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35000 Watts Podast – S3E4 – Ray Fournier (145 downloads )TRANSCRIPT
And welcome back to 35,000 Watts, the podcast. We’re having a series of interviews with college radio alumni from across the country, and it’s been really interesting so far, and today is no exception. Before we get started, don’t forget 35,000 watts, the story of college radio is available to watch right now on all sorts of platforms.
You can find it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Tubi, and also the full version is now available on YouTube as well. So go check it out. And now let’s hand things over to our host, Lisa.
All right, well, today our special guest is Ray Fournier. And he wants to share some of his history with college radio and where that led to him over the years. So hi, Ray.
Nice to meet you. Good morning. How are you?
I’m great. So where did you start in college radio and when? I started in 1965 at the University of New Hampshire, a little 10 watt station at that point, it was WUNH FM, 90.3 on your FM dial.
The university had received a license for the 10 watt station in 1963 in 1964, the board of governors that oversaw the operation of WUNH, basically gave the students carte blanche. You know, they couldn’t do something wild. and against FCC regulations. But they let them do their own programming, determine what their programming was going to be.
And that’s the environment that a friend and I walked into in September of 1965, a high school friend that I had graduated with. We were wandering around the Memorial Union building, where students gathered and on the lower level, was this little 10 watt station. We walked in and essentially never left for a long time.
So you were FM at the time. And in 19, you know, 1965, AM was king of the airwaves. So how was the, how was that?
It was a bit of a challenge. And to back up a little bit, the station had been formally known as WMDR, Mike and dial radio. And they had operated since the 1930s.
They recorded programs on wire at that and they aired on local stations over in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, about 15 miles away. And then they put in a carrier current operation, so they broadcaster with the electric lines, and then they went FM. Now to get back to the FM challenges.
I remember helping to build FM to base band units that then, well, no, actually it was FM 2 AM, a little AM transmitter that plugged into an FM radio. So we put those in all the dorms so that students that didn’t have FM receivers or radios could tune in on the on the AM side. So, That was one of the challenges that we faced.
It took off pretty quickly. So we had a large listenership among the students. So you were broadcasting 1st and carrier current, and then you broadcast it 10 watts.
What kind of music were you playing? It was all over the place. It was block programming.
And I’ve got some of the program guides here from 1967 and 68, semester 2, 1967. Actually, we didn’t have a full broadcast day then. We’d either sign on at noon or one o’clock in the afternoon and do things like the sound of symphony on Sunday or the swinging thing, which was top 40 radio.
Uh, and then we had programs that we got from the United States Air Force serenade in blue. But we did a lot of block programming. So, No matter what your music taste were, we had jazz, we had classical, we had folk, and we had easy listening, the quiet hours from 11 o’clock on.
And during finals. It was all easy listening, basically around the clock. I read that they called that study music.
We did, and that’s what it was listed as pretty much on our music surveys and that type of thing. Music to study by. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you mentioned surveys. So tell me more about that.
When we started doing top 40, you know, even though it was in block format, and also on weekends, you know, we do all requests, and that was pretty much top 40. But we started publishing surveys. And at 1st they called it the 25 +5. on the top 30.
And then they moved to the in sound survey of WUNH FM. And it was a bit of an art to put the surveys together. I mean, ideally a survey reflects what the customers or your listeners are listening to.
And for a certain amount of it, that was accurate. There was a store in town. Um, that sold among other things, records.
So if you wanted to buy records locally, you went down to town and campus, the store downtown, and a couple in Dover, which was 6 or 7 miles away, and a couple in Portsmouth, which was a little bit further away. So we would actually send people out. Uh, they’d make their rounds and stop in and see what’s selling and what’s hot and that type of thing.
But there was also a large reliance on billboard. You know, you had all the charts and billboard. So, yeah, and a certain degree of what did we like at the radio station?
Yeah, of course. So we kind of mixed all those elements together and came up with our insound survey, and it was published weekly. Uh, it showed, you know, where it was this week, where a record was this week.
And, and also, uh, at the time, listed every label, you know, whether it’s capital or Colombia or Colgate or Colgate. There were all kinds of labels out there. So did you distribute these by paper and drop them off at the record stores or were you out actually man on the street talking to people?
Well, mostly, you know, we’d go out and solicit the information and then go out and then we’d printed up 100s of these things and distributed them to the places where we had gone to see what the sales were. And we also left them around campus in the memorial union building. And, uh, to help support the effort.
I mean, we didn’t have a terribly big budget. There was advertising on the backside. So just like our program schedules.
We had, uh, places like the pizza den and the meeting house, a dining place in, uh, in Durham where the university was, seacoast motors. Um, the hardware house, ideal food store, hutmost, a pizza house. And you know this because you’re like literally looking at the documents that you’ve saved.
Yeah, I’m looking at, Yeah, a friend of mine saved a lot more documents than I did, but he had several years worth of these in-sound surveys. And I wouldn’t copied that, you know, I borrowed them and copied a whole bunch of them. And the, uh, program guides.
I don’t know how I managed to save those, but this one, well, this one has an attachment. Oh, fancy. This young lady became my wife.
No way. Yes. love that. So we just celebrated 56 years.
Well, congratulations. That’s amazing. So she was working at the radio station too.
Is that how y’all met, really? I actually met her in the dining hall. She got involved a little bit with the radio station, tried on air a little bit.
That didn’t work, but, you know, we had a lot of great radio station parties. Yeah. Every party demanded some type of audio production, you know, an audio performance or tape that got put together.
So. Whose idea was it to start surveying the community? If I remember correctly, we had a gentleman, a student by the name of Paul King, who was really into, uh, well, he was into music, but he was also into statistics, and he would pick up surveys from other stations and like WTSN over in Dover and WHEB down in Portsmouth, and we should be doing that.
And so we ended up doing that. He was the guy that put the surveys together with help. But he was the one that actually sat down, typed it out, and did most of the solicitation of what’s selling at the record stores as well as taking the surveys out. on Friday afternoons, if I remember correctly.
So what was the result of all these surveys? What did you do with the data that you collected? We just used it.
It was self-fueling, you know? It fueled the next survey the next week. We didn’t really do anything with it.
We just liked the involvement with popular music. So. Okay, so did you use it to help maybe program a little bit better?
Did you get sponsorships out of it? Well, it helped us to sell advertising on the surveys and on our program guides. Yeah.
One of the places we ended up distributing these was Stan Brown’s Honda down in Northampton, New Hampshire, which, as the crow flies, was about 12 or 13 miles away. So that, a 10 watt signal. If you were lucky and the wind was right, you know, you might get to Northampton, but it was just a lot of fun.
And it was mimicking to a degree what the legitimate stations, the commercial stations were doing, you know, out of Boston, locally. I mean, the stations like WB, Z and WMEX in Boston, they published surveys. And when WRKO and on the air, with a Drake Chennault format in 1967.
That was one of the 1st things they did was put out their weekly survey and do a countdown on the year. And we would do the counting on the year too. I forgot to mention that.
That was a weekly thing on Friday or Saturdays. We did, we counted down through that in sound survey. So what other relationships did your college radio station have with your community?
You were out there and about talking to other students and people interested in music, you know, the record stores and whatnot. Did you support any local artists? Did you have any concert types, things or, you know, what else was your station doing to support your community?
There was a certain amount of local artists, mostly on the folk side. because they were looking for the exposure and they didn’t have any, they didn’t have the wherewithal to get that exposure free of charge. would come in and do that. Well, then again, like that’s kind of one of the purposes of college radio was to pride to provide an avenue for artists that wouldn’t get played on regular top 40 radio. Yeah, and as as time went on, and music started changing, you know, we had some new wave type, for lack of a better term, artists that would come in seeking exposure.
So we’re talking like 65 to 70s, right? Yeah, early 70s. Okay, yeah.
I was not the traditional 4 year student. I almost flunked out my 1st year because I spent so much time at the radio station. And a lot of my friends did.
And then several of them ended up working commercially in radio as a result. And I got there eventually, but I became more of a student. Although, I didn’t actually graduate.
I should have graduated in 1969. I actually graduated in 1989 because I worked. I ended up working in radio, got a couple of opportunities, and that took over my life.
And I walked away from UNH, 5 credit shy. So, so I decided before my son went to UNH. I really ought to go get that piece of paper and I took a few extension courses and did, so.
That’s great. Speaking of 69, that was Woodstock, that was up in your neck of the woods, and some other pretty big events happened in 1969, do you have any stories to share about that? I know nobody at the station that actually went to Woodstock, although in later years, a few of them kind of claimed that they did, but I knew that they didn’t, you know, but it was also, you know, 68, 69 time of protest.
So there were a lot of protest marches on campus. And I remember Kent State happening and the marchers that followed that. I remember sitting around the teletype machine for the 1st draft lottery after, you know, since the 2nd World War.
And those numbers coming across one at a time. I ended up being number 267. And the government would give no indication of how deep into the draft lottery they were going to go.
And I was no longer a student by 1970. And there was a National Guard unit in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that I had talked with, and they finally said, look, either sign up or we’re taking, taking your name off the waiting list. So I signed up.
Ended up going to basic training in April of 1970, and when I was at my basic training, I found out, oh, they were going to stop about 200, but, you know, even though it wasn’t my favorite thing to do, it was the better alternative. So. But other things going on, where were you on the night of July 20th, 1969?
Ah, well, I get my 1st job in commercial radio, I think in September of 1968 up in Rochester, New Hampshire. Work there a while. Ended up with a pretty much full-time job down at a little 1000 watch station in Portsmouth WBPX AM.
And I was, I also did some part-time work at WFEA in Manchester, New Hampshire, which was 1370 AM. And also the owner of a Blau Knox Tower, if you have any, you might want to Google that sometime. Strange looking tower, but great coverage.
A 5000 watch station. And I was filling in overnight, the night that Neil Armstrong, walked on the moon, and I’m never gonna forget where I was, cutting in and out of the ABC contemporary radio network, you know, ABC ran 4 networks. Uh, contemporary was the upbeat tailored to top 40 radio, so to speak.
And had a TV in the corner of the studio so I can watch it on the local ABC TV station. And In-N-Out, and watched him, as I was listening to it on ABC contemporary, got off the air at either 630 or some, I can’t remember. I got off the air 6 or 6.30 in the morning.
And uh, my father-in-law lived in Manchester about 10, 12 minutes away. So I went to, his apartment to get some sleep. And her grandfather owned the apartment building.
It was a triple decker. It’s Manchester is an old mill town. And at, That time of the morning, he was already sitting out in his front porch, watching the traffic go by, and we started talking, and this, this old gentleman, an old, of German descent. always had a smile on his face.
And had a great memory. And we started talking, and he said, you know, I sat up last night, and I watched that man walk on the moon. And as I was starting to open the door to go upstairs to get some sleep, he said, you know, I was 12 years old in 1903.
I remember the flight, the 1st flight of the Wright brothers. So I watched that man on the moon. I remember the Wright brothers and I’ve seen everything in between.
And it’s just, it’s something I’m never, never going to forget. And probably my son never will either because I’ve told the story so many times. So where are you now?
Like I said, I worked for this little 1000 watt station in Portsmouth WBBXAM. And shortly after I went to work there, the station was purchased by Kurt Gowdy, the sportscaster. He owns stations down in Lawrence, Massachusetts, about 40 minutes away, and he owned this little station in Portsmouth.
The chief engineer had to drive up to deal with any emergencies up in Portsmouth. You know, it was kind of a hassle to keep going back and forth. And I started working with him.
Um, and found out that it was, for me, it was pretty easy. I mean, tape deck maintenance or that type of thing, even working on the, the transmitter. I mean, it was an all tube transmitter, and I’d grown up, you know, in the tube environment, it made sense to me.
So I started leaning towards that side of the operation. At that time, if you were at a directional station, you had to have a 1st class ticket on duty when the station was directional. So you had 3rd class, which you very easy to get and you used, just to be on air, they, uh, like a college radio station.
Second class had no real application in the broadcast environment, but you needed that 1st class with the broadcast endorsement to work in either AM or FM radio. So I, I studied for that, um, and then there were no question pools. You didn’t know what the questions were going to be.
You just studied and studied and studied. And took the test and I took the test and I passed it. So I was a combo man after that.
And I worked on the air. Well, I had the 1st class license, so they didn’t have to pay 2 people. They wanted to have a combo man.
They paid one person, and the pay wasn’t that great. I think it was making a little over a 100 bucks a week at that time. But it also allowed me to sign station logs and do station maintenance and sign off with a station maintenance.
So I did that. I’d work typically 6 to midnight, um, and then sign off at midnight, and if there was maintenance to be done, I would do the maintenance, and might go home at two, 3 o’clock in the morning, which was my natural schedule. I was, I was a night owl.
So it worked well. Didn’t make my wife too happy, but I did that. I worked at WBBX until 1974.
So I was there about 5 years. And, uh, Friends that I had worked with in radio, couple of them said, hey, you should go look at this, this thing that’s going on. with cable TV. And, um, And I did, and I ended up making a transition to cable when I, September 1974.
Okay, so you were like, this new thing’s coming up. Let’s let’s investigate this. Yeah, uh, cable at that time was just starting to transition.
You know, it was the history of cable was that it was a remote antenna for people who lived out of the TV market, so like people that couldn’t pick up good TV signals. You know, the somebody would start a cable system, put up a 200, 300 foot tower, stack a bunch of antennas on it, get great reception, and then sell it to the customers that it couldn’t get good reception. And cable in 1974 was thinking of.
It hadn’t really started to, but it was thinking of, um, changing to an urban environment also. And that didn’t really change until later in the 70s when satellite delivery became available. And um, And that just changed everything.
I worked until I went to work. I started working for continental cable vision, which was headquartered out of Boston, and they had operations in the Midwest and the east coast, a little bit in Florida and a little bit on the west coast. But when the environment started changing and deregulation allowed it, uh, they started building up urban areas, uh, when satellite delivery made signal, signal, additional signals available.
The 1st system that I worked in in Dover was a 12 channel system, and we can only fill 11 channels. So when satellite delivery came around, suddenly you had, you know, 10, 15, 20 more channels that you could add. things like HBO and I remember when MTV came on. I remember when the weather channel came on.
It started exploding and I ended up in the greater Boston market building cable system all throughout eastern Massachusetts. And it was a great environment. I mean, I was given a timetable.
I was given a budget, a small staff. And the instructions that, okay, this is your timetable. This is when we want it done.
Here’s your budget. Go do it. If you have any problems, let us know.
Otherwise, you’re on your own. And it was great. It sounds like that on your own, figure it out as you go, ethos from college radio, really played well for your career.
It did. It did. I spent about over 30 years in the cable industry.
It was a lot of fun. But when I started in the cable industry, I was building a head end, you know, a receive site in every community, then we started utilizing microwave, and we could link one head into another, and you didn’t need to duplicate all of the equipment, so we started collapsing, head ends, shutting them down. And then I remember calling up my microwave salesman and telling him, hey, you know that $2000000 request that I get in for microwave equipment?
I think I’m going to put it on hold. We’re looking at something called fiber. That changed everything.
So that, you know, more head ends went away. More connection by fiber. Now there are very few cable TV ends in the country.
It’s a huge fiber TV. Backbone for a reoperator, essentially. I was buying a lot of, uh, fiber equipment in addition to other cable tea equipment from a company called general instrument, which had been formerly known as Gerald.
And I got really friendly with one of the engineers at a general instrument. And I called one day and he was gone and I tracked him down and he had gone to work for Bell Labs down in North Andover, Massachusetts. They were manufacturing the lasers, uh, used in fiber TV, I mean, cable TV equipment every, for a number of years, every laser came out of North Andover.
Um, and I maintained a relationship with him because I was buying a lot of those uh, lasers that were incorporated in equipment from different vendors that I was dealing with. And I called them up and he said one day, hey, I’m looking for somebody to be product manager for our cable TV line of equipment. So I ended up working at Bell Labs for over 7 years.
Well, who better to pick than the expert? Well, that is so amazing. The engineering regimen at Bell Lavs.
At 1st I thought, this doesn’t make sense is too restrictive. But the more I got into it, the more I found that it did make sense, and it was quite the education to learn the Bell Labs way of doing it. I became a lot more disciplined and didn’t fly by the seat of my pants quite as much, but, uh.
So you honed your, figure it out as you go college radio style to this very regimented. This is how we do it. Don’t ask why, you’ll figure it out later kind of space.
Yeah I did. Okay, so um, you’ve been retired for a few years now. What do you do?
What do you do to keep yourself busy and active and are you still involved in the kind of this radio communication space? A little bit. Well, we’ve had a number of WUNH radio station reunions.
And we try and bring people together. We’ve done that probably a half dozen times. We’re kind of talking about it now, but as people get older, it’s harder to do.
But for a number of years, um, WUNH, on the day after Thanksgiving, would open the studios up to anybody that had been there, it worked at WUNH, and the invitation was, come in, play the music that you used to play when you were here, will help you if you can’t figure out the equipment these days. So we did, I did that for at least 10 or 12 years. And a group of us would go down.
They called it black wax Friday, and they would give us a block of 2, 3, 4 hours. So, for a number of years, it was four, five, 6 or 7 of us that would go down, take our music, somebody would help us get it on the air. And, um, It was a lot of fun.
Well, here you are participating in our podcast. So, yeah, it’s kind of like non-live radio. And it was kind of interesting.
My daughter-in-law is a professor at Cape Cod community college. And they have a little FM station. And she programs a weekly on Sunday morning, something called the the eclectic kitchen.
So it’s, it’s all over the place. I mean, you might hear Patsy Klein. with rap music following it. But, uh, the difference being, you know, she she voice tracks it.
You know, she sits down for an hour or less and programs it, programs the interstitials and she gets to listen to herself on the radio on Sunday mornings. Well, she should have you on there sometime. She’s had her father on a couple of times.
Yeah. Fun. Yeah, so we did a screening of 35,000 watts, the story of college radio, the documentary. at the University of Colorado and Boulder, which is only about 20 minutes from where I live, and they offered me a spot on their college radio station, radio 1190.
So I’ve been doing that on Wednesday nights and it’s just, it’s so much fun to get back behind the mic and, um, you know, put out music that people may not have ever heard of. Again, you know, that’s what we do in college radio. But I was just telling my husband the other night when I came home from one of my shifts that I forgot about the serenity that you feel in the booth.
And, you know, it’s just you talking to a bunch of people out there, you think, you don’t know, you know? But yeah, it is. It’s just so much fun to get back on the air and and just do it a little thing every now and then, you know.
No pressure. So you do it live. Yeah, I do it live.
The best way. Yeah, that’s I enjoyed the the interaction and the feedback. Both at college radio and in commercial radio.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the little station I worked at in Portsmouth, the next town over was, is Newington, New Hampshire. And there was, uh, Peace Air Force Base there.
So I would get feedback from a lot of the people stationed there. And I remember getting requests from family of people that were deployed in Vietnam. And, you know, can you record some, you know, play this, We recording it.
We’re going to send it to my dad over in Vietnam, that type of thing. Oh man, that just pulls on the heartstrings. Yeah.
You were making such a difference for people. Well, it felt good, you know? Yeah.
We never, I never knew how big the list, necessity really was, but it, it, it kind of kept me going. Yeah. And this directional station, when they went directional at night, a lot of the signal went out over the Atlanta, North Atlantic.
I remember receiving a package from the Netherlands, and inside, was a 20 minute air check. This kid in the Netherlands had recorded WBBXAM and sent me a, uh, recording, and we carried out a correspondence for a while, and he ended up sending me, I think it was 2 hours of air checks of radio Veronica. One of these floating radio stations, radio Veronica, Mit the news.
I love listening to it. So. Do you still have it?
Do you have a digitized? I don’t have a digitized. I still have it on real-to- reel, but I have the…
The full recording of radio Veronica. All right, so back to college radio. Have you seen the film?
Yeah, I watched it last week. It was interesting. Oh, good.
I liked it. Yeah. How’d you feel about it?
I like that it’s documented, although, you know, a good portion of it was beyond my time. And I mean, history is history, so it just keeps marching on. Part of the reason we wanted to do the podcast was to talk to people like you, that were in it before college radio became a thing, because without you, we wouldn’t have had that experience.
And so um, it’s been great. You’re the 3rd person I’ve talked to that has had experience in college radio before the 80s. And so, it’s been fascinating to learn more about the history of it.
And on top of that, I’m also reading the book called Life from the Underground. It’s by Dr. Cat Jewel. She’s kind of written this, um, this tome, like this amazing history of college radio, and she goes all the way back to the 60s too.
So, a lot of what I’ve heard from you and the other people I’ve interviewed from that time frame, align with what she found out too. And it’s really neat for me because I know this history from reading her book. And then to hear it from you, it’s like it all comes together and it just makes, I’m so glad it’s finally documented and we get to tell these stories and we get to record them and share them with the world out there.
So it’s really important to me to be able to have these experiences and share it. So thank you for sharing your story because again, we wouldn’t have been here without you. All right, so the last question I have to ask everybody. is what do you have to tell today’s college radio students about why college radio is important?
Oh, keep it up. The interaction with your listeners is something that’s lost in most of the rest of the world. I mean, commercial radio, especially after deregulation and huge ownership of chains.
You just lost, you just, we have just lost the feedback and the interaction. And that was what fueled us, I think, at college radio. That’s what guided us. in what we were going to play.
And the listener was the customer that we were responsive to. So I would, I would say, go with that. I really love low power stations, but there are just too few of them around and too few that are really responsive, you know, they’re, they’re in a better place than commercial radio.
But there’s not in many of them, a lot of community interaction. There’s one other thing with deregulation that we lost. I mean, you’ve got the ownership of large outlets, group number of outlets.
When I was working in broadcasting initially, we used to have something called a fairness doctrine. If you presented an editorial, you had to open it up so somebody could present an opposing side, the other side of the coin. That that’s gone by the wayside now.
We are definitely in a very scary time when it comes to truth in communication. Okay, well, this was awesome. Thank you.
I just really appreciate your time and your stories and thank you for watching the film and being a part of our story. It has been a lot of fun and I thank you for the opportunity. Thanks, Lisa, and thanks for joining us today, Ray, and thanks to all of you for listening.
We appreciate it. Don’t forget 35,000 watts. The story of college radio is available right now on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Tubi, and now also available on YouTube.
So go check it out and we will see you back here next time for 35,000 Watts, the podcast.