Outpost of Excellence

Some ten years ago, a young couple in Chicago sold their car, emptied their bank account, and took over a half-dead FM station that had $30,000 in debts and maybe six or seven pap-happy listeners. Changing its call letters to WFMT, they began to play interesting music and talk about things that a child of 3 1/2 probably could not understand. It was risky and somewhat revolutionary, and Bernard and Rita Jacobs thought for a while that they were failing.

Breaking into a broadcast not long after the takeover, Rita Jacobs said, "We wonder if anybody's listening--we're going broke." People were listening, and their number was multiplying. By last week, WFMT had the largest audience of any FM station in the U.S., an average 800,000 weekly. But more significantly, it is successfully competing with AM. While FM is often thought of as something like a worthy charity or an obscure quarterly magazine, WFMT last year grossed $400,000--more than $80,000 of which was profit.

Handsome Payoff. To FCC Chairman Newton Minow, WFMT has long been a sort of vast tasteland. Chicagoan Minow admires the station because it is making what he calls "a real cultural attack." Its programming is about 80% classical music, and the other 20% includes shows of uniformly high quality, ranging from plays and readings by minor and major poets to heady discussions and adequate but not repetitive news. Most celebrated WFMT character is Studs Terkel, who runs a daily 10-11 a.m. program of literate talk with both itinerant and local celebrities, such as Tennessee Williams and Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. "Its listeners," Minow goes on, "are loyal to the point of being fanatics." In recent months, licenses have been awarded to two new FM stations in the Chicago area--one in De Kalb, and the other in Skokie. Both were on frequencies so close to WFMT that they blocked out its signal locally. Aroused citizens have formed angry ranks in protest, setting up such a clamor that the FCC agreed to shift the new De Kalb station to a more distant frequency and probably will do the same in Skokie.

Advertisers have discovered that WFMT's listeners are a group to be taken seriously. Many are professional people and executives. Their median income is $9,300 a year. They make up in buying power what they lack in numbers. Sponsors, ranging from brokerage houses to airlines, have found that such a selected audience can pay off handsomely on the advertising dollar. One South Side real estate developer practically filled a new apartment complex last year with WFMT listeners.

Free Imagination. The success of WFMT is only the most notable example of the general rise of FM broadcasting across the U.S. Developed in the '30s when AM broadcasting was at its peak, slowed by World War II, FM was almost obliterated in the postwar rush to television. The quality of FM reception is clearly superior to AM, and is almost entirely static-free. As most of AM disintegrated into rock-'n'-rollery and TV began hunting for all the lowest cultural denominators, FM became an outpost of excellence whose scope has steadily grown. In 1956 there were 656 FM stations in the U.S. Now there are 1,188 stations.

Not all FM stations are commercial. The Pacifica Foundation runs three that are sustained entirely on listener contributions; the largest, Manhattan's WBAI (TIME, Jan. 25, 1960), has more than 11,000 subscribers and no inhibitions: T.S. Eliot is read in prime time, and last year the entire Der Ring des Nibelungen, was played in one stupendously Wagnerian 17-hour day.

That sort of thing typifies the free imagination of FM broadcasting, and stations like Chicago's WFMT have shown that at least part of the public wants it enough to make such programming commercially sensible. Surprise winner of a Peabody Award last April for the best radio entertainment of 1961, AM or FM, the station was cited for "proving daily that society's more notable cultural achievements can be effectively communicated and commercially sustained through broadcasting." It has also proved resoundingly that the U.S. public is not as tone deaf and dumb as it looks to Madison Avenue and the Major Nitworks.

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