About the KUCR Archives Project

KUCR 88.3FM in Riverside, CA is a non-commercial college and community radio station that broadcasts from the campus of the University of California, Riverside and serves a diverse community in the Inland Southern CA area. The station is currently located on the north side of the campus of UCR and has been broadcasting from the same building and location since the station’s first sign-on at 2pm on the afternoon of October 2, 1966.

The station has historically and continues to feature a wide range of original programming produced by students, staff, faculty and alumni from UCR and surrounding communities.  In addition to an eclectic range of music shows, KUCR programming addresses subjects including history, sociology, language arts, psychology, political science, economics, philosophy, anthropology and fine arts to name a few. “Indian Time,” “Radio Aztlán,” “Autotalk,” “Highlander News Room,” “Roundtable Roundup” and “Arts Alive!” are a few examples of the original programs the station currently produces.

A variety of student music programs provide firsthand access to and training for campus based DJs, as well as a venue for both new and old musicians and other artists.  The station serves a broad audience of UCR and surrounding community members, and is unique as a college and community radio station for the diversity of its programming and communities served as well as its nearly fifty year history. The KUCR Archives project and coinciding documentation of archival material for public access will provide an important resource for those interested in the history of KUCR, public broadcasting, college radio and related areas.

Station Origins

KUCR’s origination can be traced to a group of electrical engineering students who reportedly used a metal trashcan as an antenna to operate a pirate radio station from a dorm room in the Steinbrau student housing complex on the UCR campus in the early 1960s. The first pirate radio station broadcasts consisted of popular music shows by student DJs using aliases.  In the decades since the station has grown into a thriving college-based community radio station whose programming includes syndicated productions alongside original news, music, entertainment, arts and cultural programming.

The Federal Communications Commission eventually moved to have the unlicensed student-operated radio station closed down.  The UCR Chancellor at the time, Ivan Hinderaker, was approached by a group of students including Hans Wynholds and Bill Farmer, the station’s founding manager and chief engineer, and worked with them to secure $10,000 from the UC Regents to fund a student-run station at UCR.

The UC Regents were reluctant to grant funding for the project in the wake of the 1965 Free Speech Movement and related growth in campus-based activism, which they feared KUCR would provide an additional outlet for. Chancellor Hinderaker took personal responsibility for the content of KUCR’s future broadcasts and the UC Regents approved the purchase of a broadcast license for the station, originally at 88.1 on the FM dial.

William “Bill” Elledge

One of the founding members of KUCR radio station was William (Bill) Elledge.  Mr. Elledge worked as a chief engineer and programmer at KUCR from its official founding in 1966 until late 2009.  Mr. Elledge was an integral figure in many facets of KUCR history, and possessed an extensive collection of KUCR related material, including original programming in a variety of media formats and various station ephemera.  An avid documentarian, he served as an unofficial archivist for KUCR as well as the broader UCR community during his tenure at the station.

Mr. Elledge also worked extensively with the UCR Highlander newspaper, conducting interviews, publishing editorials and saving potentially decades’ worth of old newspapers, records, tapes and other items in his home. Mr. Elledge hosted a popular classical music and commentary program that aired on KUCR from 1971 to 2008.  His personal classical record collection is reported by Louis Vandenberg, the current KUCR station manager who worked with Mr. Elledge for many years, to have exceeded 30,000 albums.

Mr. Elledge’s estate materials and those related to KUCR date to his own experience as an undergraduate student at UCR in the mid to late 1960s and follow the length of his career and involvement with KUCR, the Highlander campus newspaper and UCR campus and community life in general. These materials have been generously donated to the station by Mr. Elledge’s estate and will help serve as a foundation for the establishment of archival collections at KUCR.

Archival Materials

KUCR archival material includes documentation of UCR and local community culture, politics and related events; numerous interviews and programs produced by and with renowned scholars and musicians such as Sterling Stuckey, Oscar Brown, Jr., Angela Davis, Alex Haley, Ray Bradbury and Henry “The Skipper” Franklin, among many others. For almost fifty years KUCR has been active as a local community resource for information on current news, entertainment, music, arts and other cultural events from a local to global level.  KUCR also broadcasts simultaneously on a live webstream available through our website.

The KUCR Archives project will preserve and provide ongoing access to audio and other artifacts from the stations diverse and compelling history. Archival material at the station consists of original KUCR programming on a variety of media formats such as audio cassette, reel-to-reel and digital audio tapes; vinyl records, compact discs, and broadcasting carts; as well as documents including original station program guides, listener correspondence, station log sheets for DJs and other items that have accumulated at the station over the years.

A few examples include an interview conducted with author Ray Bradbury at UC Riverside in March, 1975; photographic prints of the founding KUCR chief engineer Bill Farmer and station manager Hans Wynholds taken at the station by photographer Ansel Adams; as well as a broad range of original and award-winning KUCR music, news and other public affairs programming, UCR Highlander newspapers and discontinued Tartan yearbooks dating to UCR’s foundation in 1954.

It is difficult to imagine, but what if all that remained of the conversations, performances, interviews, speeches and so on of the past century were written transcripts, at best. The ability to record, store and replay audiovisual media in analogue, digital and similar formats is a relatively recent and significant development in human history.  This ability has enabled people to record their history and engage the world around them with a new range of artifacts unique for their capacity to capture events and audio-visual elements in real-time.

History is inevitably lost unless people actively preserve it, and the acts of both determining what needs to be preserved and then working to do so are critical to the existence of any record of human history. Audio archives and the material they contain are an important and often overlooked part of the bigger picture of human history that places like KUCR and college radio stations around the world actively help document and preserve. No project to date has captured the depth and breadth of KUCR history. This is a gap the KUCR Archives project seeks to fill.

- Elliott Kim

KUCR Archivist

October, 2011

Picture below: Founding KUCR station manager Hans Wynholds (foreground) and founding engineer Bill Farmer inside the station, c. Fall 1966.  Photography by Ansel Adams.

Picture below: Original script for first KUCR on-air sign-on read by Hans Wynholds at 2pm on Oct. 2, 1966, p. 1 of 2

Picture below: p. 2 of 2, original KUCR sign-on script.