WRPN -- Started as 'Bootleg Broadcasting'

From the Winter 2001 Ripon Magazine

By Lee Reinsch '89

Rock might be one kind of music played on the Ripon College radio station, but "rocky" describes the start WRPN got off to more than four decades ago.

The student-run WRPN-FM marks 40 years as an FM station this year. It aired its first official FM broadcast in February of 1961 and now operates 16 hours a day from a studio in Harwood Memorial Union.

But the station's actual genesis happened in 1955, when a Ripon speech instructor wrote a prospectus for a student-run station. For five years, a group of determined students laid the groundwork for the station's eventual birth, establishing WRPN as an AM station first.

Recent technological upgrades totaling $7,500 to WRPN-FM have modernized the studios, resulting in a fully digital system reported to be among the only one of its kind among Wisconsin college radio stations. WRPN-FM offers national and local news, faculty interviews, campus events, a variety of student-selected music and sports.

But it hasn't been easy. Primitive technology, tight budgets and a doubting administration added up to a station that almost never got off the ground. Toss in philosophical and artistic clashes among station managers and students, and you have a recipe for friction.

The college radio station existed for five years before starting officially on the FM dial in 1961. Those little-known years proved an arduous but necessary roller-coaster ride.

In October of 1955, Howard Hanson, speech instructor and department chair, proposed starting a radio station that would serve "... as a public voice of the College and as a student-training laboratory."

Hansen wrote in his 1955 prospectus to the administration: "The station will have to define its audience with great accuracy if it is to justify its existence. It can not attempt to be all things to all people. It is neither wise nor valid for an educational station to enter into direct competition -- program wise -- with its commercial sisters. It must, while satisfying the on-campus demands ... be a truly educational station, ... a cultural extension of the College off-campus."

WRPN began as a group of determined students doing "bootleg broadcasting" out of the basement of the former Tracy House, at the corner of Thorne and Ransom Streets. The college radio station's maiden AM broadcast in fall of 1956 didn't even wield enough force to pump into all of the buildings of Ripon's campus. At the time, WRPN was located at 570 on the AM dial, but not everyone could tap into it.

Bill Drake '63 describes what was known as a "closed carrier circuit system," where sound traveled more or less on phone lines.

"It went into dormitories on phone lines and (students) could pick it up on their radios," Drake says. "People in the community couldn't get it on their radios."

In those days, telephones didn't even have rotary dials, let alone push buttons. Callers picked up a phone and told an operator what number they wanted to call. To reach WRPN in Tracy House, callers had to say "Black 186" to the operator. Early station manager Bill Breen '59 describes WRPN's earlier years as "a couple people fooling around with technology." "Every once in a while, we would get a memo that we had done something to disrupt a transformer, or we would get a call from someone in Omaha where apparently the signal was going a lot farther than we ever imagined it to be going," former station manager Bill Jochimsen '61 says.

But by spring of 1957, technical difficulties left the station bedraggled. In addition, several students resigned due to their inability to keep their grades up, according to a report written by then faculty advisor Robert Smith.

That fall, station manager Bob Falkner '60 wrote an apologetic letter to students, faculty and administration announcing that the station had to throw in the towel, at least for the time being.

"With our hopes high, we signed on the air at 7 o'clock September 25th only to find that our equipment would not operate. For this reason, we at WRPN must cease broadcasting until such time as we can provide the service that we feel is our duty to provide for Ripon College," Falkner wrote in 1957.

But fewer than three months later, Falkner's tune changed, as the radio station's luck rose. The station signed on with United Press International (UPI) Radio Service. With the help of technical genius and WRPN staffer, Frederick C. Jaye '61, they remedied their technical snags and wired the campus completely, bringing all houses into the primary coverage area. The station increased its broadcast schedule from 20 to 37 hours per week. Listeners could tune in from 7 p.m. to midnight weekdays and noon to midnight on Sunday. But Breen questions how many students actually tuned in. Not too many, he suspects. He recalls that the station in its early days had few devotees.

"It was something that no one listened to," Breen says. "The responsibility sort of fell on my shoulders to do something about the radio station."

Breen set out to recruit extroverted and popular students to do shows that would increase listenership.

While at Ripon, Jochimsen and his twin, Peter '61, had been involved in school plays. Radio seemed like a natural extension of their affinity for the stage.

"The idea of radio just appealed to me, and then I found out that there was a closed circuit radio station, broadcasting out of the basement of Sigma Nu fraternity hall," Bill Jochimsen says.

A pre-med student double majoring in chemistry and biology, he managed to spend six to eight hours a day at WRPN. "I did it for fun, not because I was interested in going into communications as a career," he says. Jochimsen lives in Manhattan and serves as director in the medical department of U.S. Pharmaceuticals Group Pfizer Inc. world headquarters in New York City.

WRPN's advent came on the heels of the Golden Age of Radio, during a sort of limbo era existing before rock 'n' roll and the age of the deejay. Elvis hadn't yet wooed young women and the Beatles hadn't yet appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Meanwhile at WRPN, programming consisted of educational and cultural shows. The 1957 lineup included everything from "Strictly Calypso" with students Bill White '58 and Dave Doten '57, to "College Shop" featuring WRPN's Women's Director Vanessa Dehne '57 updating students on the latest in women's fashion ideas. Falkner did a show called "Falkner's Folly," where he spun records and brought listeners "the tops in pops." WRPN also played classical music almost daily in its "Concert Hall" program, featuring music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Chopin.

The Jochimsen twins did a show called "Double Talk" from 7-9 p.m. Sundays. Bill Jochimsen doesn't remember the format of that particular show -- he did several others -- but he can recall the ringing of the UPI teletype machine whenever national media fed its associates major stories. Four feet tall and two feet wide by two feet deep, the teletype machine resembled an oversized typewriter. "You would be doing something and you heard a bunch of bells going ding-ding-ding, and you would pull out the stories," Jochimsen says.

"That was 40 years ago. Things are different now. There was no concept of a screen or a (computer) monitor then."

Even years later, when the radio station moved to the former Smith Hall, now Middle Hall, and took up three rooms on the first floor, the station didn't impress Breen.

"It was a pretty hokey place, if I remember," Breen says. "It had no particular sound baffling, so we nailed up egg crates, which actually worked, so we didn't get the echoes on the radio," Breen says.

Actually, those "egg crates" were apple carton dividers, according to Bill Jochimsen. He recalls that not only did the purplish-colored, pressed-cardboard cartons work acoustically, they made the station smell nice. "Our station always smelled like apples," he says.

Restrictions on language and content didn't exist: Ripon students didn't need them, Jochimsen says. "It never was a problem; kids were different. The bottom line was that in the 1950s and 1960s, we were all pretty good kids," he says. "Nobody wanted to embarrass themselves or the school, and we took it seriously. It never occurred to me that you had to monitor or screen people."

The radio station's popularity grew, and dozens of students wanted to be involved. Breen says he succeeded at his goal of getting students to tune in to WRPN. "I had a good time seeing the number of people who listened go up," says Breen, now a finance professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

"At one time, we had 50 or 60 people who wanted to be on the radio station," Jochimsen says.

Even before going FM, the station was active in covering sports including away football games, Jochimsen says.

"In two consecutive years, there were major automobile accidents as the result of our driving hundreds of miles to do a game, and since we had no funds for hotel/motel stays, we'd try to drive back the same night, often on snowy or icy roads. No one was severely hurt, but two cars were totaled. I still remember one of the accidents when the only ambulance available was a hearse -- most ominous,"Jochimsen says.

But the station continued to be plagued with inside dramas. Administration and students clashed on journalistic ethics.

Struggles ensued between the administration's desire to play down potentially negative publicity and the students' quest for truth in reporting. Advisor Smith wrote in his "Report on WRPN: 1957-58:"

"News has been stifled at its source more than once. For example, WRPN reporters sought out the story of 'Doc' Weiske '50 replacing Coach Robert Young as basketball coach for next year, the station was told the information was not to be released until a few days later. Naturally, WRPN honored this request, as is the custom in news work. However, the next day, the local commercial station and the Milwaukee Journal had released accounts of the story. Of course, WRPN had no course but to drop the story."

In other issues, students were outraged that the administration wanted to downplay faculty resignations and not officially release the information to the press until the end of the year, according to Smith's 1957-58 "Report."

The task of developing a proposal to administrators and getting the College to buy the idea of becoming "Wisconsin's first low-powered educational FM radio station" fell on Jochimsen's shoulders. "I would never have gotten this off the ground without the help and engineering skills of Jaye, who was a first-class radio engineer and technician," Jochimsen says. "Without his help and support with the filing of the necessary applications to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), this never would have happened."

They got the green light from the FCC in November of 1960 and began transmitting in February 1961 as WRPN-FM.

A transmitter donated to the College spurred them on, and they moved to more academic quarters in what is now Middle Hall at the top of the hill in upper campus.

A young and fun woman faculty member, Penny Ramaker, came aboard as advisor to WRPN after Smith left, according to Jochimsen.

Drake was a sophomore when WRPN went FM in 1961. Students were still struggling with the administration over who would control the station.

"Of course we, the students, thought we should have more input. This is an age-old situation -- how much power should students have, and how much power should the College have?"

Drake, who works at a radio station in South Carolina and teaches speech at a nearby university, says he sees the struggle continuing with today's students there.

Operating at a 10-watt power level from a 110-foot tower located behind Smith Hall, WRPN could be tuned in on radio dials throughout the city of Ripon. Now townspeople could hear what went on behind the "ivy covered walls" of the College. This still caused concern among administrators, whose natural instinct was to monitor and protect the college's image. "The administration was afraid that it would fall in the hands of students and it would become a rock 'n' roll station," Drake says. "We felt it was a learning thing for us and should reflect us and our culture."

They found a solution: "split programming."

"We would throw a switch and to the college dorms, we'd broadcast rock 'n' roll, and to the community, we'd broadcast classical music," Drake says. This seemed to satisfy the powers that be. "The administration felt that the community could 'get' what the College was about," he says.

Amid the controversy and excitement, WRPN moved to a third location, Harwood Memorial Union.

But WRPN's on-again, off-again status reared its ugly head even as recently as the 1998-99 school year. In fact, when current station manager Jason Fischer '03 came to campus in fall of 1999, he found that the station had been shut down for most of the last semester of the previous year.

"When I arrived, it was off the air for the spring semester of 1999. What I learned from the executive staff was that the equipment went down and they didn't have the money to fix it, so they just locked the studio," Fischer says.

With recent updates and improvements, however, most of the station's wounds have been treated. Now the station broadcasts from 7:30 a.m. to midnight weekdays and 9 a.m. to midnight on weekends. A core of around 60 student hosts, plus an assortment of drop-in guests, work shifts ranging from one to three hours. Fischer says the station is also looking at the possibility of 24-hour broadcasting. "We're looking at automation options for the night owls who are out there studying. If we do automate, we would not have to have a deejay all night."

Since WRPN isn't part of a metered market, Fischer says he doesn't know how many people listen to WRPN regularly but thinks it's around 1,000 "on a good day."

The Ripon Student Senate budgeted $11,000 for this year to cover operating expenses of the station. More than half of that goes to subscribing to the Associated Press wire service. The rest goes toward music licenses, maintenance and activities, Fischer adds.

Fischer, a sophomore speech communication major from West Bend, Wis., says he hopes that the next 40 years of WRPN will see the reinvigoration of its news coverage. "At one time, the news operation was very big, and I would like to see that return, to keep college students informed," he says. While student hosts have a fair amount of freedom in determining their show topics, most steer clear of politics and controversial topics, he says, although practically every show has the potential to serve as a sounding board for callers.

During the 1999-2000 school year, WRPN began doing live remotes at some college events, including sporting games.

WRPN's 250-watt tower still only reaches an 11- or 12-mile radius around Ripon. Fischer says he has inquired about upgrading WRPN's wattage with the FCC but was told too many other stations exist in the 90.1 frequency. "We would interfere with them," Fischer says. "Our wattage is determined by who is around us." So for now, it looks like WRPN will continue to be a small college station. While most of his early contemporaries have taken different life paths, Drake continues to fill the airways with his robust and hearty voice. Drake is a morning personality at WSPA, the oldest radio station in South Carolina, where he has been a fixture for the past 25 years.

"That's pretty unheard of in this business," he says. When many of his cronies are retiring, Drake continues to work 19 hours a day, rising each morning at 1:30 a.m. and walking for exercise at 3 a.m. He covers college sports, organizes the school's annual quiz bowl and hosts a major Christmas show.

"People ask me when I'm going to retire -- I say I have to work first, because all I've had is fun since 1959," Drake says. "It all started at WRPN."