WHRB Finds a Home in the Air

Peek into the basement windows of Pennypacker Hall and you may notice that it’s a little different from the basements of most freshman dorms. Nestled among the vending machines, flat-screen television, and cushy furniture are shelves of vinyl records, rows upon rows of compact disks, and not one but several studios and turntables.

You’re looking at WHRB-FM 95.3, Harvard Radio Broadcasting. From its humble, closed-circuit beginnings in 1940, WHRB (the undergraduate staffers call it “Wirb”) has become a station broadcasting across the Boston area and, via the Internet, around the world.

A key moment in WHRB’s development came in 1957, when the station won a license to go on the air.

For 17 years after the station’s inception, only Harvard buildings had access to WHRB, via wiring threaded through the system of steam tunnels beneath the campus. Along with disc jockeys and announcers, WHRB’s membership included a board of student engineers who spent much of their time navigating the intricate tunnel system and making sure the network was running smoothly.

“It was difficult to operate, and we understood that the heyday for carrier current distribution was over,” says William R. Malone ’58, a former engineer for WHRB and a current trustee of the station. “A lot of the wiring was from the World War II era and the AC power lines were a very unfriendly environment for radio frequency signals.”

MOVING ON UP

As students began to acquire FM radios, a move to FM broadcasting only seemed natural to WHRBies of the era. An added advantage of becoming an FM station was that WHRB could be heard beyond Harvard buildings. “Clearly in terms of graduate students who didn’t live in dormitories, faculty and the greater community the original system properly engineered was not available,” Malone says. “By switching to FM we immediately extended the geographic reach of the station.”

This was an important consideration for WHRB which, although non-profit, needed to cover operating expenses. “When you reach more people, the advertising rates increase, as do the breadth and range of potential advertisers,” says John R. Menninger ’57, the station’s chief engineer at the time. In 1956 WHRB President Geoffrey M. Kalmus ’56 told The Crimson that WHRB might soon make the switch.

Snagging an FM license wasn’t easy, however, and the transformation required quite a bit of legal work that took up most of the 1956-57 academic year. In February 25, 1957—a full year after Kalmus’s announcement—the Federal Communications Commission finally approved the station’s license application, and in May of that year WHRB-FM signed on for the first time at a frequency of 107.1 megahertz.

The expenses that came along with the switch in technology meant that WHRB also required more funding from advertisements, but as long as the ends met, watching the bottom line didn’t affect the station’s repertoire. “We were operating at low financial margin, so we could broadcast things that we liked as opposed to those that would make it easier to sell advertising,” Menninger recalls. “I can’t believe that the station hasn’t changed to reflect a wider listening audience, but then students tend to be at the leading edge of good ideas. I’m sure I must have left before this honeymoon is over.”

It doesn’t seem like the honeymoon has ended just yet. WHRB continues to fill a unique niche in the Boston-area music scene: although classical music and opera claim the most airtime, the station also plays an eclectic mix that includes jazz, underground rock, and hip hop. WHRB even has a “Hillbilly Music” program that has been a fixture on Saturday mornings for nearly five decades.

But although the WHRB of 1957 and its 2007 counterpart have a lot in common, some things have changed with time: the marathon bridge games that were a fixture of life inside the station in 1957 have turned into intense rounds of Risk, and the studio has moved to Pennypacker from its original home in Dudley Hall.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

In November of 1999 the station increased its accessibility yet again and began streaming online courtesy of WarpRadio, which gave WHRB free streaming in exchange for four 60-second advertisements per day. Then-President Alexandra J. McCormack ’00 told The Crimson that the new stream served to further WHRB’s overall goal: reaching a global audience.

Although the station’s programs may serve this goal by satisfying tastes that aren’t so well-represented on the airwaves, the majority of its content isn’t aimed at its own student body anymore. “I guess we’re not a typical college station,” WHRB President Kimberly E. Gittleson ’08 says, “but nearly every organization at Harvard is a little esoteric.” Gittleson, who is also an associate Crimson magazine editor, points out that WHRB continues to acknowledge its original Harvard audience—the station’s news and sports coverage, though a small percentage of the broadcasts, are Harvard-centric, and various programs such as Record Hospital and The Darker Side cater to the more underground college crowd by playing indie rock and hip hop, respectively.

“The big difference in WHRB now from ’57 would be that there’s probably a greater diversity of music,” says Frederick S. Hird ’57, a former WHRBie who listens to the online stream. Yet WHRB’s wide-ranging selection leaves little room for more popular music. Perhaps in an effort to go global, WHRB has transformed from the Harvard-only station it was 50 years ago to one that mostly serves listeners outside Harvard’s gates. But whatever philosophy guides its programming today, WHRB’s global reach began 50 years ago with a switch from tunnels to towers.

—Staff writer Asli A. Bashir can be reached at bashir@fas.harvard.edu.