Radio Free Boston

by Carter Alan

  WBCN now had an official news department, even if it only possessed one employee, but Norm Winer tore into his responsibilities with enthusiasm. Pursuing interviews and sound bites to spice up his segments on the air, he’d regularly head out to the rally, march, or sit-in of the day. “When all the demonstrations and protests were happening, I would bring an old tape recorder with me. I’d get arrested, then reveal my press credentials at the very last minute so that I could get back to the station and broadcast the news!” This pattern—of finding creative ways to present what, in most media outlets, was a bland concoction of terse stories—remained a mission to be continued for all the years that WBCN presented news as part of its programming commitment. As Danny Schechter summarized in his book: “If the music was going to be different, why not the news?” But Winer, who established the station’s attitude of going out to embrace the stories, retained the news director position for only seven months. In a surprise development, Steve Segal enticed his good friend Joe Rogers to join him at KPPC-FM. After a flurry of tearful send-offs from the glum air staff, Mississippi Harold Wilson signed off at WBCN in June 1970, emerging days later in California with a sunnier alias: Mississippi Brian Wilson (but that’s another story). In the wake of the abrupt change, Norm Winer got his full-time DJ shift, moving to overnights, while a new figure was recruited to handle the young news department. His tenure, though, would be even briefer than Winer’s: a mere four days, in fact. But it’s one of the most legendary in the WBCN scrapbook and an emblem of the turbulent times that existed at that point in America.

  Ray Riepen supervised some interviews for the news director position, and one of those applicants was Bo Burlingham, a politically aware activist who, like many of his young generation, was catalyzed by the government’s activities in Southeast Asia. He had been a member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), which organized protests on campuses across America. Burlingham had also been part of the Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of SDS dedicated to establishing a revolutionary party to take over the U.S. government, even with violent means, if necessary, to return power to its people. In 1969, the Weathermen, as they were also known, sent a small group of followers to Cuba to meet with communist officials from that country, as well as from North Vietnam, to discuss America’s political opposition to the war. While the Weathermen considered themselves to be patriots opposing the government’s illegal and warlike actions, the leaders in Washington considered it high treason. “I had been a member of the Weather Underground in the early days, in the Central Committee,” Burlingham admitted. “I went to Cuba with the SDS delegation, but I left them pretty soon afterward. My wife and I needed to find a place to live and we settled on Boston.” He heard about the WBCN job opening from a mutual friend of Charles Laquidara’s and came in for an interview. “Ray Riepen was quite impressed that I had graduated from Princeton—even though I had barely managed that.” While the sheepskin from New Jersey scored points in his favor, Burlingham didn’t consider his political activities relevant enough to bring up, so as far as Riepen was concerned, he had found an outstanding candidate and promptly gave him the job.

  Bo Burlingham was now a happy man. He had a position that suited his interests, at a radio station whose employees were clearly not conservative or even mainstream in their political leanings. “I started on a Monday as news director. We would take news stories and insert sound and music segments. I was so slow at it at first that we had a slogan for it: ‘Yesterday’s stories—tomorrow!’ Tuesday we had improved and by Wednesday we were just hitting our stride. Then on Thursday, the teletype went off. I went over to check the machine and noticed the first word said ‘BULLETIN.’ So, this had to be important, but you had to wait while it typed out each line.” As Burlingham read the words clacking out on the machine below, his body began to chill. “The title was something like, ‘FEDERAL GRAND JURY IN DETROIT INDICTS 13 MEMBERS OF THE RADICAL GROUP, THE WEATHERMEN, ON CHARGES OF CONSPIRACY.’ All the first names were people from the leadership, people I knew, some of whom were underground by this point. Then the teletype gets to the last name and I saw that it was . . . me! I just reached down, ripped off the story, folded it and put it in my pocket.” Numbly, Burlingham walked into the next room, bumped into Laquidara, and handed him the incriminating evidence, but he didn’t get a whole lot of sympathy at first: “He reads the story and the first thing he’s worried about is where they’re going to get a new news director! I don’t know if it was him or someone else who said, ‘You’re going to need a lawyer.’”

  Bo Burlingham confessed to his membership in the Weather Underground but asserted that he did not serve in any critical, policy-making role. “I was in and out very quickly. But, there had been a mole in the organization, a person whom I befriended and got to know. I guess I was indicted because they needed to enter in testimony from me at the trial.” Danny Schechter revealed, “It was part of an FBI effort [called] ‘COINTELPRO,’ [an operation] to stop various protest movements in America by infiltrating them.” Burlingham contacted his buddy, Michael Ansara, who had been the head of the Harvard chapter of SDS and the one who had originally tipped him off about the ’BCN job; then the two sped off to Cambridge on Ansara’s motorcycle to break the news to Riepen. “We stopped in Kendall Square for something to eat and the story came on the television, naming all the names and showing pictures. I started to look down to try to hide my face; I could just picture my photo on the screen and someone across the room shouting, ‘That’s him!’ But, [luckily] they didn’t show a picture.” After telling Riepen about the dilemma, the mercurial manager’s advice was also, “Get a lawyer,” which Burlingham did immediately. “[The lawyer] asked me whether I was going to turn myself in or go into hiding. I said I’d turn myself in, so he arranged for me to do that at the courthouse. The judge posted bail at $100,000 with lots of conditions: I had to surrender my passport, had to check in [regularly], advise them of any travel plans, and I couldn’t drive through Rhode Island for some reason!”

  While Bo Burlingham waited for a trial, which wouldn’t begin for three more years, Riepen tried to figure out what to do with the alleged co-conspirator. The often-antagonistic comments about the government spoken on the air at WBCN didn’t necessarily endear the station with local and federal authorities, plus Riepen believed that a couple of break-ins at his apartment were not just burglaries but the results of a government investigation into Boston’s radical movement. “When [Burlingham] got indicted,” the general manager divulged, “I said, ‘I’ve got a federally licensed business here, and I’ve had enough heat from these guys.’”

  “Ray decided that perhaps it would be best if I left ’BCN,” Burlingham added.

  “So, I gave him a job at my newspaper,” Riepen said. Earlier that year, the entrepreneur had amassed some of his earnings from the Boston Tea Party and WBCN, joined with a financial partner, and invested in a tiny rag called the Cambridge Phoenix. Infusing the publication with cash and beefing up the editorial and reporting staff, their goal was to make a serious run at becoming Boston’s weekly of choice. In a noble gesture, Riepen steered Burlingham toward this new opportunity. “He hooked me up with Harper Barnes, his editor, and I wrote stories for the Cambridge Phoenix under my wife Lisa’s name.”

  When the trial of the Weather Underground leaders finally got to court in 1973, it was asserted that the government had obtained information about the defendants by wire taps and other potentially illegal surveillance. With the Supreme Court prohibiting electronic eavesdropping without first obtaining a court order, prosecutors realized they would be vulnerable in their efforts to win the case, since at least some of their critical information had been gathered by questionable means. Subsequently, the suit fell apart, and the charges were eventually dropped. Burlingham got his passport back and his name cleared, and then went on to flourish in a journalism career for many years to come. Despite his many successes, though, he’d never forget his four days working at WBCN in 1
970.

  In the sixties and early seventies, many policy makers in Washington considered the protest activities of its citizens as an outright attack on the country. With the Weathermen declaring an official state of war on the U.S. government in 1970, it was clear that the gloves had been completely taken off on both sides. Joe Rogers talked about the feeling of that time: “You know how you can be young and paranoid . . . but there was a sense that something politically important was going on and that you might very well be being watched. Who knew if the FBI would come storming through the door.” Andy Beaubien added, “This may seem naive now, but there was a group of us at [WBCN] who really believed we were on the verge of a political revolution in the U.S. and if you listen to an album like Volunteers by the Jefferson Airplane, it expressed the mood of the time. The station went through a very political stage around 1970, ’71, ’72. We were pretty far out on the left and a lot of what we were doing on the air had to do with the politics of the time . . . this was Vietnam and a little later it was Watergate.” In amazement, he recalled, “I remember emceeing a concert at BU; the artist was Buddy Miles. It was a white college audience and it was a benefit for the Black Panthers!”

  Danny Schechter, the man chosen to replace Bo Burlingham, would be the asset that drove WBCN squarely into the political stream. By the time he arrived in Boston, he had already graduated from Cornell University and gotten his master’s at the London School of Economics, but working in an environment that combined his pursuit of journalism and love of music seemed like the perfect place to be. At first, though, despite all of his schooling, and some journalism experience, Schechter began at the bottom as an intern working for his predecessor. “News at that time consisted of some headlines and one produced feature that Charles read and Bo wrote,” he remembered. “But people said that Bo didn’t have any radio experience and was going to have to produce an expanded newscast. Did I want to help out? So I did it first on a volunteer basis because I was interested in radio news, which I knew nothing about. It was the blind leading the blind, in a way!” He had barely started learning the ropes before Burlingham’s indictment and sudden exit elevated the young intern into the principal news position. “There was, at the time, an advertising campaign that said, ‘I got my job through the New York Times,’ so I joked that, ‘I got my job at ’BCN through the FBI!’”

  It wasn’t long before Schechter adopted the famous radio handle that would remain with him throughout his career. “I was writing news [stories] for the DJS to read and I wasn’t the best of typists, so I would correct the copy with a pen. [But] my penmanship was worse than my typing! At one point I handed Jim Parry some news which, typically, had my scrawl on it. He goes, ‘What’s this? I can’t read this! You read this and I’m going to take a leak.’” Parry got behind the microphone and gave Schechter an impromptu windup for his very first radio moment: “He said something like, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to introduce Danny Schechter—the news detector . . . the news inspector . . . the NEWS DISSECTOR!!’ At which point I read the news, kind of terrified . . . then ended up staying there for ten years. So, thanks to Jim Parry, I adopted this News Dissector brand, if you will, and used that as a way to differentiate what I was doing from what others were doing in Boston.”

  On a break from giving the news, Danny Schechter gives blood. Photo by Dan Beach.

  The News Dissector lost his shakiness and grew in his craft.

  We were playing to an audience in Boston, particularly three hundred thousand college students, at a time when the counterculture was in ascendancy and the antiwar movement was, in many ways, based in [the city] with Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and other intellectuals. This was something that was popular; in 1972, the whole country was a landslide for Richard Nixon, except for Massachusetts. We did a radio show then called “Nixon: 49, America: 1,” which was about that election. When most people think of politics they think of Democrats and Republicans and elected officials. That’s not how we defined politics. We were really talking about politics in the community and on the streets . . . politics of protest and culture. ’BCN was, sort of, charging in another direction. We weren’t lecturing the audience; it was [more] like engaging the audience.

  Danny Schechter began to build up a department that could handle the amount of story investigation and production time needed to create two regular news broadcasts at 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., plus his frequent special reports. Bill Lichtenstein, who started as a volunteer in 1970, recalled that WBCN excelled at in-depth coverage but eschewed the “on the hour” punctuality that characterized all of the other television or radio news reporters in the area. “The six o’clock [news] would go on the air sometime between 6:00 and 7:30, and could run anywhere from twenty-five minutes to an hour. The ten o’clock news would go on anytime between 10:05 [and] 11:00 and run from fifteen to forty-five minutes, depending on what was going on.” He added, with a laugh, “If Spiro Agnew was in town and there was a full-scale riot with people [being] arrested and we were getting phone calls from them, we’d be editing things together and Danny would be going into the studio with thirty-two carts [tape cartridges with recorded segments on them]. Charles would say, ‘We’ve got a whole report coming up at 11:00, so stay tuned.’ And that would be the ten o’clock news.”

  Like Schechter and most of the WBCN air staff before him, Lichtenstein was thrown in the deep end suddenly. He arrived at the station as a fourteen-year-old junior high student from Newton, which had a curriculum requiring its students to go into the community and find a volunteer job. “I called ’BCN and they had just started the Listener Line. The person I spoke to, Kate Curran, who[m] Charles brought in to set up this system to handle all the phone calls, swears that I said I was sixteen. So, I started answering the phone, in the days before the Internet and Google; [WBCN] prided themselves in the fact that you could find out anything! They stocked bookcases with reference books because people would call up with all kinds of questions . . . like ‘What’s the population of Sri Lanka?’”

  Bill Lichtenstein, WBCN’S youngest employee, covered a Black Panther story at age 14. Photo by Don Sanford.

  One day, the fourteen-year-old—ahem, the sixteen-year-old—fell under the gaze of a stressed-out Schechter, as the volunteer worked one of his many Listener Line shifts.

  There was a big protest at the Boston Police station that used to be right up the street from Stuart Street. The police in Chicago had shot a Black Panther in his apartment and people were saying it was an assassination. Danny handed me a tape recorder. “Here, go up the street and cover this demonstration.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “This is the microphone, push the red and white buttons and it’ll record; then just ask people, ‘Why are you here?’” So, I went up the street and people gave me all these really intense answers, [which] I brought back and he used for the news.

  Thus began Bill Lichtenstein’s long career as an award-winning investigative reporter and journalist, although shortly afterward he lost his cool, high school–mandated volunteer job when Schechter began paying him out of the news department budget.

  Lichtenstein once covered a Boston demonstration and subsequent protest march through the city streets. He tagged along as the throng crossed the Charles River on the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, heading into Cambridge. “It ended up at the Center for International Affairs over at Harvard. This was Kissinger’s old office and it was tied to the war effort. They would meticulously call it the CFIA, but people would roll their eyes and say, ‘No, the Center for International Affairs should be [called] the CIA!’ [The crowd] ended up breaking in and trashing the place; they started ransacking files and tearing everything up.” He laughed at the memory of finding a desk that hadn’t yet been overturned or destroyed in the melee, which still had an intact telephone. “So, I called Danny up, live on the air from inside, to do a report while all this was going on.” He was in the middle of his call to WBCN when suddenly, “Somebody yelled t
hat we had to get out, the police were coming! I concluded my report with, ‘Desks are being overturned, files are being ransacked and phones are being ripped out of the walls!’ Then I pulled my plastic phone jack out of the wall too!”

  Danny Schechter elevated the editorial power of the news department with two additions, Andy Kopkind and John Scagliotti. The former, a noted writer for left-wing magazines like the New Republic and The Nation, would later compose political essays in publications as prominent and respected as Time magazine. Before he got to WBCN, Kopkind worked in Washington at the Unicorn News Collective, which fed reports about issues concerning the war to counterculture radio stations across the country. His partner, John Scagliotti, revealed, “The collective, though, was going bad; it was time to leave D.C.” Charles Laquidara, who knew Kopkind, invited him to come up to Boston. Scagliotti continued, “Andy went up, I followed, and while we were at ’BCN, Danny said, ‘Why don’t you do some stuff and maybe they’ll hire you at some point.’ It was all very flexible.” So, despite Kopkind’s semilegendary status, he and Scagliotti began on a volunteer basis, like all the others.

  “Our very first [’BCN] piece was on the Victory Gardens in the Fenway,” Scagliotti recalled. “No one knew what they were back in those days; [it was] just these people planting nice vegetables. This was the first piece of radio craziness that we did: at the beginning [of the report] we took The Messiah, the part where they sing, ‘let us rejoice,’ and we took all the ‘let us’ . . . ‘let us’ . . . ‘let us’ [parts] out and cut them all together to make ‘lettuce . . . lettuce . . . lettuce.’ Then we had [a recording of] a woman who just mentioned, ‘We grow lettuce over here,’ and then in comes the ‘lettuce . . . lettuce . . . lettuce . . .’ That was our early work; weird!” he added, chuckling. “In fact, we were discovering and developing a whole new sound that was beginning in the early seventies, because radio had never really mixed sound effects and live actualities in news and public affairs, like using a car crash sound when there was something [in the report] we didn’t like.” The chemistry clicked; soon Kopkind and his young protégé were both drawing checks from WBCN. Eventually, Scagliotti would even be made the news director, technically Schechter’s superior. He downplayed this role: “I was the boss only because nobody else wanted to do it. When [the department] got big, somebody had to manage it and make sure everybody got paid!”