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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Radio Archaeology: Part 2
KSPC gets swept up in the superheated '60s
Artifact // Student Life, April 26, 1962 // “KSPC Gets First Prize in
National Competition;” article notes that Pomona beat out
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford with its five-part documentary
series dealing with the extreme right-wing political movement in the
United States.
Artifact // 1960s KSPC station identification jingle //
Why does KSPC
sound so good, good, good? Because extra lengths of tubes and
transistors filter the sound over, under, and around KSPC’s mellow
turntables. Makes it mild while filtering out harmful clicks, scratches
and surface noise. Remember, only KSPC brings you the finest Mylar tapes
and high-quality Vinylite records. Outstanding! And, they are round!
It didn’t take long for the cool, calculating ’50s to give way to the
superheated ’60s at KSPC. Chuck Waite created a “scandal” when he
introduced rock ’n’ roll to the new decade’s morning line-up. Wolf
recalls that Waite really didn’t much care for rock music but gave in to
popular demand. Fischer remembers that Waite would betray “only the
barest hint of irony in his swingin’ intros. [He] then turned around and
hosted on-air spoofs of rock ’n’ roll, featuring syrupy readings of rock
lyrics accompanied by saccharine melodies on his own Hammond organ.”
 Spoofs were big at KSPC. New station manager Terry Westen had a fondness
for production and his staff developed a penchant for poking gentle fun
at Southern California’s emerging “swinging suburbia” culture.
Pre-recorded hijinx included nighttime weather reports from the beach
(“It’s a pleasant 40 degrees, but nobody seems to be taking advantage of
it. There are a few grunion washing up….”); “live” traffic jam coverage
(“Who put the key in the cigarette lighter? Somebody just ran into us! I
think this a bad day for a freeway report.”); and even a “live remote”
interview with President and Mrs. Lyon where the Pomona prexy and his
wife live up to their name (“We’re here at the home of President Lyon…
ROAR! …Oh, Mrs. Lyon! I didn’t see you crouching behind the couch!”).
But things got serious, too, as the chilling effects McCarthyism and
Cold War paranoia registered at Pomona. Influenced by the public affairs
work of pacifist radio station KPFK (managed by Terry Drinkwater
and operating from KSPC’s former bandwidth of 90.7 which afforded
greater frequency for KPFK and relocated KSPC at 88.7), Westen created a
public affairs department consisting of Wolf, Debbie Duffield ’63, Roger
Choate ’62 and Don Zimmerman ’62. After reading newspaper editorials
about the ultraconservative John Birch Society, Westen and his staff
were inspired to create a five-part documentary series, “Crusaders on
the Right.” They set out to expose "conditions in society which enable
the demagogue and agitator to flourish” according to The Student Life
as the series profiled the John Birch Society and the right-wing
preacher Rev. Billy Hargis. It also featured exclusive interviews with Southern
California Black Muslim leader John Shabazz and American Nazi Party
leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
The interview with the latter, titled “Portrait of an American
Agitator,” kicked off the series and gained quite a bit of notoriety,
ultimately garnering the station the top prize from the Intercollegiate
Broadcasting System. Westen recalls that he and Choate learned that
Rockwell was scheduled to give a talk in the area and was staying in
Pomona, so they began calling hotels and asking for the leader of the
American Nazi Party. Once located, Rockwell granted the interview, and
Westen and Choate set out with their tape recorder. Westen recalls
“this is kind of a seedy hotel, the third floor, down a dim hall. We
knocked on the door — and there he was …We spent two hours asking him
questions. This was interrupted by people coming in and out of the room
giving Hitler salutes and exchanging cash! We were in the middle of some
underground movement.” Back in the studio, the crew edited the tapes
into a program with an introduction and context. Westen also recalls
that they added “carousel music that went ’round and ’round; we tried
to [make it] communicate a sense of insanity. And it really did.”
The country began spinning ’round and ’round in its own cultural
revolution as the end of the decade found America waging an increasingly
unpopular war in Vietnam. Commercial AM radio attempted to sooth the
seethe with the sunny domestic sounds of surf music and Burt Bacharach,
or the shaggy but harmless hits of the British Invasion. Underground FM
radio — especially in California — quickly became a vanguard in the
youth and hippie movements. It wasn’t long before Bob Dylan, the
Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and other such magical mystery
tourists found their way to these airwaves.
The station opened itself to a wider array of programming diversity in
the ’60s as well. Eric Nordberg ’64, a station deejay for all four of
his undergraduate years, came to Pomona College because of KSPC and
remembers that “the station was avant garde in the sense that it
included genres that were not generally on the radio then, reflecting
student interests.” Nordberg helped bring more of a pop sensibility to
the station and soon found that others were joining him in sharing their
personal interests. Roger Russell ’65 hosted a Saturday afternoon show
devoted largely to Indian ragas and Koto music, and Leonard Rogers ’63
hosted “The Opinion Plant,” an hour-long “talk block” that gave him the
freedom to do everything from discuss Broadway musicals to ad-lib his
senior thesis on-air.
By the end of the decade this mix of exciting, diverse music and issue-
and culture-oriented programming had become an intoxicating brew. Gary
Kates PI ’74, a college-bound high school senior in the Mar Vista area
of West Los Angeles, listened with rapt admiration to the underground
sounds of hip college FM stations KUSC, KPPC, and KSPC and thought,
“Wouldn’t it be nice….”
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