Quayle:
I'm Don Quayle and I live in
Bethesda, Maryland. I am right now retired
and have been for a number of years after a very lengthy career in
first, educational noncommercial broadcasting, later turned into public
broadcasting. I came into the eastern part of the country at the
invitation of Hartford Gunn who used to be general manager of WGBH television and radio. He asked me
to move to
Boston in
1960, which is why I was manager of WGBH-FM at the time that the March on Washington
occurred.
I remember that the main reason that he wanted me to
come to WGBH grew out of a seminar
that we had in
Wisconsin, of
managers of educational radio and television stations. And evidently at
that time I held forth on a passion of mine, which was that networking
and interconnection would be the only solutions to noncommercial
broadcasters being able to provide a quality broadcast service, because
by doing that you could aggregate the resources that all stations had,
and upgrade quality of every stations’ program service. So he asked me
to come to
Boston not only to
manage WGBH, but to start a regional
Radio Network. Which we did; that was the Educational Radio Network, and
it interconnected stations by telephone lines from
Boston to
New York to
Philadelphia and
Washington and back. And I emphasize
that because this was a round robin style of interconnection.
The problem was that in looking forward to the future,
we didn't have a station in
Washington D.C., which was critical to this whole concept of
a regional network. What we did as a result of that was we put a new
transmitter on the air in
Boston, and a new station with a new transmitter on the air
in
Amherst, WFCR. At the time that we bought that new
transmitter, and put it on
Great Blue Hill - which is what GBH stands for - we sold our
old transmitter to American
University, so they could put a station on the air. And WAMU went on the air on
May 6, 1961, using that transmitter. Now
that transmitter is the number five transmitter that
Major Edwin Armstrong built. He was
the inventor of FM broadcasting. And when WAMU a few years later bought a new transmitter for
broadcast, that transmitter was donated and still exists at the Smithsonian
Institution.
We put that network together, and a gentleman by the
name of
Jerome Wiesner,
who came from MIT, joined the
administration of the new Kennedy administration when he was elected president. We
learned that he had to divest himself of certain stocks, so as to not
have a conflict of interest, and knowing that he had come into certain
cash, we asked him for a donation to help support this new network. He
agreed, and it was with that money we rented the telephone lines from
the telephone company for that round robin interconnection. And when we
signed on the air in the fall of
1961,
Jerome Wiesner was the
speaker that dedicated the establishment of the Educational Radio
Network from the studios at WAMU at
American
University.
And through NET, National Educational
Television in
New
York, we persuaded the Ford Foundation to put up money that they had
originally dedicated to radio, to support this network. They did that
through NET. At that time, this would have been
July of ’62. I moved from WGBH to
New
York and became Director of Radio Services for NET. What
we did by doing that is we put the ‘R’ back into NETRC. It then became,
it became the National Educational Television and Radio Center.
There were two aspects to the radio; one was this
regional connected network, of which I was then the director. The other
one was the Broadcast Foundation of America. And what that was simply
was the collection of radio programs of the great concerts of
Europe, and some 15-minute press
review programs. So the Broadcast Foundation of America was set up in
order to handle these programs, because of a political difference of
opinion between WNYC and NET, and
the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, NAEB that had
wanted this project to get underway decided they didn't want to handle
these programs so NET said they would.
So we had the Educational Radio Network and Broadcast Foundation of
America as a part of NET, funded by the
Ford Foundation with
monies that they have previously allocated for radio.
We did a number of things that were broadcast by the
regional network, the main one being our daily magazine program, which
would broadcast at five o'clock, with inputs from every station. And
that’s why the round robin interconnection system was so important
because every station could feed the network as well as received from
it. That is the ones that were interconnected by the landline. That
program was produced by
Susan
Stamberg, who's now at NPR, and it was a precursor, if you will, to the All Things
Considered that NPR started many
years later. But anyway, we had that program, which is daily magazine
program, and a co-host of the program in
Washington and in
Philadelphia. We did that, and we
covered a number of smaller, less significant live events prior to the
March on
Washington.
The March
on Washington, coming in late
1963,
was a traumatic experience for me personally. And I made the first of
two major mistakes in my career in public broadcasting, because I was on
vacation at the time, and I was going to leave when we heard that the
March was going
to occur. I was going to leave vacation and come back to
Washington so we could all
be involved in it. And then I learned that the money at the Ford Foundation had run
out. That they weren’t going to give any more money to radio. They had
finalized the grant that they were going to give to NET, and it had three
major provisions: they were going to give NET $6 million, the
largest grant ever given to noncommercial broadcasting at that time. The
three major conditions were: one, that instructional television would be
cut out; second, that stations’ relations would be cut out, they would
not fund that; and third, was that radio would be cut out. So radio
funding at NET would end. That meant that the Educational Radio Network
would end, as it was then constituted.
At that particular moment, knowing the March on Washington
was coming up, I reasoned that it was better for everyone who was
actually involved in the actual production of programming to have that
last opportunity to do that coverage of that event. The resources were
there, I was still director of the network, they had all they needed in
terms of production personnel in order to do the job, and we decided to
go ahead. I decided not to let them know that the de-funding would take
place until after the event was over. And I was not actually in
Washington at the time that
the coverage on the March happened. But I do believe, as I recall, that the ERN
coverage of the March was the only live broadcast of that event. And there
were film cameras; there were TV units down there recording everything.
But I don't think that anybody else broadcast it live except the
Educational Radio Network, and it was the last big live broadcast that
ERN did until it was reorganized later.
The primary coordinator of the broadcast was George
Geesey and
Susan
Stamberg here in
Washington. They informed everybody about what would be done
from downtown on the
Mall, and the arrangement of the interconnection system was
such that every station along the route could feed into it as long as
you broke the round robin. So that if it was feeding up from
Washington and
Philadelphia wanted to
insert they would stop the feed and feed on and that would go around and
everybody would get the broadcast. People in
Philadelphia and
Boston and
New York would tell George what if
anything they had to offer or they had to contribute. In addition, some
of those people came to
Washington from some of the other stations and were down on
the
Mall at George's
beck and call, Malcolm Davis, that worked for me at NET in
New York, who had come from
BBC Radio many years before that,
was live on the
Mall
and working at their behest, so George and
Susan organized it and everybody contributed
what they could.
The broadcast certainly was the most significant thing
that the Educational Radio Network did, and it was interesting that it
was the last big event that ERN covered and performed. It also provided
one of the strongest arguments for renewing the effort involving
stations to be interconnected and to form a network. It was one of the
strongest arguments that I used when we were at CPB to argue for the creation of PBS and NPR.
Because with that kind of programming, with that kind of coverage of
events that could be then national, it was important that those networks
be formed and be organized. And I think that a lot of the work that we
did at ERN and at EEN proved to be a very strong precursor to arguing
for a national network later on, when the funds became available through
CPB.
I was aware of some of the impact and some of the
essence of what the March
on Washington was all about when I heard the “I have a dream”
speech. Prior to that time, it was part of a rising feeling of searching
for self-rights, for individual rights, for eliminating racial
prejudice, and we realized that an event such as this was something that
was newsworthy, would make news, would be significant. We never knew how
much of an impact it would have until you heard that speech. Even then
it was kind of hard to judge in to the future but you listen to that
speech even today, and it just curdles your blood! It just makes you so
pleased, and so optimistic about what the future could be, and how
closed-minded the past had been.