Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

A couple months ago, I was interviewed for an article in the Penn Stater, looking at 50 years of student radio at Penn State. I was supposed to meet The Gryphon for lunch that day, and I was late because of the interview.

But, having been a reporter myself, I'm always willing to help out.

The magazine just came in the mail, and I have to admit, it was more than a little disappointing.

I had talked to her about the full breadth of my experience, and she had included only one short paragraph from me, talking about a comedy show for which I used to write and perform.

Here's what she ran:

Alyce Wilson '92 Com, '96 MFA Lib
Years at WPSU: 1988-92
Jobs held: News reporter; writer, producer
Currently: Freelance writer/editor in Philadelphia area

I became a writer on the Rubber Chicken Comedy Closet, a comedy show that aired late Sunday nights. We did a thing called the "primal scream" in which we would tell people a few words or a phrase to scream out their windows. Sometimes you thought you heard somebody actually doing it.

After reading the entire article, I can understand why she chose to include what she did. While some of the quotes involved information about the station's development over the years, most were just entertaining stories. I'd noticed, while talking with her, that she'd been more intrigued with the comedy show than with my other work, but I had hoped she would have at least mentioned it.

Fortunately, I have this forum in which to tell a fuller story. (Ha!)

I first became interested in radio from watching WKRP in Cincinnati. I wanted to be something of a blend between Dr. Johnny Fever, the wacky DJ, and Bailey Quarters, the confident, talented newswoman.

My first exposure to WPSU was at a student involvement fair during a special tour of the campus for prospective students. After talking to two very enthusiastic students at the WPSU table, we followed their advice and went up to the station for a tour.

The station manager graciously took us around and showed us around. Having previously checked out the radio station at Shippensburg University and being far from impressed, I could see they had superior facilities at Penn State. I was looking forward to working there.

When I first started, there was a requirement that you had to spend 10 hours a week at the station, during which time you were supposed to help out and learn the ropes. I took them at their word and was there 10 hours or more a week. But since there was no formal training program, I used to sit in with DJs who were on the air and learn what they were doing. In this way, I befriended members of virtually every staff.

In those days, WPSU was both a student station and a public station. It included programming ranging from NPR's Fresh Air to classical music, jazz, reggae, alternative ("New Music") and Oldies. I couldn't decide which staff I wanted to join, and at that point I still thought I was going to be a journalism major, so I decided to take a position on the 91 News team.

I learned a lot: how to produce and write stories, how to present myself on air. All the ins and outs of news radio. I also learned I hated it.

I did get some good opportunities that way. I covered a press conference held by the university president at the time, Bryce Jordan. On the other hand, I also covered a lot of borough council meetings. The best thing being on the 91 New team was attending the press conference held by Timothy Leary when he spoke at the university.

Not content with simply writing news, I worked on my on-air delivery. I was frustrated with my "R's", which sounded a bit too much like "W's." Much like Barbara Walters. But hey, she made it pretty far in the biz.

By this time, I had also befriended the programming manager, a student named Raj. He worked on the jazz show and was working with the station manager on a new concept, which was scripted programming. Basically, you would research a topic, plan out the music, time out the script and the music together, and hand it over to a DJ or host in the booth, who might have no knowledge of the subject but who would read your crafted words and come off as an expert.

Raj had an idea for a program contrasting Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae and Carla Bley, three female jazz artists. But he didn't have time to do the research, so he asked me to go to the library and dig up some articles for him. When I came back with an extensive amount of research, as well as suggestions for which songs he could play, he looked at my work and said, "You know, now that you've done all this, maybe you should just write the script yourself."

So I wrote my first radio script. Of course, I had to run it by Raj first, and he suggested cutting out the section on Carla Bley and concentrating on the two jazz vocalists, instead. I reworked it, we selected a host and the program aired.

The next day, I got a note from the host saying that someone had called in to say they loved the show. This note hung on my dorm room wall for a long time afterwards.

Raj also suggested I join the Rubber Chicken, since I'd told him about my interest in comedy, and he thought I might enjoy it. So I went to a writing session with a skit, and they liked it enough to include it in that week's show. They were also happy to have a female voice on staff.

My early days with the Rubber Chicken were the best ones, because I was still learning the ropes and was happy to learn from them. I learned a lot about mic technique, sound effects and production techniques.

The atmosphere of the group at that time was very different from the staff years later, as it evolved to include new people and eventually fractured into two clashing comedy styles who would fight each other every week over whose material got in.

This part, I didn't tell the reporter.

By the end of my freshman year, I was asked to join a new staff. The program, airing late Saturday nights, was called Before the Dawn and would entirely consist of scripted programming on various topics. BTD was run by an affable guy called Brad, who embraced this new concept.

I immediately launched into writing shows. At the same time, I managed to convince one of the WPSU staffers to teach me how to edit and started schooling myself in production room skills. This, I discovered, was what I truly loved, not the dry news reporting. At the end of my freshman year, I quit the news staff.

By the end of my sophomore year, I was executive producer of BTD, as Brad had decided to move on to other projects.

At about this time, I also sought my FCC license, which was required in those days for anyone who was going to run things from the control booth. The FCC itself only asked you to fill out a form, but the station manager insisted that we first take an oral or written test on the skills and knowledge required to be on air. I studied, passed the test with flying colors, and got my license.

When BTD changed time slots to an earlier Friday night slot, we renamed ourselves The Caverns of Your Mind, after an aborted attempt to name it Full Frontal Radio. Even though we won the battle of wills with our station manager over that name, we decided we'd rather go with a name that didn't conjure such a questionable image.

Starting my junior year, when my host dropped out to spend more time on shooting his film projects, I became both host and executive producer of CYM.

At about this time, I left the Rubber Chicken over creative differences. We formed the Caverns of Your Mind Players, which would produce a comedy segment to run between the two main portions of CYM. Since we were scripted, it was difficult to get anyone to write an entire three-hour show. Instead, the first two hours were the feature program and the last hour was a featured artist. The comedy bits ran between these two segments.

My good friend Jon Kilgannon headed the CYM Players, and he coordinated all the writing and production, although I occasionally sat in on sessions and added a voice.

If I knew the reporter had only been looking for colorful stories, I could have told her a few, some of which don't exactly reflect well on my professionalism.

We ran late into the evening while we were BTD. Back then, we'd air three hours of original programming and then a one-hour show called Joe Frank: Work in Progress, which we taped off a feed.

During Joe Frank, we'd mess around. I remember eraser battles in the hallway, and one particularly magical night in the newsroom. After making sure the newsroom was not going out over the air, we put it on six-second delay. Each of us donned headphones and then did things like twang rubber bands near the mike or talk nonsense in ghostly voices. It created a looping echo effect that was absolutely fantastic.

I also remember doing a show on Monty Python with members of the Penn State Monty Python Society. While the show was airing, we held up signs from the newsroom, trying to make the host laugh.

And there were the tasteless in-jokes, such as calling the production room the "reproduction room" because of rumors that once, a couple had been caught there... um... making music.

The year I graduated, WPSU moved to its new studios in what we called Paul and Tony's School of Communications, which was a downtown building, connected to Paul and Tony's Stereo. This was a very involved task, which I documented through photos as it was happening. I suppose I should have mentioned that to the reporter.

At this time, I was working on what would be my swan song for the radio station, a four-hour program on the vampire myth, scheduled to air on Halloween.

After copious research, the program included dramatic readings, sound bites from movies, songs, sound effects, you name it.

Every single minute of it was prerecorded, in part because I wanted to add music and sound effects behind my on-air exposures (the hosting segments). This was unusual. Normally, while we had prerecorded dramatic readings and skits, the only time we prerecorded an entire show was when I was going to be away on vacation and wanted someone else to just run a tape.

Because of the move, I had to record the show in several different places: some of it in the old production studios, some in the new production studio (which still hadn't had all the bugs worked out), some in the student audio lab in Sparks Building and some on a portable reel-to-reel, which I ran through my four-track mixer in my apartment!

The show, "In Search of the Vampire," even got a little press coverage before it aired, due to a reporter seeing one of my fliers and being intrigued.

The show went off without a hitch and, except for subbing for a jazz shift here and there, that pretty much ended my involvement with the station. Even though I stayed around Penn State for four more years, for three of them I was heavily involved with my work as a grad student, working towards a MFA in English.

In my days at WPSU, I spent so much time there it was practically a second home. Over the years, I met many friends that way and brought many of my own friends in to work on radio shows, whether as voices or eventually, as writers and hosts.

So while the paragraph that ran in the Penn Stater isn't inaccurate in any way, it's a pale shadow of my WPSU experience.

The best way to characterize my days at WPSU is through a story I probably should have shared with the reporter.

One night, we were on air doing CYM, and the program manager at the time — the former CYM host — came through to put a tape in the skimmer. The skimmer was a recorder set to record on-air exposures, so that management could hear everything said on the air and provide feedback later.

At the close of the evening, the writer of that night's show left a message on the chalkboard:

Don,

Thank you for recording our voices.

I think I love you.

Carl

Giggling ourselves silly, we turned off the lights and locked down the station for the night.

More Penn State reminiscences:

May 28, 2003 - Urban Spelunking

November 6, 2003 - Penn State of Change

March 22, 2004 - Reunion in Name Only

Dedicated Idiocy: A Personal History of the Penn State Monty Python Society

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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