Sonic Boom

Peddie is fertile ground for all kinds of sounds – laughing, cheering, lively discussions.

But on Monday, November 4, 1985, the school was host to an entirely new sound: music transmitted via radio station WTPS (“The Peddie School”) all across campus.

Station founder and acting manager Brian Ades ’86 remembers the exhilaration of “the first broadcast and feeling the electricity of the signal going through the dorms.”

Beginning in the early ’70s and continuing in earnest in 1981, the U.S. government deregulated FCC laws governing media, making low-power FM licenses more accessible for schools to obtain. Ades arrived at Peddie in the fall of 1984 as a new junior, keen to ride the wave.

“My interest in radio and music was directly tied to growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, listening to Howard Stern on DC101 and following the punk scene in Georgetown,” said Ades. “The ’80s was a unique moment in music. There was so much going on, and it was exciting. I remember a lot of people walking around with a Walkman. And the mid-’80s was that moment when music really took a step forward.”

But the process of launching the high school radio station was a lot of one step forward, several steps back.

“There was a template for how to run a radio station. But there’s not really an existing template to start one,” explained Ades. “So you’re working in the dark.”

Ades was attempting this pre-internet, as a teenage boarding student. For advice on how to tackle the project, he relied on “old-school letter writing. I would go to class and then come back and write letters and letters”- or he’d visit those in the know.

“Wednesdays and Saturdays were half-days of classes at Peddie, so I would go and try to talk to someone at WPRB at Princeton University,” he said. “WMMR out of Philly was really helpful. And in Washington, D.C., someone at DC101 would give me five minutes and say, ‘do this’ or ‘try this.'”

By the spring of ’85, Ades had amassed enough information as well as several partners on the project, including Michael Levine ’86 and Dominick Cerisano ’86, to gain a foothold. He began meeting regularly with the head of school to discuss their progress.

“Mr. Potter was with me from day one and was my mentor, guard rail and critic,” said Ades. “He put me to task.”

That summer, more key pieces fell into place. Levine interned with WPLJ in New York City, and Cerisano worked to raise capital.

Ades conducted extensive research with the FCC and selected a closed circuit system- a radio with a small broadcasting range- for the station. “It looped some form of transmitters in the different dorms. So we did an installation on campus, and from there, we were able to create a signal,” he said.

In September 1985, The Peddie News announced the station’s imminent launch, and WTPS went live in early November. Six days a week, student disc jockeys climbed the stairs to the studio on the third floor of Caspersen Science Building (now Caspersen History House), filling shifts on weekdays from 6:30 a.m. to midnight and on Saturdays from 6:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

At Kerr Dormitory, which had been situated at the north end of campus, students tuned in to 640 AM. Avery and Trask Dormitories and Austen-Colgate Hall and Masters House set their dials to 530 AM. In the student center, the station broadcasted over the P.A. system.

“Peddie’s pretty diverse, between the jocks and the rockers and the artists, and the station evolved organically,” said Ades. 

“Day students were picking up on the New Jersey vibe, which was beach-oriented, a lot of Springsteen. And you had the boarders. They played Grateful Dead. The punk scene at that time was pretty vibrant, and you had European music, which wasn’t necessarily the Stones. Each group brought its own flavor to the shows and introduced it to people.”

Ades credits Cerisano for helping to create a genre balance in playlists and Levine for inspiring DJs “to tell a story with their shows.”

“We were Peddie English students,” said Ades. “There was a push not just to get into music, but also the lyrics and telling a story. Everyone’s looking for an identity at that age. We were all exploring our own ways.”

That spirit of exploration, encouraged by the station leaders, led to WTPS being a laboratory for new music. College radio, which was pushing the broadcasting envelope, served as further inspiration.

“My friends and I liked the college stations that were coming out of Princeton and Penn and Temple because they were pushing the boundaries,” said DJ Mark Cox ’86. “Early hip-hop, reggae that you wouldn’t find anywhere else on the dial. It wasn’t necessarily the big rock stations who were playing Led Zeppelin for the five millionth time.

“I vaguely remember that we had some musical concepts, but it might as well have been the didgeridoo- nobody cared,” said Cox. “It was, ‘That sounds good. Go do that.’ Obscure, weird music. That was the stuff I loved and still do. To be able to play that- it was a huge part of why I wanted to be on that station.”

Spinning tunes – at the start, the studio housed just two turntables – meant DJs were required to review the station’s limited music library before devising their playlists. Soon after launching the station, The Peddie News requested more LP donations to add to the library. But many DJs simply toted their own music collections back and forth across campus, at all hours.

“I had a stack of records like a foot high, and I’d carry them over to the radio station every week,” said Stephanie (Smith) Harris ’87, who hosted a show with Carin Beyer ’87 during her senior year from 10 p.m. until midnight.

“One time, we played a song and didn’t like it, so we just took it off in the middle. And the next day, (social sciences teacher) Mr. Murphy said, ‘Hey, I really liked that song. Next time, let it play!’ and I was like, ‘Wow, an actual adult is listening?'” Harris laughed.

Musical experimentation paired with a fair amount of carte blanche from Peddie’s administrators was a heady combination- one WTPS students deeply valued.

“We had the trust of the school to be outside of the dormitory after hours,” said Cox, who also had a 10 p.m. shift. “We were doing something a little bit different than other high school kids; we were sitting in a radio station playing subversive music.

“It was like, ‘Wow, you’re going to let two 15-year-olds broadcast to the entire school?’ That was a cool feeling. It was a very progressive thing for Peddie to do. And we got a lot of nice feedback.”

Harris had a similar experience. “There was never a time when anybody said, ‘You can’t say that, you can’t do that, you can’t play that,'” she said. Plus, “I was a boarder and wasn’t one to sneak out. But I felt like we were doing something crazy coming back across campus at midnight. That felt like freedom for sure.”

In the early ’90s, WTPS packed up the turntables, newly acquired cassette deck and CD player, crates of records and other equipment from the third floor of Caspersen and relocated to the first floor of the former student center. The late mathematics teacher and dean Samuel “Sandy” Tattersall spearheaded the move to offer the station greater accessibility and space.

Dawn Sittinger ’94 and Amy (Calhoun) Robb ’94 teamed up at WTPS during their freshman year, often bringing their own mix tapes and CDs to their shift and indulging in the excitement their predecessors had enjoyed.

“Wait, we have an hour slot to play whatever we want?” said Robb of the opportunity to host their own show. “We did our own thing, playing music that we liked, that we thought was fun. It was a time of discovery of music for us.”

“This was before the genre of yacht rock existed, but we were pioneers of yacht rock!” said Sittinger. “I remember laughing a lot- sitting up there laughing at what we could play next that would get people to react in a positive way. Our intention was always to make people laugh and smile.”

“It was a great moment in time,” Robb said. “To come across all these new bands and new genres- that was the thing to do. That was our way of being able to share music with folks around us.”

But by the early ’90s, when the women had their show, student involvement had waned- from about 50 members in its 1986 heyday to just a handful.

“I don’t think people realized we were in there,” said Sittinger. “And they’d see us walking out of the room and be like, ‘What were you guys doing?’ And we were like, ‘Playing the music, man!'”

Between 1995 and 1996, the old student center was demolished and a new one was built. The last few disc jockeys graduated. There’s likely a correlation between these events and the station folding in the same timespan.

Will Peddie radio reemerge? No one can say. But the school is, as ever, home to healthy boundary-pushing and exhilarating discovery. The WTPS Falcon can always rise from the ashes.