Today marks my Silver Jubilee at WWFM – The Classical Network. Yet somehow, unlike King George V, no postage stamp will be issued in my honor.
25 years ago this morning, I made my professional radio debut in the Trenton-Princeton area. I had gone in for an interview with Alice Weiss earlier in September, 1995. It was a Monday, and it being new territory for me, I remember going for a dry run the day before, to ensure I wouldn’t be late. A good thing, too, since who knew there were so many exits for Route 1 off I-95? Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Guitar Concerto No. 1 was playing on the radio as, for the first time, I pulled onto the campus of Mercer County Community College. It was such a lovely, idyllic campus back then, as it remained, largely, until 2013, when literally hundreds of trees were hacked down to make way for a solar field, and the college drive was rimmed with an ugly chain-link fence.
Thankfully, the interview itself went really well. I guess in retrospect I’m a little surprised I was hired. I was 29 years-old and already a firebrand for “unusual and neglected repertoire,” not really considering whether or not my personal enthusiasm happened to be shared by my interviewer. I remember citing a New York Times article I had read in the 1980s, an overview of all these Scandinavian composers being documented in recordings on the BIS label, many of whom would have been unfamiliar to most Americans. There was an air of condescension about the writer’s assessments, so I had just assumed most of them weren’t worth the time or expense of getting to know. However, over the months and years that followed, I was able to explore most of these for myself, and I was delighted to find that there was actually some really terrific music on there. I used this as an example to illustrate my reasons for not trusting anything I read in regard to music and for always trying to remain open to new experiences. Surprisingly, I was hired anyway.
I remember I was handed a sheaf of papers with names like Gennadi Rozhdestvensky and Galina Vishnevskaya on them, and Alice and Walt Gradzki, then the General Manger, went into the adjacent production studio and recorded me onto reel-to-reel as I read them. Standards are nowhere near as stringent now. There’s no longer any of that reading-of-names stuff, though of course, as someone who had listened to classical radio for probably 15 years, and done community radio himself for nine, I made a fairly good show of it.
Alice and I conversed for hours. We seemed to really hit it off. The whole time, Glenn Smith popped in and out of the on-air studio. He was playing some exceptionally good stuff that day. I’m sure if I really took the time, I could recall much of it, since they were all composers I really liked, from pretty much within my wheelhouse of 1890 to 1950. One of the pieces, I remember, was Samuel Barber’s “Third Essay for Orchestra” (actually written in the ‘70s). Another was Ervin Schulhoff’s surrealist ballet “Moonstruck.” When we were introduced, Glenn said, “It’s a good place to work.” And so it proved to be, though the future would hold some very challenging times.
I always regard Glenn as having been a mentor and father figure at the station – though, my, we could argue up a storm. However, it fell upon Bliss Michelson to administer my training. These two men were my formative influences at WWFM, and both looked out for me in their own ways. My “training,” such that it was, involved sitting in with Bliss for two air shifts, with my arriving before 5:00 in the morning to watch him turn on the transmitter. This was before the station was 24 hours. We used to sign off at midnight. By the end of the second shift, I was deemed to be sufficiently prepared, and they put me right onto weekend mornings, from 5 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, and 5 a.m. to 11 on Sundays.
“St. Paul Sunday Morning,” as it was then called, began at 11:00, recorded off satellite onto reel-to-reel tape. Reel-to-reel and cart machines were what I worked with at the time that I started. Carts were like 8-track cartridges that held promos and things of that sort. These days, Promos, I.D.s, and underwriting are fired from a touch screen – convenient, though prone to bugs and hiccups, when the screen is not kept clean of accumulating finger smudges. We would eventually move on to an I.R. machine and then a dizzying array of computers. With every change, things became more complicated and generally more annoying. You know how it is. The more things are “improved” for everyone’s “ease,” the more they seem to go wrong and the more exasperating they become. On the other hand, computers make it a lot easier to call up information and to communicate with listeners, since I was always a little hit and miss with paper-and-stamp correspondence. I also like being able to share my playlists.
I was astonished and honored that anyone would trust me, by far the youngest among the on-air talent, and a newcomer at that, to be alone to handle all that responsibility on weekends. This was a station I listened to both in Philadelphia and when I visited my parents in Easton, PA. Even without internet streaming, which came later, that was a huge listenership. Alice wrote up a playlist for the first couple of weeks, but after that I was on my own.
I was very diligent in my commitment to those shifts, despite my share of raging snowstorms and tires blown out in total darkness. These days, we have automation to cover for us, but back then, if you didn’t show up, there was white noise. It was actually kind of crazy, since there were very definitely times when I should not have been driving, and most certainly I risked my life in order to get there. But it was part of the job, and I suppose one shouldn’t expect any long-term gratitude. Since then, things have gotten much softer. Now, it seems, as soon as it starts to snow, the station goes directly to automation. We used to carry identification cards from the federal government, as representatives of the Emergency Broadcast System, that allowed us access to thoroughfares shut down to the public during emergency situations. One of my colleagues rode in once on a plow.
As I suggest, the station has had its bumpy passages over the years. Some were financial and some were interpersonal, just as at any workplace. When the economy went into a nosedive in 2007-2008, I felt myself lucky to be in radio. I thought, well, I never had any money to begin with, so this isn’t really going to impact me, as long as we can raise enough to keep the station afloat. It was a naïve attitude.
WWFM is affiliated with Mercer County Community College. It is a peculiar alliance, since in many ways the station is independent, yet in others it has always been reliant. When admissions numbers looked to be taking a turn for the worse, the college mandated cuts across the board. This triggered suspicion between departments, and many wondered why a community college had to have a classical music station anyway.
I understand tough decisions had to be made, and one by one, all of the part-time announcers were plucked from their air shifts to be replaced by an automated service out of Minnesota. I won’t go into the obvious dip in quality, or the sad loss of a local connection. The station had to do something in order to survive, even if it would be at the expense of many of its employees. The full-time staff remained on the air, since it cost nothing extra, but they all also had to shoulder many of the duties previously assumed by the rest of us.
Eventually, the budget improved and part-time hosts were gradually brought back to do regular air work. But for me it took a good 16 months. In the meantime, I continued to record my weekly syndicated shows, “The Lost Chord” (begun in 2003) and “Picture Perfect” (begun in 2010), and I was approached occasionally to produce one-off projects, like a memorial tribute to philanthropist William H. Scheide. And they brought me back from time to time to do a pledge drive or two.
Prior to my imposed hiatus, the start-time for my morning air-shift crept up from 5 a.m. to 6, once the station went 24-hours (in 1997), then later, for budgetary considerations, 8:00. It is hard to complain about getting up at 6, as opposed to 3 or 4 in the morning, despite the financial loss of a couple of hours.
I started my Facebook page on March 28, 2014, the eve of my final morning show, as a way to maintain contact with listeners and those curious to keep up. The removal from the shift was perceived as indefinite, though perhaps not permanent. Then things got complicated. At the end of the fiscal year, I was removed from the payroll. As of July 2014, I was no longer a WWFM employee, but rather an independent contractor, a “vendor.” That meant I had to submit invoices every quarter and then literally chase down my paychecks. Also, I received no benefits.
But I had the training, I knew my stuff, and I wanted to keep an oar in, so suddenly, like a weed, I started popping up on other stations. I was hired as an on-call host at Philadelphia’s classical and jazz outlet, WRTI. There, I did the occasional run of daytime classical shifts, but I soon learned there was more of a demand for overnight jazz work. I wound up hosting the Saturday morning graveyard shift there for several years.
Concurrently, I began a regular Thursday morning show at Princeton University’s WPRB. After I was hired back at WWFM, there were many times when I could be heard on two or even all three of these stations in a 24-hour period. I was also writing a weekly classical music column for the Trenton Times.
I held on to everything for a few more years, since I had amassed this dime-store cultural empire, and it was hard to let go. I could barely make ends meet, but I was doing what I loved, and it was all about sharing music. And I shared a lot of it.
Eventually, though, the WRTI overnights were killing me. I wasn’t getting a lot of daytime classical work, except on holidays, so after I gave up jazz, I just kind of drifted away. I assume I’m still technically on the on-call list, since I see my name is still posted on their website.
WPRB continued a while longer. When the decision was made to whittle down the classical air shifts from five hours to three, I moved to Sunday mornings for a year, but then I gave that up too. The next semester, the station dropped its classical music in favor of “freeform.”
Somewhere along the way, the Trenton Times also dropped its classical music coverage. This was a blow, since I was able to harness both WPRB and the Trenton Times to promote local artists and community events. I had complete autonomy over my programming and decision-making, so I felt I was able to make a difference. I do mostly my own stuff at WWFM, too, but there I have to juggle other responsibilities and personalities, some of them more challenging than others.
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I was picked up by the Princeton weekly U.S. 1, so I could continue my advocacy of the local music scene. However, this is not a weekly column, and unlike at the Times, I have to make pitches to the editor (who, admittedly, is a pretty indulgent guy). In its favor, it pays a hell of a lot better than the previous gig!
Beyond that, I figured it was probably time to put all my eggs back into the WWFM basket. The station’s finances held, and there was a change in management, so things seemed to be looking up again, though perhaps not quite to the level they once were, back when we had good, knowledgeable, professional people on the board all day long, playing complete works.
Then in March, 2020, COVID hit. We all saw it coming, and those of us who produced specialty shows were asked to prepare a five-week stockpile in advance. Once the wave broke, of course, it became apparent that five weeks would not be enough. So another five weeks were selected from the archive. And then another five weeks. We are now deep into rerun territory, but in dipping into past shows, I try to keep them varied and timely.
That’s not an easy task, when I have not set foot on the MCCC campus, which remains closed to the public, for over six months. In some instances, all it would take for me to bring a show current would be to record a fresh line or two and to adjust the signature music at the end to bring it up to length. For instance, I could have turned my Arvo Pärt 80th birthday show into a celebration of his 85th. Alas, without access to the equipment, some perfectly good, though sadly time-specific shows, are just sitting in the archive, out-of-date. I have been kicking around the idea of setting up a home studio and sending in files remotely, but I have yet to do the research. I’d also been thinking of doing live interviews via Zoom, but it would have to be through a forum that wouldn’t shut me down for including music files.
When exactly the college will re-open is anyone’s guess. Technically, I am no longer even on the payroll (as per college policy), and I will have to be rehired in order to be compensated for any work. When we were let go back in 2014, I confess it was very difficult for me, not just financially, but emotionally, since I had always regarded WWFM as my home, and for as long as I had known it, up to that point, it was the best classical music station I had ever heard.
I’m more philosophical now. A quarter-century is a long time to be in radio these days, and my career, if I’m to include my apprenticeship as a community broadcaster, spans 34 years. I’ve had a good run. For the present, my recorded shows maintain a tenuous connection with an audience for unusual and worthwhile music, and “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” are still being sent out into syndication. My most recent, live WWFM air shift was on Wednesday, March 11. My last day uploading files at the station was on Friday, March 13.
More to the point, looking back to my WWFM debut: it was with adrenaline pumping, in the final hour of Bliss’ morning air shift, that a star was born, 25 years ago today. A few days later, I took over Saturday morning and continued to cover weekends for the next 18 ½ years. When I was brought back, in 2016, I was moved to weekday afternoons.
Over time, my fortunes at the station have waxed and waned. Here’s the music I selected for my very first hour, 9 a.m., on September 28, 1995:
HOWARD HANSON – Merry Mount: Suite
SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES – Farewell to Stromness
MUZIO CLEMENTI – Symphony No. 1
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG – Aria from “The Mirror of Arcadia”
Despite my nine years’ experience in community radio, in and around Allentown, PA, I was shaking like a leaf. Sensing my apprehension as I sat there at the board, soon to open my mouth for the first time before such an imposing listenership, Bliss’ words of advice were sage.
“Remember,” he said, “it’s just you and the microphone.”
A couple of years ago, I stumbled across this rare WWFM staff photo, taken in 2003, in the old broadcast booth. Since then, on-air operations have been moved next door to a room with a better window. The room in the photo is now one of our production studios.
Pictured, from left to right:
(front) Darlene Berson, Sandy Steiglitz, and Nancy Fish;
(middle) Walt Gradzki, Marjorie Herman, Diane D’Ascoli, Jeffery Sekerka, and Phil Joiner
(back) Bliss Michelson, Alice Weiss, Andrew Rudin, Glenn Smith, and Yours Truly.
By this time, I was already an old hand. Of those pictured, only Alice remains as a full-time employee, with Walt and Glenn returning on a contractor basis, and my voice kept alive through my two specialty shows.
Radio is not for the financially needy or the faint of heart!