CULTURE | SPONSORED BY THE MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM
WM S E Celebrates 40 Years H O W A C A M P U S C L U B B E C A M E M I LW A U K E E ’ S B E AC O N FOR UNSCRIPTED, FREEFORM RADIO
By David Luhrssen
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cross a faint crackly signal came the soft roar of The Clash. It’s 1979, and I was sitting in the East Side house of an edgy band called Ama Dots—and everyone in the room was amazed at what we heard. FM radio had become a preprogrammed behemoth of boredom, but here it was—this wavering signal carrying the music of our lives. We identified the source soon enough as WSOE, a student radio club at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. The weak signal found at 91.7 FM wasn’t supposed to be heard off campus but could sometimes be picked up in other neighborhoods. Finding it was a bit like hearing Radio Liberty behind the Iron Curtain—a broadcast from another world of possibility with the message that alternatives existed to the status quo. Before long, the student radio station became a magnet for fans of punk and other new music. They flocked to its digs in a church basement on the MSOE campus with satchels of their favorite LPs, volunteering to be DJs. In 1981 the station was rechristened as WMSE and its signal
boosted to 1,000 watts, enough to reach across Milwaukee. Forty years later, the station can be heard around the globe streaming on the worldwide web. A few of those volunteer DJs are still on air decades later and one of them, Tom Crawford, eventually became station manager, part of WMSE’s paid staff of five full-timers and three part-timers. Crawford must have been listening the same night I discovered the station. “I was sitting down with my stereo receiver trying to figure out what I’m going to listen to on the radio—just rattling through the dial. All of a sudden, I came across The Clash on the radio,” Crawford recalled. “I lived in a second floor. I ran my antenna out the window, had it nailed to the house and I was able to pick up WSOE. I was blown away. I listened for a while. I heard a student announcer say the call letters W-S-O-E. I needed to know more.” Although WMSE is owned by MSOE, the resources the college devoted to the station were always slender. Much of the studio was built or rigged together by volunteers. “I worked in the Music Department. I started helping out
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Photo by David Peperkamp/Getty Images.
