About WHRW

The Birth of Harpur Radio

In the late fifties, students at Harpur College, which would one day be called the State University of New York at Binghamton, chartered a new student group called the Harpur Radio Workshop. The students who joined the Workshop were interested in the inner workings of broadcasting, perhaps as a career, perhaps as a hobby. In the beginning, the fledgling organization without enough of a budget to afford its own broadcast facilities worked with a local commercial AM station, voicing commercials and announcements, reading news, and getting a little airtime. After a short time, they acquired enough equipment to become a low-powered AM station themselves, known to the FCC as WRAF-AM, which broadcasted originally to two dormitory halls on campus, at 590 on the dial.

But the Workshop's adventurous days were still ahead of her. The revolution had not yet begun. WRAF polled Harpur's students to determine their musical tastes, and began a semi-formatted broadcast day that played mostly classical music, with some ameteur news and public-affairs programming rounding out the programming.

By 1966, two things had happened. First, WRAF was growing outside the bounds of a carrier-current AM station. The second was that FM radio had become a simulcast of the social and political revolution. In the beginning, successful AM powerhouses bought FM licenses and began to broadcast the same content on both stations, providing one source of content, and a convenient two versions. In 1964 the FCC introduced legislation that required the owners of these "duopolies" to provide original content on the FM side for at least half the broadcast day. The legislation really didn't take full effect until 1968, but because AM was the cash cow, any experimental broadcasting began happening on the FM side.

FM's jocks were progressive by any time period's standards, oftentimes playing an entire 24-minute album side to the overwhelming approval of listeners. Shows were programmed intuitively by jocks who made minimum wage, but were there because they were in love with the concept. Music flowed effortlessly, whether it was sets of songs based on a theme, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana segued with the Rolling Stones, or music choices that made no sense at all (and that was their particular theme). Some would talk between selections, some let the music do the talking. They were artists, and to parishioners of the Church Of Radio, these were the high priests and rabbis that eloquently spoke the Gospels of Townshend, Jagger, Dylan, and Zeppelin. Free-format radio allowed for the person on the air to program a show the way he or she saw fit: Music, talk, phone calls, strange noises, sound effects, spoken word, poetry, a combination of all of them, or all of them at the same time.

If FM radio as a whole was in the right place at the right time, relative to the world around it, then the Harpur Radio Workshop was as well, relative to the rest of FM radio.

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