My name’s Rick Lee, I was hired in 1963 to come to Boston and Cambridge to be a producer in radio. I had been hired by WGBH earlier to work in putting WFCR on the air in Amherst. What there was of a radio network at the time was WGBH, WFCR, and WAMC. We were beginning to expand that, and by the time of the March on Washington, had links in, which was August of 1963, had links to WRVR in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia, as well as WAMU in Washington. George Geesey was, he became station manager at AMU, I’m not sure he was in ’63; he may have been. Al Hulsen was our program director in Boston, and Al and George were the main anchors who went to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 1963.

At that time, in the early 60s, GBH had a relationship with WFCR; it held WFCR’s license at that time, and also with WAMC in Albany. None of these were broadcasting in stereo, but they all had sub-carriers, and because Great Blue Hill and Mount Lincoln and Mount Greylock are line of sight to one another, we could do two-way and three-way conversations both on the air and not on the air. Among those three stations, so we had the ability, without relying on phone lines and there wasn't satellite access, to do a variety of experiments with two-way and three-way radio. The Albany medical conferences were done that way every day at noon from WAMC Albany with connections with the other two stations. And in Amherst, before WFCR went on the air, formally and then when it did, we were doing a lot of two-way broadcasts into classrooms, where world experts in Boston and elsewhere would be available for Q&A as well as lecture presentations to classrooms full of students.

And I was the general manager of the student station in Amherst at the time and Don Quayle called and asked me if I would produce some of these two-way experiments. And I thought that's what I was going to be doing when I came to Boston, actually. But it turned out that most of that work was then being done by engineers in Boston.

The chief engineer in radio was Bill Busiek, and Andy Ferguson, who was on the March on Washington recordings, was also an engineer at the station, and there were a number of others. But mainly what I was doing was design of these network operations, but course the March on Washington came - I’d been working at the station in Cambridge only two months, and was just beginning to get some orientation of what was going on. And then I was essentially doing the work that Al Hulsen had left behind when he went to Washington. I was fundamentally producing the Boston end of things, which meant panel discussions with Geoffery Godsell, the news that Louis Lyons was doing every night, and a bunch of tape editing of pieces that were used on air in between, when either nothing was happening or we didn’t have a clear ability to get what was happening.

You have, actually, I think in the archive some material that may not have been broadcast live because we were relying on telephone lines that were not very reliable. And so I think what you have our recordings that may have been made in WAMU in Washington, which are quite clean and continuous, and we kept losing signal and then spending a lot of time talking with the phone company. We were using a lot of reused tape. This was at a time that most tape editing was done physically with a razor blade and an EditAll block. I did a lot of that, but not of the live broadcast. I was doing things that were used as fills or bumpers, or things in-between. Including some of the panel discussions and interviews that were done in Boston.

The number didn't exist, really, until the March on Washington. The part that did exist was Boston, Amherst, Albany. Great Blue Hill, on which the WGBH transmitter sits, is line-of–sight to Mount Lincoln in Pelham, Massachusetts, which is where WFCR broadcasts from, which is line of sight to Mount Greylock in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is where WAMC Albany broadcasts. And in those days the FM transmitters had sub-carriers that were not being used for stereo because the stations weren’t broadcasting in stereo until 1967. So these sub-carriers were being used for talk back, essentially. So it was possible over that network to do live conversations without anybody throwing a switch.

Dealing with the telephone company, we were theoretically to have that degree of transparency and by September or October of 1963, we began doing broadcasts every night with George Geesey in Washington, Jim Keeler in Philadelphia, and T.F. Connelly, Tom Connelly, who was my boss in Boston. And they were able, all three of them, to talk freely with each other when the network was really up. Now this is following the period that George Geesey was describing where you actually had to throw a switch to either transmit or receive; it was by September October we had lines going both ways. The way the network, I'm sure George described this to you, the way the network existed before these phone lines were bicycled tapes, where the station would record a program, broadcast it, send it to the next station down the road which would then a week later carry that same program, which would then take that same physical tape and mail it to the next and the next and the next. But of course that wouldn’t work for news programs; they would be very stale. So that's when we got into trying to work out ways of doing either the line of sight transmissions or on telephone lines. But the telephone company wasn't able consistently to provide very good connections. Things got a little better after we began to do it every day, but at the time of the March on Washington coverage, George and the people in Washington I think had really quite good audio and you’ve got good recordings of that.