QUEEN of the AIRWAVES

...Then again, Chicago's large foreignborn population, notably Poles, Italians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans, retain their old world love for fine music...

...Even so, it required considerable financial backing...

...By this topsy-turvy logic, the industry has readied plans to squander nearly half of this season's prime airtime on what Time magazine called "oaters, private eyes, and 'actionadventure' series" said to be "the bloodiest ever...

...Currently, however, Jacobs is expanding the publication into a full-scale magazine of ideas and the arts known as WFMT Perspective...

...To the delight of Terkel's sponsor, his program smashed the notion that the midmorning radio audience, predominated by housewive-s, will find such interviews dull and heavy-handed...

...In the pre-WFMT era, a station ordinarily broke into the top ten by broadcasting "formula radio," a format characterized by "popular music" and brief newscasts clogged with fifteen minutes of noisy commercials per hour...

...One need hardly spell out the need for disseminating these values...

...Commercials, intoned in the sedate voice of an English philanthropist at a charity tea, total but three minutes an hour...

...But it is culture, not coin, that gives WFMT its stature...

...If nothing else, the gore-and-giggles format meets the first essential of the network bosses: it's a moneymaker...

...In Europe, even behind the Iron Curtain, radio is used successfully to instill over a wide audience cultural values frankly superior to those dictated by Madison Avenue...

...None exceeds one minute in length...

...when these teeming millions are bombarded by a continuously televised Roman holiday of crime and violence...

...The industry cleaned up $243 million before taxes last year ( a season said to be the worst in its history), while driving away talented artists like writer-producer Robert Alan Arthur, who charged: "Television may be unique in our free enterprise system in that the harder one fights for a position in the market place, the poorer the product becomes—all in the name of 'satisfying the mass audience.' " While the networks pander to what Minow terms "the lowest common denominator," WFMT, by reversing this formula, has challenged the network radio affiliates in Chicago and network television itself by providing a stimulating switch from TV fare...

...Of first importance, though, is the cultural lag in WFMT's service area...

...It is the only Chicago broadcasting outlet to carry all Presidential press conferences, "This Week at the United Nations," a service of United Nations Radio, and lengthy special reports such as those from Jerusalem on the Eichmann trial...

...If the FCC hesitates to dictate program content to broadcasters, lest such control lead to censorship, it could give unhesitating support to FM outlets seeking to provide a counterweight to the anti-culture of the networks...

...Of particular importance would be the creation of a Department of Fine Arts and Culture, among whose much needed and protean functions could be the ability to grant long-term low-interest loans to quality radio outlets...

...Although Minow, a Chicagoan, doubtless is familiar with the outlet, now the largest FM station in the United States, few persons outside his home city yet recognize the national importance of this booming cultural rebel...

...Its audience dwarfs that of its nearest classical music competitor, bulks larger than the overwhelming majority of local AM outlets, is ranked ninth in a field of fifty Chicago stations, and is the only FM station among the leaders...

...To widen it but requires the same promotion of Handel's Messiah that ABC puts into its selling job of The Corrupters...

...Its Fine Arts Guide catalogues some 1,000 listings scheduled for broadcast each month and provides notices of coming cultural events that are read by 25,000 subscribers who pay $4 annually for the service...

...The popular success of these stations in Chicago, Lincoln, and elsewhere, is grassroots proof that a sizable audience for culture does exist...

...Broadcasting 150 complete operas and 100 fulllength plays each year, among other works, is supposed to spell financial ruin...

...and Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin...

...Because of this appeal, WFMT early in 1958 became the first U. S. FM station to break into the Hooper ratings, and in every quarterly report since it has been ranked among Chicago's first ten stations...

...Instead, breakfasters are likely to hear "The Royal Hunt and Storm Music" with their toast and coffee, typical of a nineteen-hour-long daily broadcasting schedule crammed with Handel oratorios, Beethoven quartets, and Mozartian operas...

...Few stations anywhere budget so much time to classics of such olympian stature...

...In 1957, WFMT became the only FM station in America, and the first Chicago radio station in a decade, to win the Alfred I. duPont Award for "meritorious service to the American people...

...For instance, of the city's three surviving "band music" leaders, fourth- and fifthranked WBBM (CBS) and WMAQ (NBC) are buttressed by national package deal advertising, and thirdplace WGN is the satrapy of the Chicago Tribune...

...Moreover, according to a survey by Northwestern University, WFMT listeners stay tuned-in more hours per week to this one station than to all other FM and AM radio outlets and all five television channels combined...

...In this respect, the Guide exerts a cohesive influence on the intellectual community, spurring the growth of local theater, chamber music, and discussion...

...Next year, WFMT was picked to represent U.S...

...when the nation is faced by a grave totalitarian challenge—the need for broadcasting great cultural, spiritual, and educational ideas through FM radio cannot be understated...

...Moreover, the FCC itself could limit applications for license renewal or power increases to those FM broadcasters whose outlets truly serve "public interest, convenience and necessity...

...In his address to the broadcasting chiefs, Minow pledged himself to launch educational TV on a grand scale: "If there is not a nationwide educational television system in this country, it will not be the fault of the FCC...

...SHERWOOD ROSS is a Chicago free lance writer who has made a special study of the radio and television industry...

...His insistence on programming fine classical music has steadily widened a listening audience which might otherwise have found no reason to prefer WFMT to other area FM outlets dispensing the "sweet music" purported to be the financial bread-and-butter of their trade...

...Fortunately, the station's high quality inspired listener loyalty, and there were runs at advertisers' banks, record shops, and savings institutions that made sponsors shake their heads over its uncanny sales punch...

...Meanwhile, the new WRVR, operated by the Riverside Church of New York City, and which sells a fine arts guide similar to the Chicago magazine, illustrates what a great institution can accomplish if it seeks to foster spiritual and cultural values throughout its community...

...There are fewer art galleries, concert halls, movie theatres, and plays and musicals to lure listeners from their sets...

...Its station owner, Bernard Jacobs, a former radio engineer of middle years, operates on the theory that his station exists to serve the public...

...none transmits the music, harsh voices, jingles, or shrill gabbling heard in many radio spiels...

...In Chicago, you are far more likely to hear The Lady's Not For Burning on WFMT than to see it on stage...

...Advertisers who vie to sponsor "The Untouchables" might be appalled by the format Jacobs uses to attract a mass market...

...In a new move, Jacobs recently beefed up his station's effective radiated power from 30,000 to 120,000 watts, doubling the reception area to include the populous midwest hinterland surrounding Chicago, reaching out 200 miles to those listeners with first quality receiving equipment in cities like Dubuque and Davenport, Iowa...

...Other hours not usurped by horses and hoodlums will be filled by tranquilizers like "Father of The Bride" and "This is Your Life," probably intended to relax viewers tensed up from overdoses of "Outlaws" and "Rawhide...

...when the indices of juvenile delinquency and social disorder are on the rise...

...On its ten a.m...

...Both U.S...

...Station policy, which is public policy, is paramount, and if a symphony runs over its time schedule, there is no interruption for a "word from our sponsor...

...Surveys later disclosed the station's audience of 250,000 families took home on the average about $9,000 a year each, and that Jacobs was dealing with the intellectual and business elite of the metropolitan area...

...Yet, WFMT devotes eighty per cent of its airtime to rebroadcasts from thirty-nine world music festivals, including those at Prague, Stockholm, Vienna, Bayreuth, Salzburg, and Bergen...

...Owner Jacobs even screens all would-be sponsors, bankers included, to protect his audience from pitchmanship...

...It could also make available to them, at small cost, recordings of local and foreign music festivals, drama groups, and interviews of consequence with the great thinkers of our time...

...Where once U. S. listeners along our northern border tuned in to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they can now enjoy WDTM in Detroit, WFMR in Milwaukee, KWFM in Minneapolis...

...Its devoted listeners—who number not fewer than 700,000—make a strong case for the existence of a mass audience which supports fine arts programming of superb quality, an audience which network chiefs have long asserted exists only in the private fantasies of eggheads...

...Indianapolis, South Bend, and Fort Wayne, Indiana...

...Again discarding network dogma, WFMT does not confine public service programs to Sunday afternoons...

...Meanwhile, WFMT and its FM counterparts, virtually alone among the broadcasting media, stand forth against the dark tides of anti-culture which threaten to engulf our humanist and democratic heritage...

...Until recently, the Guide's full-length articles on art and composers took a back seat to the vital listings of coming programs and events...

...If anything, guests like Pakistani poet Ali Alana, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, physicist Sir Julian Huxley, ballet dancer Igor Youskevitch, composer Alexander Tcherepnin, baritone Tito Gobbi, choreographer Agnes De Mille, lieder singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, novelists C. P. Snow and Meyer Levin—to name a typical cross-section—have proved that it is the nature of art to appeal universally...

...and foreign foundations have tied blue ribbons on the station...

...Until recently, the public had been hoodwinked into believing that the broadcasting industry, dedicated primarily to making a profit, cannot do so unless it caters to the appetite of a mass audience which can be enticed only by serving a kind of mushy bland pudding sprinkled liberally with bullets...

...And this has been done in most Western European countries (Radio Sweden is a good example), without sacrifice of freedom or hint of censorship...

...Although listeners mailed in dollar bills, WFMT's first three years showed a ledger of red ink...

...At a time when the spectacular growth of our cities throws millions of strangers together, breeding indifference and insensitivity...

...Others offering more or less the same "music" are second-place WLS (ABC), sixth-place WCFL, run by Chicago's Federation of Labor, and seventh-listed WJJD, owned by Plough, Inc., operators of a radio station chain...

...Lansing and Grand Rapids, Michigan...

...In Chicago, WFMT rises like a cathedral of the mind, a superlative, uncompromising tower in which the recorded wisdom, art, letters, drama, and music treasured up through the ages is funneled into a metropolis too long starved for these delights...

...There is no question of who dictates station content or writes commercials...

...One can advance many theories for the success of WFMT...

...weekday hour, "The Wax Museum," interviewer Studs Terkel has produced local interview shows with artists, actors, composers, and writers comparable to any found in the Paris Review...

...Its presence, however, should figure prominently in the public debate over whether the networks, which, according to Minow, are projecting "a vast wasteland" into American living rooms, can lift themselves out of the intellectual and cultural doldrums and still finish in the black...

...Wrote Chicago Sun-Times critic Paul Molloy, "WFMT has blossomed out with a brilliant personality, a cultural giant amid the faceless midgets bogged down in wax...

...radio in the documentary class of Prix Italia, and it won Ohio State University awards for "the best cultural program" and "cultural excellence in overall programming...

...concerts taped by the British Broadcasting Company and the national radio networks of France and Holland, as well as those from the Library of Congress series in Coolidge Auditorium, Washington, D. C, the Philadelphia Orchestra from the Academy of Music, and its own well-stocked record library...

...QUEEN of the AIRWAVES by SHERWOOD ROSS A MID THE tumult touched off by the celebrated address of Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minow on the failure of network television, the tenth anniversary this fall of Chicago's radio station WFMT might pass unobserved...

...For all its fine museums, Chicago lacks the cultural diversity of New York City...

...Moreover, the WFMT audience listened longer...

...The striking truth is that an unsubsidized radio independent, launched a decade ago on little more than high hopes, has risen to become one of the biggest radio stations in the nation, in terms of audience, and perhaps the finest, in terms of program...

...While this is a noble goal, one wonders why an Administration styling itself as champion of a New Frontier cannot also assist the quality pioneer FM stations...

...Even without a bankroll, WFMT has proved itself viable enough to siphon off listeners, customers, and sponsors from the city's cut-throat AM marketplace...

...When Variety several years ago headlined that WFMT had come within a gallop of unhorsing a network affiliate from the polls, the network outlet changed its format from "band music" to hard-core rock-androll and soared upward in the ratings...

...Its early fiscal agonies were akin to those now deviling FM stations WBAI in New York City and its related Pacifica outlets, KPFA, in Berkeley, California, and KPFK, in Los Angeles, all fine music and quality discussion stations...

...Its unique and refreshing approach to commercials is partly responsible for this...

...Men are not born with an instinctive taste for either blood or Beethoven...

...Of national interest is the fact that WFMT is virtually Chicago's only leading independent station that enjoys no corporate, network, newspaper, or radio chain backing...

...Through a rediscovery of classics and culture was the Renaissance born...

...Unquestionably, the failure of the networks to fire the mind accounts for the TV blackout in the homes of its listeners...

...The result: in a metropolitan area of five million, WFMT's 700,000 faithful comprise a group the networks can no longer ignore...

...He defines "public" to include those deafened by the noise and nightmare of the networks, both audio and video, and asserts that superior quality on the airwaves will elicit extraordinary response...

...First-ranked WIND, whose output is heavily rock-and-roll, is owned by Westinghouse...

...Such tastes are acquired...

...Springfield, Illinois...

...Of this triumph, the Chicago Daily News observed, "WFMT is the most unique radio station in the country and one of the city's most remarkable cultural possessions . . . a source of spiritual sustenance...

...WFMT also serves Chicago as a clearing house for the arts...

...In the southwest, there is KHGM in Houston, and KFSD in San Diego...

...The following year, alone among 4,000 station owners, Jacobs received the Thomas Alva Edison Award for founding the station which "best served youth...

...The only other independent station among the leaders is long-established WAIT, now ranked eighth, an outlet beaming nondescript background music...

...An Administration which would create a department of cities to solve its urban crisis will make no mistake if it establishes a Federal agency for closing the culture gap...

...Here and there, following the WFMT pattern, radio outlets are springing up which deserve recognition and support...

...Sponsors, which now include major utilities, Blue Cross, nearly all foreign airlines serving Chicago, and realtors for a successful integrated housing development, all take orders from Jacobs, and his listeners, with a smile...