Steve Meuche
                                            July 14, 2005
                                           Jeff Charnley,
                                             interviewer
Charnley: Today is Thursday, July 14th, 2005. We’re on the campus of Michigan State
University in East Lansing. I’m Jeff Charnley interviewing Steve Meuche for the MSU Oral
History Project for the sesquicentennial of Michigan State, which we’re commemorating this
year in 2005.
        As you can see, Mr. Meuche, we have a tape recorder here for this oral history. Do you
give us permission to do this interview?
Meuche: Yes, I do.
Charnley: I’d like to start first with just some general educational and professional background
and training. Where were you born and raised before college?
Meuche: In Dayton, Ohio.
Charnley: Where did you go to high school?
Meuche: Kettering High School in Kettering, Ohio, which is right outside Dayton.
                                                  1


Charnley: Was there any particular high school teacher or parent that had an influence on you
in terms of education, an important one?
Meuche: Yes, there was one in particular. Her name was Leah Funk [phonetic], and she was
the drama teacher and debate coach. I was on the debate team, and we traveled virtually every
weekend all over the state. She was an amazing person because we spent about half of our day
in her class, because she taught us everything, but she taught us all the things that we needed to
get done rapidly so we could spend all our time focusing on preparation for debate. Then there
were the kids in there who were doing the drama stuff, too. We won the Ohio State Debate
Championships two years in a row. She was quite a person. And she never slept. She did not
have a bed in her house. She would nap occasionally on her sofa.
Charnley: That’s amazing. Did she encourage you to go into broadcasting?
Meuche: No, actually she didn’t. I worked for a Junior Achievement company that was a radio
broadcasting company. Junior Achievement at the time, they did everything, kids would sell
commercials, other ones would do announcing and stuff. We had a mentor at this radio station
who was our advisor. I did editorials, which were pretty funny at the time. But it was a big band
station. So my beginnings in radio were working at a big band station.
Charnley: This was in what year in your high school years?
                                                 2


Meuche: This was in the sixties. I graduated in ’62. ’58 through ’62. Ella Fitzgerald, Count
Basie, Duke Ellington, you know, all that stuff.
Charnley: Did you learn much about some of mechanics of radio at that time?
Meuche: Yes, I did.
Charnley: How was it that you came to Michigan State?
Meuche: I wanted to be either a forester or in broadcasting, and so I chose three schools that
had strong programs in both. I thought I wanted to be a forester because I was a shy person, I
thought, and really would be much happier working with trees than people, or so that was the
idea. But then I came here for the summer orientation and discovered how much math and
science you had to have to be in forestry, and changed my major to broadcasting before I even
came to school here.
Charnley: So the fall of ’62 was when you came?
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: What were some of your early impressions of Michigan State?
                                                 3


Meuche: First of all, having been born and raised in Ohio, it was a different state, and I guess
when you’re that young, that’s somewhat different, because you’re not as used to it. But my
early impressions I think were initially some awe about the size of the place. I certainly
remember having terrific times with the friends I met in the dorm. There was one other person
from my high school who came to Michigan State, since we were out-of-state students. I did not
have a preference for a roommate, so it was luck of the draw. They tripled us, which they still
do, I think, in Shaw Hall. So there were three of us in a little room in Shaw Hall, and we either
had to be really friendly or else it wasn’t going to work out very well.
Charnley: So the normal rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan State, you were right in the
middle of that.
Meuche: I was never much into the Ohio State thing anyway.
Charnley: So you didn’t betray any family confidences? [laughs]
Meuche: No.
Charnley: When you switched your major from forestry, tell me again what you went into at
that time.
Meuche: It was called television, radio, and film at the time.
                                                   4


Charnley: The School of Communication Arts and Sciences, was that part of that?
Meuche: Yes, it had been in existence at that point. In fact, I think it’s one of the oldest in the
country, about to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary this fall, I think.
Charnley: Did you have any contact with Gordon Sabine at that time?
Meuche: No, not much. I knew who he was, of course.
Charnley: In the 1960s, while you were here as an undergraduate, in what ways did you get
involved in broadcasting?
Meuche: I was working at the radio station in Shaw Hall. There were radio stations in a lot of
the dormitories on campus. They were what were called the old closed-circuit stations where
they broadcast over the electrical wiring in the building. It was awful quality. But I actually
ended up being the manager of the station in Shaw Hall. Then I was also working at the one in
Brody Hall, as well. Then I got a job at WKAR in my freshmen year, working there. So I was
playing radio a lot.
Charnley: Was it music mainly, or were you doing interviews?
Meuche: Yes, it was sixties rock and roll, early sixties rock and roll, at the dorm stations. We
used to have this big old clunky console that had turntables built into it and speakers, and we’d
                                                   5


roll it out into the lower level of Shaw Hall and have big dances every Friday night. There
would be hundreds of MSU students who would come. So I would spend my nights helping run
the Shaw Hall dance on Friday nights.
         But at WKAR, because it was a professional radio station and it was very labor-intensive
at the time, so announcers did nothing but announce, so you had to have somebody operate the
control board and play the records and play the music, and then there had to be another separate
person, an engineer, at the transmitter to control the transmitter. So it was very labor-intensive.
         The music was mostly classical music. I did not know anything about classical music,
my background having been my family’s interest in big band music, and the station I worked at
in Dayton, and then the sixties rock at the campus station.
         So my first job at WKAR was as a control board operator for the announcers. So all I did
was play the music and turn the microphones on and take cues from the announcers. I spent,
obviously, a lot of time listening to them announce classical music. After a while, I think it
probably was only maybe my first year, maybe even less, I had learned the classical music
because I was subjected to it constantly, sitting across the window from the announcer, so that I
took the audition. They had a rigorous audition at the time. We had a great blooper tape of kids
who took the auditions and all the different ways they mispronounced all the classical composer
names.
Charnley: You need to be a linguist.
Meuche: So I took the announcer audition and got promoted to an announcer.
                                                   6


Charnley: Where was the station at that time?
Meuche: It was in the Auditorium Building. We were crammed in literally to the fourth floor,
third floor, and then overflowed into the second floor, which is really the balcony level of the
auditorium. So the offices on the second floor were essentially storage closets under the balcony
seats. No air conditioning and the windows didn’t open up there on the fourth floor.
Charnley: That was the main offices for quite a few years, wasn’t it?
Meuche: Until 1981, when we moved into the Communication Arts Building.
Charnley: What was that like?
Meuche: Oh, that was like heaven. It was like just heaven. It was an amazing facility that was
designed by one of the greatest known acoustical studio designers in the country at the time.
And going from studios in the Auditorium Building that literally had windows in them, so you
could hear buses going by, we ended up in studios that were acoustically outstanding. I always
felt at the time, because buildings, you know, I think they still do, have to be built to state
specifications, which means no Taj Mahals, but I thought they did a really nice job of creating an
attractive building which now needs some work, but that was 1981 and today is 2005.
Charnley: Yes, twenty-four years. Do you remember some of the announcers? Were they
students or were they paid staff?
                                                  7


Meuche: It was a mixture of students and paid staff. There were announcers who, I felt at the
time, were just really, really good, and I lost track of them. I don’t know where they went on to
be.
        I do know that when I was a student, there were three students who were in classes with
me, and two of whom worked at the station who went on to be pretty famous as broadcasters.
One of them was Susan Spencer, who was an anchorperson and news reporter for CBS
Television Network. Another one was Jay Johnson, who left here and worked at a number of
stations, but ended up as a legendary NBC local news anchor in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but then
got elected to Congress and became a congressman. He was in Congress for only one term and
then lost. Let’s see. That probably would have been the first [George H.W.] Bush election
perhaps, because I think he just got lost in a Republican landslide. He was a Democrat. And
ended up, strangely enough, being appointed by the Republican administration to be director of
the U.S. Mint, and he was there for a little while. Now he still lives in the Washington [D.C.]
area and is doing consulting work.
Charnley: So you’ve had some contacts with him or maintained contact?
Meuche: Actually, yes, I did. Yes, I did. He was here working at the station, which I suspect
we’ll get to it later, during all the student Vietnam War protests. One time about—must have
been about ten years ago, he did a whole series for the Green Bay station about Vietnam War and
being on a campus at the time. He brought his TV crew down here for a weekend and we spent a
weekend walking around campus and sitting on the porch of the Auditorium Building, telling
stories about what it was like working at the MSU station during the Vietnam War protests.
                                                    8


Charnley: Interesting. Are those tapes still in existence?
Meuche: I have—I need to listen to it because it may have fallen to pieces by now—an
audiotape from February 1970 of whatever year that was. It was extremely cold. We had one
portable tape recorder. It weighed a lot, really, really heavy. I went out to cover what you could
probably characterize as riots, student riots, on Grand River Avenue. Students were breaking the
store windows. The state police were there in their riot gear. I recorded this street scene, and all
I remember is the recorder was very heavy, it was extremely cold, and I got clubbed in the back
by a state policeman. I do want to listen to that tape. I do have that tape.
Charnley: That sounds like a priceless treasure.
Meuche: It will probably be awful when I listen to it.
Charnley: Well, slice of life from an interesting period. How did the Vietnam War affect the
radio station?
Meuche: Well, it was interesting, because we just missed that as students. You know, we were
just out of school and working at the station at the time, and so it was more our job to be
onlookers and cover it, rather than go participate. But it was a tumultuous time on campus,
obviously. There were protests that would break out all over the place, sit-ins at the
Administration Building, and demonstrations. That was all mixed in that same era of the sixties
with the riots in Detroit, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby [Robert F.] Kennedy,
                                                   9


and Martin Luther King [Jr.]. It was an incredibly interesting, unfortunate time in many respects,
but it was quite an interesting time to be involved in a news-gathering operation with what little
resources we had at the time.
Charnley: Did the station cover any of the major demonstrations or anything like that?
Meuche: Yes, we did. We were doing a lot of long-form stuff at the time, major addresses. We
actually used to broadcast a lecture, or a class, or a speaker on campus, every day at ten o’clock
in the morning. In fact, I think this program was called On Campus. So if there were events that
were related to the war or other current events, those would appear in a long form. It was almost
like the C-SPAN of the sixties on radio at the time.
Charnley: How did the professors respond to that?
Meuche: To the program?
Charnley: Yes.
Meuche: Well, it was a strange time, for programming that particular radio station, because in
the sixties there was no NPR [National Public Radio]. NPR didn’t come along until 1970. We
had limited off-campus resources for news, just an old clicky-clack Associated Press newswire,
and we had to make do with what we had here.
                                                   10


         The other thing that was most fascinating was that we didn’t have audience ratings. We
couldn’t tell how many people listened to programs, and, frankly, we didn’t care, because we felt
that it wasn’t our job to reach as many people as possible like the commercial stations, because
we weren’t selling commercials. We were doing no fundraising whatsoever. We were 100
percent paid for by the university. So in a perverse kind of way, it was like we broadcasted what
we thought people ought to hear rather than what people necessarily really wanted to hear, which
was what the commercial stations were doing. It was a very different time.
Charnley: The transition from an ag school to a major research university, which many people
would say was accomplished during the fifties and the early sixties, were you doing agriculture
programming in that time?
Meuche: Oh, indeed we were. We had a full-time farm director and a full-time women’s
director. We had a daily show called the Farm Service Hour, and it was every day at noon. I
think it was an hour and a half for a while, but then it was mostly an hour when I was there, and
it was every day at noon because—remember the logic. The farmer gets up early, goes out
works out in his field, and comes in for a big hearty lunch at noontime.
Charnley: Turns on the radio.
Meuche: Turns on the radio, because he must have the Farm Service Hour. And it was almost a
formula show where, you know, if it’s Thursday, it will be so-and-so, the Eaton County
Cooperative Extensive Director, who will come in and tell you whether you should plant your
                                                  11


corn now or not. That went on for a long, long time. The program won a lot of awards, but
eventually people realized that farmers didn’t necessarily have that big hearty lunch at noon, and
nobody really needed to tell them when their soybeans needed to be planted. They had finally
figured that part out. [laughs]
        So the old Farmers Week here, all of that was a big deal for the radio station, you know,
wall-to-wall coverage, as they say.
Charnley: That was during spring break, wasn’t it, usually?
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: When the students were gone.
Meuche: And the Auditorium Building, where the radio stations were, would be just jam-
packed with Future Farmers of America, hundreds of them, for their little annual meeting during
Farmers Week. We have their old historical pictures of Farm Show things on the radio station.
One of my favorites is one of the farm directors interviewing a cow. I remember getting letters
from farmers saying that they played the radio station in their dairy barn because it really soothed
their cows. The cows liked the actual music. It would be interesting to know what the
Homemakers Hour programs consisted of, because—
Charnley: You weren’t involved in that production?
                                                12


Meuche: Well, I don’t quite remember that, but there was a full-time women’s director, and
there was a show called the Homemakers Hour that I remember. In its waning years the
Homemakers Hour was fifteen minutes long. I’ll bet if you listen to it today, it wouldn’t be
complying with today’s equal rights. I’m sure it was very, “Now, ladies, remember when your
man comes home,” I mean, I’m making this up.
Charnley: What became human ecology, did human ecology have any role in that, or was that
Cooperative Extension Service?
Meuche: No, there was a relationship between Cooperative Extension and the Farm Show. In
fact, they paid for part of it, or a part of the cost of the salary of the person, for at least a while.
There was also a relationship between the women’s editor and the human ecology. It wasn’t
called human ecology then; it was home economics. My wife is a home economics graduate.
Charnley: I forgot to ask about the station. Was this an AM station at that time?
Meuche: Interestingly enough, the AM station went on the air in 1922. Again, if we’re going
back to the sixties, the early sixties, the FM station went on in 1948, which is unbelievable,
because nobody in the 1960s, hardly anybody, had an FM radio. If you bought a radio, it didn’t
even have FM on it, and the FM listening in the country was really small compared to AM
listening. AM radio was dominant. There’s a dramatic graph that shows when the crossover
finally took place, where the AM just kept going down and the FM went up to the point where
today probably 80 percent, or at least 80 percent, of all listening must to be to FM radio as
                                                     13


opposed to AM. So there was this WKAR FM station that went on the air in 1948 and nobody
could listen to it.
         My first FM radio was, living in the dorm, working at WKAR, and wanting to be able to
hear the FM station, I went out and bought a converter device to attach to an old tape recorder to
play it through the speaker in my tape recorder, because you could not, literally you could not
buy an AM/FM radio at the time. So what WKAR did was they simulcast everything. The AM
station could only be on the air from sunrise to sunset, and so they just played—everything that
was on the AM station was also simultaneously on the FM station.
Charnley: That restriction still applies, doesn’t it, the AM sunrise to sunset?
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: Is that a FCC [Federal Communications Commission] rule?
Meuche: It is the goofiest rule. It has to do with the fact that AM radiowaves bounce off the
ionosphere and travel huge distances at night. When I was a kid and we used to go to Canada
every summer, it was one of my pastimes seeing how many distant radio stations I could listen
to, and, boy, when you were up north could you ever get AM stations from all over the United
States. I used to do that, too, when I was in high school and stuff. I was always a radio junkie;
wait until nighttime and listen to my favorite shows in Virginia or Philadelphia or something. So
it was because of this, stations going this long distance, that the FCC made stations that shared
channels, some of them, not be on at night.
                                                  14


        So the reason that WKAR AM had to go off was to protect WWL in New Orleans. At
one time we tried to figure out a way to be able to stay on after dark. We hired consultants, did
research, who showed that we would have to protect WWL’s signal to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and
therefore we could only be on the air if our signal wouldn’t go further than Fort Wayne, Indiana,
which it certainly would do at its daytime power at night.
        When I worked at the station in Dayton, that was the big band station, the Junior
Achievement Company, they were a daytime station and their signoff used to say, “Due to an
archaic and ridiculous FCC rule, it is now time for WAVI to leave the air.” I always thought,
“Boy, you’re flaunting this one.” We never did that here.
Charnley: You were probably tempted, though.
Meuche: Right. It was a wartime thing, too. The notion was that you needed to hear those big
powerful stations if you were in a rural area, and that was the only way to reach these rural areas,
because there weren’t very many radio stations then compared to today.
Charnley: WKAR, those weren’t the original call letters, were they, of the radio station here?
Meuche: Those are the only call letters I know of. People ask what do they mean. Who came
up with them? I get asked that question all the time. The answer to the question is, they were
randomly assigned by the FCC. And interestingly enough, they could have been changed.
Today these rock-and-roll stations change their call letters about every week. It’s not hard to
change your call letters. Once or twice, you know, somebody would get an idea at MSU. One
                                                 15


time it was a board of trustees member, but I don’t remember who it was, that we should have
the call letters WMSU. I always argued that WKAR was of such historical significance, in being
truly one of the oldest, not the oldest, but one of the very oldest educational radio stations in the
country, that those call letters should be preserved. I almost lost that battle once, but it turned
out that WMSU was not available because it was owned by Mississippi State University.
Charnley: And Montana State.
Meuche: I never told anybody that if MSU really wanted those call letters and they made an
offer to Mississippi State University, you can buy them. They could be paid to change their call
letters. But I felt so strongly that they are of such great historical significance that they need to
remain that way. And interestingly enough, when the TV station went on the air, it went on the
air with the call letters WMSB, Michigan State Broadcasting. Well, guess what they are now
and have been for years? WKAR.
Charnley: When was that switch made, do you remember from your research?
Meuche: The call letters?
Charnley: Yes.
Meuche: No, I don’t.
                                                   16


Charnley: We can look that up.
Meuche: Probably when they switched from the shared agreement with Channel 10. They
shared time with Channel 10 and then switched to Channel 23 full-time.
Charnley: Were you involved at that time?
Meuche: I was not involved with TV.
Charnley: You were doing radio.
Meuche: I was involved with TV in that we did some things together and people like the sports
department, Jim Adams, Terry Braverman [phonetic], they worked at both TV and radio. There
was also some of the news; there was a news relationship, too. We shared a program guide for a
while after we started fundraising, but I didn’t become really involved in TV until 1989.
Charnley: Was the frequency 870?
Meuche: Well, it might not have been 870 in the very, very beginning, because in the very, very
beginning it was experimental. There were a bunch of electrical engineering students who didn’t
care about programming; they just cared about being able to transmit radiowaves. So at that time
the call signs were not—I don’t believe they were four, three or four letters; they were letters and
                                                  17


numbers or something. We actually have the early logs where they would sign on at noon and
broadcast for five minutes and then sign off.
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]
Charnley: This is side two of tape one of the Steve Meuche interview.
        When the tape ended, we were talking about the logs, the station logs, of the early
WKAR, and you mentioned that you didn’t know exactly where they were, but you had seen
them at some point.
Meuche: I’m sure they’re still around somewhere. Unfortunately, we did not do—“we,” not
necessarily “me”—I like collecting things, historical things, and unfortunately, there’s not a lot.
There are a lot of photos and some written stuff, but, boy, there aren’t a lot of programs. It
would be hard to really preserve programs that were—first of all, nothing was recorded early on.
Very little was recorded. What was recorded was recorded on these giant transcriptions that you
would cut something onto a huge platter.
Charnley: Like a larger record.
Meuche: Yes. They were fourteen or sixteen inches, like a big pizza box. In fact, all of our
theme songs for all the different classical music shows and stuff were all on transcriptions, where
they’d been cut to a transcription, and you had to have these giant players.
                                                 18


Charnley: Then you were going from one to another during the course of the broadcast, what
was the process of where you were able to use them?
Meuche: Well, you used two turntables. So you could always have the next one ready over
there, and they were quite clunky and the had styluses in them and they would get dirt on them
and sound funny.
Charnley: Could you talk a little bit about after you graduated, how was it that you ended up
staying here at the university?
Meuche: Actually, I was offered a full-time permanent position at WKAR before I graduated in
1965, as a producer/director. I have a funny just as an aside to that. The thing that I will never
forget and that is, remember I was an out-of-state student because I was from Ohio. So I was
paying a lot more than in-state students. Suddenly I was employed full-time by MSU. So I went
over to the registrar’s office, or whoever was in charge of that, I remember that in the old
Administration Building, and said, “I don’t think I should be paying out-of-state tuition
anymore.”
        And they said, “Well, why is that?”
        I said, “Well, how can I be out of state if I’m a full-time employee of MSU?”
        And they told me that it didn’t matter, I should still have to pay it. I don’t remember
what I did. I wasn’t surly or anything. But eventually they decided that, no, maybe I only had to
pay in-state tuition if I worked for the university full-time.
                                                  19


Charnley: You weren’t commuting from Dayton.
Meuche: No. That was only in the last one or two terms before I graduated.
Charnley: Were you doing music at that time or was it news production or a combination?
Meuche: Actually, I was doing both. While I was still a student, I was doing the sign-on
program, the first program at the beginning of the day, which was a music program, interestingly
enough, mostly big band music. Eventually I did a whole bunch of programs. At that time we
had programs. Today regular stations have formats. You have a favorite format; you don’t have
a favorite necessarily radio program. You may have a favorite television program, of course, but
you have favorite radio stations. But we had all these compartmentalized programs. We had The
Homemakers Hour and The Farm Service Hour and a program called The Scrapbook, which I
did for years after the producer, who had done it for years, left and went to get a Ph.D. at
Stanford [University] or somewhere.
Charnley: What was The Scrapbook about?
Meuche: The Scrapbook was a great show. It was a variety—a show of news, interesting kind
of tidbits, interviews with people, and music. I actually kind of broke the music barrier on the
station because I would play stuff that had never been played before. I mean, I played the
Beatles. Nobody played the Beatles on WKAR at the time.
                                                 20


Charnley: Did you hear from President [John A.] Hannah about that?
Meuche: No, no. Actually, I enjoyed doing it. I just felt like if there was something that was
interesting, that it would be fun to play it on that program. But like I said, we had The Farm
Service Hour, The Women’s Show, The Scrapbook. There was a show called Listen to the Band.
Some of these were just fifteen minutes long. So we had like a marching band show every
afternoon. We had a Broadway Show. And my favorite was Hymns You Love. So I would do
Listen to the Band or Hymns You Love or these shows. I always thought Hymns You Love was
amusing because it was fifteen minutes long and you’d play one religious album for fifteen
minutes, but it was white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hymns you love. Well, I played Mahalia
Jackson. But those shows eventually all went away.
        Then the big year was 1965 when we split the two stations. So for the first time the FM
station became totally separate programming than the AM station. Well, I shouldn’t say that.
Some of the programs were still simulcast, but a radical step for the stations at the time.
Charnley: Did the FM station concentrate on classical at that time?
Meuche: Classical, and it was very eclectic. The programmer was Ken Beechler [phonetic],
who was the musical director at the time. Ken is an absolutely brilliant person when it comes to
the arts and culture. Again, it was a period when we didn’t have a lot of audience research.
Remember we still weren’t fundraising.
        There was an MSU professor named Hans Nathan [phonetic], who was an expert in new
classical music, the stuff that drove me nuts because it was atonal. He used to have a show, so
                                                   21


we’d play that. Beechler would weave Dylan Thomas reading poetry in the middle of classical
music and we would play—well, there’s an old joke in public radio today that some of the
classical music stations that are classical music stations, if you can’t dance to it, don’t play it.
This is classical music, right? Well, believe me, we played a lot of classical music you couldn’t
dance to.
Charnley: I’m glad you mentioned Ken Beechler. Was he directly involved in broadcasting?
Meuche: Yes. He did programming on the air, but he was the architect of the new FM format.
I did the sign-on show, the first show of the day, at six-thirty in the morning.
Charnley: For FM?
Meuche: For the newly separated from the AM station FM.
Charnley: Do you remember what year that was again?
Meuche: ’65.
Charnley: Was that about the time when more people started getting FM broadcasts?
Meuche: Yes.
                                                  22


Charnley: You mentioned that graph where the two—
Meuche: Right. I think that was in the late seventies when the crossover happened. I think
there were enough people listening to FM that it certainly made sense to have two separate
programmed stations. Again, remember, no network. The programs, the external programs we
had—and the other thing that’s important, compared to today with public radio stations, is there
weren’t very many public radio stations. The early public radio stations were almost all
affiliated with colleges and universities. MSU was one of the very, very first, and they were, oh,
they were hugely popular in the Big Ten. Big Ten had the public—they were kind of the
dominant force in early educational. They weren’t called public radio then; educational radio
stations.
         So there weren’t very many stations, but there was a network, no interconnection
network, run by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. They were headquartered
at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Stations would produce programs that were
intended for more than a local audience, a national audience, and then submit them to NAEB to
possibly be accepted for national distribution.
         Then what you’d do is, in the mail—it all sounds so old-fashioned. In the mail every
quarter you would get a catalog of shows that were available and then you’d order them and then
they would come in boxes in mail on tapes. So it was all bicycling, what we called bicycling,
tapes around. It was like when you’re done with your tapes, you send them on to Ohio State.
Charnley: Kind of like what movies used to be or 16-mm movies.
                                                23


Meuche: Yes. And it was so funny because at the time everything—again this is this whole
notion of programs instead of formats, everything was thirteen weeks, a quarter. So it would
either be thirteen half hours or thirteen hours and you’d play one a week for thirteen weeks at a
given time. And those were the kind of programs we were producing here locally. We weren’t
always producing thirteen in a series, but I was producing local series. Then I also got a grant
and produced a national series that was distributed nationally by NAEB called the Circumstance
of Science, which was about science in the late sixties.
Charnley: Did you do anything at that time on the cyclotron or any of the research that was
going on on campus?
Meuche: Was that going on at that time, in the late sixties?
Charnley: It was just starting.
Meuche: I didn’t do anything. I was focusing a lot on the programs I was producing. This
would be after you do your show, The Scrapbook or this morning show, then you would spend
the rest of your day producing programs. It was very clunky the way programs were produced
then. You literally had to cut the tape with razorblades and splice it with splicing tape.
Charnley: Physical editing.
                                                  24


Meuche: Interesting today at the radio station, WKAR, there is no tape. It’s all digital, hard
disk, everything.
         But I was focusing primarily on programs about youth issues. We had another producer
who was doing environmental-related stuff. Then with another producer we did a program, The
Poor was the name of the series, in the Lansing area, focusing principally on migratory workers
in Michigan. At the time Michigan was the third largest employer of migrant labor, which is
hard to believe, and they were right here. They were over west of here in Eaton Rapids, picking
pickles, and, of course, up north and over on the West Coast with all the fruit farms. The
conditions were pretty intolerable for the living conditions and the social services. We hitched
up with some people who were working for the state trying to improve the conditions, and spent
a lot of time at migrant labor camps doing the series. It was quite enlightening, because I’d led a
rather sheltered life growing up in Ohio, and this whole experience, I think that was what the
college experience did.
Charnley: How did you approach it for radio? One can understand and one has seen
documentaries with film and videotape, but how would you approach those same topics with
radio?
Meuche: It was a lot of interview stuff. The way programs were produced at the time it would
be—I have The Poor tapes, but I haven’t listened to them. It would sound so rudimentary if you
listened to the way those shows, I think, were produced. A lot of just interview and, you know,
today the stuff, the radio material has so much sound and things. I mean, we were riding around
on these dusty country roads with this man named Ubaldo Patino, who I believe is still alive. We
                                                 25


did a documentary about the Hispanic migration to the Lansing area a few years ago on TV and
he was one of the interviewees. We probably weren’t recording talking to him while the car was
bouncing over the road and the dust was blowing in the window. You know, if you did
something today, that’s the way you’d record it. We probably said, “Stop. Turn off the car so
we can do this interview.”
Charnley: Interesting. So that one got picked up by the NAEB.
Meuche: Not The Poor, because that was local. The Circumstance of Science would have.
Charnley: Were you working on a master’s or anything at that time?
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: You were right on campus?
Meuche: Right. I got a master’s in—I don’t know if it was still called television, radio, and film
at the time or not. My thesis advisor was—there were some really good professors in the
Television, Radio and Film Department—was Arthur Weld [phonetic], who was like within five
minutes of a Ph.D. in French and never got his Ph.D., and he taught film courses. My master’s
thesis, which interestingly enough, my granddaughter, my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, who
is a movie nut and very interested in drama, ended up seeing my thesis at my house and read it a
month or so ago. She said, “Can I read this?”
                                                26


         I said, “It’s very academic. This is not fun stuff.”
         She said, “No, I’d like to read it.” So she took it home, and she brought it back and she
said, “I thought that was very interesting.” She said, “You write just like I do.”
Charnley: You must have felt very good about that.
Meuche: It was about violence in motion pictures. The movie Bonnie and Clyde at the time
was a watershed movie, because it was considered by many critics to be one of the most violent
movies ever made. I had a lot of fun doing that thesis because there were incredibly good film
critics during those times, and I did this research project about the evolution of violence in
motion pictures and how Bonnie and Clyde became a watershed in terms of how movies were
made. It pales by comparison, of course, to today, but it was a fun thesis. Art Weld was my
advisor for that, and he retired and moved to Florida. I think someone told me recently that he
has passed away. I’m not sure.
Charnley: Were you able to use any of your master’s work in your later broadcasting at all?
Meuche: A master’s degree, I never had a job that required a master’s degree. Well, I shouldn’t
say that. I did teach at MSU for a couple of years shortly after I got my master’s. I also taught a
broadcasting course at Lansing Community College for a while, too. At MSU I was teaching
radio production. It’s funny, I happen to still have my grade sheet, because the final exam, each
student had to do a radio production on tape. I thought I had some of those tapes, but I’m not
quite sure, and the notes I wrote. But I had two notable students when I taught at MSU. One is
                                                   27


my dear friend who just retired from WKAR, Hal Prentice, who was the music director at
WKAR for years and years. At his retirement I embarrassed him because I had the grade sheet
and Hal got a B-minus, even though there were a lot of As. The other person who was in the
class was Steve Garvey, the famous baseball player. Steve didn’t work too hard in that class. I
think maybe he was too focused on baseball at the time.
Charnley: As I recall, he had a good radio voice.
Meuche: Yes. Those facilities were so funny compared to today. They were up above
Fairchild Theater. There are a couple of rooms up there.
Charnley: Just across the street from where we are.
Meuche: Yes, the other end of the Auditorium Building. Oh, I can see that equipment now.
Today it would just look like it belonged in a museum. Well, it belonged in a museum. It was
funny, the Michigan Association of Broadcasters had a display of the history of broadcasting a
few years ago at the Michigan Historical Museum, the state historical museum, and we had a
reception down there for our donors and stuff, and it was like déjà vu. Part of the display was a
radio control room, and it was the same equipment that we had at WKAR when I started there. It
was like, “Oh, my goodness. I cannot believe this. Where did they get this?”
Charnley: Did you find out where they got it?
                                                28


Meuche: No. But right next to that, of course, was a digital TV set.
Charnley: In terms of the tremendous technological change that you have seen in the course of
your career and that you’ve mentioned a little bit, was it hard or easy to keep track of all those
changes, or did you anticipate those as a radioman?
Meuche: I wouldn’t say it was hard, but, boy, there was a lot of, “Oh, wow,” to it. I mean, there
were so many moments, and some of them today don’t sound like they’re very dramatic at all. I
mean, I remember when we first became connected to National Public Radio and it was on
telephone lines, not satellite. The satellite didn’t come till five or six years later. So everything
we got from NPR came over these not-very-high-quality phone lines, and it was like, oh, wow,
listening to a real public radio network coming from Washington. I remember sitting there and
listening to it, and the first thing they ever fed to stations, the very first thing, it was when the
Vietnam veterans protested at the [U.S.] Supreme Court in Washington. It was a piece that a
man named Jim Russell, who’s still working in public broadcasting today, did of the Vietnam
veterans protesters at the Supreme Court. And I’m sitting here listening to this thing, and it was
sound of them arresting the veterans, putting them in a bus and driving away as they chanted,
“One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.”
        And I went, “Oh, wait a minute. Can we broadcast this?” We’d never had to deal with
anything like this before.
Charnley: Interesting. And that was broadcast on WKAR?
                                                    29


Meuche: I don’t remember.
Charnley: John Kerry was involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, VVAW.
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: MSU, did they sign on to NPR relatively early?
Meuche: We were one of the very first stations. I think today there are at least eight hundred
NPR stations. There were less than a hundred in the beginning; I think it might have been
around seventy. It was absolutely fascinating, because it was just such a breakthrough moment
for us, because it just totally liberated us from being confined in a kind of smaller world.
Charnley: Did you find that the audience was interested in that at the time? Were they doing
any surveys?
Meuche: That was just starting. That was just starting, and as I recall, our FM audience at the
time, our weekly FM audience, was about 15,000 to 20,000 people. Today it’s over 100,000
every week, at least. So much of that is due to NPR. So much of it is due to commercial radio,
too, thank you very much. I mean, commercial radio has been very successful, I think, in driving
people to discover and find a place where you don’t have to listen to endless commercials and
disc jockeys that talk nonsense all morning long. So the audience for National Public Radio is
just huge now for public radio stations.
                                                   30


Charnley: In the late sixties, who was head of broadcasting at MSU at that time?
Meuche: Interestingly enough, MSU was one of the few places, especially in the Big Ten, with
both television and radio stations that were separately administered. Actually, there was a man
named Armand Hunter [phonetic], who was the founder of television at MSU, who convinced
John Hannah that the university should become involved in TV at such an early time for TV,
1954. He was around for a while. I had the real honor and privilege of knowing him because
he’s truly the MSU at least television pioneer. But in 1960, late sixties, Dick Estell [phonetic]
was the manager of the radio station. I became the manager of the radio station in 1978. I was
the program manger beginning in 1969. So from ’69 to ’78, I was in charge of all the
programming, and all of the producers worked for me.
Charnley: As you linked with NPR, was there less local programming that was produced?
Meuche: No, not at that time, because at that time we still were 100 percent paid for. Well,
maybe things were getting tight then. Because we didn’t have our first fundraiser until 1975, and
NPR started in 1970. So for that period from ’70 to ’75 we were still dependent on MSU for 100
percent of our support, but I think because we no longer had to deal with the clunky notion of the
bicycled tapes and weren’t as compartmentalized with the programming with all this, you know,
Homemakers Hour and all this stuff. In fact, at that point in time, some point along there, we
started moving to large blocks of classical music time, especially at night where the announcers
were not really there; they were recorded on tape. So a bit of time was spent every day having to
                                                 31


record your announce tape, and then a student normally would play the announcer tape, and then
the record, and then the announcer tape, that kind of thing.
         So I think there was a change in what people had to do that might have freed up people to
be able to focus on producing more programming. But there was a lot more emphasis then,
instead of on that one—there was very little of that long-form stuff. So we were able to do
things like a whole series of programs with the voice library and the library with Bob Vincent,
who, of course, was the founder, when he was still here. Then later we did stuff with Maury
Crane [phonetic]. So we did a little national series on that. That was when we really got into
state government coverage, too, because we suddenly realized—see, commercial stations just
stopped doing news eventually. So there was a real niche there.
Charnley: And the proximity of the Capitol is just down the road.
Meuche: It was a natural, yes.
Charnley: Was there any competition between the stations at University of Michigan?
Meuche: Early on I had incredible respect and admiration for them. For some reason I always,
early I felt that they were a better public radio station. I don’t know why I would have felt that
way, but I admired them a lot and I admired the man who was leading the station. His name was
Ed Burroughs [phonetic] at the time. But then they got in a trap where they didn’t change over
time and they maintained that very kind of eclectic, old-fashioned, classical music format with
announcers who sounded like stuffy old announcers. It’s kind of what we call in radio now that
                                                   32


you have to sound accessible instead of distant. So they got stuck in that kind of format until just
recently when they completely changed, much to the chagrin of the hardcore classical music
lovers down there, and actually totally changed the station to an all news and talk format. So
there was a long period of time when we became the dominant station and—
[Begin Tape 2, Side A]
Charnley: This is tape two side one of the interview with Steve Meuche.
Charnley: When the tape ended, we were talking about somewhat of the rivalry between the U
of M stations, radio and broadcasting, and Michigan.
Meuche: We’ve always gotten along. In fact, we’ve always been the envy, I think, of some of
the other stations in other states, because the Michigan public radio and public TV stations have
always worked closely together. I think it was probably in the sixties, late sixties, maybe early
seventies, we did lots of, not lots, but we would do occasional joint program projects where we’d
take some kind of conflict of statewide interest and then link together the stations with some kind
of a clunky setup where we relayed our parts off the air. So we’d actually be like, all right, so
this first segment will be ten minutes long and it will be done at the University of Michigan, and
the way we’ll get it on WKAR’s air is to tune into University of Michigan in the Auditorium
Building station and put it into the WKAR transmitter. Then they would finish and then we
would do our part and they would tune us in down there.
                                                 33


Charnley: It sounds pretty complicated.
Meuche: It was clunky, too. But we did that with U of M, Western Michigan, MSU. And we
today still work closely together and have a state association that meets regularly along with the
TV people. That’s also unusual in some states. The public TV people hardly ever relate to the
public radio people, and Michigan, our association is both public radio and TV.
Charnley: Were you involved in that early?
Meuche: I was the chairman of the board for a few years and on the executive committee and
quite involved in that.
Charnley: Was that state-funded?
Meuche: Oh, no, it’s a nonprofit corporation that’s funded by the stations themselves.
Charnley: We were talking a little bit about the covering of state affairs, state government. Did
John Hannah support that in the early stages or was it something else?
Meuche: I admired John Hannah so much. Of course, he was the president when I came here as
a student, but I never knew John Hannah. I don’t recall ever receiving any kind of feedback one
way or the other from the Hannah administration. Now, I was not the manager during a lot of
                                                 34


that time, but certainly the university never said, “We want you to go in this direction,” or, “We
don’t want you to.”
        In fact, that’s one of the things I am absolutely the proudest about MSU, in terms of its
relationship with the public radio and TV stations, and that is having spent years and years and
years with my colleagues who are at other university and college stations and having heard
horror stories about how their administration interfered in one way or another with the
programming on the station, and where it gets especially dicey is in news. If you have a story
that you report and it’s negative about MSU, there can be people at the university who will be
angry about that.
Charnley: Public relations.
Meuche: And if at any time somebody, at least we always strongly, and still do today, felt that if
any person in the administration told us, “You should not have done that story because it
reflected MSU in a negative way, and don’t ever do stories again that are negative toward MSU,”
that would become a serious problem for us, because that would totally compromise our
journalistic integrity. So therefore, other stations would be reporting this story, the newspapers
would be reporting this story, but we would be saying nothing? Like I said, based on horror
stories from other stations, not once in my entire career here did anyone make us change
programming or not report something. There were little incidents from time to time where
people were mad because we did something, and they would call us up or tell us that they
weren’t happy, and we would say, “Well, but we have a job to do and that really has to be the
way it is. We hope you can accept that.”
                                                  35


Charnley: With the publication of Ramparts article that dealt with issue of the involvement of
MSU during the Vietnam War—
Meuche: Wow, I had completely forgotten it. Oh, my goodness. Ramparts. I remember that.
Charnley: Do you think that was 1966?
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: But I wondered if there were any repercussions, if that was covered, or on the radio?
Meuche: You know, that was so long ago, I don’t remember. But, boy, I do remember that
controversy.
Charnley: We’re talking about the role of MSU in training the South Vietnamese police force
on campus and the allegations about CIA connections and that sort of thing. I didn’t know if that
was one of the controversies that the station avoided.
Meuche: No, not at all. I don’t remember it as being something that where we—no, we
wouldn’t avoid it, but I don’t remember us ever getting criticism for doing anything about that.
But I’m not sure what we did about that at the time.
                                                 36


Charnley: In the seventies, obviously some of the sports scandals and that sort of thing. Maybe
we could talk a little bit about sports programming. How did you balance that? Were there
some people that wanted all sports?
Meuche: It was all sports all the time. It was. Actually, it kind of used to drive me crazy,
because we broadcast everything, football, basketball, baseball, hockey. I mean, sports was
always strong with the leadership. I mentioned Jim Adams and Terry Braverman. I forgot Bob
Shackleton [phonetic], who was here. Jim was Bob’s assistant. It was Bob and Jim at the time.
        Baseball was the most frustrating because it came right in the middle of the afternoon
during the weekday, you never knew how long it would last, and if it got rained out, then they’d
change it, and the next day, what you thought was going to be a single game, suddenly became a
doubleheader or something. It was just like—you’d wring your hair. It was disruptive, you
know. But there were people who liked it.
        We ran the statewide football network for years, where if you wanted to listen to MSU
football on a Saturday afternoon on your little local station in Petoskey, it will be Jim Adams and
Bob Shackleton. That’s who you’d listen to. I believe in the later years then we also
programmed it in a way so that there were opportunities for those local commercial stations to
cut away and run commercials. Eventually that all went away.
        I don’t know how the baseball and that kind of sport went away. I think it went away
because we finally convinced people, or convinced ourselves that as we became more
sophisticated and were fundraising and wanted to reach more listeners without compromising the
type of programming we did, that you can’t break a format, which is what we call it. So you
can’t have classical music every day except, oops, sorry, we’re not going to play any classical
                                                 37


music today, we’re going to have two and a half hours of baseball on the radio. But the football
prevailed for a long time, and especially on the TV station because it wasn’t available. Now, of
course, you can watch every basketball game, you can watch every football game and you can
watch the hockey games on the cable channels. So the necessity, I guess, if that’s the correct
word, for doing that on the radio went away. But, oh, yes, lots of sports.
        There was the TV show Sportlight on WKAR. We did a show every day called News
Sixty. We did a sixty-minute news program on the radio station and there were sports sections
and hard news sections and features. A pretty dramatic undertaking for the times to do a sixty-
minute program every day. Of course, I think it was at six. It might have moved to five. Six
today would be—you wouldn’t want to put anything on at six today.
Charnley: Your listening audience would probably not be there.
Meuche: All Things Considered is at six o’clock. Wouldn’t want to waste a lot of local news,
public affairs energy, at six o’clock; too much competition from television.
Charnley: Was there a relationship with on-campus broadcasting or instructional television?
Were you involved in that at all?
Meuche: Mildly involved. But of course, I ended up being director of instructional television,
ITV, eventually, but not until the late eighties. My only involvement with instructional
television was when I was teaching the broadcast courses right after I got my master’s degree. I
also taught a course in television and radio announcing, and for the television announcing course
                                                  38


we did it in the instructional TV studios, which were in Erickson Hall. At the time instructional
television and public television were two separate entities; they had not been merged. That was
my only really contact with those folks.
        Then ironically, it turned out that twenty years later, almost twenty-five years later, I
ended up having responsibility for that instructional television and working with some of the
same people who helped me when I was teaching this television announcing course, because I
knew nothing about television, but I was teaching television announcing. It was like, okay, I can
teach announcing, but—so we did, you know, “Okay, Students. Now it’s time to do the weather
forecast.” I’m like, “Help me out here, instructional TV people. Take care of these cameras for
me, will you, because I don’t know how to do anything with a camera.”
Charnley: Was Kent Creswell involved in that?
Meuche: I don’t know if Kent was at that time. Erling Jorgenson was the pioneer of the
instructional TV stuff.
Charnley: On campus.
Meuche: And Kent did come here later, from Ohio State, as the associate director. Then Kent
worked for me when I was director of broadcasting services heading up the instructional arm of
that. There was a time, I think it was probably in the seventies, when there were these really
prestigious program awards called the Ohio State Awards. Ohio State ran a competition for the
television and radio awards competition, and Kent was a judge running a judging center, and I
                                                 39


worked with Kent as a judge each year judging those award submissions. So that was my first
real contact with him. Later on I ended up doing that, running a judging group here on campus
in the nineties. The awards have since disappeared.
Charnley: How did the nature of your job change between the seventies and the eighties?
Meuche: To me it wasn’t as dramatic as between the sixties and seventies. There were a couple
of significant changes. Of course, one was the most dramatic, in terms of facilities, was moving
to the Communication Arts Building in 1981. Also in the mid-seventies NPR moved to the
satellite network. So for the first time we were capable of getting multiple radio channels from
satellite, and we were selected to be one of only I think it was about fifteen public radio stations
that not only had a downlink capability to receive the programming, but also an uplink. So we
could transmit to the entire public radio system via satellite. That was pretty dramatic. I always
thought that was really quite technically interesting how you could take a signal and beam it
22,000 miles up in the air and capture it at another public radio station in California. Today it’s
not so dramatic.
Charnley: People have it in their homes in a little small dish.
Meuche: And interestingly enough, as a matter of fact, so that was such a big deal to have that
satellite uplink in the mid-seventies, about three or four years ago we packed it up, all the
electronics for transmitting radio, and sent it back to NPR. We decommissioned the uplink part
because that’s not the way you do things anymore. It’s all over the Internet or fiber optic lines.
                                                  40


We still have a TV uplink, because it’s a little harder yet to do high-quality video that way, but
you know that we’ll be doing it that way soon. This was seventies to eighties.
        Well, the public radio audience started growing dramatically. The whole fundraising
audience thing dramatically changed. We did our first on-the-air fundraiser in 1975. I remember
it because we set up the news room in the cramped auditorium as the area we did the pitches
from, and we raised $10,000 in 1975. That was the total amount of money we raised from
listener contributions. Today the radio station is over a million, the television station over two
million every year. We did not do underwriting, those underwriting announcements. We, public
broadcasters, have all been trained to call them underwriting announcements. Everybody else
calls them commercials. There really is a difference. But, boy, they’re pushing the line these
days, I’ll tell you.
Charnley: Yes, it’s quite a contrast. It seems like one of the first ones, Masterpiece Theatre,
that connection, I remember that was about as close to endorsement.
Meuche: Yes, that’s mild compared to today. That’s really quite mild.
Charnley: Where you’re seeing the product and you’re hearing the pitch.
Meuche: You’re not allowed to say, “Buy this product.” You’re allowed to show the product.
You can’t urge people to take action. Of course, you still can’t interrupt the program, which is
the way, certainly, it ought to be. And there’s a lot of research. I mean, from time to time we get
                                                  41


people who complain about it, but there is a lot of research that shows that people do understand
the necessity of that.
Charnley: Were you involved in that fundraiser, the very first one?
Meuche: Oh yes.
Charnley: Did the university start withdrawing some of the support in relationship to that? It
seems like that was a tough balance.
Meuche: You know, and that was always a fear of mine, that they would say, “Well, if you’re
fundraising, we’ll just offset our support by the amount you raise every year.” I don’t believe
that happened. There were periods when things were tough economically in the state and others,
as I’m sure history has recorded here for sure, 1981, and the modified coordinated proposals,
where they took 17 million, I believe, out of the MSU budget, MSU did at the time. [M.] Cecil
Mackey was the president. That was the first time ever that—ever until two years ago—we
actually had to lay off employees because the budget cuts were so extreme, relatively speaking,
in 1981. Since then, actually, the MSU support has not gone up. In fact, it hasn’t even kept pace
with inflation, but probably neither has the MSU overall budget. But MSU is still, I think, quite
generous in its support, even though we got a big budget cut two years ago. But again, it was a
rough time and we ended up having a couple of layoffs again.
        The combination, the funding model now, I think is a really good funding model where
MSU pays for some of it, some of it comes through congressional appropriations, and the
                                                 42


listeners or viewers pay for the rest. And the listener/viewer support is about 50 percent. I think
that’s good, that nobody really is the majority owner, even though, of course, MSU owns the
license, so they really do control the stations.
Charnley: Were you surprised that the radio was able to maintain that level of giving, or not
surprised by that?
Meuche: Actually, radio’s done quite well. In terms of the listener support?
Charnley: Yes.
Meuche: Radio’s done quite well. TV is struggling these days because there is just so much
competition, so many cable channels. And public radio and TV people tend to lose sight of
reality sometimes. I remember one of the very first public TV meetings I went to in 1989 or
1990, and they had this elaborate presentation about how public TV had nothing to fear from
cable television because the public television national audience was bigger than all those cable
networks, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, Food Network, CNN, ESPN, bigger than all
their viewers combined, and that was fifteen years ago. Oh, it’s not true at all today. No way.
Charnley: They were ignoring that, I think, or misjudging it.
Meuche: Discovery Channel was spending more money on advertising than public television
was spending on programming in a year. How do you compete with that?
                                                  43


Charnley: You went more into administration in the 1980s.
Meuche: Yes. Well, I was the radio general manager starting in 1978, but then in 1987 Bob
Page, who had been the TV manager for years and years and years, retired. Irv Bettinghouse
[phonetic], the dean of College of Communication Arts, who was the area we reported to at the
time—we’ve been all over this university in terms of changing reporting relationships over the
years, but at that point in time it was Communication Arts and Sciences, and Irv Bettinghouse
came to me and said, “Bob Page is retiring. I’d like you to be on the search committee or—.”
Well, no, he said, “I’d like you to also be, if you’re willing, the acting director of the TV station,
as well as radio general manager. Or if you’re a candidate for the job, then tell me and we won’t
do that.”
        I said, “Well, let me think about it.” And I thought about it, and the next day I said, “I
can’t give up radio,” because it was are you going to become a candidate to become the director
of the TV station and somebody else would run the radio station. Remember, they’re still
separate, even though we’re in the same building now. I said, “I can’t give up radio. So I’ll be
the acting director for TV and do the radio job, and you go find yourself a TV manager.”
        I was on the search committee. After two years of being acting TV director, along with
my radio job, and the search committee becoming frustrated because a couple of people who
were offered the position eventually declined, they suddenly realized that they could save some
money and create some synergy if they combined the television and radio administration, as I
had mentioned earlier, like it was at most universities. So they created a new position, the board
of trustees created a new position, director of broadcasting services, and made me the director of
broadcasting services. So that’s what I began doing in 1989.
                                                  44


         So it was like, “Oh my, I’ve been doing radio for all these years and suddenly we’re into
the world of television. This will be interesting,” and it was interesting. I had to keep telling
people at the TV station, “Look, you produce those programs. We’ll talk about what direction
we’re going and stuff, but just remember one thing, Steve has never produced a television
program in his life. I’ll try to figure this out, but I can’t direct a TV show, because I used to do
radio.” Well, it worked out pretty good. I enjoyed it and I think we accomplished some things.
Charnley: What were some of the producers that you relied on then to hold up the leg of the
TV?
Meuche: Actually, many of them are still there, and some of the legendary ITV producers now.
They’re all gone now. Dick Brundle [phonetic]. Gary McQuaig [phonetic]. Gary McQuaig,
here suddenly, is working for me in the 1990s, and he was my director that helped me do that
television announcing class in Erickson Hall. And the TV people, directors, many of whom are
still there, too, some of whom retired.
         One of my early TV stories that kind of summed up my baptism to TV was, because I
always had an interest in programming I took a real interest in television, public television
programming, which was unusual, because for some bizarre reason public TV managers tend not
to be involved very much in programming. I took a real interest in it and learned a lot that way,
but I also made my early mistakes in TV by not understanding how it worked.
         One of my favorite early-on stories was they were programming the television station and
they had the ability to videotape programs fed from PBS and schedule them at other times. So if
you had a children’s show that you wanted to show, you could record it when it was fed off the
                                                    45


satellite at seven a.m., but if you wanted it to be on at ten a.m., then you’d play the tape back at
ten a.m. And we were doing some things that I thought were kind of goofy, so I said, “Well, I
don’t understand why you’re recording this, playing this here, doing that, doing that.”
         And they said, “Well, that’s the only way we can do it. We have to do it that way. We
don’t like doing it this way either, but there’s no other way to do it.”
         I said, “Well, why is there no other way?”
         And they said, “Well, we don’t enough tape machines.”
         I said, “You don’t have enough videotape machines?” I said, “In radio, if we don’t have
enough tape machines, we go buy one. They cost two thousand dollars.”
         They said, “Uh, Steve, welcome to television. Do you know how much a television tape
machine costs?”
         I said, “I have no idea. Just go buy one.”
         And they said, “Oh, okay. Where’s the thirty thousand dollars coming from?”
         I said, “Oh, okay. I guess we won’t be buying a tape machine soon, will we?”
         Radio’s so simple compared to TV. One person in radio can go off and do a program
from start to finish. TV, you do a big studio production, it takes eleven people.
Charnley: Was MSU producing many TV programs when you took over?
Meuche: We had a little niche. We had a little niche where we were producing, because there
was a man at the television station for years who was an absolute legend. His name was Dr.
Donald Pash and he produced a series called Young Musical Artists, and some of the most
famous American musicians today, when they were very young and undiscovered, came to MSU
                                                   46


and performed, and Don Pasch created, all the way back into black and white and then into color,
programs with these performances of these artists. He became an absolute legend because it was
such an incredible niche that nobody else was into. He has retired. I think he retired shortly
after I became the acting director. He now lives in Chicago.
         We decided we wanted to try to maintain some of that fine arts tradition, so we did hire a
young man, Eric Schultz was his name, MSU music graduate with some TV interest, and we
created a series of programs that were what I would call now not just a straight performance, but
a kind of performance documentaries. We didn’t do very many because they just took so long to
produce and they were so elaborate. But those were distributed nationally on PBS.
         One of the last ones we did was the Ellen Zwilich Commission for the Gardens, the
Children’s Gardens, the symphony that she wrote and was performed here at Wharton Center,
the world premier of her symphony. I think it was her fifth symphony. We did a documentary
about all her visits to MSU and studying the gardens and composing, went to New York, Eric
went to New York to her studio and did a documentary about how she wrote this symphony, and
then did a documentary of the performance of the actual symphony. We won an Emmy Award
for that.
[Begin Tape 2, Side B]
Charnley: This is tape two side two of the Steve Meuche interview.
         We were talking about Ellen Zwilich’s, The Gardens, and you mentioned the—
Meuche: Eric Schultz the producer.
                                                 47


Charnley: And you have an Emmy Award?
Meuche: Yes. That was a regional Emmy Award, not a national award, by the way. Let’s be
correct here. And Eric Schultz, who was the producer, who was the mastermind of those
programs, left. Actually, he went through the MSU Weekend MBA Program, and got an MBA,
and then strangely enough, left and went to the New Jersey Public Television Network to do
performance programming.
Charnley: He was able to use it as a springboard.
Meuche: See, public TV stations have to make decisions about where they want to focus on
their programming, and the station here really isn’t big enough to be a major regular producer of
national programming. By “not big enough,” I don’t mean to belittle station, but the problem is
that the minute you commit yourself to doing that kind of thing, the local programming suffers.
Somehow you decide, you know, I want to be a producer of these shows that are on PBS all the
time.
Charnley: And a contrasting station would be like GBH in Boston, some of the others from—
Meuche: Correct. San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York, they’re the ones that produce
all that programming, but they have multi-, multi-million-dollar budgets and they’re constantly
having financial problems. It’s so difficult to produce those kinds of programs.
                                                 48


        So, long ago we made a commitment that in addition to our programs of local interest
that we would focus on statewide programming because we were in the capital. There are seven
public television stations in Michigan, and we are the public television station that produces
virtually all of the statewide programming, the programming that’s carried by all the other
stations, Off the Record, which we’ve done forever and ever.
Charnley: With Tim Skubick?
Meuche: With Tim Skubick, who lived in Shaw Hall with me and worked at WKME, the Shaw
Hall closed-circuit radio station in the 1960s, and did the Friday night dances with me. Tim
Skubick is still doing Off the Record and has been. He calls himself the senior capital
correspondent. I always used to crack up, because I thought that was pretty funny, but, boy, he is
now the senior capital correspondent. I guess they did an anniversary thing for him in the studios
two years ago, anniversary of the show.
Charnley: Was that the twenty-fifth?
Meuche: No, I think it was the thirtieth. I’ll have to check that. And without hesitation, the
governor showed up, you know. He’s done a beautiful job. So that show, Off the Record, tapes
every Friday morning, satellite uplink Friday morning, broadcast on every public station in
Michigan over the weekend. And we do a series called Michigan at Risk, which is always a
topic of statewide concern, that we produce here. That program is carried live. Well, not live,
but simultaneously at the same time, same night, on every one of the seven Michigan public TV
                                                  49


stations. And then we do a lot of specials, the governor’s State of the State Address and
legislative specials, programs like that. So that’s our niche. None of the other public TV stations
in Michigan are producing programs for the other stations on a regular basis; here occasionally.
Charnley: What’s the Michigan equivalent of the C-SPAN?
Meuche: That’s Michigan Government Television, MGTV. That’s not a public TV thing. That
actually is financed by the cable companies. Now, we have an excellent relationship with
MGTV. We work with them. In fact, we put all the MGTV programs on the campus cable
system here so faculty and people can use them in their classrooms if they wish. For a long time,
I don’t know if we are still doing it, we were doing the archiving of all their daily broadcasts, and
they use our material occasionally when we have something. We occasionally will do an
interview with the governor, long-form, you know, an hour-and-a-half, hour interview, they
would ask us for that kind of material.
        When we do the State of the State, we do the State of the State address, and the
opposition party responds live every year. That used to be expensive because we had to haul
cameras down there and microwave the signal back here. The legislative television system,
working with MGTV, has all the cameras and facility there, so they do the video part for us. So
they save us quite a bit of time and money by working together on that. So we work closely
together.
        We’re also working much closer with the local commercial stations. We have a
partnership right now with Channel 10, WILX, the Lansing State Journal. Together, the three of
                                                 50


us are doing mayoral debates. We did them last year. We’ve done some joint projects. It’s a
good thing. It makes you feel good working together with other media in Lansing.
Charnley: You mentioned the cable networks controlling the Michigan government
broadcasting. Was there any relationship in terms of local, like, Comcast or some of the other
cable companies?
Meuche: The relationships with the cable companies are interesting. For a while the cable
company managers, local managers, were turning over so fast that as soon as you established a
relationship, they’d be gone. I don’t know what was going on. Either they were growing so fast
that they kept moving these people to other places, or they were getting rid of them, I don’t know
what it was. But I’d say over time our relationship has always been relatively good.
        But then there are various different FCC matters that are much more formal, where we
have to have agreements with cable companies, for example. For example, cable companies fall
under FCC rules regarding whether they have to carry certain off-the-air TV stations. The cable
companies, frankly, would like to carry as few off-the-air. By “off the air,” I mean your local
stations that have transmitters. They would like to carry as few as possible because they don’t
make money on it. They make money on the cable networks and those shopping networks. So
they like to keep their channels for other purposes. Now, they’re not nasty about that, but we
had an instance, for example, where we were on the cable in Ann Arbor, a good place to be, to
say the least, and the cable company there dropped us. It’s very complicated, the FCC rules, but
they had the right to drop us, and it was unfortunate.
                                                 51


        If I might go off on an aside, one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me
was I was deposed, a deponent, for a Supreme Court case, and this was Turner Network
Television and Time-Warner, Incorporated versus the FCC. The issue that ultimately went to the
Supreme Court was an FCC rule called “Cable Must Carry.” The rule said that if a television
station put a strong enough signal into your community, you had to carry it. So, prior to that, the
cable companies didn’t have to do that.
        So here’s how this evolved. I hope I don’t go off on this too far. But the way this
evolved was, early on most people didn’t have cable, so it didn’t matter. If you lived in
Kalamazoo, you could watch WKAR, because you watched it off the air. Then cable came to
Kalamazoo and fewer people watched stations off the air; they watched them on cable. In fact,
today cable penetration, what they call cable or dish, combination cable and satellite dishes, is 90
percent. So there are only 10 percent who are watching TV stations off the air today. Well,
suddenly then, if people used to watch you in Kalamazoo off the air, but now they have cable
and the cable company chooses not to carry you, you’ve lost lots of viewers.
        The FCC confronted that issue and said, “Well, wait. This isn’t right. People are
disaffected from their opportunity to watch TV, so therefore we’re going to require cable
companies to carry any station that puts a strong enough signal into their community that could
be watched off the air.” And that’s what they sued about, Time-Warner and Turner and a whole
bunch of cable people, that it was unfair for the FCC to force them to carry WKAR in Flint,
where we were on.
        The reason I was deposed was we had evidence that the attorneys loved. This was
through America’s Public Television stations, the lobbying organization for public TV stations,
that demonstrated beyond a doubt that when we were removed from cable systems in Ann Arbor
                                                  52


and Kalamazoo, that our membership income in those areas dramatically decreased. So they
caused a financial hardship for the stations because people in Ann Arbor, if they can’t watch us,
they’re not going to give us money anymore. So that was why I was deposed. The Supreme
Court ultimately ruled in favor of the FCC, and that’s why we can still be seen on cable systems
in Flint, where we wouldn’t be if that law had not been upheld.
         So then I read the whole Supreme Court decision. It’s big. I mean, those things are
really, really big, and yet I’m not in it once. There’s no reference to me.
Charnley: Not even a footnote.
Meuche: No. But it was fun, being deposed at this big legal firm in Washington, D.C., with
these—excuse the expression—slick lawyers who came down from New York working for the
big television companies. It was quite an interesting day.
Charnley: What was the relationship in terms of time from when Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo
dropped you to this lawsuit? Was it several years or was it relatively close?
Meuche: It was four or five years.
Charnley: So you regained the Ann Arbor audience then?
Meuche: We regained the Ann Arbor audience and we regained the—it was difficult because
we had to start writing letters to cable companies saying, “According to FCC rule so-and-so, you
                                                  53


have to put us back on. We’re not on.” So it became somewhat of a contentious issue, but we
were determined we were going to be on where we were entitled to be on. The reason Ann
Arbor dropped us is, you only have to carry so many public TV stations, and so they dropped us.
Charnley: Is that fifty-six?
Meuche: Fifty-six. They dropped us. Why they ever did this, they dropped us and put on the
Toledo public TV station, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Then you’re talking about
cable, one of our recent things with cable is now, again, a must-carry agreement for digital,
because that’s now a big issue. We’re on the air with our digital TV station, but the cable
companies don’t have to legally carry that digital TV station. The Lansing cable company is
carrying the digital TV station, but only on their more expensive digital service that you have to
pay extra for.
Charnley: It almost sounds like a similarity between the shift to FM.
Meuche: Absolutely.
Charnley: And now the shift is to digital.
Meuche: Absolutely. That’s going to be the most dramatic change, is the shift to digital from
analog. Well, that will be even more dramatic because the analog stations have to go away. The
TV stations that people watch today suddenly will disappear and there will be nothing left but the
                                                 54


digital stations. And I just keep saying there will be riots in the streets when somebody turns on
their TV one day and all the stations are gone.
Charnley: They’ll be looting Best Buy and ABC.
Meuche: Well, fortunately, they’re getting less expensive. The FCC has done what they did
with UHF television. WKAR was a UHF TV station, went through the same thing as FM. There
was a time when there was no UHF on TVs, nothing above Channel 13, and then the FCC finally
required that every TV that was manufactured have both UHF and VHF. You can’t buy a TV
today that doesn’t have 2 through 63 or whatever, 83, whatever it is. Well, they’re doing the
same thing now with the TVs, that it’s being phased in with the bigger ones right now, but there
will come a point in time when you cannot buy a TV, a legal TV, that doesn’t have the digital
capability. That’s the way they’re going to do it. But how long do you keep TVs? So at some
point there are going to be a lot of people who aren’t going to—well, and then the issue again
becomes cable. If the cable companies aren’t required this must-carry rule, again, to carry those
digital stations, you’re going to have that same problem again.
Charnley: Was that challenged again at all, or was that pretty much accepted?
Meuche: Not yet. It’s still kind of evolving because digital TV is still so new. WKAR digital
TV went on the air a year ago. It’s been on the air a year and a half now, eighteen months. We
actually signed on the digital TV on the exact date at the exact time that WKAR TV, analog TV,
went on the air fifty years earlier.
                                                 55


Charnley: Wow. Interesting coincidence.
Meuche: And that was a nightmare, building that digital TV station with the equipment.
Charnley: Where is that located?
Meuche: We had serious problems with the equipment that we purchased because it was so new
and so expensive. That’s in Okemos on Dobie Road. MSU owns a little nature preserve
research area out there, and TV and radio stations have been out there for a long, long time, the
FM. The AM is on the MSU farms.
Charnley: So there were some equipment problems with that?
Meuche: Well, see, here’s the problem with digital. By the way, we’re on the air with our
digital radio stations now, too, both AM and FM. So we’ve got WKAR AM, WKAR FM,
WKAR AM digital, WKAR FM digital, WKAR TV, and WKAR DT, which is the way the FCC
says you’ve got to ID. So suddenly we’ve doubled the number of stations without having the
extra money to run them. This is a government mandate. The radio wasn’t a government
mandate, and the radio was relatively inexpensive compared to the TV. The TV, we’ve spent up
to this point with the digital, probably close to three million dollars, and we do not have the
capability of doing local programming. We cannot locally produce programs in high-definition
TV because every piece of equipment we have is not compatible with the new digital high-
definition format. So there still has to be another equal expenditure of two to three million more
                                                   56


to equip the control room, studios and field capability to go out and produce a program outside
the studios.
Charnley: Well beyond the 30,000 for the recorder.
Meuche: Yes. Luckily, as with everything electronic, the prices are coming down, but it’s
extremely different, sophisticated. Our nightmare was the antenna. They had to replace the two-
ton antenna that’s sitting on top of a thousand-foot tower. I’ve always been fascinated by the
transmission process. A lot of managers probably don’t even know where their transmitter is. I
certainly like to go out there and see when they’re doing this kind of thing. That was quite an
incredible—those tower climber company people—I don’t do heights. [laughs] Oh, they scare
me. But they had to take off the top of that tower this sixty-foot long antenna that had been up
there for thirty years and put the new one up there. The new one cost over four hundred
thousand dollars because it was the combined analog and digital. Shortly after they did that, it
blew up.
Charnley: Of its own accord or was there lightning strike?
Meuche: No, there was a fault in the manufacturing. So suddenly there we are with—not
having the digital is no big deal because not many people can watch it at that point, but the
analog was gone, too; Channel 23 was gone. Luckily when we installed that, we put in a
temporary antenna halfway up the tower, so that when we did work we could switch to this other
antenna. So we had to switch to that other antenna, which significantly reduced our power.
                                                 57


People could not watch us in Jackson anymore, caused all kinds of problems with the cable
companies out there who could only get these really awful pictures. We went through, oh, my
goodness, I think it went on, between the time we blew that antenna and we finally got it
replaced, it was four or five months, because they had to take it down. Come back out here, take
it down, not an easy task, because it takes them forever to put all the rigging on the tower. Take
it down, truck it away back to the factory in Maine, do an autopsy on it, decide they can’t fix it.
They convinced us to switch to another kind of antenna, which caused all kinds of changes in the
electronic configurations. It was just a nightmare.
Charnley: Was the timing bad, too, in terms of—
Meuche: Well, when you don’t reach as many people, you’re not raising as much money.
Charnley: And that was during fundraising?
Meuche: Oh yes. Oh, absolutely. Of course.
Charnley: Worst-case scenario.
Meuche: Yes.
Charnley: In terms of the Internet and how that affected broadcasting—
                                                58


Meuche: Oh, goodness.
Charnley: —would you talk a little bit about that? Because that obviously occurred during
your tenure.
Meuche: Well, we very early got into having the webpage and streaming the programming. So
everything that’s on WKAR Radio, with one exception, it’s a copyright problem, the Radio
Reader, about a half hour, everything else is streamed live on the web, so you can hear it
anywhere in the world. That’s been fun, getting e-mails from people saying, “I’m an MSU
alumnus and I used to love WKAR. I now live in Japan and I listen to the station and it’s really
fun.” So that’s been fun.
         Plus, the good thing about the radio webpages is all the local programming is archived,
too, so you can go back and listen to it later. So we had a graduate assistant a few months ago
who won an award, a programming award, and I had not heard her piece, her award-winning
piece, but you can go listen to it because it was archived on the website. The TV is a little
different, because, again, it’s a rights problem, so you can’t put PBS programs on there, but all
the local material is, again, archived there. So you can watch the Off the Record shows, you can
watch the Michigan at Risk shows.
Charnley: So teachers can use those in class.
Meuche: Yes. And then we run another website called WMSU.org. See, I used the MSU call
letters. We did that on purpose, so the board would feel comfortable. [laughs]
                                                  59


Charnley: They wouldn’t attack the WKAR logo? [laughs]
Meuche: Right. We use that for MSU-related stuff. If you go there, there’s all kinds of stuff,
commencement addresses, symposia. It’s a free service to the MSU community. If you do an
international conference at Kellogg Center, we’ll put it on there for you. That’s fun, and that’s
the kind of thing we like to do. We need to do something for MSU, and we do a lot for MSU.
Sometimes there are people who think we don’t do enough, but we’re reflecting MSU all day
every day.
Charnley: We were talking about, also, the history, certainly the 150-year anniversaries, and
obviously WKAR’s been an important part of the last fifty years of the institution. Are there any
ways that you were involved in preservation of the MSU history, or how it was presented on both
TV and radio?
Meuche: I’m sure over the years there are things that are archived here, and we’re just going
through our tape library again. I mean, I just saw the other day a program—oh, some of those
things were so dreadful. But there was a young student here named Jim Spaniolo, who was the
editor of the State News, who became the executive assistant to President [Clifton R.] Wharton
[Jr.], who went away, became an attorney, worked for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, and
ended up as the director of their foundation in Florida, and, as you know, came back here and
was dean of the College of Communication Arts until just, oh, a year and a half or so, and has
gone on to be the president of a university in Texas, I believe.
                                                 60


         But anyway, I just saw that the other day, it was Jim Spanilolo, assistant to President
Wharton, interviewing President Wharton about what’s going on at MSU, broadcast on WKAR
in beautiful black and white. [laughs] So there are those things and they’re around. I don’t
know if they’re in the university archives or if we have them.
         I know that we had a bunch of film that we did transfer to the archives recently, and we
are working with the university on the official sesquicentennial television documentary. That
will be a really good, I’m confident, documentary that’s being produced.
Charnley: It’s good to hear that at least some of those things are being preserved. They’ll get a
wider audience, I’m sure.
Meuche: I must mention, because we’re beyond the sixties, but one of my embarrassing
moments, just for the record here, is that I have the distinction in 1969, a young man, twenty-five
years old, who was working at the University of Minnesota Public Radio station applied for a
news job at WKAR, sent an audition tape and scripts that he had written for his station. I sent
him the “Thank you very much for your application. We appreciate your interest, however,”
letter, and his name was Garrison Keillor. I have the letter that I wrote. So I rejected Garrison
Keillor for a news job at WKAR.
Charnley: And now the station plays Prairie Home Companion for years.
Meuche: They think that’s pretty funny at the station.
                                                 61


Charnley: Did you meet him? Or I guess you would talk to him anyway, because he was on
campus.
Meuche: Oh yes, sure. They actually did two of the national shows. WKAR sponsored two of
the national shows when he came here. But that was when Garrison was simpler. The venue had
to be a funky auditorium, so it was Eastern High School, and I forget where the other one was,
but they were Lansing High School auditoriums. The admission was five bucks or something.
Today, just as we speak, I think, they’re making a movie, a motion picture, that Garrison Keillor
wrote about Prairie Home Companion, with big stars. I mean, I think it comes out in the fall or
the winter. So it’s much more than it was at the Eastern High School auditorium for five bucks.
Charnley: That’s quite a distinction. I’m glad you brought it up.
Meuche: When Garrison was here, we went down to the Lansing City Hall because the mayor,
Terry McCain at the time, was going to present him with a key to the city. I remember that,
because Garrison and I went down to Lansing City Hall and there were two Garrison Keillor
moments when we were on the elevator with a young couple who was going to get their wedding
license at the city clerk’s office. This woman, the young woman—I don’t know, I must have
said, “Do you know who this person is? He’s famous.”
        And she said, “No, I have no idea who he is.”
        And Garrison Keillor said, “Oh, I wrote Moby Dick.”
                                                 62


        Then we went up to the mayor’s office in the Lansing City Hall, which is on the top floor
of the City Hall, and Keillor walked over and looked out the window at the capitol and he said,
“This must give you a feeling of great satisfaction sitting up higher than those people.”
Charnley: That’s great. [laughs]
        Let’s maybe talk a little bit about your retirement. Oh, I’m sorry. Let’s go back. I forgot
to ask about the fire.
Meuche: Oh, the fire. Oh, my.
Charnley: I was on campus then and I was on my way in to Morrill Hall, and I had to take a
different route because I saw the smoke. Was the Quonset hut burned?
Meuche: Oh, that fire.
Charnley: That fire.
Meuche: Oh, that fire. That was the good fire. [laughs]
Charnley: Tell me about that.
Meuche: The good fire or the bad fire?
                                                  63


Charnley: The good fire. Well, let’s talk about both. Let’s start with the MSU WKAR TV in
the Quonset hut.
Meuche: The Quonset hut story was that we had moved into the Communication Arts Building
and the TV station was in—there were, as people who know MSU history, a whole city of
Quonset huts over where the Breslin Center is located now, and the TV station was located in
this handsome Quonset hut for years. It was actually the mess hall, so it was the biggest,
probably the biggest—
[Begin Tape 3, Side A]
Charnley: This is tape three side one of the Steve Meuche interview.
        When the last tape ended, we were talking about the fire at WKAR, the Quonset hut.
Meuche: The famous Quonset hut, the former mess hall. As I was saying, I remember going
over there and having meetings in Bob Page’s office, the manager. I mean, they were temporary.
They were there forever because they were built right after the war for the G.I. Bill soldiers.
There used to be trees growing out of the floor in his office. TV people used to talk about how
when they were producing TV programs and it started raining on the tin roof, they had to stop
because it was so noisy. We thought we had problems with the Auditorium Building and having
windows.
        Anyway, so we all moved to the Communication and Arts Building in 1981. They were
going to tear down the Quonset hut and get rid of it, but it was full of asbestos, so they had to do
                                                64


asbestos abatement. They were using torches to cut the asbestos out of the walls or ceilings or
whatever. They went home after work, and apparently something was still ignited from the
asbestos removal, and that morning, it must have been probably around—it was certainly billows
of black smoke by about eight-thirty in the morning, I think. The Quonset hut caught fire and
burned up. That was the “good fire” in the sense that there wasn’t anything in there, nobody got
hurt, and it was ready for the bulldozer anyway. That was the good fire.
Charnley: What was the other one you mentioned?
Meuche: The bad fire was in 1978, August of 1978. The FM and TV transmitters, as we
mentioned earlier, are out on Dobie Road, both in the same building. Due to—well, they never
were sure, but due probably to a malfunction in the TV transmitter—TV transmitters are so Rube
Goldberg, it’s unbelievable. They have cooling systems that pump antifreeze through the TV
transmitters because they get so hot inside, and it was thought that something malfunctioned.
But there was a huge fire in the building, completely destroyed the building. The building is
back down this road along the Red Cedar.
        I remember vividly because I was in my office at the Auditorium Building, and one of the
engineers called and said, “You’d better get out to the transmitter. The transmitter is on fire.” I
started driving down Grand River, and as I was just starting to drive down Grand River, toward
Okemos, you could see billows of smoke in the sky. The Meridian Township Fire Department
didn’t realize—nobody had ever told them—that that building was there, and when they
discovered that it was full of megawatts of electricity burning, had this slight trepidation about
                                                 65


standing there with hoses pouring water on it. So I think they had to have the power company
come and turn the power off.
        It was just a total disaster, put us off the air for a long time. Radio was off the air for only
a few weeks, because they rushed a replacement transmitter and built a temporary little shelter at
the bottom of the antenna. It didn’t damage the tower or the antenna, so radio was able to get
back on pretty quickly. TV, there was no way they could do that, because the TV transmitters
were so big and there was just no way to do it. So we had to wait until the building was rebuilt.
        The insurance adjusters, when they first came out, took one look at it and said, “Oh, we
think all this equipment can be cleaned up and you can use that again.” And we finally
convinced them that you don’t take expensive electronic equipment and cover it with water and
soot and black ash and plan on using it again. So they declared it a total loss. The university had
a deductible on it. I think they had like a 400,000 or 800,000-dollar deductible. The university
paid the deductible; the insurance company paid the rest of it. They rebuilt the building. We got
new equipment and finally got the TV station back on the air.
        What saved TV at the time was we were able to feed the TV directly into the local cable
stations, so people who lived in the immediate Lansing area could still watch WKAR TV, but
nobody else could until we got back on the air.
        I just saw a picture last week, because I found my fire photo files and gave them to our
person who kind of collects the history of the TV station, and there’s a picture of me standing at
the transmitter while a fireman is chopping a hole in the roof with his axe. You know how they
have to do that. And I’m standing there—oh, I remember them vividly—in my plaid pants. It
was 1978. I showed that picture to somebody there and I said, “Don’t you like those plaid
pants?”
                                                    66


        And he said, “You know, those were real popular then.”
        The TV manager, Bob Page, was up north on vacation, so he wasn’t there.
Charnley: You were his assistant?
Meuche: No, I was the radio manager. Radio transmitter and the TV transmitter were in there.
I was the radio manager. But he was up vacationing up north, and he swears that he told them,
“I’m going on vacation up north. Don’t call me unless the station burns down.”
Charnley: Oh no.
Meuche: He says he said that. And they called him and said, “Bob, the station burned down.”
[laughs]
Charnley: When did you decide to retire?
Meuche: I actually stepped down as the director of broadcasting services in January of 2004. I
think I submitted, or talked to Dave Gift the vice provost who I was reporting to at the time, I
think I told him about eighteen months in advance, because I wanted to make sure they had
plenty of time to do a—maybe it was a year—to do a search. There aren’t very many of us in the
business today, so it’s always a lengthy process to replace somebody. They did hire, which I
suggested, a national firm that specializes in public broadcasting. But I was supposed to retire
                                                 67


July 1st, 2003, and the search was taking too long, so they asked me if I would continue until a
new person was hired. So I did continue from July to January 17th, I think it was.
         Then I spent six months on a consultancy and wrote a grant application for equipment
and had fun. That was fun, not having to worry about people or money for six months.
Charnley: Since your retirement, have you had any continuing contacts with the university?
Meuche: Actually, yes, I still have an office. This spring I wrote another grant application for
free—nobody paid me—for radio—there’s a government agency, it’s pretty competitive, for
equipment for public television and radio stations, for some digital studio equipment for the
radio stations. I wrote the narrative. I don’t write the technical part; I can’t do that. They did
recently call and negotiate with us. So usually that means you’re going to get the grant, but we
don’t know yet. So I did that.
         I’ve done some audience research. That’s one of my favorite pastimes. I was involved
early on, and still am today, on the executive committee of the Board of Directors of the public
radio nonprofit research company that does all the research, assimilates all the research for
public radio stations. So I’m still working with the station on some audience research projects.
         As a matter of fact, when I leave here, I’m going over there, because when I was there
earlier this week, they gave me a tape of a new program that’s proposed, public TV program,
that’s a financial-related program, which is also an interest of mine, and said, “Would you please
look at this and let us know what you think.” So I have to go over and let them know what I
think.
                                                  68


Charnley: Do a review of that.
Meuche: So it’s fun, because I get to do stuff when I want to do it. I’m still trying to clean out
my thirty-nine years of the Steve Garvey grade sheet and the fire photos. I’m getting there. I’m
making some progress.
Charnley: You’ll need to contact the archives, I think.
Meuche: Yes, I will. I do need to talk to them because I’ve got, I also have some—yes, I do. I
have some tapes that they may want that are commercial network, radio network, tapes about
MSU.
Charnley: When you started here as a student, coming from Dayton, did you ever anticipate
that you’d not only go to the university here, but that most of your working life would be spent
here at Michigan State?
Meuche: I suspect that became kind of obvious once I started working full-time at WKAR. It is
bizarre, because it’s like not many people just come to one place. What made it exciting here for
me was every time I had done a job long enough where it was starting to get kind of rote, a new
opportunity came along. It was just great that the TV opportunity came along when it did, as
well as the radio manager opportunity.
        For a brief period of time, when I was a student, I also worked at what is now WFMK,
the commercial station in Lansing. I only applied for one other job when I worked at WKAR,
                                                 69


and that was to put on the air a new FM station for the Rochester, New York public TV station,
and that was a community licensed station. So the licensee is a community corporation. They
did offer me the job, and my boss at the time, Dick Estell, as they say, bought me out. “What
will it take for you not to leave?” And I never did go to Rochester, New York. And I’m very
happy I didn’t, even though that became a very successful public radio station. I became very
close to the man who offered me the job, because I started doing public TV, and he was one of
the leaders in public TV, and has since retired. But that was my only flirting with leaving MSU.
Charnley: Very interesting. I’d like to thank you on behalf of the project. I appreciate your
insights.
Meuche: It’s been fun. I hope I didn’t talk too much.
Charnley: Not at all. Thank you very much.
[End of interview]
                                                 70


                                                     Index
Adams, Jim, 17, 38
Beechler, Ken, 22
Bettinghouse, Irv, 44
Braverman, Terry, 17
Brundle, Dick, 46
Burroughs, Ed, 33
Crane, Maury, 32
Craswell, Kent, 40
Estell, Dick, 31, 70
Funk, Leah, 2
Garvey, Steve, 28
Hannah, John A., 31, 35
Hunter, Armand, 31
Johnson, Jay, 8
Jorgenson, Irwin, 40
Keillor, Garrison, 62, 63
Mackey, M. Cecil, 43
McQuaig, Gary, 46
Meuche, Steve
   As Michigan State University student, 5
   Board memberships, 69
   Circumstance of Science, 24
   Director of Broadcasting Services, 45
   Early broadcasting experence, 5
   Early impressions of Michigan State University, 4
   Early interest in radio, 14
   Early radio experience, 2
   Education of, 1
   Important influences, 2, 27
   Instructional television, 39
   Judge of Ohio State Awards, 40
   Junior Achievement experience, 2
   Manager of WKAR (1978), 31
   Master's thesis, 27
   Retirement, 68
   Teaching experience, 28, 39
   WFMK position, 70
   WKAR radio station positions, 6, 20, 31, 44, 45
Michigan State University
   Campus in 1962, 4
   Communication Arts Building, 7
                                                       71


   Dances in Shaw Hall (1962), 5
   Effect of Vietnam War, 9
   Farmers Week, 12
   Radio stations on campus in 1962, 5, 6
   Relationship with National Public Radio, 30
   Vietnam War student protests, 9, 10
   WKAR radio station, 7, 8, 10, 11
Nathan, Hans, 22
National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 23
National Public Radio (NPR), 10, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41
Page, Bob, 44, 65, 67
Prentiss, Hal, 28
Schultz, Eric, 47, 48
Shackleton, Bob, 37, 38
Skubick, Tim, 49, 50
Spanilolo, Jim, 61
Spencer, Susan, 8
University of Michigan
   Radio station, 33
Vincent, Bob, 32
Weld, Arthur, 27
WKAR DT, 57
WKAR radio station, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 57, 59, 61
   Awards, 12
   Budget, 43
   Effect of Vietnam War, 9
   Farm Service Hour, 12
   Frequencies, 13, 15, 17
   Funding support, 32
   Fundraising, 41
   Homemakers Hour, 13, 20
   Hymns You Love, 21
   Listen to the Band, 21
   Moving to Communication Arts Building (1981), 40
   News Sixty, 38
   On Campus, 10
   Origin of call letters, 15
   Programming, 11
   Relationship with Michigan State University, 36, 42
   Relationship with National Public Radio, 30, 31
   Relationship with University of Michigan, 34
   Relationship with Western Michigan University, 34
   Satellite communications, 41
   Spartan Sport Life, 38
   Sports programming, 37, 38
   Station split (1965), 21
   Technological changes, 25, 29
   The Farm Service Hour, 20
   The Poor, 25
   The Scrapbook, 20
                                                        72


  Transcriptions, 19
WKAR TV, 57
  Digital TV, 56
  Emmy Award, 48
  Fire (1978), 66
  Fire (1981), 65
  Michigan at Risk, 50
  Move to Communication Arts Building (1981), 65
  Off the Record, 49, 50
  Relationship with cable companies, 51
  Relationship with local commercial stations, 51
  Relationship with Michigan Government Television, 50
  Relationship with with Michigan State University, 60
  Young Musical Artists, 47
WKAWX
  Funding model, 43
Zwilich, Ellen, 48
                                                       73