A Short History
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| Bruce Richardson Co-Founder WBRS
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It’s summer term and Bruce Richardson is hot. He’s asking himself how it is that a highly recruited Spartan baseball prospect is crawling through the heating ducts that link the dormitories at Michigan State University’s Brody complex? His five cohorts have somehow convinced him that only he can navigate this claustrophobic sauna bath to connect the wiring critical to the fall launch of a new radio station. The year is 1956 and campus radio station WBRS is about to be born at Michigan State University.
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Fast forward to homecoming 1999. Bruce Richardson, now a successful business executive walks with Gary Reid, faculty manager of WDBM, MSU’s student run FM station. They are touring the state of the art facilities Gary and his team have carved out of a corner of the basement of Holden Hall. Bruce surveys the digital audio workstations the ISDN remote links and the rack containing WDBM’s RealAudio Internet link to the world and smiles. “We’ve come a long way!”
This is the story of campus radio at Michigan State. What began as a single station serving the Brody complex through the hum of 60Hz carrier current amplitude modulation (AM), grew to the world’s largest college radio network, and ultimately achieved the dream of constructing an FM station staffed and directed by students, for students. It’s a story of volunteers who stole precious time from university studies to operate and maintain a group of 6 independent stations, many producing live programming 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Many of these people went on to careers outside of broadcasting, but a surprising number parlayed their college avocation into leading roles in the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. All who entered the studios of the Michigan State Radio Network were fundamentally changed by the experience, realizing that broadcasting was a business that was accessible to anyone with a dream, the desire and the tenacity to stick with it.
Incredibly, this story takes place in the shadow of a robust university broadcast facility that included an AM, FM, a Television station, an advanced Instructional Television Network, and a medium sized broadcast market that boasted a half dozen radio stations and one local commercial television operation. Michigan State became a Mecca for people who wanted to learn about broadcasting. In it’s heyday, no other university in the world could claim to have the portfolio of instructors, curriculum and facilities that existed in East Lansing.
WBRS was the first of the Michigan State Network (MSN) stations, signing on in the fall of 1956, but the web quickly grew to include WKME in Shaw Hall, WEAK in Wonders Hall, WMCD in McDonnell Hall, a short-lived WFEE experiment in Fee Hall and the network flagship, WMSN, located in the basement of the Student Services Center. At it’s peak MSN’s 6 stations broadcast a mix of locally produced and all-campus programming. There was a unique affiliation with ABC that allowed the stations to use the broadcast radio network feeds for national news content. The WMSN studios had a full time news operation with wire service subscriptions and a network of remote lines that fed student produced sports play-by-play and live concerts from multiple locations on campus. At the start of each term, disc jockeys would load boxes of vinyl albums, turntables and microphones vehicles for remote pick-ups from the MSU bookstore, and throughout the year campus radio DJs often spun tunes for dorm dances.
Students received the signals via the dorm electrical wires. Broadcast programming was injected into the electrical system on 820 kHz (later 640KHz) and the entire dorm wiring became an antenna. The “carrier current” technology was crude and the sound quality was only fair, but the mix of popular music and information targeted specifically toward students garnered a large and loyal following for many years.
In it’s golden age, campus radio at MSU provided volunteer employment for over 100 students. General managers earned a small monthly stipend and were given a valuable on campus parking pass. The program dovetailed well with the Spartan Television and Radio curriculum, giving students a place to practice without taxing the limited production facilities then available at the Union Building. The national recognition focused on MSU encouraged the trustees to find funding for a new state of the art College of Communications Arts & Sciences building and, despite loud objections from one local broadcaster the university began to focus on a student broadcast FM station.
Ultimately, the dorm stations closed down as budget money was focused on a single carrier current station, now dubbed WLFT, “at the Left of the dial”, which broadcast out of the old WKAR studios in the Auditorium building. The ten year effort to win an FM broadcast license culminated in the launch of WDBM, Impact-89, which broadcasts locally from facilities in Holden Hall, and has a worldwide presence on the Internet.
This narrative is by necessity only a brief overview of the history of campus radio at Michigan State. Those who lived the story may feel like the hungry student who gets a whiff of the Brody bakery on the way home from a long day at class. So explore, remember, and add your personal history to msucampusradio.org.
