Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Radiophonic Archival Systems

Archival Frameworks

The Vrabely Collection

In 2022, the family of the late Reverend Stephen J. Vrabely (1923-1994) donated around 1400 shellac, lacquer, and vinyl 78rpm discs to Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music (ATM), all from the pastor’s collection. For the most part, they consisted of recordings of Hungarian artists and ensembles from the early-to-mid 20th century performing countless styles of music, csárdás folk dance shelved beside operatic arias shelved beside Romani brass bands, and so forth. While Reverend Vrabely very well might have been a man of eclectic musical taste, though, this music was not just for his own personal enjoyment. Long before they became artifacts in a vault, these records played a unique role in Vrabely’s ministry as selections to be played on the Hungarian Hour, a program that aired on Hammond, Indiana-based radio station WJOB beginning in 1940 to serve Hungarian American and Hungarian migrant populations of northwest Indiana’s Calumet region, a hub for industrial workers starting in the latter half of the 19th century. The Hungarian Hour was one of several programs on WJOB that targeted a particular ethnic enclave; the network also sold airtime to producers of Slovak, Greek, Spanish, and African American specialty programming, a piece of information that offers insight into the potential audiences in WJOB’s broadcast range at the time (Pontecorvo 2024).

My main task in working with the Vrabely Collection was to take inventory of these records, filling out a spreadsheet devised by our professional archivists with names of songs and artists, alphanumeric publisher and manufacturer identifiers, and any other noteworthy information or features available to me through visual and tactile examination. It was detail-oriented work, requiring me to learn to distinguish between the letters ö and ő or ü and ű and digitally copy and paste each letter in place. Indeed, neither the computer nor I were the optimal instruments for this project, unused as we were to even the basics of Hungarian orthography, much less the vocabulary. It didn’t take long, though, to become acclimated to the limited text at hand. I learned that zenekar refers to a musical ensemble; Google Sheets learned to suggest oft-repeated artists from the first few letters of their names. From dates stamped on the record sleeves, I could even learn when each disc might have been played (tentatively; the exact use of the stamps was never explicitly noted), adding a temporal dimension to my spatially grounded sense of how Rev. Vrabely might have used those items.

These two paragraphs represent two paths of knowledge production from the Vrabely Collection facilitated by the archival framework in which it has been placed. I conceive of these paths as flows, one moving from outside to inside (and back again) and the other from the ground up, respectively. In the first place, by engaging with the big picture of the Vrabely Collection, I understand more about its relationship to the context of Indiana broadcasting. The ATM houses several Midwest U.S. and specifically Indiana radio-related collections and materials. The Donald Lake Collection includes country/western dance music recorded for the show Hoosier Hop on WOWO, a station in Fort Wayne in northeastern Indiana. Recordings of the Greater Harvest Baptist Church broadcasts dubbed by Melville Herskovitz come from just across Indiana’s northwestern border, on the airwaves of WAAF in Chicago. More close to home are eclectic mixes of local bands recorded live for WFHB and released in the form of various CD compilations (e.g., Acoustic Harvest Firehouse Mix No. 1 and WFHB’s Local Live: Remote Broadcasts series) stored among the ATM’s commercial recordings. The Vrabely Collection adds to this larger picture of radio-mediated imagined communities in the state and the region over time by bringing together the raw materials of Vrabely’s collages in service of projecting an idea of Hungarianness in the Calumet region. Complementing the ATM’s Midwestern radio materials in this case are its materials about the specific Calumet region of Indiana to which The Hungarian Hour broadcast, notably recordings and press clippings from two large field research projects led by then-IU Folklore Institute Chair Richard Dorson on identity in the Calumet region. These offer a broader picture of the many communities imagined within the geographic region to which Vrabely broadcast his Hungarian musical selections. The Vrabely Collection thus adds new depth to my understanding of the ATM, Indiana University, the Calumet region of Indiana, and Indiana itself, while my understandings of Indiana, the Calumet region, IU, and the ATM give me context for the materials of the Vrabely Collection. A fuller picture emerges from these pieces that offers me a sense of The Hungarian Hour’s potential significance in its local setting.

As an archivist working with Rev. Vrabely’s materials decades after his passing, any reconstruction of this context I do requires a large amount of imagination. In trying to ascertain the knowledge that the collection is producing, I have found it crucial to engage deeply with the details of the individual pieces of the archive. Through these, I gained a sense of the Hungary he projected to his geographically local segment of the diaspora in the U.S., the many styles represented on the air in assembling an aural sense of a distant home. My access to the Vrabely Collection through the institutional structures of the ATM thus also allows for studies of community imaginaries created within the imagined community by Reverend Vrabely, a member of said community. This is a means of knowledge production that, borrowing from Moore (2016), I see as a boundary process that blurs the perceived community-formal archive dichotomy. In this sense, the WFHB archives make for an excellent complement to the Vrabely Collection.