University of Missouri Campus Radio
KCCS – The Early Years 1963-1965
Written by Ed Wilsmann, 1st Station Manager
with editorial assistance by Guy Immega and Mike Robertson,
co-founders of the Campus Radio at the University of Missouri(Dedicated to the late Milt Schwartz, 1st Station General Manager)
September 2002
Milt Schwartz launched Campus Radio. He provided the vision, drive, necessary politicking, essential fundraising, recruitment of volunteers, programming and a large percentage of the actual airtime content.
The Concept
This is the story of the founding of the campus radio station at the University of Missouri in 1963.
The idea for a Campus Radio Station at MU for the Men’s and Women’s Residence Halls Associations began out of necessity – or maybe it was frustration. Music in the dormitories in the 60’s was limited to listening to either an AM Radio or the portable record players of the few students who had them in the dorms.
At night, in the steel and concrete dorms, you could only receive the clear signals of two AM radio stations. Those stations were KFRU ( Columbia ) and one Little Rock , Arkansas clear channel "top 40" station. That meant that your evening radio listening choices were either the "play by play" of the Hickman High School Kewpies basketball game, or what I called “high school country rock and roll” with a lot of Little Rock commercials. FM radio was just beginning and FM receivers were limited to the large console models. Only two FM stations were on the Columbia FM dial. Both played non-commercial classical or “elevator type” background music. Few students owned, or wanted, FM radios.
In the 1960s, college students were seeking their own musical identity and voice. Establishing a campus radio station that introduced contemporary music to the local scene was a new phenomenon. Music that defined the times was the impetus for launching the radio station. Today, nearly all schools have a local radio station and students continue to seek and create their own breed of leading edge music. The Internet has accelerated the trend, and a myriad of post-Napster sites allow for the exploration and downloading new music. However, radio continues to define the voice of and for young people.
Attempts by MU students to start a campus radio station had been made in the early 60’s and failed.
In the fall of 1963, I moved into the almost new dorms near the medical center, Baker Park Hall. It was my sophomore year. Milt Schwartz, a journalism student and sophomore, was looking for a room in Baker Park, but he was late obtaining his room assignment. (I learned much later that this was one of his personality characteristics – with Milt nothing happened unless he had a deadline, and if the deadline were not firm, he would negotiate.) Since my intended roommate had not returned to the dorms, I was asked to meet Milt, show him the room, and then tell the housemother, Mrs. Calvert, if he was acceptable to me.
A day later Milt entered the dorm room, looked around, and introduced himself. He was about 5’ 6”, black hair, early afternoon 5 o’clock shadow, wide shoulders, stocky build and wore black horn rimmed glasses. (About the 5 o’clock shadow, his beard was so prolific that if he went anywhere in public after 5 PM he had to shave for the second time that day.) He shook my hand and we had a brief discussion about both being from St. Louis and our major fields of study (his was Journalism, my major was Marketing.)
That was it. This chance room assignment would help launch the first successful student effort to start a dorm radio station. The combination of Milt's plan to take future J-School Radio and TV production classes and my extensive music collection of rock and roll and movie themes had our dorm-mates kidding us early in the semester about starting a radio station.
I was one of the lucky few in the dorm who owned one of the new “reel-to-reel” tape recorders. I had purchased it from Sears and used it during my high school days in my role as a disc jockey for after school dances.
Another chance encounter in the Pershing Hall cafeteria with an aspiring electrical engineer and “ham radio” operator, Guy Immega, gave Milt and I the technical wizard that we needed to make our ideas work. Guy was tall and lanky with blond hair and glasses. Oh yes, and we knew he was an engineer because in those days most engineers walked around campus with foot long “slip-sticks” (slide rules) clipped to their belts.
These were not “high tech” days. This was a time when MU had only two computers installed on campus, at the Med Center and the Engineering school (an IBM 1620 with 16.5K of memory. It filled a large air-conditioned room and needed a raised floor for cables). Fax machines & calculators did not exist.
We anointed Guy “Chief Engineer and Mad Scientist” (he remains one to this day) for his ideas on how to broadcast our radio signal and a myriad of other concepts about future inventions.
Milt and I studied the previous attempts to start a campus radio station by talking to those students who were involved. A large part of that failure was due to the idea of a campus radio station becoming a "political football" and some fears that the group of students running the station would wield a lot of dangerous power.
Many in the MU administration thought that any campus radio station should be owned and managed by the University. After all, MU had an international reputation in the field of Journalism.
We learned that to succeed we needed to be non-political and clearly demonstrate that we had no hidden agenda. We needed to stay focused on our mission to satisfy the need for contemporary music choices in the dorms. The Cuban Missile Crisis had occurred during our freshman year, Vietnam was looming larger, and the anti war movement was evolving in California. We did not want to appear in any way as a "threat" to the Establishment or the University. We also needed to stay away from campus politics.
The Maneater newspaper, campus newsletters and the Missouri Student Association (MSA) also had political power and influence. We avoided contact and controversy.
Another need was to maintain a grade point average that kept all of us as “students in good standing.” Building the station was a completely volunteer effort, and while our enthusiasm was palpable, it could also be a major distraction from academic work. The previous leader’s effort to get on the air had failed to maintain his GPA and was now enrolled at a Missouri junior college. We could not let this quest consume us. We needed a plan and would eventually need lots of manpower and, oh yes, money.
Action Plan
I will step off some of the things we had to do before Campus Radio became a reality:
- Develop a plan to distribute a radio signal.
- Produce a sample product. We decided this would be in the form of an audiotape demonstrating the type of programming we planned to offer.
- Sell the product to the University and the Men's and Women's Residence Hall Association. (The MRHA and WRHA).
- Get money. Get equipment. Get studio space.
- Get a license and call letters approval from the FCC.
- Recruit a volunteer staff and produce pre-recorded programming.
- Get on the airwaves, produce “live” programming, supplemented with “tape” and stay on the air.
- Do whatever we forgot to do in the previous steps to get on the air and stay on the air.
You can’t have a radio station without a signal, which means technology, engineers, wires, and long and “short” circuits. We began in the fall of 1963 in a broom closet in Baker Park Hall with a turntable, a microphone, and a carrier current transmitter (CCT). The first transmitter was a commercial unit about the size of a small suitcase on loan from the manufacturer.
The carrier current transmitter placed our signal onto the low voltage power lines of the dorm on the AM radio dial. If your radio was plugged into any Baker Park dorm power line, you were able to receive the radio signal. Placing an AM battery powered radio near a lamp or lamp cord also worked. You had to move the portable radio along the lamp’s cord until the buzz and crackle stopped. The beauty of this CCT approach was its limitation – you couldn’t pick up our signal outside the dorm building, so we did not violate FCC regulations against free broadcast of radio signals. Technology for student radio had arrived, or so we thought!
Baker Park students were about 80 % jocks. Gary Lane, our football team’s quarterback, and Bruce Van Dyke, lived in the room next to us. Football player, Gerald Stevenson, was one of several volunteer Baker Park DJ’s. Gerald did a jazz show that was so good it hooked me on the music of jazz artists like Turentine, Chet Baker, Jimmy Smith, Nancy Wilson, etc. Only problem was that Gerald was a LARGE defensive lineman. He barely fit his frame into the cramped broom closet. Closing the closet door, as they say, "was not an option." Gerald was "cool" despite being rather “warm” in the broom closet.
Milt and I were also Baker Park D J’s, however, we were both able to fit into the closet. We were on the Baker Park airwaves for a few hours each night and the audience was very enthusiastic about our alternative music.
We presented our plan for an all-dormitory carrier current radio station and played our sample program (“reel to reel”) audiotape to the MU administration. A debate then ensued with the university engineers that controlled the power lines. "Who would hook up the transmitter to the power lines?”
The advice from the university engineers... "There were safety issues, and by the way, our system would not work”... something called a Faraday Shield was a component of each transformer on the power grid and would block our signal at each dorm. Instead of serving all the many dormitories at MU, we would be limited to just one.
Guy's proposal to install custom built "Faraday by-pass" devices sent the university engineers into apoplexy. He proposed a special unit to allow the radio signal to be connected between the high voltage and low voltage sides of each transformer, thus allowing every dormitory to receive our signal.
Guy’s idea would have worked. However, as with several of Guy’s ideas it had a slight downside. A lightening strike would likely have fried the entire university electrical system (not to mention a few students!). Guy’s "mad scientist’s" credentials for this work included his experience in electronics at the Med Center. He had a part time job as the “pair of hands” successfully building experimental electronic heart defibrillators and radio pacemakers for animal implantation.
We got the definite feeling that the University was not enthusiastic, to say the least, about our ideas for a Campus Radio Station.
After “Plan A” was rejected by the administration we presented “ Plan B”. We would send our broadcast signal in audio form using leased telephone lines to each dorm (we’re not talking high fidelity here!). Each audio telephone line signal would then go to a carrier current transmitter (CCT) similar to (but smaller than) the one we had tested in Baker Park.
The CCT would then convert the audio signal to an AM radio signal and impose the AM radio signal on the dorm power line. Each dormitory would have its own CCT. The problem was that there were no commercially available small (and inexpensive) carrier current transmitters on the market. To solve this problem Guy went into R&D mode (“mad-scientist” mode to Milt and I) and started designing a new type of distributed CCT. Guy used a novel method to connect the signal to the low voltage dorm circuits (the circuitry is now used in home security systems). It worked (!) and eventually 10 vacuum tube transmitters were hand-built (under high time pressure) by Guy and his volunteer techie staff. It’s a wonder with the volume of dedicated project man-hours used that no one on our technical staff flunked out.
Let’s see, our approach went from one big transmitter to about eight or nine smaller hand built transmitters. Now we would need to rent audio quality phone lines to each dormitory. Along with the studio console, turntables and tape machine, the cost to get on the air was mounting. We needed more and more money.
The Sample Product
While Guy was dealing with how to get the signal to the Residence Halls and briefing us daily on his frustrations with the university engineers, Milt and I had produced the 20 minute “reel to reel” audio tape of sample programming. The format of the tape included classical, rock, folk, and study time music with two minutes of campus news. We presented the tape at various dorm meetings, as well as meetings with the housemothers and University Staff. The students were sold on the concept, but the University administration remained in true Missouri “show me” mode.
Based on the sample programs, we received some initial funding from the Men’s & Women’s Residence Hall Associations. Their plan was to add a small amount to next year’s residence hall fees and earmark the money for dorm radio.
Studio Space and Equipment
The MRHA “loaned” us two small offices in the basement of the Pershing Cafeteria Building.
Both offices were rectangles along the north wall of the basement. The rear wall was concrete and each office had a clear glass wall with a view of the lounge and a door opening into the lounge area, which was a constant source of noise. The cafeteria basement also housed a snack bar, and student lounge with a “Color” TV. The west rear of the basement was the student laundromat.
Guy declared the west office as the "mad scientist lab," and he began ordering his electronics. The scattered array of electronic parts and vacuum tubes as well as the smell of melting solder was soon apparent.
Milt & I declared the second office “Studio A”. We started studio constructions by attaching egg cartons to the walls to "sound proof" and break up the "echoes". We taped cardboard on the glass wall to block the view.
Guy rigged a light above the studio door that said, "On The Air" whenever the "Studio A" mike switch was “ON.” He also rigged a potentiometer board to control the sound mix of the two turntables, one tape recorder, and two microphones.
I had spent part of my Christmas and New Year’s holidays in St. Louis talking to commercial radio station managers and begging for donations. Those donations consisted of a small library of promotional long playing records (LP's) and a large used ribbon mike. (The kind you see on Larry King’s desk and in old movies.)
Somehow Guy arranged the one-month loan of a brand new AM transmitter. It was borrowed per our original plan and was many times too powerful for our needs.
The License
We planned to submit an application to the FCC for the call letters KISS (Kampus Independent Student Station). However, another station had been granted those rights.
We reviewed the list of the call letter rights already granted by the FCC and proposed the call letters KCCS (Kampus Carrier Current Station.)
The FCC approved our call letters and we were assigned 580 on the AM radio dial.
The approval was for a 90-day trial period. Guy cautioned us that if we covered up another station with our signal and someone complained we would be taken off the air immediately.
The Crisis, the Interim Fix
"Why aren't you on the air yet? What are you doing with our money?” There was no signal past Baker Park (the damn Faraday shield) – all other dorms were silent on 580 AM. With the revamping of our original plans, set backs, and technical problems, we were about to lose the MRHA and WRHA’s support. Do you think the local phone company was moving rapidly to install our audio phone lines?
We needed success, and we needed it soon. In one late night crisis session, Guy said we had three weeks to return the borrowed transmitter. We could of course “ illegally” use the transmitter to broadcast over the airwaves (not carrier current) since our other methods were taking longer than expected. This would reach all the dorms – and potentially most of Columbia Township. Dangerous!
We immediately “bit” on his idea. How do we do it?
Guy: "We’ll need a broadcast antenna – a really long one to work at 580 AM."
Milt and Ed: "No what we really need is a SECRET HIDDEN broadcast antenna.”
A few nights later, Milt, Guy, and I were crouched in the bushes next to Pershing Cafeteria with a big roll of wire and several rolls of black electrical tape. It was three in the morning, and we could see our objective in the dim moonlight.
We were dressed for a commando mission wearing black sweatshirts, and dark jeans, with navy watch caps. We had all rubbed carbon black on our faces as camouflage... [We decided the knives in our teeth, to cut the tape, would have been a little too much.] We had observed the security guards “clock in times” and were carefully avoiding the presence of the night watchman.
Pershing Cafeteria was built on a fall away lot with a ledge protruding out over the West side and tapering back to ground level on the North and South sides. We began circling the cafeteria building with the very fine gauge copper wire with thin enamel insulation. We used the black electrical tape to hold the wire to the underside of the cafeteria ledge.
After wrapping the copper wire three times around the entire building we stuffed the end into a hole in the basement wall. Guy had previously drilled that hole through the concrete of the outside basement wall of the KCCS studio. If we were caught, how would we explain what we were doing? And who would believe us? Would they even believe we were sober at the time?
The next day we tested the signal and after Guy adjusted some strange looking tuning coils, KCCS was officially, if not legally, in business. We announced that we would be on the air at 3 PM that Friday. I was the DJ that "signed on" with a mixture of Pop and Rock music. Guy had rigged a telephone in the studio to flash a small light bulb rather than ring, another "mad scientist" somewhat illegal invention.
Shortly after 3 PM I answered the studio phone. Guy said that he was in the reception area of the nearest women’s dorm and the signal was loud and clear at 580 on the AM dial. I replied to Guy’s report with the word "Great" as the music played.
Guy said that he could also hear my voice over the radio saying "Great.” Oops, in my excitement I had left the mike key open. Glad I only said "great" We were always worried that profanity would get us kicked off the air immediately.
I announced the station phone number and many students called from the dorms to say the signal was working. The word spread that KCCS was on the air. You could walk down the halls of every dorm and hear the KCCS signal. On warm days you could hear it through the open windows.
The two-week (illegal) broadcast trial ended and pressure was even greater to get back on the air immediately began again. As the phone company gradually hooked up the audio line to each dormitory, Guy and his volunteer staff then hooked up each dorm transmitter, under close University supervision.
Milt Schwartz & Ed Wilsmann in the KCCS Broadcast Studio – circa 1964
More Adventures in Audio
One warm breezy late Sunday afternoon, we drove around Columbia with a portable AM radio to see if the KCCS signal was "bleeding over.” Remember we did not want anyone to complain that we were blocking his or her favorite radio show.
We were playing an awful Lester Lannin dance album because it was distinctive – distinctively bad. As we passed the Stephens College campus, I thought I heard our signal in the vicinity of a power line. I asked Milt to stop the car, walked around the corner, and up a few steps, and entered through an open door into a building. The door, that had been propped open, immediately blew shut behind me. A “Fire Alarm Exit Only" sign told me I was trapped.
Several young ladies dressed in hair curlers, nightgowns, and slippers stared down the stairwell at me and demanded to know what I was doing there. I had walked into one of the side doors of a Stephens’ college dorm. How was I going to get out of this one? If caught, how was I to explain? And again would they believe I was sober?
After about an hour of sitting in one of the student’s dorm rooms explaining my plight, discussing possible escape plans, and waiting until it got dark, the students offered the following plan.
They would dress me up as a girl, escort me to the lobby, walk up to the attendant at the sign out desk, and explain that I was their guest who forgot to sign in. They then would slip me out the front door.
My problem with the plan was that if I were caught, how would I explain the headlines? “Local KCCS Manager / “cross dresser” caught inside Stephens dorm.” They would throw the book at me. Not to mention that I expected a sobriety test from the campus police. “Cross dressing” on my college record! The Army ROTC administrator would love that one on my junior year application papers.
No, the only way was to “face the music” and confess. I walked down the stairs with four Stephens’s ladies, two on each arm. We stepped up to the attendant and I said, "Sorry, this is all a big mistake, I was checking for an illegal radio signal, um you see, to see if it came from over here, and um, the wind blew the fire door shut, I was trapped and um . . . that’s what happened."
The dorm attendant who appeared to be in her late sixties looked at me and said, "OK, so I am a temporary employee, first day on the job. What do you want me to do?”
I wish I had been quick enough to say, "Say ... Good Night Gracie!” Instead I said, “Well it's been nice, I am leaving now.” I was thankful I had never mentioned my name to her.
At that point, Milt’s car, transporting the rest of the KCCS group pulled up to the Stephens cross walk. They asked where I had been. I pointed back to the Stephens dorm. I looked up and the Stephens girls were hanging out the windows on two different floors. One lady yelled to us and asked if I was the guy who was just up on their floor. When I said, "Yes.” A big cheer erupted from the dorm windows. I am not sure but I think a few were waving panties?
My group in the car just nodded their heads in disbelief when I again pointed to the dorm and the groups of waving and cheering coeds.
And Now ….Stay tuned for the Station Format
We auditioned many volunteer DJ's who could play records from their own collections. Others, mostly “J” school students, volunteered as our newsroom staff. The newsroom staff had to share space with Guy the "mad scientist.” Eventually we counted over 50 volunteer on the KCCS staff.
One volunteer who brought his classical music collection to the studio was Mike Robertson. He was a freshman, and an aspiring writer and English major from Kansas City. He impressed Milt and I with his on the air “patter,” knowledge of classical music, and the fact that he could pronounce both the German and French names of the artists and composers. He spent many hours at the station, and we offered him the position of Program Manager for the following year. He was unable to take that role since he received a letter from MU informing him he was no longer a student “in good standing.” Mike was not the first or the last of our volunteer students to have their grades suffer from an addiction to campus radio.
Another journalism student, Jim Jennet, also broadcast the news and acted as a DJ. He drove to Kansas City on the weekends to be a news anchor on a Kansas City TV station. Years later, I learned from an ABC Sports commentator that he became right hand man to Ronne Arlidge (head of ABC Sports and later network president).
We published a mimeographed one-page monthly program schedule. (This was a time when MU had only one Xerox machine at the library. It was 15 feet long and required 2 operators.)
Since being a student required that we all study, we decided to tape some programming in advance, programming that we could repeat on the air several times. We began taping future programs to include two-hour blocks of "quiet hours” music. (The dorms had enforced quiet study time starting at 7 PM on weeknights).
On weekdays we began broadcasting at 3 PM with one-hour blocks of music programs and five minutes of news and weather “on the hour.” We played top 40’s Rock, folk music, and jazz, until dorm quite hours began at 7 PM.
On weeknights, from 7PM until 10PM, we broadcast “The Quiet Hours.” After five minutes of “The News at 10,” I did my show "Theme Time on Campus Radio.” I played the themes and soundtracks from recent movies such as Goldfinger, Laurence of Arabia, and Exodus. I mixed the soundtrack albums with current TV themes such as The Man from Uncle, Peter Gunn, plus a jazz version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme dedicated to the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) cadets who practiced on the drill field at “Chowder (Crowder) Hall.”
Milt Schwartz followed at 11 PM with his one-hour program, a format he copied from a KMOX announcer in St. Louis, “John McCormack, the man who walks and talks at midnight.” The lights were turned down in the studio, Milt’s deep base and whispering sexy voice were accompanied by soft slow sexy music. He played tracks by Robert Goulet, Sammy Davis, Jr., Nancy Wilson, and my Henry Mancini soft jazz collection.
Men had no “dormitory hours.” On weeknights the university women had been locked in their dorms since 10:30PM – “MU chastity rules.” Obviously the women could not be trusted. Milt’s show prompted a lot of calls from the ladies to the studio phone, not to mention calls between the “hall phones” in the men and women’s dorms. (That is correct, “hall phones,” one phone per floor for about 20 students.)
Many times we also aired a sexy pre-recorded promo with a sultry female voice asking, "Ed, what are you doing? Ed, what are you doing? Edd, what are you dooing?,” each one more breathless and passionate than the previous one. My answer in an almost moan, "Listening to KCCS, 580 on your AM dial.” We were pushing the MU censorship limits here.
I recall producing and doing an improvised series on the GDI Man with Mike Robertson. Dorm residents were called Independents as opposed to fraternity members. “God Damn Independent” was the usual term. GDI man was in the mold of the Superhero with his crusade against apathy in the dorms. Somehow the tune "I Don't Care" was prominent.
Around 1964, an artist named Vaughn Meador also produced a hit comedy album on the Kennedy family and all of a sudden I was doing the Kennedy Boston accent on the air. I was asking for “Lynden” (VP Lyndon Johnson) to get me a cup of coffee, Bobbie Kennedy, the young Attorney General to get me a warrant for someone‘s arrest, or mispronouncing "Kuber" for Cuba. Does the Camelot soundtrack playing in the background strike a cord?
That humor suddenly ended when JFK was assassinated. MU classes shut down for about a week, and we all mourned the death of a great president. Later, I had to review all the pre-recorded tapes to make sure all the Kennedy jokes or references were erased.
The weekend KCCS schedules often depended on who was staying in town. Several volunteers began to put on Friday and Saturday “all night” group talk radio shows. Guy even read his poetry on the air , we were scraping the bottom of the barrel! –( aww, those poems were fun! - Mike R).
“And Now.. News on the Hour” … From the KCCS News Room
The newsroom was quite cramped (remember the news staff shared the west office with the technical staff.)
We had no money for an Associated Press news wire or any other news service. Each afternoon one newsroom volunteer was assigned to buy the first copy of the Columbia Missourian. They would then bike or run to the studio, divide the paper into sections, and our staff would then use several ancient typewriters to rewrite the copy for air use as the 5 o’clock news.
Typing was quick and dirty, and although we did try to proofread, and many of us became proficient in reading “cold copy” on the air. (“cold copy” consisted of words we had not seen before.) These words arrived on sheets of typing paper slipped under the studio door seconds before they were to be broadcast. (Sometimes they arrived DURING the news broadcast!)
Apparently this set the scene for an old Journalism joke and it was bound to happen at KCCS. As Milt was reading a page of the news, a staff volunteer took his cigarette lighter and lit the bottom of the page. As the flames gradually worked their way upward consuming the text from the page’s bottom, Milt began to read faster. He was trying to beat the flame before the words were obscured. As he increased his pace, faster and faster, his usually clear enunciation became a babbling noise. Luckily (?) we had no fire suppressing sprinkler system in the studio.
As for the weather, we read the newspaper’s weather forecast on the air and called the Columbia Time and Temperature Telephone Service to relay the current temperature to our listeners.
Fade Out
When Milt and I both moved off campus in the fall of 1964, our roll at KCCS diminished. After all we were no longer dorm residents. Guy stuck with the station for a semester or so until ousted by the next KCCS regime. Guy tells me that the new leaders erased all history of the KCCS founders, like a Stalinist purge. That was an ugly and painful chapter in campus politics. At least the campus radio station carried on after we left – we had built something of lasting value.
After graduation, Milt and I remained close friends, although most of the time we lived in different cities, until his death from brain cancer in 1996. He was a well-respected lawyer and litigator in St. Louis. Later, he succumbed to brain cancer, leaving a wife and daughter.
While working at KCCS, I had conducted "pre-recorded on tape" interviews with two career Army officers. They both were my current Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) instructors. Since M U was a land grant college, Reserve Officers Training Corps was required of all able-bodied freshmen and sophomore students. I was very surprised and impressed with their educated manner and their experience with many other cultures. That favorable impression helped me to decide to continue with the ROTC program into my junior and senior years. The extra “scholarship” pay also helped me complete my education and receive my commission.
After graduation I served in several positions. I commanded a Nike Hercules missile unit in Grafton, Illinois, which I deactivated in November of 1968. I finished my final two months of active duty in a “bird colonel” slot at Scott Air Force Base. In all, I spent just under two years in the military.
Since then I’ve made a career in Human Resources Management and retired after 20 years with the same company. I am now and independent H R Consultant and also the current President of the Bayou City Tigers (Houston, TX area) Chapter of the M U Alumni Association.
In 1966 Guy joined the Peace Corps, partially to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam era. He served with the Corps in Africa, avoiding alligators and helping fight a smallpox epidemic. He returned to MU in 1969 and completed his engineering degree. I was the best man at his wedding – he married one of our KCCS newsroom volunteers. Unfortunately the marriage did not last due to the pressures of Vietnam. The Draft boards were not giving credit for Peace Corps duty and he fled to Canada.
I visited Guy in Toronto in 1970. In an ironic twist, the draft lottery law was enacted and Guy’s number was so high that he was not drafted. He returned to St. Louis and visited me several times in the early 1970’s. In 1975 I moved to Louisville, Kentucky and we lost touch until we re-connected as a result of this KCCS essay. Guy is now an entrepreneur in Vancouver, BC – his company Kinetic Sciences Inc. manufactures high-tech fingerprint biometrics sensors. He is also an expert in robotics.
I visited the campus in the years following the success of KCCS, usually on a football weekend. Occasionally I would stroll up the Pershing Cafeteria walkway and look up at the buildings concrete shelf edge to see if they had discovered our ILLEGAL and SECRET Radio Antenna. I think the antenna wire disappeared in the early 70’s, but the electrical tape took a little longer!
Was that the campus radio station in the cafeteria basement playing the overture from Camelot in the background? Or was it the new 70’s Disco version? Today the programming is Rap and techno music. I wonder what the students’ future taste in music will be.
This article is a response to the campus radio station web site request for e-mails about experience working at the station and that’s my story of KCCS the early days, unless of course you were there and can add your own recollections to this essay. Go ahead; share your thoughts and memories of the evolution of campus radio at MU by posting your remembrances on the campus radio web site kcou.mu.org.
