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corner of my eye. It reached across and pushed the mic key, and suddenly, I could hear myself. I actually thought I sounded okay, and my confidence grew as I continued. I read the remainder of the stories plus the formatted out-cue taped to the paper stand. My voice did sound higher than I thought it did in real life, and I had a nasal, flat
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sound that must have been left over from my upstate New York childhood. I got up and practically floated back toward the main offices before I realized I’d forgotten to turn the teletype back on.
    As I walked through the door, the station manager was furious. “Where were you? You made me look stupid. I throw it to you and you’re not there. What the hell happened?”
    So I wasn’t really on the air in the beginning. I looked mournfully at Schmidt, without whom I would never have been on at all. I didn’t remember if the station manager had told me to throw the mic switch or just assumed that I’d know something so elementary. I thought that some engineer controlled everything. I was ruined already before I’d even started.
    But Schmidt spoke up. “Sorry boss,” he said, “but that damn mic switch was sticking again. The kid thought it was on but I had to jiggle it to make proper contact.”
    “Well damn it, have it fixed before the next sports report. Can’t you get anything right, Schmidt? Embarrass the poor guy on his first show with your incompetence. Actually, Dick, once you got going, you sounded pretty good. Are you busy at eleven? That’s our final sports wrap of the night.”
    Schmidt had just performed the most courageous act I’d ever seen in person. He winked at me as we walked out of the office to grab a cup of coffee and said, “Don’t let that guy bug you. He yells at everybody.”
    That’s how I learned radio—by doing it. I did sports for a couple of weeks and then a DJ position opened up. The elusive chief announcer was supposed to meet me before I went on and explain the guidelines, but he never arrived because he had a hot date that night. So I just went on and winged it, playing whatever I liked from the albums contained in the office filing cabinets. It was an eclectic mix, some light jazz, folk, rock, whatever they had. I started trying to imitate the Top Forty patter of the jocks I grew up listening to, but the style seemed unnatural to me. So as the show progressed, I toned it down, finding a comfortable level of conversation. My dorm roommate, George Yulis, stopped by to wish me well, and I invited him to join me. We talked as we did off the air, about girls, music, comedy, clothes, whatever we found relevant. We got absolutely no feedback from management about the show; we assumed they hadn’t listened. So we did it the same way the following week, and continued unsupervised throughout the semester. We didn’t call it free form at the time: We didn’t call it anything. We played album cuts, singles, comedy bits, whatever we felt like. I’m sure hundreds of other college kids were inventing their own kind of radio concurrently. The baby boomers were getting their first taste of a new kind of radio that spoke to them directly. It certainly wasn’t the hyped-up, commercialized pap we grew up with on the AM dial. Some FM stations were even attempting to duplicate this largely college phenomenon for profit.
    In 1966, free-form radio was in its infancy on commercial airwaves. To understand what led to it becoming a dominant form of radio just a few years later, one must understand what came before.

Rock and Roll High School
    It was all about fun, fun, fun till your daddy takes the T-bird away, or at least that’s what we thought growing up.
    As the Beach Boys reverberated on low-fidelity AM radios in the early sixties, no one expected much more from the box. Most of the popular music of the early sixties was exceedingly forgettable. Recording artists rarely possessed much talent. The songs were written by others, often nine-to-fivers in New