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Memories of WBRU in the 1960s

Fred Brack Reminisces

I remember ...

• Falling over backwards in one of those huge wooden chairs during a board meeting.
• Yelling Del Shannon's name during a talk-up of one of his records, while Jerry Hubeny (I learned later) was telling the board meeting in the next room that the DJs should be lower key, like me.  Everyone heard me...
• Timing the last song before the hour very carefully (on AM) to have it end exactly as the hourly beep sounded, marking the start of NBC News on the hour.  (Whatever happened to those beeps?!)
• Jerry Hubeny telling the story about how he snuck up on chief engineer Bob Cope while he was inside the transmitter housing doing maintenance (with power off) and saying "Bzzzzt," startling Bob into whacking his head on the case!
• Driving the WBRU news van with Andy Fisher and having him complain that I wouldn't go through red lights with our orange flasher on.
• Feeling that Dave Pearce had the best announcer's voice, hands down.
• Feeling that nobody knew more about music than Paul Payton.
• The perennial call from the back row at the board meeting when Les Blatt was General Manager and standing to address us:  "Stand up, Les!"
• The chairs in the open area for our board meeting:  theatre seats bolted to the floor.
• The excitement of opening a package from a major recording studio like MGM to see what records they had sent us.  Those freebie contracts were hard to come by, and they were supplemented by our in-kind advertising contract with Beacon Record Shops.
• The Lorne Green ad for Butler Chevrolet -- great voice, but boy did I get tired of hearing it!
• Trying to break up serious Andy Fisher doing the news.  Someone I was with stood up on a chair in front of the window in front of Andy, unzipped his fly, and stuck his little finger out!  It had a negative effect on the newscast...
• Taking advantage of our transmitter being off the air, running in to do production on "the board."  In fact, doing production (making promos, etc.) is perhaps my fondest memory of my time at WBRU.
• Cuing tapes on the two Ampex recorders to use for production, splicing only as a last resort. 
• Working on my Boston accent the first year.  I think it was Jerry who identified specific words I had problems with (I remember "figure" and "California"), practicing them over and over.
• The heat in the studio -- we wanted to open that window, but then noise from the campus green would get broadcast, and people down below would complain about the music we cranked up on the monitors.
• The countdowns from remote locations to "Brown University Sports" with the late Pete Bedard as announcer.  He couldn't hear us, so he gave us a countdown, and we had to be ready for him.
• Speaking of that process, we had to rely on the telephone company to install a line for each remote, and we didn't have the money to call to make sure it was working; so the procedure was to make a collect call to the station for "Ferguson Jones."  As I recall, we didn't accept the charges if the line was working OK!  This became known as the Ferguson Jones call.  (See the Ferguson Jones page!)
• The day the power went out in Providence, and Art Norwalk deduced from what he had already heard on the news that the power problem in New York had now rolled out of state on its way to New England, making it a major news story, which he immediately phoned in to former co-workers at ABC News.  (As an interesting aside, several years later I was on the 21st floor of a NY hotel during the second blackout, listening on my new Ham 2-meter radio to people complaining about losing power in their neighborhoods, when this time I realized the implication -- and I looked out my hotel window just in time to to see the blackout sweep across Manhattan block by block!  And it was then that I learned that interior stairwells in NY hotels were not required to have emergency lighting.  I was able to facilitate the rescue of an elderly woman from an elevator via my Ham radio, as the police didn't have any working phone system at the time.)
• I remember thinking:  I went to WBRU; Brown was my extra-curricular activity!

(Posted 1/17/05)

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