WCPE's Silver Anniversary

WCPE's William Woltz tells the story of The Classical Station from its humble beginnings to the successful international broadcaster that we hear today.

Tuesday, July 18, 1978, was a hot summer day in Raleigh, North Carolina. A handful of volunteers gathered in an old frame house on Wake Forest Road, nervously anticipating a moment toward which they had been working for years.

Shortly before 4 p.m., someone threw a switch and vacuum tubes began to glow inside a home-made transmitter. Then, with a second switch, WCPE Radio was on the air for the first time!

WCPE has come a long way in the last 25 years. Today WCPE is a leader in classical radio, serving central North Carolina and southern Virginia with a 100,00-watt signal on 89.7 FM. WCPE's Great Classical Music is heard throughout North America via satellite, cable TV systems and affiliated radio stations; and listeners worldwide enjoy this music via Internet streaming.

WCPE's story is a remarkable tale of innovation and initiative, combined with the hard work and dedication of countless volunteers. As WCPE celebrates its 25th anniversary this summer, it's a good time to remember the station's truly humble beginnings.

The first program broadcast that July day was a BBC news update, a scratchy, static-filed relay picked up on a shortwave receiver. Then, in a small bedroom-turned-studio, volunteer Dave Bowden switched on the microphone to become WCPE's first announcer on the air. He played a program of easy listening selections for the few listeners who stumbled onto this new sound on their dial at 89.7 FM.

They didn't get to listen long. After thirty minutes the transmitter overheated and shut down, an inauspicious beginning for a radio station that now prides itself on the reliability of its back-up systems. "That was the most embarrassing thing," WCPE General Manager Deborah Proctor recalled recently. Proctor, who heard the station go off the air, hurried from her engineering job at a local TV station to the transmitter site and made a few adjustments. Within minutes WCPE was back on the air.

That evening WCPE played its first classical work, the Organ Symphony of Camille Saint-Saens. With its grand and stirring finale, the work was a fitting tribute to the years of effort that finally came together that day to give birth to The Classical Station, WCPE.

The story began in 1973 when some friends from NC State University came up with the idea of starting a radio station. They formed the Educational Information Corporation and applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a license to operate a two-watt transmitter. It would take five years of planning, fund-raising and scraping together equipment before WCPE would take to the air.

By that time WCPE was licensed to operate at 12,500 watts. Proctor built the first control board and transmitter using military surplus parts. The signal was relayed from the studio to an antenna on the roof of a 12-story building in North Raleigh.

The old house had its quirks. Traffic noise from Wake Forest Road was a problem, and the floor sprang under foot -- not a good thing when all the music was being played off LP records. Frosty Clark, a WCPE engineer an announcer who has been with the station since "day two," remembers those early trials. "Sometimes when somebody would walk into the studio it would bounce the tone-arm right off the record," Clark said. The solution involved building a heavy wooden and steel frame up from the basement through large holes cut in the studio floor. The turntables were mounted to that structure. "That made a much more solid footing for the turntables," Clark said.

WCPE was the first U.S. radio station to air BBC news updates. That brought its own share of adventure. The station had several short-wave receivers, each tuned to pick up the BBC on a different frequency. Just before a newscast the announcer on duty would dash out of the studio, down the hall, and down several steps to the room where the receivers were mounted. The mission was to find which frequency sounded the least noisy at that time, and put that signal on the air. Once, while running to tune the BBC, Proctor tripped and broke her ankle.

From the beginning, WCPE has depended on the faith and generosity of listeners for its operating budget. But in the early days, on-air fund-raisers were supplemented by another source: yard sales, which volunteers conducted in the front yard of the old house on Wake Forest Road.

WCPE was not strictly a classical station in those days. The format included a little of everything: easy listening music; taped broadcasts from Radio Moscow; classic radio shows; disco; a half-hour program on Sundays announced entirely in Italian. And every evening, from seven until sign-off at nine, the WCPE Concert Hall: two hours of Great Classical Music.

Gradually the broadcast day lengthened. Then, in 1982, the station reached a turning point when a new transmitter increased broadcasting power to 33,000 watts. Recognizing that listener contributors favored classical music over other formats, WCPE switched to an all-classical format and began to broadcast around the clock. Thus was born Great Classical Music, 24 Hours a Day. Other milestones followed, and most of them didn't come easily. In 1983 the station applied to the FCC to increase its power to 100,000 watts. Approval would require seven years and a number of petitions. In the meantime, WCPE moved its operations to its current location outside Wake Forest, N.C.

Once full-power authorization came in 1990, the radio station had to acquire the necessary equipment. A local TV station donated its 1,200-foot broadcasting tower, on condition that WCPE undertake the mammoth task of dismantling, moving, and reconstructing the structure.

In 1993 WCPE began to broadcast at 100,000 watts, but with a restriction. The FCC required that the broadcasting antenna be placed only two-thirds of the way up the tower. After more petitions, the FCC allowed WCPE to mount an antenna at the top of the tower, and the station did just that in 1998, installing a sophisticated, first-of-its-kind broadcasting antenna that greatly increased coverage.

But there was still a catch. Because of perceived interference problems to the west, WCPE had to limit its power in that direction. Only last fall did the FCC lift that restriction. Now WCPE is working to remove the antenna "shield" and bring listeners in all directions a full-power signal.

A new chapter in WCPE's history began in 1998 when the station activated its satellite uplink, bringing Great Classical Music to owners of large-dish satellite receivers throughout North America. Soon cable TV systems and other radio stations began to carry WCPE's satellite signal. That same year, WCPE began to stream its musical programming on the Internet literally reaching a world of new listeners.

Today WCPE looks to the future while remaining committed to the goal of bringing Great Classical Music. With all that's been accomplished so far, the next 25 years should prove to be very exciting!

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