FTV: Welcome Alumni

 

     Over the years, I have found periodically updating the history of WOAS-FM is the best way to remind locals and newcomers that we are still ‘Your Sound Choice’ in Ontonagon.  Since we began streaming video of our studio and our over the air broadcast signal, we have also become ‘Bad and World-Wide’ (if ZZ Top will forgive us for mangling one of their lyrics (Billy Gibbons’ song I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide first appeared on their Deguello album in 1979.  The song was inspired by Texas bluesman Joey Long, if you were wondering)).  In any event, the 2025 All School Reunion gives us another reason to revisit the past, catch up to the present, and offer an open house from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. for anyone who is interested in stopping by to take a peak at the WOAS-FM studio on Friday, July 25.  *News Break:  Our tower needs to be replaced* and then we will be on the air full time once again at our new home at 91.5 FM.  The new tower won’t be in place for the All-School, but you can still check us out that weekend on the air at 91.5 or on the web at www.woas.fm.org. 

     The best place to start this brief history of WOAS-FM is, of course, at the beginning.  In 1977-78, Ontonagon Area Schools High School librarian Thomas Graham Lee decided our little town needed a radio station.  He filed an application with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) for a license to run a modest Class D 10 watt FM station from a studio located in two rooms off the HS Library.  With no equipment, tower, or studio to broadcast from, Tom literally began from scratch.  A host of student, faculty, and community volunteers came together to get the station on the air by December 17, 1978.  There was no radio station broadcasting from Ontonagon then and local radio celebrity Jan Tucker’s show was carried on a station from afar (first from Ironwood, then Houghton).

     The equipment was all ‘pre-owned’ (used) and donated or purchased at low cost.  The tower, provided by the County Road Commission, was put in place with a lot of manual labor (think building the pyramids or an old fashioned barn raising).  Studio construction and assembly of all the electronic components (both done by volunteers) took a lot of planning and time.  When the station finally took to the air, it featured a broadcast desk with two turntables, a cart machine (a device that played 8-track cartridges), and two massive reel-to-reel tape players.  The ‘cart machines’ were used to play Public Service Announcements (PSAs) and the reel-to-reel players carried canned (pre-recorded) programs during times when live DJs were not on the air.  

     DJs were required to pass an FCC License exam in order to be on the air.  Tom performed the General Manager’s duties as well as instructional duties.  The day shift was staffed by students (many drawn from study halls) and the evening schedule was filled by community volunteers.  Many new things were tried over those first years including broadcasting high school ball games.  If one looks above the ceiling tiles at the school, there are still miles of wiring left over from the network used to do these remote broadcasts.  After the start-up phase was complete, Lee turned over the day to day management to English teacher Margarette Muskatt so Lee could focus on other projects he had in the works.

     In the mid-1980s, interest in WOAS was flagging.  Many of the pre-owned studio pieces  began to lose the will to live.  The Community Schools program in Michigan was still very active in adult and after school education at that time.  The CS director, Mike ‘Zenith’ Bennett, saw an opportunity to grow the station’s reach as part of the CS program.  Mike began writing grants to replace the failing equipment, worked to get more students interested in being on the air, and set up a schedule of evening programs for each day of the week (except for the weekends and when school was out of session).  

     A good example of Mike’s innovative approach was a grant he applied for to support Doug Fillpula’s ‘Walk of Life’ program.  Doug’s show targeted older folks, especially those in the hospital Long Term Care Unit and Maple Manor.  He would open each show with Dire Strait’s Walk of Life and offer old time tunes, brain teasers, and interesting things from the days gone by.  Another example was Linda Graham’s ‘Laulan Voima’ Finnish language show.  The National Museum of Radio in Washington, D.C. asked for tapes of her unique program and we happily obliged them.  The list goes on and on, but the gist of it was simple – people in the community who were passionate about music were offered a chance to share it with listeners within the boundaries of Northern Ontonagon Country.  At 10 watts, the station’s signal was limited by the ‘Bluff’ that extends from Mass City to Rockland.  The one demographic that Mike was proud to say he heard from a lot were the unfortunate folks spending time in the county jail.  They were a ‘captive’ (sorry) but appreciative audience.

     In the mid-1990s, state-wide funding for the Michigan Community Schools program evaporated and the adult education classes disappeared.  Bennet moved into a new position as the elementary school principal before he took another position at Bessemer High School.  With Mike no longer running the station, I volunteered to step up from my position of ‘volunteer DJ’ to ‘General Manager in training’.  Mike stayed in contact so I didn’t exactly feel like the Lone Ranger, but the first two years I was the GM was a crash course in learning the radio gig.  There were many things I didn’t know about broadcasting when I started at WOAS.  At first, I was just making From The Vaults tapes to run during the intervals between live DJ shows.  With Mike gone, we kept on the air with a skeleton crew and started to plan for the future.

     There were two nagging things to tackle as soon as I was put in charge of the station.  The first was the pile of mail that had accumulated when Mike’s new office was a mile down Parker Avenue.  We had a large office desk with a wing that was literally three feet deep with unopened correspondence.  The first CD package I opened was Drive to Survive  by Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers.  Mike had contacted a lot of record labels for music to air but he hit the blues labels hard as that genre was his passion.  Blue Wave Records, Blind Pig (originally based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Thackery’s label), Alligator Records, Antones . . . if a label featured blues artists, we were on their mailing list.  I put Drive to Survive playing as I began sorting mail and became a big fan of Thackery and a host of other Blind Pig artists.

     Deep down in the pile, I found a correspondence from the Federal Communications Commission.  A chill ran down my spine when I read a note that had obviously arrived well before August of 1997.  It was a form reminding us that our license had to be renewed by October of 1997.  Talk about a quick education in FCC regulations!  I am still not sure how I got it in on time, but I did and we survived a close call without losing WOAS-FM.  Since that initial renewal, I have had the pleasure of repeating the process three more times.  I am not complaining as the cycle of license renewals is normal, but each of the renewals I have had to do has been on a different platform.  The first time, it was done on a paper form.  The rest were all done electronically with each cycle featuring a ‘new and improved’ method of filing.  We shall see what the next iteration in this filing process will look like in a few years.

     WOAS-FM operated in this fashion until the OASD School Improvement team began meeting the second year after Mike left.  I volunteered to do an evaluation of the radio station and made recommendations for the future.  Other staff members volunteered (or were volunteered) to write up summaries of other school offerings and special programs.  At the second meeting, we were supposed to report our findings.  The superintendent was a bit dismayed as he went around the room asking for reports on each area.  Nobody else had a report except yours truly which gave me plenty of time to explain the station’s history.  I ended by saying, “The radio station is twenty years old and with the pre-owned equipment failing, we needed to either remodel the station and upgrade the equipment or close the doors.”  

     When asked if I had a list of what was needed and the cost, I said, “Yes, I do.  Here is the list of necessary equipment and assuming free labor, it will cost close to $8,000 dollars to implement these changes.”  Superintendent John Peterson looked at the numbers and said, “We can’t possibly afford it this year.”  Before I could respond, he continued, “Could you still do it if the board allocated $4,000 this year and $4,000 next year?” Thus began WOAS-FM’s third phase of operations.  When the plan was announced, UPPCO’s communications director, Janet Wolfe, contacted us and said, “UPPCO would like to donate $1,000 to the project.”  We were off and running to make our largest capital investment since Mike Bennett’s time as GM.

     With half the money available the first year, we prioritized the two things we could not do without to keep on the air.  Our two engineering consultants, Jim Bradley and Al Harrison, recommended a 25 watt BEXT transmitter and a 10 channel Arrakis broadcast board.  We budgeted new players (cassette and CD) and a CD burner in the next year’s budget.  We already had a basic recording deck/mixing board for the production studio we had purchased with a grant from the Detroit Free Press.  That unit was not ideal but we knew it could be upgraded later.  Before we went on the air in 1998-99, we did some extensive rearranging in both studios.

     About the time we were planning how we would re-do the studio’s layout, the school announced they would be putting new carpeting in the library over the summer.  I happened to run into the carpet company rep when he was measuring the library.  I showed him the station’s two studios and asked what it would take to get them recarpeted as well.  He said, “With a job this size, we will always have enough remnants to do both rooms at no extra cost…BUT…you have to move everything out of them first.”  He said they would be back in a week to do the installation so when the custodial staff emptied the library, I hauled every desk, cabinet, table and the two large equipment bays (housing the two reel to reel tape layers and the transmitter) into the hall by the cafetorium.  It took two days but it was worth it to see how much space we had.  All that was left was to decide which things we could do without.

     After the carpeting was installed, the library aide mentioned there were extra bookshelves in the library at the old elementary building on Greenland Road.  She said, “We are taking them out.  Would you like some for the radio lab?”  Thus we gained one whole wall of free shelves.  With those in place, Al and Jim installed the new transmitter and broadcast board while I worked on putting back the cabinets and tables we would need.  Nobody was spinning vinyl anymore so our record inventory went to St. Vinnie’s in Ontonagon.  The rest of the shelves and cabinets we did not need were put in the custodian’s room with ‘take if you need’ signs attached.  Within a week, they were all gone.  New interior doors and cabinet doors were installed by the students in the woodshop class.  By the end of the 1999-2000 school year, we had a remodeled studio.

     With a stable broadcast system now in place, it was easier to get students scheduled into radio.  Like the old days, students bored with study hall were our best source of day shift DJs.  With our limited signal range, we began exploring the realm of internet broadcasting.  Our techno-whiz in this endeavor was former OASD student and local computer guru Mark Szaroletta.  The school technical director at the time had given us two out-of-date computer towers to adapt for our purposes.  Mark dove into his pile of spare parts and created ‘Kang and Kodos’, the servers we used to stream audio and video from the station onto ‘the internet’.  We had some early success toward this goal (ie:  getting our over the air broadcast online) but every time we got it to work, the Intermediate School District (ISD) in Hancock upgraded their system and put our efforts back to square one.  With the reliability of our online portal proving to be dismayingly unstable, it was hit or miss for the first decade.  Mark’s work life took him elsewhere but we kept trying to make the system more reliable.

     We finally hit on a free streaming service that worked very well, but this free platform suddenly morphed into a ‘pay for your subscription’ service that we could not afford.  When things looked the bleakest on this front, one of the online help techs at the ISD contacted us.  He said he had set up a similar website with audio and video streaming at his old high school downstate.  He offered us a way forward and had us set up in no time at a price (for his consulting work) we could afford.  Steven had the inside knowledge of the systems at REMC 1 (Regional Educational Media Center – a division of the ISD) that we lacked.  He was able to adapt our web feed to work on another free streaming service (Twitch) where we have maintained our online presence ever since.

     Space will not allow me to go over everything involved with us losing the 88.5 frequency to a Class A non-profit group in Marquette.  The best way to catch up with everything that took place between 2021 to the present is to visit www.woas-fm.org and scroll back through the FTV archives to hear the whole story.  The short version goes like this:  We were handed a basket full of lemons when we learned that 88.5 would no longer be our home after more than 40 years.  The generosity of too many people to name here allowed us to make gallons of lemonade which we can now use to toast to our new home at 91.5 FM.  The 2023 fundraising campaign did more than just allow WOAS-FM to continue.  We started with a modest $3,000 goal for a new transmitter and in the end, people donated six times that amount.  We started in ‘we just need a new transmitter’ mode and ended up replacing that unit, adding a new equipment bay, purchasing a new broadcast board, and ordering new tower elements tuned to our new 91.5 frequency.

     It would be great to have had enough money left in our account to have some station swag available for the open house.  Unfortunately (or should I say ‘fortunately’?) all of our funds have gone into the station’s new equipment.  If those of you who visit us during the All School Reunion want to get some up to date 91.5 promotional materials, we will be able to accommodate you with the help of our local print shop, Peninsula Graphics.  We will do a limited two day broadcast at 91.5 so tune us in while you are in town.  Welcome back, we hope to see you at the All Class Reunion.

  *News Break:  Our tower needs to be replaced* – we got a rude surprise on June 23 when we planned on installing our new tower bays.  All three legs of our pre-owned tower (it was given to us by the County Road Commission in 1978) are ice damaged.  A tower inspection was done on July 3, 2025, and it was determined that the age and damage leads us to only one path forward:  we need to replace the tower.  The estimated cost of a new tower installation comes in around $30,000.  We are exploring other options and are waiting to see what funds are available from the school district.  We will keep you posted.  In the meantime, see the announcement about the tower fund campaign we are starting in this issue of the Ontonagon Herald. 

Top Piece Video:  ZZ Top ,  we thank you for the great line . . .