The following anecdotes, newspaper clippings and other WPRB memorabilia from 1960-1969 are taken from the book WPRB's 50th Anniversary: A History of Princeton University Radio 1940-1990, edited by Adam M. Rosen '91.

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It's 4:50 on a December afternoon in 1960. WPRB is twenty years old, and so am I. I'm glancing at the clock during The Music Shop Show, which I hosted from February, 1958, to June, 1961. WPRB had recently boosted its power from 88 to 17,000 watts at 103.9 MHz; but since FM receivers were hardly commonplace in that day, we simulcast to the campus on 640 KHz, an old civil defense frequency. My show featured artists like the Four Freshmen, June Christy, Teddi King, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Percy Faith, Nelson Riddle, Jackie Gleason, the HiLos and the Kingston Trio, whose LPs I borrowed from the Music Shop at the University Store in return for on-air mentions.

Early rock stars like Ricky Nelson, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Paul Anka lifted Holder Hall off its foundation during the program following mine each day at five o'clock, Ward Sylvester's Spins 'n Needles. Rock was three years old, and I figured it didn't have a prayer. Sometimes Ward would grab the other microphone and trade insults with me on the air. But Ward had seen t he future, and it was rock (anyone heard Vic Damone on the radio recently?)!

WPRB was a superior introduction to professional broadcasting, leading to announcing jobs at the Voice of America, WCSC-AM, South Carolina, and WTAR-AM, Norfolk, Virginia, before I switched to advertising time sales in 1973. Today, I'm an account executive at Tribune Broadcasting's WGN-TV in Chicago, Illinois. - H. Brian Eyerly '61

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You know how sometimes you doubt your own recollections, when something is just too good to be true? I have a memory like that of WPRB. About twenty-five odd years ago I witnessed one of the watershed events of this century in the studios in the basement of Holder Hall. Only after careful reflection have I decided that it did indeed happen as I remember it and that I'm not just imagining things. I was, however, convinced when I realized that something in such utter bad taste could have only happened at WPRB. You see, I was present at the very first utterance of the greatest expletive of the 20th century: 'Fucking A.'

It happened sometime in 1961, maybe 1962, but no later than that I am sure. I defy anyone to find an earlier use of that lyrical profanity (don't confuse the phrase with 'A-okay' made so popular by the astronauts). Of course, since then the phrase has captivated the English-speaking world, being of particular attraction to those serving in the military. No doubt the prevalence of war in the national conscience and consciousness since then has accounted for the rapid dissemination of the phrase. It wasn't long before the phrase rivaled and then surpassed other gems, like 'snafu' and 'bubkus.' You have to admit that 'Fucking A' flows so easily off the tongue. It has the natural flavor of apple pie to it. It's difficult to appreciate it for what it is...a truly seminal expression, the ultimate primal scream, the shadow of humanity's deepest frustrations leaping off the wall of Plato's cave into the concrete world.

It was all due to Studio A. In those days, everything at WPRB was broadcast out of Studio B, an intimate glassed-in box only large enough to hold a DJ and a few sycophants. Studio A was larger, but its console never worked. If it weren't for the fact that the large conference table in Studio A was a perfect place to set down those big boxes that pizza come in (even then!), Studio A would have been of no use whatsoever.

Two members of the engineering staff, Minet and Auslander, decided to change this, though I'm not sure why. They espoused the Che Guevara school of electronics. Their modus operandi was to plug in anything on the fritz and hope that it exploded, because the sparks would pinpoint the problem. (They applied this principle to my roommate's malfunctioning stereo and in 30 minutes transformed it into scrap metal.) That's why the console in Studio A was so fascinating to them. It exploded with the persistence of a Mexican fiesta, which may have explained their predilection for working at it late at night with a case of cheap beer at hand.

During one of these late night escapades, Minet was on his back under the console monkeying with some wires, while Auslander was standing up, hovering over the monster with his eyeglasses way down on the tip of his pimply nose, hoping to see the damn thing pop. I could see them through the window out of Studio B while I was on the air. I'm not sure exactly what happened next. Whatever it was, t he lights flickered momentarily and Minet screamed 'FUCKING A!!!' so loudly that even with my earphones on I could hear him. And he continued yelling the words over and over, while he hopped around holding his right hand. So, when Auslander, who now was totally cracking up over his buddy's misfortune, pushed open the door to Studio B to share the merriment with me, those fateful words went out ever so clearly over the air, making my engineer blanch. And, as Minet continued to yell and Auslander continued to prop open the studio door with his doubled-over body, those words continued to go out over the air, until the engineer came to his senses and flipped the switch. Of course, we never heard a word of complaint, proving that no one, not even the FCC, was listening.

I don't think Minet, after his pain subsided, ever used the words again. But Auslander did, all the time, and so did everybody else, me included. Soon, it was all over campus. From there, it conquered the nation. Tomorrow, the world, as they say.

Of course, nobody knew what the 'A' was, except for the few of us there that night. But it didn't matter what 'A' was. It really had nothing to do with any 'A' in particular. The phrase lassoed the Zeitgeist; 'A' really stood for everything so maddening and so frustrating that it couldn't be put into words. What happened to Minet that day was just a happy accident, something like Newton and the apple. I mean, if he had yelled 'Fucking B,' who would have noticed? Auslander probably would have given a little chuckle and that would have been it. - Stephen Pribula '63

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Many of my fondest memories of Princeton are associated with WPRB. I joined the staff as an engineer during the spring semester of my freshman year, and qualified for announcing assignments as well shortly thereafter. I was on the staff when the frequency changed from 103.5 to 103.3 and when the studios were rebuilt and WPRB became a stereo station.

By 1964, there were a number of stereo-FM stations in the country. Virtually all of them programmed classical music. Top 40 music was rare on the FM band at the time. I believe there was a 24-hour Top 40 station in Oklahoma in the mid-'60s (at least rumor had it so). The 'hits' of the day were typically sold as monaural 45 RPM singles. No station I know of stocked stereo albums with the tracks for a Top 40 playlist, so stereo rock and roll was unheard (and unheard of) on the airwaves of 1964.

My good friend and engineer for the Monday afternoon rock show, Bob Orban '67, and I decided to end the WPRB broadcast season (and my senior year) with a two-hour stereo rock show. At this late date, I can't remember whether it was May 4 or May 11, 1964, but I believed then, and have no contradictory evidence to this day, that the show was history's first anywhere stereo rock and roll broadcast.

Another story has to do with the hit record 'Walk Right In' by the Rooftop Singers. For reasons only he may be able to explain, my classmate, Jim Perry, decided on first hearing the song that it deserved to be a hit. It happened to be a track that was playable within the 'easy listening,' Top 40 and (with some broadmindedness) folk music formats. Jim's enthusiasm for the song lead to a decision to 'lean on' it (play it on the hour and half-hour every 90 minutes throughout the day with the exception of classical and jazz format time slots). We already knew that several influential New York disk jockeys and program directors listened to 'PRB occasionally (to track the taste of the 'college crowd,' I suppose). 'Walk Right In' was soon picked up by New Brunswick and Newark stations and by the major New York City stations not long after. It's possible that the song would have become a big hit without our help, but at least one trade publication gave credit to WPRB. Personally, I've never thought the song was that great.

I also recall another, less intensive and much less successful, effort to 'hype' a song. In 1962 or early 1963, Hurst Groves '63 found that an obscure record label had sent us a promotional copy of the number one song in the United Kingdom. The song, by an unknown Liverpool band, had received no attention on this side of the Atlantic. We gave the song quite a bit of play on our Top 40 shows for a couple of weeks. The response we got, when we got any at all, was negative ("awful song," "awful sound"). The song went nowhere at the time. It became a huge (very huge) hit about a year later after Capitol Records and the Ed Sullivan Show had intensively promoted and 'introduced' the Beatles to the U.S. In the '60s at least, 'PRB had a habit of being far ahead of its time; so far ahead that there often was practically no audience. We had a marvelous time anyway." - Murphy A. Sewall '64

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Memories of 1962-1963: Watching some of our 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. rock DJs combo their own fast-moving shows was always a treat. How many of us can remember peering into the control room to watch tight-cueing Hurst Groves working the old Collins mixer and the three turntables to record his next day's show through Channel 2 while doing that day's show live on Channel 1?

Election Day, November, 1964: Murphy was thinking of us when he wrote his law. A WPRB remote team had gone up to New York to embellish our coverage of the Johnson-Goldwater contest live from the election returns headquarters of, I believe, one of the national radio networks or press services. On the way up to the studio after sunset to get ready for the broadcast, I noticed a bright light shining from near the top of the antenna above Holder Tower. A group of us navigated up the pigeon-blessed stairs in the tower for a closer look and discovered arcing between the top antenna bay and a guy wire. A hole had been burned through the outer shell of the bay and was venting the insulating gas. To save the transmitter, we powered down and, while serenaded by the production team screaming outrage at us for blacking them out during prime time, reconfigured the antenna coax to use just the bottom two bays. By the time we got back on the air, LBJ's landslide over Goldwater was history." - Bill Duncan '66

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I would be interested to know how many WPRB alums from the 1960s faced the terror of unpronounceable and phonetically misleading Vietnamese name on hastily grabbed wire-service copy for their maiden news broadcasts. - Thomas C. Ragan, Jr. '66

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I was a rock DJ ('The Weyl Child') and occasional newsman for 'PRB from 1964-1967. Among my colleagues at the station then were Paul Friedman, who went on to become Executive Producer of ABC's World News Tonight, Bob Orban, whose engineering genius made him a well-known broadcast technician, Rick Rosenthal (a.k.a. Rick Arnett), last glimpsed as a news anchor on Channel 9 in Chicago (I ran into him once at a White House luncheon for regional broadcasters in 1984), and Paul Gray ('The Rotund One'), the only 'PRB alum I've kept up with; he's now a Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

What I remember most from those days and nights in the basement: doing all-night rock marathons just for the hell of it, and getting requests from the people stocking shelves at the A&P in Trenton...covering the opening of the 1964 World's Fair in NYC, gagging on 'It's a Small World After All'...and the great NYC blackout, when 'PRB suddenly became one of the few radio stations still on the air, transmitting news for the big guys in the powerless Big Apple. I also interviewed Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee; he was so impressed that he passed my name along to Esquire, which featured a shot of me reading The Incredible Hulk in their issue on campus fads. Sic transit gloria...

The music was British Invasion and early psychedelia, my broadcast heroes were Big Dan Ingram of WABC (the tightest intros in the biz) and Soupy Sales, and while we tried damn hard to sound professional under the steely gaze of 'Paulie' Friedman, we were really just having fun. - Peter Weyl '67

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When I arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1966, I brought a suitcase full of British pop records of the era. I very quickly realized that all these records were knock-offs of what was happening in the U.S. Motown was flourishing. I discovered Blues and Jazz and even though Chuck Berry was a disappointment at one of our dances, I was deeply in awe of the rich heritage of American music.

WPRB was at that time firmly devoted to easy listening like Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, classics in their way, but not exactly 1966 teenage stuff. I got a spot on the WPRB roster because Boyd Britten (now 'Doc on the Rock' at KROQ in Los Angeles), thought my voice sounded like the world service of the BBC.

After a year of this 'dreadful' music, I went back to England for the summer of 1967. Apart from Sergeant Pepper, it was the summer of Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Cream. When I got back to Princeton in the fall of 1967, the playlist opened up a bit, and for a few months we did daily shows featuring loud rock and roll from a mobile set-up in one window of the University Store. It was fun to wander around on the sidewalk with a microphone interviewing passers-by and playing the latest batch of records from England. I'm firmly convinced that WPRB actually premiered a good many records that didn't really kick off in the U.S. until early 1968. - Rupert Macnee '69

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To read a decade-by-decade history of WPRB, click on the links below.

1940s - 1950s - 1960s - 1970s - 1980s - 1990s