Musical programs concentrated on classical music, but also included a great deal of jazz. In 1944, about a year after the first orgy, Richard L. Kaye '46 broadcast the second classical music orgy, which he called The Harold Ferdinand Van Ummerson Memorial Program.

Because the station had not built up a record library of its own, the Briggs and Briggs music store loaned records in exchange for advertising. Every morning, disc jockeys would go to the store, select the records they wanted to air, and return them the next day.

WHCN was run separately from The Crimson by 1942, when it paid back the paper's investment and became independent as WHRV, the Harvard Radio Voice, known as "The Listening Habit of America's First University," according to David R. Elliott '64, the station's unofficial archivist.

After World War II, a number of students trained as technicians in the Army returned to Harvard and helped move the station to the basement of the original Dudley House on Dunster St., where they rebuilt the studios.

The station was still small, with only a single studio and control room. "My principal memory of it was that it was a fire trap and we always wondered how long it would last," says former President Richard P. Kleeman '44.

On February 1, 1951, WHRV was incorporated as Harvard Radio Broadcasting, Inc. The same day, the station inaugurated new call letters and began transmitting as WHRB.

Since the station's founding, it had been prevented from broadcasting to the public by the difficulty of getting one of the limited AM frequencies. But in the mid-'50s, the FCC began regulating and assigning FM frequencies.

"FM in those days was an abandoned and unknown way of transmitting a radio signal," says Loren L. Wyss '55-8, a former station president. There were only two FM stations in Boston, and they "appealed to a few music freaks because of [FM's] high fidelity," Wyss says.

The station applied for a frequency but immediately ran into difficulties. "The chief problem was a legal one--the FCC didn't want a bunch of kids who changed every two years to be responsible for a radio station that broadcast rather widely across the Boston area," says Wyss. But with the help of a number of WHRB graduates who worked for the FCC, the station was given an FM frequency.

Another station donated a 500-watt transmitter and on May 17, 1957, WHRB began broadcasting all over the Boston area. "We would get cards from people who had heard a 'strange signal' as far away as 100 miles west of us. It forced the station to become much more professional and to mature much more quickly," says Wyss.

The station still aired mainly classical music, but also played jazz, opera, and newly popular folk music. WHRB also concentrated on its news programs, just at a time when inexpensive portable tape recorders were being introduced. For the first time, reporters could play tapes of events or interviews in addition to describing what had occurred.

When President-elect John F. Kennedy '40 came to Harvard in early 1961, WHRB news director James F. Flug '60 managed to be the only reporter to interview him that day, by talking to him in his limousine. As a result, Flug was the first reporter to find out about Kennedy's plans for starting the Peace Corps.

"When [Kennedy] got out into the Yard, there was a total mob scene," says Flug. "As he passed by, I said, 'I'm from WHRB and I'm supposed to interview you.' He said 'Hop in!'"

Earlier, Flug had interviewed Kennedy in West Virginia, where the candidate had refused to answer some of Flug's questions about his media campaign. Flug recalls that Kennedy's "people told me later he had in fact remembered the Harvard reporter who had given him such a rough interview."

Flug says that at the time "we really had a running competition with The Crimson" in news coverage. WHRB began to issue a summary of its 11 p.m. newscast and would pass it out every morning in the dining halls.