Author: Kenneth Devoe

In June of 1968, when students were leaving the Yale campus for summer vacation, about a dozen of us decided to stick around New Haven and keep WYBC-FM on the air 24×7 until our classmates returned in September.

This was the first time in WYBC’s history that the station would be on the air non-stop instead of signing off when the school year ended, as many college radio stations did.

If you weren’t part of WYBC or the radio biz, this might not seem like a big deal. But it was. Many forces were at work that affected us personally, culturally, politically, and artistically. These forces led us to do what we did at WYBC in the Summer of ’68 in a way that totally changed our lives and changed radio as we knew it.

Just about everything good that’s happened in my adult life is a direct result of my experience at WYBC.

When I got to Yale, I had no clue as to what I wanted to do post-Yale. My plans or lack of them didn’t include going into radio. In fact, I had no idea that college radio even existed.

[… Then] I heard what sounded like a couple of people my age broadcasting play-by-play of a Yale football game. I was astounded. College kids on radio?