[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 23 (Tuesday, February 28, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1532-S1533]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WDEV: SOUNDS LIKE HOME
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, 2006 marks the 75th anniversary of a true
Vermont treasure. Locally owned and operated, WDEV of Waterbury, VT,
first came to the airwaves on July 16, 1931. Its continuing and
expanded presence in Central Vermont and the Champlain Valley ever
since then is a rare and stellar example these days of the invaluable
resources that independent, community-based media can offer.
WDEV station owner and President Ken Squier took the reins of WDEV
from his parents, Guila and Lloyd, who first operated the station at
the same time my own parents were operating a small Waterbury newspaper
nearby, and his parents and mine were friends. If things had gone
differently Ken and I might have had a media conglomerate in the
making. Growing up in the station's studios, Ken's life was steeped in
the culture and the craft of community radio. He understood WDEV's role
in community life, and when he assumed operation of the station, his
approach to community-based programming became the foundation of the
station's lineup. Today the residents of Waterbury and its surrounding
communities turn the dial to WDEV to find everything from a trading
post to buy and sell their goods and treasures, to such off-beat
program offerings as ``Music to Go to the Dump By.'' WDEV is the place
to go for everything from local news to high school sports to school
closings. It has become a vital source of news, information and
entertainment to its devoted audience. WDEV is an authentic piece of
the Vermont that we cherish.
Under Ken's guidance and initiative, WDEV has broadened its scope,
becoming the anchor for the Radio Vermont Group, which now operates
stations devoted to classical and country music, as well as news,
sports and community events. It has taken to the web, where WDEV now
streams two of its most popular morning news programs, ``The Morning
News Service'' and ``The Mark Johnson Show.''
Ken has shepherded WDEV through the years with his acute sensitivity
to the local perspective. I have always enjoyed stopping in to the
station for a quick chat, or greeting Ken and the station's longtime
personalities at local events, from parades to political rallies. I
look forward to chatting with Eric Michaels, Radio Vermont's general
manager and vice-president, every month during his daily morning show.
The connection that WDEV and the voices it carries have to the
community is as distinctive and unique as Vermont is to our country.
Vermont Life recently published a well-crafted piece, ``Community
Radio Speaks,'' featuring the history and highlights of WDEV's 75 years
on the air.
I join my fellow Vermonters in congratulating Ken, Eric, and all the
people who, in 75 successful years, have made WDEV a station with a
true touch for its Vermont audience.
I ask unanimous consent the article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Vermont Life, Spring 2006]
Community Radio Speaks
(By Marialisa Calta)
``Rural radio is important to people,'' intones Eric
Michaels in his mellifluous radio-announcer's voice. He is
taking a break from his duties as on-the-road producer of
WDEV's ``Music to Go to the Dump By,'' broadcasting, on this
particular Saturday in September, from the Tunbridge World's
Fair. ``We feel that if we are out in the community, working
hard, people will know us and respect us. We take our work
very seriously.'' A cow in a nearby 4-H exhibit moos loudly,
and Michaels, fiddling with his equipment, sends a song over
the airwaves, a country-western tune called ``I Don't Look
Good Naked Anymore.''
There, in a nutshell, is the contradiction--and the
strength--of WDEV, which celebrates 75 years of broadcasting
from Stowe Street in Waterbury this July. Smart local
commentary is mixed with ridiculous tunes. Conservative local
pundit Laurie Morrow's show, ``True North,'' broadcasting an
hour or two before nationally known liberal icon Amy
Goodman's ``Democracy Now.'' Patsy Kline, the Texas Tuba
Band, stock car racing from Barre's Thunder Road and Harwood
Union High School boy's basketball share airspace with Miles
Davis, Red Sox baseball, state legislative reports and
Mozart.
It's the place on the dial (550 AM, 96.1 FM and 96.5 FM)
where a Vermonter can tune in for the Dow Jones average of
the milk prices. Where the Associated Press delivers news
from the world, and Bethany Dunbar, an editor at The Barton
Chronicle, delivers the news from the Northeast Kingdom.
A listener whose normal fare comes from ``dedicated''
channels--all-sports, all-talk, all-country-music, all-jazz--
and who accidentally tuned in to WDEV might find the station
bewildering, if not downright schizophrenic. But, as
Middlebury College professor and author Bill McKibben points
out, the hodgepodge of views, opinion, musical styles,
reports (sports, business, agriculture, politics, news)
pretty much reflects the hodgepodge of views, opinion,
musical tastes and interests that make up the average Vermont
community.
McKibben, who included WDEV in a story about the virtues of
a life lived on a small scale that he wrote for Harper's
Magazine two years ago, said that when you listen to the
station ``you hear . . . things that other people are
interested in. Which is pretty much the definition of
community.''
You also hear--and this may be WDEV's genius--the actual
voices of the community. It is nearly impossible for anyone
who has lived in WDEV's broadcast area (which extends south
to Route 4 and north nearly to the Canadian border) to listen
to the station for even a few hours without hearing the voice
of someone the listener knows. It might be Dan DiLena reading
his menu from the Red Kettle in Northfield or Ben Koenig of
the Country Bookshop in Plainfield singing about his store in
a hokey Caribbean accent. It might be Ed from Morrisville,
phoning in to ``The Trading Post'' at 6:30 a.m. to sell an
old-fashioned grinding wheel and a prickly pear cactus. It
might be a birthday wish going out to someone the listener
works with. Or a caller to any one of the talk shows:
``The Mark Johnson Show,'' Morrow's ``True North'' or
progressive activist Anthony Pollina's ``Equal Time.'' If
you listen to WDEV long enough you will get a sense of
what your neighbors are doing and thinking. Which is a
pretty good way to not only define community but to keep
it alive and well.
At the heart of this rich local stew is the station owner
and president, Kenley Dean Squier, who, at 70, has made a
national name for himself (and was part of two Emmy-award
winning broadcast teams) as a television broadcaster covering
stock-car racing and other sports for CBS, NBC, ABC, ESPN,
Fox, Turner Broadcasting and the Speed Channel, among others.
Squier is a walking conundrum, a serious fan of jazz and
classical music with a deep background in the auto racing
world of NASCAR. He is a man equally at home interviewing,
say, Governor Jim Douglas about fuel shortages or health care
or hosting ``Music to Go to the Dump By,'' and reading
advertising copy (including, full disclosure, an ad for this
magazine, a sponsor). He employs an enormous--by corporately
held radio standards--staff of more than 30 yet he is
famously cheap; Bryan Pfeiffer, who cohosts ``For the
Birds,'' (a show about birding), loves to joke about the
single light bulb that Squier allows, the bulb that all the
broadcasters purportedly have to share, unscrewing it from
one broadcast booth and taking it to another.
It is not unusual for Squier, in a single broadcast, to
support the death penalty, criticize the Bush administration
and fulminate about the rise of corporate monopolies. His
station may broadcast conservative Ann Coulter and
independent Congressman Bernie Sanders in the same morning.
``It's as if Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken shared a brain,''
wrote McKibben.
``His watchword is `relevant,' '' says Mark Johnson, who
has been hosting a two-hour weekday call-in show on the
station since 1998. ``It's all about what's meaningful to the
community.''
And you can describe ``meaningful'' in different ways. The
All Men's Moscow Marching Transistor Radio Band, for example,
depends on WDEV to provide music for its parade up the main
street of the village of Moscow every July 4th. Farmers
depend on weatherman Roger Hill's forecasts for haying. Kids
tune in on snowy mornings to hear about school closings.
Representative Sanders recalls that once, when he was on the
air, a station newscaster interrupted him to inform listeners
about an accident on Main Street in Waterbury.
Squier was born to radio; for Christmas 1935, his parents
Guila and Lloyd Squier (then the program director) sent out a
holiday card depicting the infant Ken in front of a set of
building blocks spelling out the call letters WDEV. The
station itself was only four years old, having been started
in 1931 by the visionary Harry Whitehill, owner and operator
of the Waterbury Record and the Stowe Journal. Whitehill was
a man of many trades; he sold stationary, pens and ink, party
gods and wrapping paper from his
[[Page S1533]]
newspaper headquarters at 9 Stowe Street in Waterbury. He was
also Vermont's Collector of Customs, an active post during
Prohibition and a job that brought him frequently to St.
Albans. In 1929, Whitehill heard Vermont's first commercial
radio station, WDQM, there, and, reasoning that ``more
people can hear than can read,'' he returned to his
newspaper to proclaim: ``We need a radio station.''
``Radio was big city . . . worldly stuff,'' writes Squier,
who chronicled the birth of the station in an unpublished
history of WDEV. On July 16, 1931, the dulcet tones of
Miss Kate Lyons of Waterbury Center singing ``The Rose in
the Garden'' were sent over the airwaves, marking the
station's official launch. The antenna was a copper wire
strung from the newspaper office to a nearby funeral
parlor.
It was a glorious venture, an opportunity, as U.S. Senator
Warren R. Austin put it, ``to sell a cow or an idea, quickly
to a great number of people.'' The engineer for that first
broadcast was 28-year-old Lloyd Squier, the son of the
Whitehills'' housekeeper. The young Squier (now known as
``The Old Squier'' and frequently heard on the station via
old recordings) soon moved up to program director responsible
for an entire hour of airtime a day. Fred Somers & Sons
Hardware (still on Main Street in Montpelier) was an early
sponsor.
Within a year, the station was broadcasting local sports,
legislative hearings and other events of note. By 1936, the
WDEV offices were a ``mini-media Mecca'' according to Ken
Squier, complete with Western Union, New England Telephone
and Telegraph Co., the radio station and the newspapers all
under the same roof. ``Because of radio, people can live
among the most beautiful hills on earth, our own Vermont
hills, and yet in an instant feel the pulse of world affairs
by simply turning a switch,'' said then-Lieutenant Governor
George Aiken in dedicating a new tower and transmitter that
year.
Nowadays, what makes WDEV stand out is not that it brings
us world news, but that--unlike the huge networks of radio
stations fed formatted shows from a remote central location--
it brings us the local happenings. The staff, on any given
day, might be broadcasting from a State House hearing, the
opening of the Farm Show or a county fair, a race at Thunder
Road (which Ken Squier co-owns), a high school hockey game, a
ribbon-cutting at a local lumber store or from a phone booth
in downtown Montpelier, as Michaels did during the flood of
1992. (Michael's phoned-in report--replete with operator's
request for additional coins--aired on the morning of the
flood when the rising waters prevented him from getting
through the city). Events like the flood, in fact, underscore
the station's importance; Squier enlisted every employee--
from the news staff to the sales reps--as reporters that day.
The payoff came when then-Governor Howard Dean, asked at a
press conference how he was keeping abreast of flood news,
answered that he had been listening to WDEV.
Another of the station's strengths is the number of
unforgettable radio personalities who have taken on larger-
than-life characteristics in listeners' minds: Buster the
Wonder Dog (Squier's own border collie); the station's
country band, the Radio Rangers; Farmer Dave; the Old Squier;
Ma Ferguson; Glen Plaid; Seymour Clearly and Spike the Cat.
Past and current broadcasters--the late ``Cousin Harold''
Grout (who hosted ``The Trading Post'' for at least 30
years), the late Rusty Parker (who suffered a fatal heart
attack in 1982 while broadcasting the morning news) and many
more--seem like old friends to regular listeners.
In addition to sports of local interest--70 local high
school basketball and hockey games, Norwich University
hockey, local motor sports events, Red Sox games and
Mountaineers baseball--WDEV has pioneered ``sporting events''
that have become community institutions: the Winter Croquet
Tournament, Opening Day at the ABCD Deer Camp, Opening Day at
Perch Camp (an ice-fishing extravaganza), the State Agency of
Transportation Snow Plow Championships and the Joe's Pond Ice
Out competition, to name a few.
There is no doubt in this era of corporately owned radio
stations that a locally owned station like WDEV and its Radio
Vermont affiliates (WLVB-FM in Morrisville, a country
station, and WCVT-FM, a classical music station in Stowe) are
anomalies.
An analogy can be made, in fact, between the physical
landscape and the aural landscape of Vermont. Think of
corporate-owned stations--what Mark Johnson calls
``electronic jukeboxes''--as sprawl. Public radio is
analogous to state parks and land in conservation trusts.
WDEV is analogous to the working landscape. Like tractors and
manure pits, it's not always pretty. But it's real. And it's
distinctive.
``It's a station that understands the community and
understands what the real issues are,'' says Congressman
Sanders. He has held hearings on the recent trends in
communication law that enable large media conglomerates to
own large numbers of stations. ``Local ownership of media is
increasingly important and increasingly rare,'' he said in a
telephone interview. ``When it goes, something valuable is
lost.''
Loyal listeners would say that ``something'' is a piece of
Vermont.
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