Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

Filling Gaps: Radio Experimentation in the U.S.

A radio station should not be just a hole in the Universe for making money, or feeding an ego, or running the world. A radio station should be a live place for live people to sing and dance and talk: to talk their talk and walk their walk and know that they (and the rest of us) are not finally and irrevocably dead.

—Lorenzo W. Milam, Sex and Broadcasting, 1975

The emergence of community radio as a phenomenon has taken place in different ways and at different times in different places in the world, with different relationships to the state and other radio formats. Radio broadcasting became part of the public sphere of the United States in the early 1920s, during which decade the airwaves became populated by smaller and larger entities. One WFHB colleague I spoke with recalled becoming involved with radio as a youth during the 1967 World Scout Jamboree after befriending a fellow scout who was reporting on the Jamboree for the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Voice of America. This led my colleague to a long career in radio theater beginning in the 1970s. In our conversation, this broadcaster cited New York-based experimental broadcast outlet W2XR (later WQXR) as “the first really nonprofit, community-type station,” explaining:

The reason I know about [W2XR] is that’s where Norman Corwin got his start in radio. Corwin had been a journalist. He started in print journalism as a kid, as a young man, in newspapers and so on… radio was coming up at the time, it was beginning to get really big, you know. And here was this station. He had an idea of, can we put poetry on the air in a different way, not be just some voice reading a poem, but bring it to life? And he went down to W2XR and said, what do you think? And they said, okay, we’ll give you 15 minutes a week. Good luck. There’s no money. Do your best. (Interview 14)

My radio colleague maintained a professional relationship and personal friendship with Corwin until the latter’s death in 2011 at the age of 101 (“His older brother lived to be 108 and their father lived to be 112; I thought he was going to be around…”). Norman Corwin’s decades-long career in radio is well documented elsewhere, but worth commenting on here in understanding the experimental possibilities of early U.S. radio. In particular, Corwin’s well-known social activism on air is noteworthy; while working for nationwide conglomerate CBS, he produced numerous programs in favor of civil rights and racial equality, leading to allegations by “a small cadre of ex-FBI agents” of his “pro-Communist activities” (Barlow 1999, 77). Corwin began at W2XR in their early, non-commercial years, working alongside progressive activists and other radio personalities in W2XR’s ongoing efforts to push the radio envelope. Eventually, the station would be bought by the New York Times and then become part of New York’s public radio network. Even so—and even though Corwin spent most of his career working for large, nationwide radio networks—his time on the cutting edge at W2XR ably demonstrates the room for artistic and thematic creativity in broadcasting that has been available outside of commercial settings since early radio productions. My colleague’s connection to Corwin as a broadcaster and as a friend suggests to me not only a camaraderie between geographically disparate experimental radio operations like W2XR, the Pacifica stations discussed in the next section, and WFHB, but also direct interrelations. Further, the Corwin narrative as conveyed by my colleague also suggests a precarity inherent in such creative programming: limited time, limited space, limited resources. Do your best.