As I write this letter, the local newspapers and TV stations are awash in a kind of hard-bitten nostalgia, recounting the “Blizzard of ’78” in pictures, narratives and statistics. I was a first-year student on the Hill that February. I recall a snowbound week in Carlin Hall, looking out windows at drifts that, in memory, rise up to the Carlin Bridge. I remember some of my more adventurous hallmates venturing out on snowshoes and cross-country skis. And I recall long afternoons that segued into evenings, cocooned in those tiny dorm rooms, huddled around pre-CD stereos, listening to music and weather reports. Some of those stereos were tuned to our own WCHC.

As you will read in our cover story, the campus radio station has been a fixture of student life for over 50 years. A few of the people who “spun records” and reported everything from sports scores to the night’s Kimball fare, have gone on to prominent roles in media markets across the country.

Though WCHC was, in the old days, something of a male bastion, the young Maggie Sullivan Wilderotter ’77, got her start in communications there, doing commentary and color for Crusader basketball games. Still breaking down barriers, Wilderotter was recently named senior vice president of business strategy at Microsoft, becoming one of the highest ranking women in the telecommunications field.

Were you to stroll past the WCHC studio on Hogan 2 this past semester, you would have seen the station hallway overflowing with history: Stacks upon stacks of old 33 1/3 record albums—more than three decades’ worth—climbing up every available wall. The towers of vinyl were being placed in storage, victim of the need for CD shelf-space. More than one over-40 administrator and faculty member stopped to gaze on this exhibit to lost youth.

But one of the benefits of working at Holy Cross is the almost daily lesson in the difference between trend and tradition. And while popular culture is forever transient, the impulse to entertain, inform and communicate is a timeless one. So, while the music that emanates from WCHC may no longer be familiar to you, there’s a good chance that the young people programming that music would be. They are tomorrow’s alumni, and, as such, they’re the inheritors of the history, traditions and values that define Holy Cross and shape its students. If you can bear the pun, we’re all on the same wavelength. And it originates now, as always, from Mount Saint James.