WKCR alumni tune in for station’s 70th

It may not be a surprise to Columbia students that it was a Columbia professor, Edwin H. Armstrong, who developed the FM radio signal. It was Armstrong who helped two students, Richard Brown and Richard Booth, set up a makeshift radio studio in John Jay 1107, beginning what is now WKCR.

Today, Feb. 24, marks the 70th anniversary of the first official broadcast of Columbia University Radio Club, which will be celebrated in an alumni reunion dinner at 6:30 p.m. in Roone Arledge Auditorium. In those seven decades, WKCR achieved remarkable accomplishments, including winning a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1968 riots. Today, over 1,500 people make up the extensive list of WKCR alumni.

One of these alumni, Ken Howitt, CC ’76, is the primary organizer of Thursday evening’s event. He previously organized a similar reunion for the 36th anniversary in 1977. “I believe very strongly that you should always give back,” Howitt said. “Columbia and WKCR did a lot for me, and I feel that giving my time is very important.”

Indeed, alumni seem to have benefited greatly from their time at WKCR. Some of the most esteemed Columbia alumni were involved with WKCR: Robert Siegel, host of NPR’s evening news broadcast, David Friend, senior vice president for news at CBS, and Erica Jong, author of the bestselling “Fear of Flying,” to name a few.

“All of them have excelled in their fields because of the skills that WKCR taught them, and all of them give credit to WKCR,” said Howitt, who has been communicating with alumni across the globe in organizing the reunion. “It really is kind of a remarkable thing.” Colleen Dunning, BC ’09, is currently working on the WKCR History Project, in an effort to gather stories for a soon-to-be-released book about the station’s history. Dunning has been working with current students at WKCR, interviewing alumni at class reunions, giving them tours of the station, and recording the oral histories that she is using to compile the book.

“It’s been really great to be reaching out to all of these different alumni who have been doing all sorts of really interesting things—lots of really entrepreneurial people doing really cool things in their fields” Dunning said. “The ’68 riots were definitely the biggest event in WKCR’s history, [but] many of them were there to cover other really important events.”

Since its inception, WKCR has covered everything from music to sports to news. The station is far more than a college radio station. From playing Bach to interviewing the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., its coverage of such diverse topics and genres has made it one of the most important stations in the metropolitan area.

Chris Pitsiokos, the current program director for WKCR, is enthusiastic about the alumni event. “The regular involvement of these alumni programmers sets the tone for the way current WKCR programmers are well aware that they are part of something much larger than themselves,” Pitsiokos said, noting that a handful of the station’s regular programmers have already graduated. “This event will be a wonderful opportunity for current student programmers just getting started to mingle and learn from some people who were programming as early as the 1950s.”

“My hope is that people understand the impact that WKCR has had on the world,” Howitt said. “The way that a university should be measured should not only be the education that it gives to its students but also the impact that its graduates have on society. WKCR is a treasure for the University.”