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WCHC has been transmitting its signal for over 50 years,
and while the music has changed, the passion for broadcasting remains.
By Paul E. Kandarian
 Dec. 6, 1948, 8 p.m.
Radios on the Holy
Cross campus crackle to life with a new AM signal. The inaugural
broadcast of WCHC begins and, with it, an educational experiment
unlike any the College had ever before undertaken.
“The campus station will enable you to
broaden and deepen your knowledge of learning in fields both
familiar and unfamiliar, since you may now listen to lectures
by teachers in all departments of the College,” says
Holy Cross president, Rev. John A. O’Brien, S.J., following
a liturgical blessing of the station and a musical interlude
by the student choir, under the direction of Santo S. Cataudella ’49.
“The station will serve, too, as an outlet
for student talent in music, drama, debating, radio itself
and other fields,” Fr. O’Brien continues. “It
will also offer a valuable means of intercommunication and
interchange of ideas between faculty and students, thus enabling
us to know each other better, to assist one another in our
academic efforts and become more united in our common campaign
for a better and greater Holy Cross.”
For Jack Rattigan ’50, the station’s
first director of continuity, the fun—and learning—had
just begun, laying a foundation that would last a lifetime.
Rattigan now owns a media management and sales training company.
“A priest at Holy Cross once said the
station was an experiment,” Rattigan says. “But
it turned out to be an educational opportunity that would
never happen again.”
* * *
WCHC-FM now runs out of two studios in Hogan,
where it has been since Nov. 27, 1967—with a tiny hallway
stacked chest-high with old 33 1/3 record albums and a grease
board above it carrying the admonition: “The records
piled in the hall need to be protected from feet and theft.
These are not garbage. Last year, they were the vinyl archive,
and they are a school archive still.”
In the tiny studios is the new face of Holy
Cross radio—shelves lined with thousands of CDs, covering
music tastes from the Action Swingers to Zydeco Joe. Music
plays, but no student DJ is on site; the music, made possible
by computerization, is about as far a cry from the old days
as you can get.
“How times have changed,” laughs
Rattigan, who recalls attending a football game between Holy
Cross and William and Mary in 1986 and seeing a giant WCHC
mobile remote truck. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Crowded or not, the modern station is still
light years ahead of WCHC’s humble beginnings in a renovated
fourth-floor attic storeroom in Fenwick, with much of the
equipment consisting of Navy surplus gear.
According to WCHC’s first program director,
Richard Dowd ’50, the station’s foundation was
actually laid in the early 1940s when he was a student at
Fairfield (Conn.) College Preparatory School; Father John
H. Kelly, who would later teach at Holy Cross, had started
a radio club there.
“We were doing some remotes, and someone
called and said they needed new male voices at (local station)
WNAB,” Dowd says. “A bunch of us went down there
and found out it was a hoax, but they gave six of us a tryout.
I had the deepest voice, got a job and kept it until the
regular guy came back from World War II.”
Twelve Fairfield grads went on to Holy Cross,
says Dowd—followed soon after by Fr. Kelly, who wanted
to start a station. Dowd is now editor in chief at Clarity
Publishing, a religious publishing company in New York.
“We set up the first studio in Fenwick,
and I became the first program director because I knew him
and was interested,” Dowd says. “For many of us,
it was our only extracurricular activity.”
Radio was king in those pretelevision days,
and students who grew up with the medium were now taking
part in creating it. Early shows at the station included, “Quiz
Time,” “World Politics Forum,” and as the
Big Chill of the Cold War was settling in, “Radiological
Defense, Principles of Radioactivity (or atomic energy) and
Application of These Principles to the Civil Defense Program.”
And in what would surely be a controversial
move today, sometime in 1952 the station—along with
50 other college stations nationwide—received a free
UP news printer courtesy of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
“We did the full scale of things at the
station—we did dramas, we covered baseball games, football
games—and we used to get telegrams every day from the
New York Times which gave us five-minute radio broadcasts,” Dowd
says.
After graduation, Dowd went into the Navy,
where he edited the base newspaper and would later become
information officer for the amphibious division. And because
his was the first graduating class after World War II, he
says, “We had people from 16-to-32 who were freshmen.
We had a lot of veterans and that changed the complexion
of the school.”
Rattigan agrees, saying, “We’d hang
out with guys five-to-10 years older than us and, without
even knowing it, we helped these guys get back into the mainstream
of life.” Each night, Rattigan hosted a show titled, “Here’s
to Vets,” which consisted of playing Veteran Administration
recorded discs of music and information about veterans’ benefits.
Rattigan said the experience involved more
than just airtime.
“The major thing I liked—and I don’t
think college stations do this anymore—is that we learned
there wouldn’t be radio unless someone paid for it,” he
says. “Art Smith and I wanted to broadcast baseball,
so Father Kelly said to find out how much it would cost to
put in a phone line. It was around $40, so we went and sold
advertising amounting to $40. Father Kelly always said, ‘You
want to do something, you cover the expenses.’”
Rattigan, who recalls covering sports in the
Bob Cousy days of basketball championships, says, while it
was fun, “We were serious about it. If I was going to
do color for, say, the Dartmouth game, I’d have to phone
and get all the information—with the expense coming
out of my own pocket.”
But mostly, the experience forged lifelong
friendships, he says: “When I look back at the guys
I’ve stayed close to, most were guys from the station.
My roomie, John “Doc” Hogan ’50, was involved
with the station, and we’re constantly in touch. He’s
still my best friend in the whole world.”
* * *
WCHC was a spawning ground for a lot
of major media talent, on- and off-air. Martin Lessard ’74,
who manages a cluster of FM radio stations in Dover-Portsmouth,
N.H., was involved with the station, as was Peter Smyth ’75,
president/chief executive officer of Greater Media Corporation
and his predecessor, the late Tom Milewski ’71. Boston-area
viewers are no doubt familiar with two others: Brian Leary ’77,
longtime anchor at WCVB-Channel 5, who is now a lawyer but
still does legal reporting for the station, and Joe Shortsleeve ’79,
a reporter at WBZ-Channel 4 for the past 13 years.
“We did a little of everything,” Leary
says. “My old roommate and I were co-sales managers
one year, and one year we did DJ shifts, spinning records—literally
in those days—and also doing play-by-play for football
and basketball.”
Until he hooked up with WCHC, Leary says, he
had no inkling of a broadcast career.
“I was just looking for a diversion, but
as I got more involved in the station and had the chance
to do play-by-play as an avid sports fan, I thought it was
a neat opportunity,” Leary says. “But since broadcasts
were only heard on campus, I’m not sure we ever had
an audience,” he adds with a laugh. “It was like
singing in the shower.”
When doing DJ stints, he’d ask classmates
about his style, Leary says, “and they’d say, ‘Yeah,
we heard you making a jerk out of yourself.’ I can only
imagine that the combination of a microphone and a 19-year-old
mindset made for some interesting chatter.”
But the learning experience molded Leary, he
says, and “I never would have gotten into broadcasting
without it. It was really a great training ground for so
many of us.”
Shortsleeve says the day he arrived at Holy
Cross, “I unpacked my clothes in Carlin and went to
the station. I’d always wanted to do (radio) and that
fall, I did an internship with Channel 25 in Worcester for
the 10 o’clock news.”
Shortsleeve would also intern at Channel 5,
working during the “Blizzard of ’78,” and, “by
the time I graduated, I was well on my way.
“It was just a lot of fun—a great
experience,” he says, adding that, during his time,
the station expanded to broadcast to a wider area: “We
didn’t realize what a big deal we were in Worcester.
Now we’re doing weather for the city, and we’re
able to get commercials from Subway and all the other places
that college kids enjoyed. It became very real, very fast.”
Shortsleeve, a history major, spent all four
years at Holy Cross doing radio work.
“I didn’t really decide I’d
like news until I did WCHC,” he says. “I went in
a DJ and came out the other end a news guy.”
Tom Osgood ’67 was something of a rebel
in his WCHC days. Now a regional manager in the Northeast
for ACE Hardware, Osgood once took out an ad in the College
paper decrying the administration’s unwillingness to
pay for repairs to a cable the phone company dug up that
knocked the station off-air for a couple of days.
“Oh, yeah, now I remember it,” Osgood
laughs when reminded of the ad. “It was a battle between
us and the administration, the phone company or whomever.”
It was also during Osgood’s tenure at
WCHC that he set a national collegiate record for marathon
broadcasting—doing 75 hours of continuous radio—and
topping the record of 70 set by rival Boston College the
previous week.
“We did it for a number of reasons,” Osgood
says. “One, to see if we could break the record. Another
reason was to raise money for club sports at the school.
And it also tied into a sleep deprivation study that some
psych majors were doing.”
And maybe, most importantly, “We knew
some of the BC guys, and they’d sent us a letter saying
we didn’t have the nerve to try it,” Osgood laughs. “I’m
sure sitting around the station with a few beers helped us
make our decision.”
A businessman all his life, Osgood says his
WCHC experience “had some benefit in my preparation
for that. In effect, we ran our own business, we raised our
own money by selling advertising and fixed our own equipment.
I’m sure that experience, plus a lot of mistakes we
made, helped us in later years.
“When I think back to some of the guys
I worked with during that time—and I know this sounds
hokey—I’m probably a better person today because
of those relationships,” Osgood says.
Named station manager for the 1973-74 school
year, Phil Zachary ’76 was the first second-year student
in station history to achieve that status—an honor ordinarily
reserved for “a rising senior,” Zachary says now.
“I walked into the door the first week
I was there in 1972, and it was a life-changing experience,” he
says. “Radio really was fascinating in that it became
an outlet for feelings and emotions on campus; it was the
first fall we were coed. There was so much changing daily
at that point, we became the voice of what was happening.
Vietnam was still going on—all these things were happening—it
was just a fascinating time.”
Like most others, he did everything at WCHC,
including spinning records; he also remembers the two most
requested songs in those new coed days.
“The women requested, ‘We Gotta Get
Out of This Place,’ by the Animals, and the guys wanted, ‘I’m
a Loser,’ by the Beatles,” Zachary laughs. “Those
two songs defined the fall of 1972.”
Zachary says, without question, the WCHC experience
helped shape who he is today—an executive vice president
for the Curtis Media Group in Raleigh, N.C.
“We had budgets to work with, personnel
who didn’t follow the rules, shifts that had to be filled,” Zachary
says of his days running WCHC. “It was challenging around
exam time or a big football game or a concert in town because
you couldn’t get anyone to work that night. That was
my entree into management. Turning off the station was not
an option.”
The station was an 18-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week
business, and Zachary says “When you’re trying
to run a business, you have to rely on each other—it
was a commitment we took seriously. It shaped the work ethic
for a lot of us who worked there. It got to the point that
area radio stations were eager to get kids from Holy Cross.
We knew what we were doing. We were reliable and smart.”
Asked if he misses spinning records these days,
Zachary wistfully says he does, while adding, “It’s
a great way to earn a living, but I wasn’t good enough
to earn a great living.”
* * *
WALK around campus these days and ask
kids if they like—or even listen to—WCHC, and you
get a variety of answers. Some say they listen occasionally,
some don’t listen at all, some will listen to buddies
who are on the air. In these days of walk-around CD players,
instant Internet music and live concerts virtually any time,
there’s a lot of competition for the ears of the young.
But Matt Chmura ’03 doesn’t mind.
The current station manager, he has been involved at WCHC
since his first year at Holy Cross. According to a transcript
of the original 1948 WCHC broadcast, the late Mark D. Atchison ’49,
president of the Student Congress, said “We will always
be interested in student reaction to our program.” And
for Chmura, that still holds true 55 years later.
“We did a survey of what kids wanted to
hear, and that’s why we dropped alternative music and
moved to the top 100,” says Chmura, a political science
major. “From the feedback we’ve been getting, our
listenership hasn’t decreased.”
No one gets paid at WCHC, same as always. It’s
sometimes tough to get students to work, same as always.
But the show goes on—including a day recently when the
WCHC broadcast was generated exclusively by computerized
programming.
Driving from Holy Cross, one can still pick
up the strains of music 10 or so miles away—a far cry
from the on-campus crackle of 1948. The music has changed
and so has the personnel, but the benefits of having an on-campus
radio station endure.
“It’s a lot of learning, a great
way to mix up your education,” says Chmura, who wants
to get involved in media relations for a career.
With the history of WCHC solidly behind him,
he seems to be on the right track.
Paul Kandarian is a free-lance writer from Taunton,
Mass.
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