UMass Boston - Winter/Spring 2007-2008 - (Page 17)

Wumb geNerAl mANAger Pat Monteith ’74— An American Original giVe Dobie the CreDit bY leSlie limoN n American original.” Those are the first words out of National Public Radio President Kevin Klose when asked to describe WUMBFM General Manager Pat Monteith. “Just look what she has done,” he enthuses. “She got a station on the air where nobody thought was possible, at a frequency where nobody said was possible. She’s continued to expand the empire and the audience continues to expand. There is no end to this lady.” The WUMB “empire,” which has just celebrated the 25th anniversary of its first FM broadcast, now includes five easternMassachusetts stations, all offering the same programming. But perhaps nothing captures WUMB’s reach better than the world map on the studio’s wall: Internet streaming brings listeners from as far afield as Scandinavia and Asia—even Antarctica. And nothing reveals the station’s impact better than those listeners’ email messages, many from former Bostonians who love the sound of familiar Boston accents on the air. “The accent is actually something we want,” states General Manager Pat Monteith, whose own is evident. “I want our announcers to be real and connect to where we live.” “A As one of a handful who presided over the station’s conception and birth, Monteith has been its driving force through adolescence into adulthood. When she and fellow UMass Boston students hit upon the idea of starting a radio station, did they have any idea what it would entail? “Not a clue!” she laughs. So what epiphanies brought them to this mountaintop? Monteith chuckles. “Would you believe ‘The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis’?” In 1968, as she and her cohorts puzzled over how to set up operations at UMass Boston’s original, downtown campus, Monteith happened to watch a rerun of the early 60s TV show involving a college radio station. That gave her the answer: string wires from a makeshift studio to speakers in the cafeteria. Yet even then, “one of the things I’m proudest of is that it was never a game for us; it was always real,” she says. They followed FCC rules and regulations; all announcers, for example, had FCC licenses. They did resort to a few unorthodox practices, though. In the early years, someone would cross the street to a commercial radio station each morning to snatch its news copy. If all had gone according to plan, Monteith, a math major, would have graduated four years later and pursued her dream to become a NASA ground control specialist. But there was a snag: umass boston n

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of UMass Boston - Winter/Spring 2007-2008

UMass Boston - Winter/Spring 2007-2008 Contents U News Values and Vision, Bricks and Mortar An Inauguration to Remember An Expedition to Iceland An American Original Reciprocal Dedication About Alumni Alumni Calendar A Report on Private Giving Generous Friends

UMass Boston - Winter/Spring 2007-2008

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