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About WFDD: A Brief History
"This is station W-A-K-E coming to you from the campus of
Wake Forest College in Wake Forest, North Carolina…"
With these words, a radio station was born. In the
fall of 1946, Alva "Al" Parris and Henry "Randy"
Randall, began broadcasting--illegally--from their rooming house.
Their early five-watt broadcasts only covered an area of about 300
feet in all directions--students in the girls' dormitory could barely
hear the station. Over the next year as students pushed for better
broadcasting range, the president of the college, Dr. Thurman
D. Kitchin, helped establish the station as an official campus
radio station. Students successfully raised the necessary $200 start-up
funds, and by spring of 1948, the station had its FCC license.
With the help of faculty advisor Dr. Marc Lovelace, the now
legal radio station secured space to broadcast from the press box
of old Groves Stadium. Brothers David and Ralph Herring,
Jr. built the first 50-watt transmitter, relying on diagrams found
in a book about electronics and on the advice of a Raleigh radio
engineer. On April 19, 1948, chief announcer Roland C. "Woody"
Woodward was joined by President Kitchin and student body president
Horace "Dagwood" Kornegay as the "Voice of
Wake Forest" hit the airwaves. As it turned out, the original
call letters WAKE were already assigned to another station. Within
the month, the fledgling station's call letters became WFDD, which
stands for Wake Forest Demon Deacons.
For the next ten years, WFDD was completely a student-run station.
When Wake Forest College moved to Winston-Salem in 1956, WFDD moved
as well. Early programming included classical and popular music,
programs by faculty members, an hour of devotional material each
week, some campus sports, news, and a nightly broadcast of the "Deaconlight
Serenade--beaming musical good cheer to you and yours, styled Wake
Forest way." Visit
the Deaconlight website
In 1958, Dr. Julian Burroughs, who served as student station
manager in 1950-51, returned to the station as the first non-student
station manager. Burroughs served both as a professor in the Department
of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts at Wake Forest University
and as station manager for WFDD until 1981. During this tenure,
WFDD became a non-commercial educational FM station in 1961. Local
listeners helped raise money for the addition of a new antenna and
36,000-watt transmitter in 1967, making WFDD the first FM stereo
station in Winston-Salem. On May 3, 1971, WFDD became a charter
member of National Public Radio--the first in North Carolina--when
it carried the initial broadcast of NPR's "All Things Considered."
Following Burroughs term, J. Patrick Crawford served as station
manager for one year. Then in 1982, Cleve Callison became
station manager, and WFDD began operating with a new antenna and
100,000-watt transmitter. However, on May 5, 1989, this transmitter
was destroyed by a tornado.
88.5 WFDD currently broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
from a 60,000-watt tower in northern Davidson County. 88.5 WFDD
has a listening area covering 32 counties in North Carolina and
Virginia. Denise Franklin, who became station manager in 2007, leads a
team of 12 full-time and several part-time employees, as well as
numerous loyal volunteers. WFDD's current programming includes NPR
news programming, classical music, jazz, and very popular shows
like Car Talk, Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!, and A Prairie
Home Companion.
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