Harvard Business School Alumni

WHBS, 820 on Your Dial

By Keith Larson | Dec 19, 2008

Almost fifty years before HBS developed a broadcast presence with its own Web site in 1996, the School had a rather limited one: the radio station WHBS, which was in operation from 1948 to 1964 or 1965. It was limited because the broadcasting was done via HBS’s power lines, only to campus buildings. Since it was not, technically, “on the air,” the station was unlicensed and not subject to FCC regulation.

In January 1948, members of the MBA Class of 1948 who were radio hams had made it possible for HBS to receive the programs of WHRV, the Harvard Radio Network, from across the river. Also that January, students produced the first HBS radio program, which was broadcast over WHRV. Later a group of students decided to build the School’s own station and assembled the equipment for it.

They rewired and added to a radio receiver, converting it into a transmitter. The amplifier was made from a 35-cent breadpan turned upside down with holes punched in it to accommodate tubes, microphone inputs, and gain controls. With this equipment, two microphones, and soundproofing rugs and blankets hung from the ceiling of a cramped basement room in McCulloch Hall, WHBS went “on the air” on March 11, 1948, with Professor of Business History N.S.B. Gras speaking on the “Socialization of American Industry.”

At first, WHBS broadcast for 4 hours every evening, Monday to Thursday. The number of broadcast hours expanded (to five nights a week in 1950 and to 6½ hours each evening in 1954) and shrank several times over the years, depending on available personnel. The hours were filled the first year with a series of faculty speakers, roundtable discussions, a “Connoisseur’s Corner” musical series, occasional recorded comedy, an HBS Sports Roundup, a late-night news summary drawn from the New York Times, and other campus news.

Later years saw a great variety in program content: visiting businessmen as guest speakers, Career Guidance Forums, “Music to Study By,” “Music to Relax By,” “Open House” (in which individual students were interviewed), “Meet the Faculty,” WAC, Business Policy, and other case discussions by faculty, “Job Market,” “Mystery Melody” (an audience call-in program), and such services as weather forecasts and the morning menus at Kresge. Students had their own disk-jockey programs of pop, folk, and classical music. Jim May (MBA ’64G) played an hour of international pop music every week using records borrowed from a music store in Harvard Square. He remembers that the day Edith Piaf, France’s famed chanteuse, died, he devoted the hour to her songs.

Each year 20-40 students were members of the station, involved in announcing, DJ-ing, promotion, management, or engineering. After an initial grant of $350 from the Student Association, the station paid its operating expenses through advertising.

Besides providing business and technical experience, WHBS’s stated goals were to give students information, promote faculty-student relations, and provide social functions for its members. The station organized parties with the radio staffs of Radcliffe, Wellesley, and other nearby women’s colleges and sometimes rebroadcast their programs. During the 1952-53 academic year, the station had a “Wellesley Blind Date” show. In 1962, broadcasting from a refurbished studio in the basement of Glass Hall, a group of “Program Girls” presented “The Bedtime Hour” once a week, “which was known to turn into a twist party in the hall outside the studio.”

For some unknown reason (maybe one of you readers knows why), the station stopped broadcasting in 1964 or 1965, and the Harvard Crimson reported on March 3, 1965, that the equipment (four turntables, a 50-watt transmitter, a main control panel, and lots of old 78s) was sold to Winthrop House, one of Harvard College’s residential houses for upper classmen.