Greencastle Mayor Joins in Celebration of WGRE's Sign-On

April 29, 1949

April 29, 1949, Greencastle, Ind. - Greencastle Mayor Harold M. Stewart was among those on hand to celebrate this week's opening of Putnam County's first radio station, WGRE. Broadcasting at 91.5 on the FM dial, the station signed on yesterday and offers DePauw students a hands-on opportunity to learn broadcasting while providing the campus and local communities with news, sports, weather and music programming. (pictured, l-r:Elizabeth Turnell, assistant professor of speech; Dean Edgar Cumings; Herold T. Ross '18, head of the speech department and station director; and Mayor Stewart)

Dean Edgar Cumings attended the proceedings in place of DePauw President Clyde E. Wildman, who is hospitalized.

The new station's studios are located in Harrison Hall. Its programs include live music and radio drama as well as specialty shows, ranging from children's programming to examination of local issues. (at right: John Cook '51, chief monitor works the controls while Kenneth Welliver '51 delivers the news.  James Dapp '50 looks on in the background)

According to the book, DePauw: A Pictorial History, "Radio broadcasts had begun on a regular basis from the DePauw campus as early as April 1941, when an arrangement was made with station WIRE in Indianapolis to carry two or three 15-minute educational programs a week from an improvised studio in the psychology department's experimental laboratory on the third floor of Harrison Hall. In 1948 Herold Ross of the speech department, who had been named director of the radio program in 1945, applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a license permitting the University to operate a 10-watt FM station. The license was granted, and in April 1949 station WGRE-FM began broadcasting from studios in rooms 318 and 319 of Harrison Hall, using a transmitter donated by the General Electric Corporation."

Learn more about the station in this previous story.

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