Birth of a College Radio Station

Before there was KRVS on the campus of UL there was a pirate station. It broadcast from the same building, Burke Hall, and from the same rooms that the station now inhabits. Blues, rhythm & blues, pre-Beatles rock ‘n roll and even some local music could be heard blasting out of dormitory radios across the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus, and anywhere else in the neighborhood with proximity to power lines. The pirates made their own equipment, and one of them came very, very close to being killed by it. Their goals were to serve the community and get girls.

The year was 1962.

In those days the Speech Department was where students enrolled to learn radio, television, speech correction and the dramatic arts. USL was a small college, but two speech majors had a big idea. Cal LaMartenier and my brother Skip Broussard wanted many things, and two of them, good music and women, converged on the radio dial. Reach out from behind that dial, they thought, with some Frogman Henry and some Irma Thomas, and all will follow. Local station KVOL played predominantly white pop, which was raucous enough to inspire rebellion in young American bones, but it was the funkiness of R & B and rotgut blues that these two hoped would grease those bones. Sadly, it could only be tuned in late at night on a quality radio from stations WLS in Chicago, WNOE and WTIX in New Orleans, WABC in New York, and from Wolfman Jack, broadcasting with lethal power from across the southern border in Ciudad Acuña. If the greasy stuff was going to be heard locally in broad daylight, someone would have to do it.

The radio and TV studios of the department had most of the needed equipment, but no transmitter. The true college station that department head professor A.L. Caputer had long wanted was a year away, thus no outside broadcasting was possible from his powerless, closed-circuit studio. Skip and Cal decided to fix that. Skip, armed with a ham radio license, had always wanted to be a disc jockey and have his own station, and Cal was dangerously bright. They took turns learning to read the schematic diagram to build a transmitter, and parts were scrounged from Skip’s father Alton, the school’s lone journalism professor and a ham radio enthusiast who made his own gear down to sawing the steel for the chassis.

It was during this time that Skip got fried. He showed up to work on the transmitter after Cal had gone to class and saw this note: “I left it on, but the tubes need to be changed.” Skip saw that it was indeed on but the switch for the tube plates was in the off position, so he confidently went to work changing the big World War ll-era power tubes. He touched the metal plate caps covering them. This was a 500-watt transmitter. When he got up some time later from flying several feet against the rear wall, Skip realized that the switch governing the plate wasn’t wired into the circuit – “off” meant nothing.

They pressed on and built the AM transmitter, but there was one more problem to solve. Skip said, “ ... these two geeks, with little knowledge, realized they couldn't possibly construct a conventional radio tower for an antenna, so they researched other methods to broadcast their signal. They hit on the concept of carrier current, which uses standard electric power lines as the antenna. A special filter device, plugged into a wall socket, kept the electricity out of their transmitter, thus turning the whole power grid into an antenna.” After tuning the transmitter and the antenna’s frequency, the local power grid was now loaded for Little Richard and Jimmy Reed.

The pirates spun their own vinyl and borrowed liberally from the department’s library, and the jockeying was done with turntables and bulky RCA Johnny Carson-style microphones, also courtesy of USL. In this way the impolite music was liberated from 4 to 9 pm, commercial and format free, to dorms and homes and car radios up and down the better length of the streets and boulevards of Saint Mary, Johnston and University. Free at last were the three Slims: Memphis Slim, Guitar Slim and Polkadot Slim, along with New Orleans music such as Fats Domino’s sax player Dave Bartholomew, Irma, and locals Bobby Charles, Rod Bernard and T.K. Hulan.

Handmade flyers appeared on the bulletin boards in the girls’ dorms – did these men care about the boys’ dorms? No. The records spun, the requests were called in, and surgically targeted dedications went out. Happiness was in the air, and new friends were made. As Skip said, “the DJ got to connect with his audience.”

He added that their success “demonstrated that the student body was behind it,” and behind a less cynical reading into that is the observation that money could be made – it was an opportunity to begin funding a legitimate campus station. They considered selling advertising to the local bars and businesses that catered to the student body but didn’t know how to charge for it, much less to whom the money should go. Obvious beneficiary Professor Caputer was ruled out because they couldn’t yet reveal themselves. What they had done – building a radio station from school property and scraps and broadcasting without permission – was Not Done. (It wasn’t strictly illegal; FCC regulations would have applied if they had raised a true antenna, but at that time a power grid was an unregulated means of disseminating music.) So they abandoned their altruistic leanings and went back to full slouch before the microphone.

The music flowed for about six months until they were undone by a young woman who called from her dorm to request the song “Alley Oop.” Intercampus calls were made by rotary dialing a three-digit number; she misdialed and made her request to a dean who’s name is now forgotten. The dean, confused, asked questions and got answers. He went to Burke Hall the next day, and in Skip’s words, “ate Caputer’s ass.” The hammer had fallen.

To his credit, Caputer didn’t arrange a scourging. “You yardbirds don’t turn this back on,” he said. “We’re gonna have a real radio station one day, so just be patient.” It seemed the professor surpressed a smile.

“I really think he was proud of us,” said Skip, “We scrounged all the parts. We didn’t cost the university a dime.”

The Lafayette Guide was a small circulation weekly newspaper created by our father, the aforementioned Alton Broussard. It had a three-year run before being shut down due to an incident related to integration, which is another story. This little memoir was inspired by a Bill Bourdier article that Skip and I recently stumbled upon when leafing through bound copies of the newspaper. The article, “Dream Station Comes True,” states that KRVS went on the air January 30th, 1963, with “a ten-watt transmitter and an effective radiated power output of 30 watts. It has an accurate broadcast radius of 25 to 30 miles, but under freak conditions has been picked up in Inglewood, N.J.”

Thirty watts. Wow.

KRVS now broadcasts at 100,000 watts to more than a half-million people, and is available to the entire world via internet.

Although the pirates had carried out the market research detailing the potential success of a campus station, Skip suspects that “the real reason behind KRVS is Mr. Capuder. He was tireless, dedicated, a true teacher in the best sense of the word, and he believed in his soul that USL needed that station. Getting the FCC license was a long and difficult process and probably had been started way before our little experiment. I also bet it was fraught with politics. “

Several photos ran with the article, one of which shows a suave and happy Skip Broussard who, ironically, did not work at the new station. Working his way through college, Skip took a paying job at KSIG in Crowley, followed later by a night shift at KVOL. He eventually went to KVOL’s Lafayette competitor, KXKW, where he nicknamed himself the Ragin’ Cajun. That was the first time those words were heard together, and you know how far they went. While there, Skip did live broadcasts from CJ Broussard’s Bayou Club on the Breaux Bridge highway, MCing the shows and even booking some of the bands. Both the live broadcasts and the performances were staged behind chicken wire to protect people and equipment from flying beer bottles.

That’s a story for another time.