WYBC: Alan Zaur

I was, among other things, a techie at WYBC. I also remained in New Haven during 1968 and did a little technical work at the station when it was required. In order to have money for school I needed a “real job”. So, I worked at WNHC-TV that summer as a broadcast engineer at the TV transmitter.

In 1968, being a techie at WYBC had its amusing moments. One morning at about 2 AM I got a call from the overnight DJ telling me that the Collins console was “bleeding,” and I had to come right over to the station.

As you well remember, many of the DJ’s were experimenting with psychedelic drugs. Plus, it was the middle of the night. I figured it was some sort of visual distortion or hallucination. But no, when I got to the station there was this thick fluid seeping from the front of the console.

Using my scientific skills, I tasted a small sample (not a good idea, but it was the middle of the night, after all). It was densely sweet. We took the console apart and discovered that someone had put a can of soda on top of the console. The can had subsequently slipped in the small space between the console and the wall and tipped over. How long the soda had taken to seep out is anybody’s guess.

I developed an interest in intellectual property during that summer of 1968 when I was working at WNHC-TV, and I thought that was going to be my career path. Community antenna television was just getting off the ground, and that is what really raised the issue of the ownership of intellectual property.

I took my one and only sociology course (The Sociology of Mass Communication) in the fall of 1968 based on my experience at WYBC and at WNHC-TV. The course required a long research paper which I wrote about CATV and the possibility that it would grow into something like Cable Television with all the financial issues that would raise for the owners of the program materials and the CATV/Cable networks.

My teacher had just learned that he was not being granted tenure at Yale, and he was really upset/pissed off. He gave terrible grades to most of my classmates but somehow I managed to get a B on the paper. His only comment to me was that I was living in a fantasy world in worrying about these issues since he could not imagine anyone incurring the capital expense of running cable to most of the homes in America. I really wish I had kept that paper with his comments on it!

My intention was to go to law school to explore these issues — mostly because it was a totally new field of law. As we were soon to learn, computer programs and re-distribution of electronic media were not adequately protected by copyright or patent law. Incidentally, I think it was Mitch Kapor from WYBC who was the first to litigate the protection of “look and feel” when he successfully protected the key sequences in Lotus 1-2-3. I also think that Mitch invented the drop-down menu.

If it hadn’t been for the terrible events at Kent State, I probably would have stayed in law school. Instead, I decided that serving corporate masters for the rest of my life made little sense, and I took a year off to sort things out. Somehow I was able to talk my way into medical school and subsequently did a psychiatric residency at Pennsylvania Hospital. After ten years in Philly, Karen (who was my girlfriend since freshman year and whom I later married), my two sons and I moved to Vermont. Although the kids are gone, Karen and I are still here in Montpelier after nearly 30 years. I closed my office about 18 months ago, although I still have a small consulting practice–mostly with adolescents.

I have never been unhappy with the decision to become a doctor–actually, every day was fun (mostly!).