doubt its the same group, but here’s a clip from the Princetonian, October 9, 1941.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned since initiating this history project, it’s that once the research bug bites you, the related fever is hard to shake. Case in point: these just-rediscovered artifacts from the mid 1940s, when WPRB (then called WPRU) was still in its infancy, which sent a considerable thrill up my spine. A huge part of the fun of digging into the deepest recesses of the station’s history is noting how doing so keeps moving the marker for the oldest-known (document/photo/recording/etc) further back.
While we have unearthed a few yellowed letters and documents from station founder H Grant Theis that detail the plans which lead up to the station’s launch in December of 1940, the assortment of scans presented here offers one of the oldest-known insights into what the station’s programming was like.
These clippings were discovered by current WPRB staffers Zenala and Misha in the bottom of a filthy file cabinet during an otherwise routine cleaning project. The documents were actually sent to the station back in 1992 by Stanley Abensur ’42. Huge thanks to Stanley for anticipating their relevance 25 years ahead of time, and to Zenala and Misha for bringing them to my attention!
Without further delay, we are pleased to present the following:
Exhibit A: Early floorplan of the station’s old studios in Holder Hall. (See above)
[Click here to download the 4-page PDF version]
From 1940-1955, WPRB’s call letters were “WPRU”. The station was heard on-campus at 640 AM and for a time, its staff created a weekly, printed bulletin. Paul Dunn ’58 recalls: “I believe we distributed [the bulletin] to dorms and at commons. This was the time when our signal reached only a few dorms, and we were trying to increase station awareness on campus. John Norton, known as Dopey, along with freshmen Ned Irons and Dave Meginity had developed black boxes—small transmitters which were installed in dorm basements.”
Working at WPRU or, in fact, having anything to do with broadcasting was the farthest thing from my mind the first time I entered the station in the early fall of 1954. I was simply fleeing from a group of sophomores who were trying to steal my beanie, which all freshman had to wear then. Holder Hall was the sophomore dorm, but we had to pass through this enemy territory to get to the Commons to eat. A month or so later, a few of my friends and I came up with the idea that WPRU, which, at that time, didn’t sign on till 8 pm Sundays, should have a classical music program Sunday afternoons. We had met some members of the station — Art Hulnich ’57 comes to mind — and we proposed the idea of a Sunday afternoon program called Sunday Sketchbook, and it was eventually accepted. It was not long till I was thoroughly addicted to life in the basement of Holder. (more…)
