How the trouble began

Sam Smith - Not long after I arrived at Harvard sixty years ago, I joined the student radio station, WHRB-FM. I would come to have a jazz show (Jam with Sam), a four hour Saturday Show featuring an ad hoc mixture of news, music, interviews, and live performances, as well as becoming news director and then station manager, only to have the latter post quickly rescinded after being placed on academic probation. I had thought that WHRB was a Harvard honors major but it turned out it was only an extra-curricular activity. So it was with no little pleasure that last weekend I joined three hundred other ghosts (the station’s name for its alumni) at a 75^th anniversary event in Cambridge Mass.

The station, among other things, had served as a salon des refuses for students whose personalities and preferences didn’t quite fit with those of the university they were attending, a sort of haven for imagination, independence, special interests and just plain quirkiness.

That this continues to be the case was hinted by the lack of any note of greeting or appreciation from the president of the university (although perhaps in best WHRB tradition it had just been thrown away). After all, even the latest studios are relegated to a somewhat obscure locale.

None of which, however, made any difference to the ghosts in attendance who included present or former music critics for the NY Times, New Yorker, and Boston Globe, as well as some who had worked in journalism for CBS, CNBC, and NPR, a former top aide to Ted Kennedy, and folk singer Tom Rush. Among ghosts those not there were Bruce Morton, Chris Wallace, a friend who ended up in Allenwood federal penitentiary and Lew Walling, a fondly remembered staffer who was one of the first 40 American servicemen killed in the Vietnam War.

As I sat at a dinner table occupied by a former sound engineer, another ex-news director, and one time producers of jazz, classical and folk music programs, I was reminded that one of the skills WHRB had taught was how to work in common cause with those of notably different abilities and passions.  Your clever news report depended on a sound engineer starting the tape at precisely the right moment and one’s knowledge of Mozart meant little if it turned out that you had forgotten to run one of the scheduled ads.  

And for most of us there, WHRB had given us some of the skills and passions we would use the rest of our lives.

My memoir of WHRB is here including the story of how I helped start the only student riot Harvard had during my stay there.