Rochester Review :: University of Rochester

In Review

MILESTONE MOMENTS‘WRUR is on the Air’ Since its founding in 1948, WRUR has offered students valuable training and an open canvas for creativity and expression. By Karen McCally ’02 (PhD)

Toby Kashket ’18 (left) and Carrie Taschman ’18 hosted a show together on WRUR for four years and were co-general managers their senior year. (Photo: J. Adam Fenster)

Rock on, WRUR.

The radio station that began on a small corner of the River Campus, in the basement of Burton Hall, is now 70 years old.

What might be said about radio in general could also be said about WRUR: it has shown remarkable persistence. It survived the rise of television, thrived in the age of the VCR, and found new life in the 21st century, as first the internet, and then social media, threatened its eclipse.

Ray Ettington ’51, station manager in his senior year, says WRUR helped him get over stage fright. Having begun as a newsreader and voice actor, he says that to this day, “I attribute my successful 36-year career in IBM sales and marketing to the selling and public speaking skills I learned at WRUR.”

The station began as a primitive enterprise, transmitting programming through a series of electrical wires strung through the underbellies of campus buildings. Jim Carrier ’66 helped bring the station into the FM era.

“I’ve had a wonderfully productive and adventurous life,” he told Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist, in 2016. “And it all began in the basement of Todd Union.”

The station has evolved with each generation. Carrie Taschman ’18, the co-general manager during her senior year, says, “The nice thing about radio is that it can be what you want.” Perhaps that’s one reason for the station’s longevity. Students have been able to devise programs featuring every variety of music, local and national news and information, live theater, sports, and coverage of campus events and personalities distinctive to each era.

There’s one more song that has remained the same. That’s the commitment of the student DJs, engineers, managers, and others who make the station run.

“A lot is ending,” said co-general manager Toby Kashket ’18, upon her graduation last year. But, speaking for both herself and Taschman, “we know that if we’re coming back to visit school, WRUR will be the first place.”

Find a multimedia history of WRUR at Rochester.edu/news/wrur/. Through recollections, sound clips from the Archives, video and audio interviews, and written sources, the site brings the station’s past and present to life.