When Manhattan Chemical Engineer Louis Schweitzer gave away his $200,000 FM station last year, he did so, he said, because it was threatening to become a commercial success. The December 1958 newspaper strike had brought so many advertisers and so much advertiser interference to New York's WBAI that Schweitzer had to scramble for a way to preserve his programing ideal: "Free radio."
Last week WBAI-FM began broadcasting under new ownership—California's Pacifica Foundation—and Donor Schweitzer's ideal was getting a good run for his money. The station's program is crowded with excellent music, also makes room for viewpoints that would make many a network executive's brush cut burst into flame.
Listeners last week heard Sexologist Albert Ellis give highly unconventional advice on marital and premarital relations. Two days running, Marxist Herbert Aptheker had the chance to speak his mind. But sex and sickles were only a small part of WBAI's offering. A fine panel discussion tied up "Payola and Mental Poverty" in broadcasting, a series of two-hour lectures began on "The History of Music," and other shows looked into fields that varied from "The Art of Clyfford Still" to "The Death of a Wombat."
One principal source of material for WBAI is the British Broadcasting Co.'s famed, culture-heavy Third Programme, which rents records of its shows to the foundation for $1 a disk. This week Gilbert and Sullivan fans can hear a BBC D'Oyly Carte broadcast of Patience, and Shakespeareans will hear Stratford-on-Avon's Shakespeare Memorial Theater company do Twelfth Night. Next week WBAI will play a tape, made in Europe last summer at the Bayreuth Festival, of an uncut (close to five hours) performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger.
No. I Volunteer. Like Pacifica's other two radio stations (San Francisco's ten-year-old KPFA and Los Angeles' six-month-old KPFK), New York's WBAI now operates entirely without commercials, depends on listener contributions to meet its expenses. With a basic subscription of $12, Pacifica has 7,500 contributors in San Francisco; 5,000 have already joined up in Los Angeles. At week's end, after seven days as a noncommercial station, WBAI had 700 subscribers.
The No. 1 subscriber was Louis Schweitzer himself, who was also serving as unsalaried manager. The station could hardly have more fond attention. Schweitzer, one of three brothers in a firm that makes specialty papers (it merged in 1957 with Kimberly-Clark), keeps a G.E. transmitter tube on his desk because he considers it beautiful, has been an active ham operator since 1914.