WYBC: Tom Guterbock

It was in some ways a foregone conclusion that I would heel WYBC. My brother Walt (TD ’66) was the Program Director of the station when I was a freshman.

I was naturally blessed with the gift of gab, a resonant voice, and a love of radio. That deal was sealed the night in January 1966 when the WYBC men appeared in Freshman Commons with a tape recorder and a sheaf of old news copy pulled off the AP teletype: The WYBC Freshman News Reading Contest!

I took my turn reading the news copy and learned the next day that I had WON the free pizza that was offered as a prize. My brother took no end of grief about his younger brother acing the competition.

The magic of radio was brought home to me the first time I visited the station. I learned why radio was called the “Theater of the Mind.”  From Control Room 1 (the AM side) there came the sound of a terrific soul DJ. When the “on air” light went off, I went into the studio to see that the DJ was a white guy (was it Jerry Lidz?), looking not at all how he sounded!

I see now that he was guilty of what we now disapprovingly call “cultural appropriation,” but the magic of the medium was evident that evening. (Within two years, all soul music at the station was spun exclusively by our African-American members.)

Like other big organizations at Yale, WYBC was run like a fraternity. To become a member, one endured a grueling eight-week heeling period.  Some men went through it only to learn that they were not voted in as members.

We had our distinctive tie, many traditions, and degradation rituals such as the dreaded “Executive Interview.” In a darkened room with a bright light shining in the eyes of the interviewee, members of the Board tested the mettle of the heelers by demanding things like selling a useless object to a “Carpathian Camel Circumciser” (played by a Board member who sported a phony accent and, of course, would never actually agree to buy the thing.)

It was so much fun and it was so cool to be on the air. I did jazz, rock, news, and a mixed format similar to the modern stations that say: “We play everything.” I hung out and supervised the air time of others. I produced ads and promotions. I’m sure my GPA would have been at least a point higher if I hadn’t spent so much of my time at the station. I learned so many valuable lessons for later life – how to introduce myself to people, how to sell (we all had to sell commercials in the community), how to solve technical issues (while on the air) without losing my cool.

Eventually I became Vice Chair of the station, which meant I was in charge of the heel, and it was there that my love of teaching really came into flower.

In retrospect, our group at WYBC was guilty of serious overreach. We not only took the station to 24/7 operation in 1968, but we extended the AM signal to Connecticut College for Women, hired a full-time sales guy who turned out to be a bit shady, put on concerts at Woolsey Hall that usually lost money, hired a black DJ from New Haven with whom relations soon turned sour, all while radically transforming the station’s format and audience.

We were over-committed and under-resourced, and yes, there were some serious conflicts that arose among us. I learned a great deal about how people in organizations deal with stress, how coalitions shift, and how different we all were in our styles of leadership. I think those lessons, some of them painful, are the ones I value most. Yet all these years later, I remain friends with the guys who, like me, were captivated by the magic of radio.  Not to speak of the moments, every now and then, when I’d introduce myself to some student on campus that I hadn’t met before and they’d say: “Oh, I heard you on WYBC!”