Caught In The Press, Part 5

originally published January 24, 2007

Editor's Note: This is a very occasional reminiscence of the the author's experiences and foibles in local journalism. As promised in the last installment on Oct. 19, 2005 (occasional, indeed!), this episode chronicles the author's role in bringing National Public Radio to Athens.

Listening to NPR the other morning, I heard the WUGA FM 91.7 announcer mention that the station has been on the air here since 1987. That started me remembering when you couldn't get public radio in Athens unless you really wanted it and had the right equipment to bring in the weak signal from WABE FM 90.1 in Atlanta - the closest NPR station.

In addition to our few live shows on Observer Television, we had a lot of empty air time when we weren't broadcasting. Our founder and driving force, Chuck Searcy, had moved on, and so had our first station manager, Phil Williams, AKA Philip Lee Williams, who moved on to writing books and working at the University. In their absence, I remedied our lack of programming by subscribing to a United Press newswire, which was basically a continuous crawl with the latest news items - more than a decade ahead of the cable stations which now plaster every available space with crawls. On Observer Television, the crawl was not a distraction: it was the whole show. It's weird to think somebody might have sat before the TV set just reading the crawl, but it was at least there for you to check up on the news when you wanted it.

There was no sound, of course, so all you had was the silently crawling news briefs.

Max Gilstrap, a veteran librarian at the UGA Main Library, told me that he listened to WABE FM from his home with a special antenna and suggested that it would be a great thing if everybody in Athens could get NPR. Why didn't we see if we could plug in WABE to our station?

Hugh Christian, whose family then owned local radio station WRFC AM 960, had already offered to pay us to carry that station live, but I never could reconcile the idea of somebody else's advertisements running on our station. I also thought that the bulk of the programming should be music, since it might be distracting to have talk shows running along with our news crawl. Little did I know then what capacity for multitasking multimedia the human brain would develop, to watch and listen to TV news shows while at the same time reading crawls and stock quotes and breaking news as we routinely do now.

I thought Max had a great idea, and I called WABE in Atlanta to ask them if they had any objection to our broadcasting their station on ours. I thought they would be delighted, but basically they were uninterested. At least nobody ever got back to me. So I got in the car and drove over to the station and found the manager and sat down with her and explained what I wanted to do. She never did seem to grasp it, but finally indicated we could do whatever we wanted.

Clay Adams was head engineer at Observer Television, and he rigged up a receiver, but then we found that WABE's 90.1 signal was being blocked out by the campus student radio station, WUGA FM 90.5. Damn! Clay did some research and found a filter that would keep WUGA off our reception through the little dish we installed up on a corner of the roof above Observer TV. You could still see it up there as a silent reminder of the station until the building was condo'd into "The Observer" luxury condominiums, the first time The Observer and luxury had ever been mentioned in the same breath.

Clay's filter worked, and suddenly you could turn on the Observer TV news crawl and as an absolutely free bonus get National Public Radio right in the comfort of your living room - no expensive antennae needed. That was a year or so before WUGA FM 91.7 cranked up. Thanks to Max Gilstrap and Clay Adams, we pioneered public radio here, along with the news crawl. We had to pay UP for the crawl, but our piggybacked NPR was free (and probably violated all kinds of agreements between NPR and WABE, and, come to think of it after all these years, was probably why the WABE folks were so noncommittal about it).

Emboldened by our radio success, I also tried to add movies to our repertoire, only to run into the realization that Athens was in the Atlanta market, and we would have to pay Atlanta prices, which were prohibitive. I finally found a source in Hollywood who owned an old film archive, and after discussion, he thought we could "structure a deal." We did, and for $75 apiece, he sent the absolutely worst old black and white movies I have ever had to watch, things like space films where the rocket ship was obviously constructed out of a tin can and the dialogue made for ears of the same material. We named it "Trash Theatre" and limped along for a while, but compared to those films, our news crawl was riveting. Still, I did get a lot of mileage out of saying that I had structured a deal with a guy in Hollywood.

Correction: In last week's Pub Notes, I referred to President Jimmy Carter as a Georgia Tech graduate. In truth, he attended Georgia Tech but graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Thanks to Capt. Andrew Waldron for pointing this out.

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher editor@flagpole.com