‘Get Listening, Kids’

WMUC staff in 1964 mug for the camera outside Building FF, the station’s digs in the old Gulch area before moving above the South Campus Dining Hall. (Photo courtesy of Bill Seaby ’64)

START ME UP // College radio at UMD began in 1942 as the Old Line Network, an effort cut short by the draft of hundreds of Maryland men into World War II. Students took to the AM airwaves again from a classroom in the speech department on Oct. 11, 1948—this time, as WMUC AM 650. It lasted only three days because of poor transmission but was revived the following year after the low-power signal was routed through electrical wiring throughout dorms, dining halls and, eventually, Fraternity Row.

The station did stints in the basement of Silvester Hall (now Baltimore Hall) and a repurposed shower room in Calvert Hall before moving in 1953 to one of the temporary Army barracks located in the former “Gulch” area on South Campus. Spinning Top 40 hits, AM 650 grew in popularity on campus, where it surpassed the ratings of every commercial station in the region. That fact—confirmed after Frank Zappala ’68 convinced Arbitron to do a survey for free—helped the station sell airtime to local and national companies itching for the college demographic. “I would throw on a sport coat and just start knocking on doors,” he says. “The beer companies were begging to advertise, but we couldn’t get that approved.”

BRITISH INVASION // The day of the Beatles’ first U.S. concert in February 1964, Bill Seaby ’64, Paul Palmer ’64, Fred Krautwurst ’64 and Alan Batten ’65 lugged an Ampex portable tape recorder, a mic stand and about 100 feet of cord down to a press conference at the Washington Coliseum. When it ended, Seaby and Palmer jumped onto the stage and in a bold move asked John Lennon to record a promo spot for the station.

“He told us he wasn’t allowed to because it could cause some bad feelings for the other stations, but we told him we were just a little campus radio station,” recalls Seaby. “I scribbled what he needed to say on a notecard, and he went ahead and did it—and then it was over.” With the tagline, “Get listening, kids!” it’s one of the only known station IDs that Lennon ever recorded in the U.S. “My biggest regret was The Diamondback reporter who came with us lost the photograph he took of us on stage.”

BREAKING NEWS // While WMUC reporting has spanned everything from presidential elections to a dairy cow stranded on the seventh floor of a women’s dorm in a 1960s prank, it provided an invaluable historical record of the unrest over the Vietnam War. Clutching a tape recorder and microphone, Peter Ferrara ’73 covered the 1970 riots on Route 1 then raced back to the station to transfer his reports onto a reel-to-reel for broadcast. The Associated Press caught wind of his efforts and soon paid him a stipend for each report he filed. When the state again sent in the National Guard the following year, WMUC announced troops’ positions on campus, with student correspondents reporting live. “I remember the police came to shut us down and the station manager saying, ‘No, we’re free to do this,’” says Kernis.

A SLICE OF THE PIE // Many of the big acts that played College Park in the ’60s and ’70s—including Fats Domino and Peter, Paul and Mary—gave interviews to WMUC. In 1971, an emerging folk singer named Don McLean stopped by the station to chat with DJ Sheldon Michelson ’70, who asked if McLean was working on anything new. “He said, ‘You know, I got this one thing, and I need a copy of it. If you let me record it here you can keep a copy,’” recalls Kernis. That session is thought to be the first recording ever of “American Pie;” listen closely for lyrics that eventually changed in the released version, now considered an informal national anthem.

WMUC’s first radio tower was installed in 1979 after an exhaustive five-year campaign to secure a frequency on the FM dial. (Photo courtesy of Diamondback Photo Collection, University Archives)

FM OR BUST // After more than five years of bidding, two FCC rejections and a two-year campaign called “FM or Bust,” WMUC finally secured a secondary, Class-D FM license at the bottom of the FM dial: 88.1. The FM station would share digs with WMUC’s AM 650, which continued to run until 1999 on the third floor of the South Campus Dining Hall—one of the highest points on campus. During the summer of 1979, staff readied the station for the inaugural FM broadcast.

“The tower could only be 30 feet; anything taller would interfere with the nearby College Park Airport,” says Andrew Coile ’82, who helped erect the transmission tower. Coile and Larry Pollack ’80 painted it themselves in the required alternating white and aviation orange. WMUC’s 10 watts were a whisper compared to the 50,000-watt mega-reach of its commercial peers, an issue that created new problems for the station decades later.

On Sept. 10, 1979, program manager Marty Rosenstock ’81 launched a new era for WMUC with Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio.”

Photo courtesy of University Archives

JIM HENSON // In 1979, Rosenstock tapped a friend working Homecoming, where Muppeteer Jim Henson ’60 would sit as grand marshal, with a covert mission: to sneak him into the grandstand for an impromptu interview. Rosenstock managed a quick chat, not with Henson, but his green sidekick. “I was holding the microphone up to Kermit’s mouth instead of Henson’s because he had just made him come so to life,” he says.

Program Director Elliot Klayman, left, and DJ Terry Wilson review tally sheets from the 1984 WMUC Radiothon. (Photo courtesy of Diamondback Photo Collection)

FREE-FORM RADIO // After a hard lobby by staff, WMUC planted its FM flag in a free-form format that by the early 1980s allowed DJs to design their own shows and highlight lesser-known artists; they embraced the emerging D.C. hardcore scene along with other eclectic and underground acts.

“It was just a time when everyone was playing their favorite stuff,” says former DJ Melinda Johnson. Over the years, metal, hip-hop, emo and indie music found homes at WMUC.

“It feels like a public service,” says Laura Schnitker Ph.D. ’11, who developed an exhibit on WMUC’s history for Hornbake Library in 2013. “It’s more important than ever that we still have live DJs curating shows of all kinds of eclectic music for people who are genuinely curious.”

BIG PIMPIN’ IN STUDIO // In 1993, WMUC’s “Soul Controllers Mix Show” hosts emerging rap star Canibus and a then-unknown Jay-Z.

Flo Petite ’23 of the band Homeschool Friend plays in the Live Room.

AMERICAN GRAFFITI // Since the station’s move to South Campus Dining Hall in 1974, DJs, visiting artists and staff have left their mark on the station’s walls. In 2014, Facilities Management upgraded the studio walls and carpet, with the agreement that tagging would be limited to only the “live” room, a performance space frequented by local and visiting bands (look closely and you’ll find signatures by Ice Cube, Alvvays, Alex G and others).

A short time later, the staff painted the lobby walls in chalk paint for graffiti as free-form as the music; each semester, the walls are scrubbed clean using Coca-Cola (“the only thing powerful enough to remove all traces of chalk,” says current General Manager Aidan Appelson ’23) for the next batch of station DJs. 

DJs Jane Lyons Raeder ’18 and Jonathan Raeder ’15 had their first date on “All-Star Day;” years later they took their engagement photos at the station. (Photo courtesy of Jane Lyons Raeder ’18)

ALL STAR DAY // More than 15 years after dominating American radio as the 1999 song of the summer, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” had a brief resurgence in College Park. WMUC staff, who had made the single a regular feature of parties in the Knox Box apartments, declared Feb. 22, 2015, “All Star” Day, commencing a mind-numbing 24-hour marathon of the song on repeat, occasionally interspersed with cover versions; one DJ managed to get Smash Mouth’s drummer, Kevin Coleman, on the phone for an interview and to record a station ID. Lyons, who did the graveyard shift that day, remembers listening in for most of the marathon. “The song would end and there would be these few seconds of silence. For a minute you’d think, ‘Maybe it won’t be “All Star”?’ But it always was.” When Lyons married her husband and fellow WMUC DJ Jonathan Raeder ’15 years later, the couple played “All Star” right after their first dance.

THE RECORD LIBRARY
Thought to be the second largest on the East Coast, WMUC’s record library is currently maintained by two student librarians, who catalog new entries, keep things organized and move older albums to a separate “valuable” record room. While cameras now keep watch on the vast collection of over 70,000 items, that wasn’t the case in earlier decades, when staff regularly pilfered vinyl for personal use, leaving behind the jackets. Over the past few years, station staff have built a collage of these empty jackets on the record room wall. “During my sophomore year, I gave a tour to my roommate’s dad, who was a DJ at WMUC,” says Appelson. “He saw the mural and pointed out all the records he stole.”

“I spent the entire summer of 2006 cataloging the record library into a searchable database, which had never been done before,” says former GM and DJ Anton Kropp ’07. “We typed in every song, every artist by hand. This was long before the cloud; we were running everything on a local machine in the server room. The radio station is hit by lightning a lot and occasionally you’d have these power surges. One night, it got fried one too many times. We lost everything. Now as a software engineer, I tell all of my people to back up everything; you never know when you’ll be struck by lightning.”

LONG LIVE WMUC // In an era where college radio stations have largely been sold off, stations like WMUC are notable purely for surviving. “WMUC has become an endangered species,” says Patchen Mortimer M.F.A. ’03, who, along with several other alums, still hosts a weekly WMUC show. Its endurance is largely due to the legions of students who took up the mantle over its 75 years, but also because of the university’s ongoing financial and operational support. WMUC, he says, is the anarchistic, artistic yin to the university’s academic yang—and a space for a lot of people who don’t fit in. “It’s loners, punks and weirdos for sure, but they’re communing with frat boys and female business majors,” he says. “That synthesis is what makes us better.”

In September, WMUC welcomed a new crop of DJs looking for the freedom to spin records and make their community through music—with the hope that the kids will keep listening. “It’s a magical feeling of, Oh, wow, this is the community that I’m part of,” says Appelson. “And we have momentum now.”