TINY LITTLE STATIONS

Radio Free UMass
Tales of three W's – WFCR, WMUA and (sometimes) WOCH

by Ali Crolius

It's just hours away from the finish line of the WFCR fall fund drive, and it looks like we aren't going to make it.

     This despite weeks of preparing listeners to get their checkbooks and credit cards ready, and offering the option of pledging online. Despite such carrots as mugs and sweatshirts and scarves from Amherst sheep, and such sticks as imagining the early commute without Morning Edition. Despite impassioned appeals to head, heart, and wallet from virtually everyone connected to the station in any way, from irrepressibly bubbly county reporter Susan Kaplan '75 to local used-book dealer Fred Marks. Despite all this, at 4:50 p.m. on Thursday, November 18, the last full day of the ten-day drive, the total stands at a close-but-no-cigar $234,066. The goal is $250,000, and the drive ends in two hours.

     But hope is always alive, here in the WFCR studios. Despite this late-afternoon lull, surely people are getting ready to call. Surely listeners have the number memorized by now, the one that reinforces the station's location on the dial: 1.800.639.8850. And there's a challenge to sweeten the deal: an anonymous pair of loyal listeners from Longmeadow say that if ten new members sign up by the five o'clock break, they'll pitch in an extra $1,000.

     The phones are as somnolent as a nursery of napping babies.

     Those of us filling in on the phones banter nervously. The Black Sheep Deli, one of some 150 business supporters of the station, has sent a tray of sandwiches and juice to fortify the troops. But as we watch fellow-volunteer and UMass assistant dean of students Merle Ryan '82G, '89G tabulate figures on the big blackboard, most of us are reflecting on the fact that our goal is to raise in five hours roughly as much dough as some of us earn in a year.

     It's daunting. And yet, in its moment-to-moment unpredictability, the pledge drive is also fun—a roller-coaster ride of dejection and elation. What are the magic words that will motivate, inspire, or guilt-trip listeners to pick up the phone and pledge?

     The old hands appear calm. Visible through a plate-glass window separating the studios is the shiny pate of classical music announcer and station webmaster Walter Carroll, who's patching in All Things Considered from Washington. In the minuscule news studio next door, local ATC host and world music disc-jockey Kari Njiiri is adjusting his headphones to read the local news. Here in "Pledge Central" with the volunteers, reporter Karen Brown and classical music announcer Priscilla Drucker are cozied up to a pair of mikes, working the unseen audience with steady determination.

     With the practiced conviction of a person in her fortieth or so fund-drive, Drucker is expounding on the concept that at FCR, we can have it all—Placido Domingo live from the Met, Terry Gross and her carousel of creatives, the tinder-dry wit of Garrison Keillor, the depression-dissolving guffaws of Click and Clack, the mellifluous commentary en Español of our own Luis Meléndez '83S, '89—all for about the same amount of daily change we spend on our morning coffee fix.

     Drucker addresses herself to no small number. Thanks to a new transmitter and 349-foot tower atop Mount Lincoln, erected in 1997 as the first goal in the station's capital campaign, FCR's signal pushes out a hundred miles in all directions. It reaches north to Keene, New Hampshire; south to Middletown, Connecticut, and east to Worcester. To the west it extends into the Berkshires—the summits of which, in most weathers, keep it from quite reaching the New York line, beyond which the seven-station chain of the WAMC network holds sway.

     At this moment, moving into prime drive-and dinner-cooking time with its popular evening newscast, FCR is reaching over 12,000 people. Yet, as is gently but relentlessly observed during these fundraisers, a mere 8 percent of the audience actually contributes to this commercial-free, if not message-free, service.
"Please—we've got a lovely group of volunteers waiting by the phones," Drucker implores her listeners far and wide. "Won't you help them feel useful? That number to call . . . "

     In this, my maiden stint as a volunteer, I'm getting my first look around the building from which virtually everything I know about the events of the last decade has issued. In those ten years, I'd developed pictures of what the place and its personalities looked like. All these pictures had all been wrong. Priscilla Drucker, for example, with her gravelly voice and encyclopedic knowledge of the classical canon, had evolved in my imagination as a sort of endearing Aunt Pris figure—a formal soul with a penchant for plum-colored suits and tiny-floral-print turtlenecks, forever dabbing with a handkerchief at a cold-reddened nose. Au contraire: I look admiringly across the studio at a thoroughly modern, jeans-wearing woman a good decade younger than my mental aunt.

     Another misconception: I'd assumed that a station broadcasting profiles of Leontyne Price and communiques on corporate malfeasance would be at least modestly compelling as a physical space. Not so. WFCR occupies the top floor of Hampshire House, a three-story building plunked down on the north side of Massachusetts Avenue near the Whitmore parking lot. Constructed in the '40s as temporary housing for returning servicemen and their families, Hampshire House is an uninspired barracks with long central halls separating rows of dinky apartments-turned-offices or studios.

     General manager Martin Miller reports that most public radio stations occupy similarly unprepossessing spaces. He remembers being shocked upon visiting the headquarters of Marketplace, the weeknight business report that turns the budding global economy into a bouquet of really enjoyable stories: This savvy show is beamed from L.A. by a radio station housed in an aging armory on the USC campus.

With a staff of thirty-three full- and part-time employees, more than 200 active volunteers, a small cadre of student interns, and a yearning to expand technologically, WFCR has long since outgrown the corridors and crannies of Hampshire House. In fact, Miller was hired away from WGBH in Boston five years ago especially to head up a campaign for a new facility.

     Miller is fond of saying that WFCR's mission is the same as the university's: to be a beacon of public education and a wellspring of public resources. And the two institutions have long been linked. UMass has provided space for the station since 1961, four years after the area's first "educational radio" began emerging from a makeshift studio in a Springfield high school, under the call letters WDEK. Its successor, WFCR, born on the sleepy cusp between the conformist fifties and the Zeitgeist-changing sixties, was conceived "as an alternative to what was on the air," says director of outreach Karin Obermeier '83, '95G. It has operated with the financial and philosophical support of UMass and the other members of the Five Colleges consortium ever since. The staff are nominally UMass employees, though only parts of two salaries are paid from university funds, and Miller reports to the Office of University Outreach.

     It is a truly symbiotic relationship, in which FCR and UMass each enhance the cachet of the other. As the station's host and headquarters, UMass is mentioned on the air a minimum of twenty-nine times a day. The campus also benefits from the fact that the station has microphones at the ready to quote local academicians on national issues: During one recent fortnight professors Jerome Mileur and Jeffrey Sedgwick of political science, Lee Badgett of economics, and Martín Espada of English were interviewed in FCR's studios.

     The station broadcasts performances by UMass musicians, helps publicize campus as well as community arts events, and provides training for students: This year Audie Cornish '00 and George Chidi '00 worked in the news department, and Beth Ajalat '01 did an independent study in the development department. WFCR has also been a training hall for entry-level professionals with national aspirations; NPR's Aaron Schachter, ABC-TV's Debra Wong, and a dozen others who got their start in Amherst have gone on to bigtime jobs.

     UMass, for its part, holds the FCC license and provides shelter and services, making a total contribution of about 14 percent of FCR's budget. This expenditure is analogous to the state legislature's support for the campus: It's substantial and indispensable, but it must be supplemented by other funds. Excluding space, services, and salaries, UMass's contribution covers about 3 percent of an annual operating budget of $2.2 million, and the other campuses and Five Colleges Inc. provide another 3 percent. The lion's share of yearly expenses— equipment, supplies, NPR program fees, (which have been sharply increasing as federal support declines), and everything else—comes from fund-raising. In order to raise additional funds for a new station, a new, fiercely faithful group, the non-profit Friends of WFCR, has arisen. Already, with the help of two full-time fund-raisers, the group has drawn in more than $850,000 toward equipment, and the campaign hasn't gone public yet.

     Martin Miller, a dark-haired, forty-four-year-old, somehow Clark-Kent-like native of Long Island, has a big vision of what WFCR can become, and he's gifted at articulating that vision. Though his demeanor borders on droll and his manner is generally laid-back, Miller can become intense in fund-raising mode—his dentist-drill repetition of the phone number has been known to send a listener diving for the dial—or on such subjects as media concentration. Locally, he notes, only three of several dozen radio stations remain independently owned. "We know that huge conglomerates are buying up all the stations," says Miller. "We are headed toward a media environment where five, six, seven big companies control the media in this country. The estimate is that each company will own 1,200 stations—and we're getting close, with one already owning 800."

     In Miller's view, "public radio is going to be the last democratic place where multiple voices can be heard." And he's certain there's a market for that place: a public hungry for the diversity that stations like FCR provide. As proof, he points out that 8 million people a day listen to Morning Edition: more than twice as many as watch The Today Show. Recent data for Hamp-den, Hampshire, and Franklin counties show that among those Miller calls "public radio's natural audience"—people thirty-five and older—more listen to WFCR than to any other station. Even among a broader audience, those eighteen and above, FCR ranks sixth among thirty-six stations.

     "Public radio programs are, by definition, not among the most popular—that's why they're on public radio," wrote Miller in one of the e-mail reports he's begun circulating to the station's membership. "To stand so high among the radio stations of our area is something to be proud of."

     As evidenced by his affinity for broadcast e-mail, Miller believes the information revolution, too, represents opportunity for public radio. The FCC is expected to "release" new frequencies soon, and public stations hope to acquire some of those bands to produce "targeted programming." WFCR has already started down this road with its new all-info affiliate, WPNI-AM. Day-long jazz on one frequency, all-classical or all-talk on another, are becoming practical and near-term possibilities.

     The WFCR of the future will be a true community crossroads, says Miller, a center not only for broadcasting by teachers and students and disenfranchised groups, but where the former can practice media literacy and the latter can gain access to the Internet. "I personally see the Internet as the next place for community dialogue," he says.

     Indeed, FCR's leap onto the 'net has already occurred. Under the only slightly improbable direction of elfish longtime classics announcer Walter Carroll, wfcr.org is developing into a lively place. Going well beyond online posting of schedules and playlists, the site offers live audio streaming, up-to-date and interactive arts calendars, and streamlined links to organizations, underwriters, and other public broadcasting sites. Listeners with the right audio program in their computers can peck away at the keyboard and not miss a minute of the programming day. And of course, the website is also the latest way to add members: As of February, listeners could "cyber-pledge"—a technique that Carroll and others hope will become second-nature. (For every $20,000 pledged off-air, the station tries to knock a day off an on-air drive.)

     Like any well-meaning parent, Miller is ambitious for his station. Local stations, he says, are the lifeblood of "the national conversation," and for a station its size, FCR sends a considerable number of stories to its national network. In both news and cultural offerings, the station does its best to help listeners, as so many Valley bumper stickers enjoin, "Think Globally, Act Locally." But not at the cost of the local scoop, the basis of which is vigorous reporting by an expanded local news team. Susan Kaplan covers Hampshire County, Bob Paquette '77 and Kari Njiiri break news from Western Massachusetts, and, as of last winter, Karen Brown has directed a new Springfield bureau out of Channel 57/WGBY-TV. The station also airs such homespun weekly shows as the veteran Valley Folk, which Susan Forbes Hanson has nurtured for some fifteen years, and the year-old Field Notes, a ground-hugging series of reports from the local woods, marshes, and meadows by UMass Extension staffer Laurie Saunders.

     Miller notes that most of public radio's super-shows were originally fostered, and still are broadcast, by affiliate stations: Fresh Air from WHYY in Philadelphia, Car Talk from WBUR in Boston, Prairie Home Companion from Minnesota Public Radio. "Who's the next Bob Edwards?" asks Miller. "Who's going to replace Garrison Keillor? We can have a say in that if we can develop talent at a local level."

Let me assure you—this is not a money-making operation to date," laughs Miller. He refers to the creation, two years ago, of WPNI, public information station 1430-AM: the nation's first collaboration, says Miller, between a public and commercial station. From Holyoke, the small AM affiliate sends out its signal at a modest 5,000 watts compared to WFCR's 50,000. But it's cheap to run, says Miller, pulling world-wide programming "right off the satellite."

     The idea originated three years ago in a conversation between Miller and Tom Davis, owner of Holyoke-based rock station WRNX-FM. Both men were conscious of the seemingly insatiable demand for talk radio, which in FCR's case could conflict with the musical offerings that are a core value of public radio. WPNI not only mediates that conflict but helps satisfy what Miller calls "a very healthy appetite for news and information programming." The station's round-the-clock broadcasts include not only the best of FCR's offerings but ones that 88.5 hasn't been able to shoehorn into its schedule: NPR's Talk of the Nation, for example, and BBC World Service News. The trivia quiz show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, produced by FCR alumnus Doug Berman, (also known as "esteemed producer Doug-the-subway-fugitive-not-a-slave-to-fashion Berman" of Car Talk) was picked up first on 1430 AM and is now available on 88.5 as well.

     The most important thing about WPNI, Miller says, is the expansion of listening options and the edge it will give its parent station as radio technology evolves into broadband and digital. "Will we ever make up the investment in WPNI?" asks Miller. (The project was launched with a combination of NPR and FCR funds.) "I hope so. But my main hope is that we do what we do at WFCR, which is cover our expenses."

     Still, Miller who is director of development as well as general manager at FCR, is ever on the alert for any potential freshet of revenue. Increasingly, during his tenure, listeners have been alerted to a resourceful stable of fund-raising projects that at this point produce something over $100,000 a year. Most double as excellent PR for the station, and painless, even altruistic acts of consumerism for the listener.

     For instance, "Vintage Vinyl," the decade-old autumn sale of second-hand recordings on the Amherst Common, moved 19,000 records and CDs and raised $39,000 for the station last fall. WFCR announcers regularly plug the Public Radio Music Source, an online venue at which listeners can order virtually any recording with five percent of each sale going to the station. A two-year-old travel program sends two or three dozen paying participants at a time off to European music festivals and such-like destinations, in the company of FCR broadcasters: with jazz guy Tom Reney to the Jazz in Marciac festival in France, with classics guy John Montanari to Rome, Parma, and Milan, and so on.

     WFCR also sponsors live events that bring cultural and arts personalities to the Valley: biologist Jane Goodall, writer Anne Lamott, NPR heroes Terry Gross, Scott Simon, David Sedaris. These events reinforce FCR's position as a pillar of cultural life in the region, and also build relationships with such partners as the Calvin Theater in Northampton and the schedulers of the handsome halls at the Valley's colleges. (Mount Holyoke's Chapin Auditorium is a frequent venue.) Looking ahead, Miller sees other potential tributaries of income: Live studios at the new facility will enhance the ability to attract celebrated visitors, and can also be rented out to local groups who need them.

     An announcement about the future site of WFCR was due this spring or summer. Miller has stayed mum on specifics, saying only that the Friends have considered sites in the new research parks—the Mass Ventures building in Hadley and another slated to be built in Sunderland. Finding a spot on the 1,400-acre central campus is less likely, though not impossible. Miller does say the station will do its best to remain on the busline, to keep it readily accessible to its student interns and the campus in general.

The sandwiches are gone, the volunteers have drifted off into pleasant chatter, when suddenly, with just a minute and a half to go 'til five, the red lights on all the phones begin to blink. I pick up the phone in front of me and, reading from my cue card, find my most cheerful and officious voice.

     "Thank you for calling WFCR. May I take your pledge?"

     "Uh, how much is the Josh Simpson paperweight?"

     I run my finger down the list of premiums, material incentives that Martin Miller calls "tchotchkes . . . our recognition that everyone has their own thing that makes them want to give." I pass those scarves of organic undyed wool from an Amherst sheep farm, those sweatshirts emblazoned with a pensive Duke Ellington, those polar-fleece pullovers, those kaleidoscopes from Van Cort Instruments in South Deerfield.

     "The paperweight is yours if you pledge at the $325 level," I inform the caller. "That's just a dollar a day," I add helpfully.

     There's a pause. "Okay. That's okay. Thanks." The caller hangs up. Oh well. The phone rings again immediately, this time with someone pledging $60. And again, with a local pizzeria wanting to get in on the excitement by giving pizzas to the next ten callers.

     "That Mahler recording—do we still have some of those?" calls out Zane Kotker, a Northampton-based novelist volunteering for the first time.

     "Let me check," says Miller, turning to the idiosyncratic sticker system by which volunteers and staff keep track of the outflow of premiums.

     It's happy chaos. Well, not chaos, really, just the buzz of people on the phone with people responding to something that Brown or Drucker has said on the air. But Karin Obermeier surmises that it's also a listener-land equivalent to the adrenaline rush in the studio—a last-minute realization that this is their last chance to be part of something successful. "Some people respond only at the end because that's when the goal is attainable, when they can be in on the final push," she says.

     I leave before the big wrap-up, but when I phone later, Obermeier tells me that the quarter-million-dollar goal had not only been reached, but surpassed. And it happened during All Things Considered, she says, when we set out to raise $6,500 and pulled in $8,000. In fact, I'd been part of the most successful fund drive ever, not only exceeding financial goals but bringing in 1,100 new members.

     "I am always amazed and humbled that people actually give us money," a tired but satisfied Obermeier reflects. "People place such a value on what they hear, be it news or music. "They have a very personal relationship with that, and in the end, they do support it."

Up the hill and past the pond, past the University Store and down the Campus Center escalator, lies WFCR's sibling station, WMUA 91.1 FM. Family resemblances between the two include the signature cramped quarters that don't seem to matter once you get inside and catch the energy. But there are big differences between these stations also. You'd never mistake an MUA broadcast for one from FCR—or vice versa.

     The older sibling by thirteen years, WMUA first beamed its modest, ten-watt signal from a turret of South College on a brisk November night in 1948. Its three founders were veterans interested in reaching the dorms of the rapidly-expanding Mass Aggie. Their broadcasts included tobacco, hog, and corn prices and were to be found on the AM dial; FM was still several years in the future. After a stint in Marston Hall, MUA moved seventeen years ago to its present location, next door to The Collegian in the Murray Lincoln Campus Center. From these subterranean quarters the station's 1,000-watt signal is transmitted to Orchard Hill, where an aging (but soon to be replaced) tower beams its eclectic mix of rap, blues, spirituals, world music, rock, hiphop, R& B, interviews, Minuteman sports, and debate on public issues thirty miles into the ether.

     As sibling relationships go, this is a case of the older sib retaining its youthful looks the longest. The place pulses with both hipness and informality. Many of the staff found their way there through friends. Newly elected general manager Dan Barowy, a senior in legal studies, was recruited by predecessor Richard Ezra Zekaria '00 when an opening came up for a visual media director last fall. Now Barowy DJs two shows and handles the station's administrative duties as well. He's also the creator of the spiffy wmua.org. Not everyone involved with WMUA is an undergraduate, or even a student, explained station advisor Glenn Siegel during a recent tour of the place. But with its mission to serve UMass and its environs as a training ground for wannabe broadcasters, an outlet for music lovers and politicos of every stripe, and general between-class drop-in center, it does attract a young and open-minded crowd.

     In being described by the often sniffy Valley Advocate as "a station that consistently outclasses most of Western Mass's professional public radio stations," WMUA has hauled in quite a compliment for a student organization that gets half its money from the SGA and raises the rest through a poster sale, a bit of underwriting, and a single annual fund-drive. Across campus, WFCR may be getting the late-breaking dispatches from Sylvia Poggioli or Daniel Zwerdling, but if you want the play-by-play of home hoops or jazz so experimental it hasn't been invented yet, turn the dial a few bands to the right, to 91.1 FM.

     MUA is risky: you never know what you're going to get. I don't mean the occasional collapses into the pitfalls of youth and amateurism—noise, non sequiturs, lame banter, and dead air—I mean the truly astonishing variety. Tune in one morning and you may hear gospel music so rousing it makes you feel like the engineer of the Glory Train; tune in an hour later and it sounds like the death rattle of some small creature the cat dragged in, or perhaps the cat itself. Siegel explains that this careening quality can be attributed to the philosophy of "niche programming"— playing music that commercial stations deem unprofitable or obscure. The niches fit into a format of "blocks" so that listeners have at least some idea what genre they'll encounter. MUA starts its broadcast day with "eclectic" at six a.m., followed by jazz blocks; world-beat blocks; public affairs; and so on until, before signing off with a final block of eclectic the next morning at three a.m. The specific content of the blocks is the prerogative of the person behind the mike, and the mercurial possibilities of that make the station singular: In the course of a few days, MUA listeners may hear an interview with Indian filmmakers on campus to screen their film on ancient huts celebrating feminine sexuality; Hebrew liturgy laid over a rap beat; Hopi chanting; "feminist-industrial" rock; and synthesizer music so beautiful it's like the singing of cold, remote stars.

     It takes flexibility to make the transitions. But apparently many listeners "don't mind listening to South Indian music right after an hour or two of jazz," says Siegel, with a pleased air. One such listener, state representative Stephen Kulik '01 of Worthington, says, "Whenever I'm home, or driving around my district or in my office in Turners Falls, I'm listening to MUA. Even if the music is not something I'd normally listen to, it's good and it's varied," says Kulik.

     As at FCR, it doesn't take much in the way of space to accomplish all this. The MUA I saw on my tour is a warren of little rooms carved out of little rooms. The production studio displays specimens of the latest digital equipment alongside the turntable technology of yesteryear. (The latter is still preferred by some DJs—Mike Barrett '01, for instance, who brings in a pack of his own vinyl to spin during his Thursday evening hardcore show The Liberation Frequency.) In the news studio, the "ON THE AIR" sign is lighted, meaning that Strates Frangules '03 and Jason Czernich '00, the two young men in the broadcast booth, are reading the mix of ghastly regional murders and innocent campus announcements that is the mid-morning news. The studio shares a plexiglass window with the main control room, where the DJ of the hour sets up shop; this morning, Ben Karetnick, a sweet, geeky kid with a gold hoop in one ear, is carting in selections from his own collection of obscure CDS for the show Java Jazz.

     Like many of the MUA crew, Karetnik is not a student ("I took one class once"), but a freelance drummer from Vermont who has become a member of the WMUA family by subbing for other DJs when they can't make it in. Since one of the station's objectives is to provide "for individuals and groups that historically have not had access to broadcast media," it welcomes people like Karetnik. Siegel says MUA has no desire to be a station aimed at white audiences or compete with commercial neighbors who reprise with "numbing redundancy" the current top-40 list. Rather, he says, it wants to reflect the abundance of cultures and subcultures that make life in Amherst so colorful.

     About a quarter of the station's eighty DJs, in fact, hark from off-campus, and they represent quite an assortment of ages, races, educational levels and political vantage points. They range from communication major Jen Moskal '03 of Holyoke, who started out at age twelve helping her father Mitch on the request line for his Saturday morning polka show and now has her own oldies hour called Jen's Time Machine, to the Reverend Bobby J. Wallace, seventy-three-year-old pastor of the Miracle Temple Church of God and Christ in Northampton, who sprinkles his gospel music offerings with "downhome-type ministry" that includes Bible-based chastisement of homosexuality and other departures from the straight and narrow. This does make for some awkward juxtapositions at station meetings, agrees Siegel. But despite the occasional philosophical disconnect, such color and controversy are not only tolerated but welcome at a station espousing commitment to "the diverse university and Pioneer Valley community."

Siegel's workplace, and MUA's main office, is a comfy riot of CDS and tapes and filing cabinets and political posters that feels as if it's been created by many hands over many years. The scuffed carpet is littered with the backpacks of students busy at various tasks around the station. Siegel himself is a forty-five-year-old former human services professional who came to the Valley "in pursuit of the good life" twenty years ago. Starting out as a jazz announcer, he stayed on to keep a loose guiding hand on the station's operations. College radio stations, he acknowledges, can devolve into little more than hang-outs with a lot of expensive equipment in them. Siegel, along with Barowy, program director Adam DeYoung '01, and about fifteen variously paid and titled others, keeps things shipshape, or at least in compliance with FCC regs. It's their job to make sure that the scores of people who want on the air are trained in the technical and philosophical basics of the station—a process long and complex enough to separate the merely curious from the serious broadcasting disciples.

Those who sign on tend to all but move in. Dave Rose '02, a communication major from Connecticut who co-directs the sports programming with Justin Rudd '01, calls WMUA "my second home. I spend more time here than in my dorm." Though he likes his classes, Rose says the hands-on challenges of traveling to the games of the teams the station has committed to covering—football, lacrosse, all women's and some men's basketball, some soccer and baseball —has given him the sounder education. The station has also offered mentoring relationships: Rudd reveres the man who first showed him the ropes at MUA, Mike Corey '99. Corey, who once held the job Rose and Rudd now fill, is one of those personalities who lives on, like a friendly spirit, in the station's studios. He was snapped up a month after collecting his degree in communication by the University of Delaware's WRDX-FM/WJBR-AM: The twenty-two-year-old rookie with the passion for women's basketball beat out 100 applicants to broadcast over the Blue Hen Network. Corey said he owes it all to MUA and its commercial affiliate, WHMP-FM in Northampton.

     "Without a doubt in my mind, I can say I apply most of the stuff every day that I learned in school," said the affable Vermonter in a phone interview last winter. "The tools are there—you just have to extend yourself and put your best effort into it." Corey says he's still defining his personal career goals, but popularizing women's basketball, which WMUA made a priority, is among them.

     Having just become a "Golden Oldie" of sorts itself by reaching and celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, WMUA has no wider ambition, says Siegel, than to serve its mission as "a repository and mouthpiece for musics, new and old, that rarely get heard." This is music that is esoteric, "not in that it's weird, but in that the masses are not ready for it," he says with a little laugh. "It's not Paula Abdul played at one-quarter volume. You can't have it playing in your office and make sense in your aural environment." But the cultural programming at WMUA does have an internal logic, Siegel believes, if you realize what it's trying to do.

     "Most of the people who do programs here—they feel they're fulfilling some greater good," he says. "All educated people should know who Ornett Coleman or Magic Slim are. Where else do you get to hear Nusrat Ali Khan in the U.S.?

     "Obviously, the sounds these DJs play are very different. But they're identical in that they're all at the crossroads of their communities."

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