WXXY?
WJSL, the campus radio-station at my alma mater, Houghton College (“HOE-tin”), is no more.
Or rather, the station still exists, but no longer the original call-letters, W-J-S-L.
They’ve been replaced by W-X-X-Y.
In the early ‘60s, WJSL was hardly a serious commercial radio-station.
It was more an educational tool.
It was AM, but so weak you could hardly get it outside the Houghton community; the college and the town.
In fact, hit the outskirts and it faded away.
As I recall, WJSL had two studios in the original Fine Arts Building, which was little more than a converted WWII modular building.
WJSL had a tiny record-playing studio with two turntables, plus a larger studio that could swallow the college choir.
I don’t remember this ever being used.
Large cases of soda were stored there.
There also was a small closet with a United-Press-International machine.
It wasn’t a ticker-tape machine; it was typing news onto a continuous roll of paper about 8&1/2 inches wide.
First word of the Kennedy assassination came over this machine.
WJSL also had a large control-room to one side of the new auditorium.
That auditorium was remodeled recently, and that control-room disappeared.
During the summer of ‘62 I worked at WJSL; spinning records in that tiny studio.
I remember our transmitter was a two-foot-high gizmo on the floor.
It wasn’t the “Tower-of-Power” I expected.
It was only 12 watts; WKBW in Buffalo was 50,000.
The college was partial to classical music, so over-and-over I played the conclusion to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
So much a college janitor, probably my only listener, arrived to see what was up.
Some time ago WJSL affiliated with WXXI, the publicly supported classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to.
It was a marriage made in Heaven.
WJSL was essentially a classical-music station.
It could use feeds from WXXI.
It also went FM, and built a hilltop transmitter near Rushford Lake south of town.
It’s semi-independent. It uses WXXI feeds, but also National Public Radio.
One pleasant side-effect of this merger was at long last the staff at WXXI was pronouncing “Houghton” correctly; not “WHO-tin” or “HOW-tin” but “HOE-tin.”
I guess it’s still a college radio-station.
But the call-letters “WJSL” are no more.
And despite the myth advanced by the college’s Christian supporters (it’s a Christian college), “JSL” doesn’t stand for “Jesus’-Saving-Love.”
It stands for “James S. Luckey,” a founder of the college.
Or rather, the station still exists, but no longer the original call-letters, W-J-S-L.
They’ve been replaced by W-X-X-Y.
In the early ‘60s, WJSL was hardly a serious commercial radio-station.
It was more an educational tool.
It was AM, but so weak you could hardly get it outside the Houghton community; the college and the town.
In fact, hit the outskirts and it faded away.
As I recall, WJSL had two studios in the original Fine Arts Building, which was little more than a converted WWII modular building.
WJSL had a tiny record-playing studio with two turntables, plus a larger studio that could swallow the college choir.
I don’t remember this ever being used.
Large cases of soda were stored there.
There also was a small closet with a United-Press-International machine.
It wasn’t a ticker-tape machine; it was typing news onto a continuous roll of paper about 8&1/2 inches wide.
First word of the Kennedy assassination came over this machine.
WJSL also had a large control-room to one side of the new auditorium.
That auditorium was remodeled recently, and that control-room disappeared.
During the summer of ‘62 I worked at WJSL; spinning records in that tiny studio.
I remember our transmitter was a two-foot-high gizmo on the floor.
It wasn’t the “Tower-of-Power” I expected.
It was only 12 watts; WKBW in Buffalo was 50,000.
The college was partial to classical music, so over-and-over I played the conclusion to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
So much a college janitor, probably my only listener, arrived to see what was up.
Some time ago WJSL affiliated with WXXI, the publicly supported classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to.
It was a marriage made in Heaven.
WJSL was essentially a classical-music station.
It could use feeds from WXXI.
It also went FM, and built a hilltop transmitter near Rushford Lake south of town.
It’s semi-independent. It uses WXXI feeds, but also National Public Radio.
One pleasant side-effect of this merger was at long last the staff at WXXI was pronouncing “Houghton” correctly; not “WHO-tin” or “HOW-tin” but “HOE-tin.”
I guess it’s still a college radio-station.
But the call-letters “WJSL” are no more.
And despite the myth advanced by the college’s Christian supporters (it’s a Christian college), “JSL” doesn’t stand for “Jesus’-Saving-Love.”
It stands for “James S. Luckey,” a founder of the college.
posted by BobbaLew at 12:28 PM
3 Comments:
Heh -- they still had the UPI paper feed as late as 1991, when I was at the college, grabbing reams of news off the machine to convert into a script for a news broadcast in my broadcast journalism class ... from which I've never really used anything.
Back in the day, they really tried to bill themselves as "Witnessing Jesus' saving love."
At least they never pronounced themselves "The Frequency of Heaven" as one of the local evangelical stations does on its bumper stickers. That always struck me as a bit presumptious.
Somebody actually read this?
Wheeler, of course!
I remember walking into WJSL once, and reams of paper were cluttering the hallway.
“Will someone please tear the paper off that UPI machine?”
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