The decade of the Fifties was a watershed in history. The first few years of the period were socially, temperamentally, and materially tied to the Forties. The rest of the decade clearly had a foot in the future. Once more, a war served as the point of division and demarcation.

The university's unparalleled growth after World War II had created a feeling of excitement and anticipation. The erection of Stopher Hall (first men's dorm), the new Health Center (now the Stockdale Building) and the Student Union (now Oscar Ritchie Hall) in the late Forties seemed to signal a return to the halcyon days of the Teens and Twenties when students were piling into the university and the university was building new facilities to house the onslaught.

Campus growth is bittersweet

In the post-WWII period, the university couldn't put up new buildings fast enough. By 1950, Kent State had some 6,000 students, still including a substantial portion of World War II veterans. There were more layers and levels of administration to handle the growing enrollment. Almost 300 faculty were employed. Nevertheless, for many people, Kent retained its collegiate atmosphere, its small town ambiance. Here's one description:

"The university is on a beautiful campus of 225 acres, 105
of which were purchased in 1948 so as to provide for con-
tinued expansion of facilities required by the increasing
student enrollment. Most of the buildings are arranged in
a semicircle near the crest of a wooded hillside, from which
one looks down upon Kent and the surrounding country."

That half-moon hill of yellow-brick buildings on Hilltop Drive is the same view students from the 1930s and 1940s remembered and still talk about. It's also the view many Kent students in the early 1950s recall.

'Exquisitely picturesque halls of ivy...'

For example, it's the picture retained by Don Kirkman, a Navy vet who entered Kent in the early Fifties as a journalism major, graduated in 1958, had an illustrious career with Scripps-Howard Newspapers, and who won the Taylor Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1970: "Kent was very collegiate in the mid-50s: basically a half circle of buildings atop a hill, plus Engleman Hall and the football stadium behind the hill; exquisitely picturesque halls of ivy."

Behind that hill, and beyond the facade of gentle memories, however, loomed an enrollment surge and building boom that, by the 1960s, would uproot Prentice Gate at South Lincoln and East Main as the primary entrance to campus. Martin Nurmi, former professor of English, categorized the years from the mid-Fifties to 1970 this way: "In these years, the noise and mud of construction somewhere on campus was almost continuous....By 1970 the campus would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had not seen it since 1955."

That inability to recognize a campus that one had fondly remembered for many years was an unwelcome result of the building boom. The feelings of 1942 graduate, John Mine, are typical. He wrote of "the small, quiet lovely place of old," the whole of which could be viewed from East Main Street. Mine called the bevy of buildings being built behind the hill "that burgeoning appendage at its rear."

University personality changes

Shriver, historian of the university, detected the temporal, temperamental and philosophical split within the university. He observed the change in personality of the university:

"Despite the nostalgia of some members of the University
family, the growth of the post-[world] war years had an
exhilarating effect upon most. The atmosphere of the cam-
pus was alive with the excitement of change, with the con-
viction that the University was about to take its place among the major schools of the country."

Then came Korea.

The university abruptly was tossed back in time. Enrollment dipped as male students (and faculty) again began disappearing from the campus. A tenseness and sense of unease again took a grip of the campus. Small groups of students would cluster around the journalism office to read wire stories about the war that were posted on the walls.

Still, as bad as conditions became, they didn't become quite as globally traumatizing as those during the second world war. The effects on the university were serious and dramatic, but Truman's "police action" did not cause the emotional and academic upheaval of World War II. Enroll-ments fell, but overall growth within the academy continued. And while there were fewer men, there didn't seem to be the dramatic impact on women and opportunities for women as in the world war.

GIs again flood campus

One thing common to both conflicts was the returning soldier. For the six years following the end of the Korean War in 1953, veterans on the GI Bill comprised a significant proportion of Kent's enrollment.

Like the rest of the university, the School of Journalism and the Division of Radio were in for exhilarating experiences during the Fifties.

A Newswriting class in Merrill Hall taught by Bill Fisher.

The big news in the journalism school was more courses and more students. The school was offering more than 40 courses in five sequences (news-editorial, public relations, radio/television news, industrial publications, and press photography). Journalism claimed 175 majors by 1951, and the school boasted that total class enrollment for an average quarter was 256 students. New courses were being offered: Survey of Television, Movie

Making, and a one-hour "Stater" class (one class period and six hours on Stater each week). During the Korean War, enrollment dipped, but by 1956, Taylor was reporting that enrollment had increased for the third consecutive year. There were 61 freshmen in the program, 14 more than in 1955.

Public Relations becomes more popular

Taylor said enrollment was going up "because of the rapid growth of the public relations enrollment and the attractiveness of the industrial publications field."

New faculty members were needed to handle the larger enrollment By the fall of 1950, Al Crowell and Carlton J. Smyth had left Kent State. Replacing them were William A. Fisher and Dario Politella. Jim Fosdick, photography, and Mike Radock, publicity and news, remained from the postwar years.

Fisher came to Kent State from the copydesk of the Fort Wayne, Ind. News-Sentinel; he also had worked on a Texas paper. He had a bachelor's degree from Franklin College and a masters from Northwestern. Fisher was adviser to student publications, the Kent State chapter of Chi Pi/Sigma Delta Chi, and head of the news sequence during his 34-year stay at Kent.

Politella barely got settled before he was recalled into the Army Air Corps as a first lieutenant. Fosdick had a strong and positive impact on the school and its students. He was a stable force for the Photo Short Course program and, in the classroom, his admonition to remember the acronym "FAST" when taking photos was remembered by more than one alum.

Murray Powers' impact

Murray Powers still was teaching editing part-time and building a reputation second only to Bill Taylor. Recruited by Taylor from the Beacon Journal in 1940, Powers was having a significant impact on students, reinforcing the rigid standards imposed by Taylor.

News was the focal point of the School of Journalism curriculum. But, other sequences were on the rise. Alum (1955) Tom Duke says: "In the '50s, the public relations sequence...was just starting to grow, and there were relatively few PR students in the school. Many new classes were added to the public relations curriculum, including Public Opinion and Propaganda....The PR sequence students also took many additional business-oriented courses...to help them understand the businesses where they would be employed."

As the faculty grew and sequences expanded, there were other changes in the journalistic support structure of the university. Most of the offices for support staff such as the University Editor and the Public Relations Bureau director were in Merrill Hall, close to the School of Journalism offices and classrooms, and the offices of student publications. Increasingly, Merrill Hall was outliving its 1912 intentions. Stuffed into Merrill with Journalism, publications and uni-versity support staff were the huge departments of English and music. Kent Hall, home of Radio-Speech, was no picnic, either. Jammed into the 1916 structure were speech, psychology, sociology and home economics.

With the number of students and faculty increasing in the School of Journalism, student organizations were looking toward national affiliations.

Chi Pi achieved national affiliation with Sigma Delta Chi in 1953.

Chi Pi, men's journalism honorary founded in 1927 and reorganized around 1939, had made an unsuccessful effort to affiliate with Sigma Delta Chi, the national professional journalism organization, in 1941. Three Kent delegates had gone to the New Orleans SDX convention with signed petitions but were unsuccessful. In 1952, the group decided to try again. Still, Chi Pi had no luck. Taylor and Fisher agreed to take a chance and carry the membership issue to the floor of the national SDX convention that year in Denver.

With Fisher at the point, serious wheeling and dealing in Colorado began. Fisher concedes there was some "strong political activity (which I admit to being involved in) at the Denver convention. But, it worked." The Kent chapter was installed February 14, 1953.

The KSU chapter (Chi) of Kappa Alpha Mu, national photojournalism honorary, was installed in 1950 with ten charter members.

Charter members of Theta Sigma Phi, national professional organization for women, in 1951.

Kent State's female journalism members had been left when Chi Pi reorganized. So the women had gone ahead in 1940 and started their own honorary, Lambda Phi. By the late Forties, they had successfully petitioned the national women's journalism honorary, Theta Sigma Phi, for membership. Once selected, they served a three year proba-tionary period. On June 1, 1951, in the Kent Student Union, the Beta Zeta chapter of Theta Sigma Phi was installed at KSU, the third chapter in Ohio and the 50th nationally.

In 1956, a Public Relations Undergraduate Association was founded, with James Bruss, head of the university News Bureau, as adviser.

The Chestnut Burr, in the early Fifties, was printing about 5,000 books and had an annual budget of about $23,000. Murray Campbell, editor of the 1951 Burr, reported that the yearbook had used more than 1,500 photos. He also noted that the Burr offices had been moved for a while into a 9 X 14 room in the "ROTC building," the reference being to one of the prefab units brought in after WWII that had served as a tem-porary student union.

Heading the Kent Stater in 1954 were Larry Carpenter, editor; Dick Fedosh, business manager; and Bill Miller, managing editor.

The Daily Kent Stater, in the early part of the decade, had a circulation of about 4,000 and a quarterly budget of some $5,500. The Stater office remained the central nervous system of the School of Journalism. Regardless of sequence, almost everyone worked on the paper at one time or another.

For journalism majors, the Stater furnished a common frame of reference. From 1936 until the program left Merrill Hall in 1967, the journalism offices, the newspaper, the journalism lounge, the university news bureau, the cubbyhole offices for publication editors, the evening trips to Commercial Press, the chats with Clarence the printer--all provided a centrality of experience and perspective for students over a 31-year period.

Taylor's "Nothing Short of Right" slogan, painted on the Stater wall, looked down on two and a half generations of staff members, and it inspired other slogans: "There is a difference between journalism and responsible journalism" (Stater editor Marvin Katz, 1958), and "Integrity Without Compromise" (1960).

Kappa Alpha Mu, national photography honorary, was installed at Kent in March 1950. Jim Fosdick (seated right) was adviser and Journalism faculty member. (Chestnut Burr photo)

In the School of Speech, history was being made on one hand, and on the other, seeds of frustration were being sown.

The history was the launching of the long-awaited community station, WKSU-FM. The frustration, however, started when radio--and Clarke's--long-time friend, ally and spokesman, E. Turner Stump died unexpectedly in 1953.

For almost 20 years, first with Wright's Radio Speaking class, through development of the Radio Workshop, to the establishment of the AM wired-wireless campus coverage radio station, Stump had been a supporter of Wright and then Clarke. He had shared a vision of the role broadcasting could play at Kent State and had been an articulate advocate at the upper levels of academic administration.

E. Turner Stump loss hurts broadcast

His place was taken by LeRoy Cowperthwaite, an academician who never seemed to appreciate the role of professional programs in the university and who never approached being the ardent supporter Stump was. Under Cowperthwaite for the next 30 years, broadcasting faculty said they had to fight to retain program identity and autonomy. When Cowperthwaite finally retired in 1984, broadcast faculty said the program wasn't much better off than it had been in 1953.

Before all that, though, in the early part of the decade, the Division of Radio was working hard to become a quality professional program.

John Weiser, who had become the second full-time, tenure track faculty member in 1949, joined with Clarke in developing Speech 490, Radio Internship. First offered in the fall of 1950, the course was for nine quarter hours and was to be a professional experience on a "recognized radio station." By 1956, the course was being offered in the summer

John Weiser

and its title had been broadened to Broadcasting Internship, supervised by Weiser.

Clarke also had helped develop a cross-college curriculum with Business in commerce-radio. By 1951, there were 15 majors and the program was receiving praise from such national broadcast organizations as CBS.

Equally significant news for the Radio Division was that, starting in 1950, graduate students could major in radio. First graduate was Richard Uray, who received an M.A. in Radio-Speech in December 1950 and who was appointed an instructor in radio at the University of Houston a month later.

Other exciting news for the radio faculty and students was talk of development of coursework in television and a possible new facility for the School of Speech (and, therefore, the Division of Radio). In 1952, Clarke and Stump toured radio and television facilities at six major midwestern universities: Purdue, Illinois, Iowa, Iowa State, Minnesota and Wisconsin. They especially were interested in how the schools were developing television, in anticipation of such expansion at Kent.

Television down the road?

Eighteen months later, in March 1954, Clarke told a Kent Stater reporter about plans to expand radio facilities on campus and to introduce television. He pointed out that he and Stump had optimistically looked to the time when the School of Speech would have its own facility for all speech programs, including Broadcasting.

Clarke must have known something was afoot because he had very specific notions of the minimum physical configuration needed to mount successful radio and television academic and support programs.

Less than a year later, KSU President Bowman announced that a $3.5 million multi-discipline building (called the Music and Speech Center) would be built by 1960. And, indeed, it was, on the far eastern perimeter of campus, so far removed from the old central campus of Rockwell and Kent halls that some students said the building was on the "Ravenna campus." The new facilities, at first, were the marvel and envy of other state universities. Within 15 years, however, the popularity of the Broadcasting program and the politics of the School of Speech, combined to make radio and television's "new" home a series of ill-equipped, noisy, maze-like closets.

'Wicksue Foom,' on the air

Just as the Kent Stater was the pre-professional centerpiece of the School of Journalism, so too was WKSU-FM in the Division of Radio. In the Fifties, the station took baby, then giant, steps.

In April 1949, there were two groups presenting radio programming. The Radio Workshop students still were producing and broadcasting short Saturday morning programs over Akron stations. The once spacious Radio Workshop facilities in 319 Kent Hall, however, was getting very crowded.

When the campus coverage AM station went on the air in the spring, the Workshop students were pretty much shunted aside. Soon, however, it would the AM station's turn to get squeezed. Clarke had announced in December 1949 that the Federal Communication Commission had agreed to consider Kent State's application for an FM license. As far back as July, only three months after the AM outlet went on the air, Kent's Board of Trustees had ap-proved plans to seek an educational 10 watt FM station. In December, Clarke was predicting that, once the FCC issued a construction permit for the new station in 4 to 6 weeks, the new community station might reach listeners in a 15-mile radius.

The FCC approved the license, but it took almost 3 1/2 months (April 1950). The Kent State non-commercial station was to operate at a frequency of 88.1 megacycles, and its call letters would be WKSU-FM. It became the third such station in the state, the other two already on the air at Ohio and Miami universities.

Radio on the move

Clarke, sanguine as ever, gave another prediction. Pending receipt of equipment and its installation, the new community station should be on the air by June 1950. Part of that equipment was a transmitter and a 50-foot antenna atop Kent Hall. He also looked at the five-pound bag on the third floor of Kent Hall and announced that it could hold 10 pounds of broadcasting operations.

Said Clarke: "Community-wide broadcasts will be possible with the new FM outlet. In addition, the present Radio Workshop program on WAKR will be continued, as will the 'wired wireless' campus AM broadcasts." Two weeks later, Clarke said the antenna on top of Kent Hall would have a true elevation of 1,257 feet above sea level, making it the tallest structure in Kent. He also was able to provide more specific financial details. Cost of the new transmitter, antenna, turntables and all incidental material and installations would cost around $3,245.

He still was looking for an air date in June. Administratively, WKSU-FM looked like this: there would be student staff; Clarke would direct that staff; Weiser would be in charge of operations; and Stump, as head of the academic unit responsible for the radio division, was the chief administrator.

WKSU-FM remained a paper entity as June came and went. In mid-July, however, Clarke could announce that equipment was in, the antenna was installed, and one-hour daily equipment tests had been started and would continue for 30 days. The station would be on the air for real by the end of August, an increasingly frustrated Clarke assured the campus community. Make that September, he said at the end of August. At last, on October 3, 1950, an engineer cued an announcer, who welcomed the audience and introduced the first program, "Rhythm Rambles."

Rhythm Rambles, first program

It was noon. WKSU-FM was on the air.

On the air not just for an hour. Not just for two hours. On the air from KSU studios, with its own transmitter, for five days a week, five hours a day (noon-2 and 5-8 p.m.)

Suddenly, it seemed like many more than 15 years had passed since Harry Wright had strolled into the Radio Speaking classroom for the first time in 1935. Weiser viewed the event proudly, but realistically: "There was only a ten-watt transmitter...We were lucky to get outside of the city [of Kent]. Psychologically, however, it was a real boost to the students, who now felt a greater community responsibility; they were really on the air. Hence the numbers of students increased and continued to increase."

There was even some cooperation with the School of Journalism. Within a year, though, Journalism was providing news and features for the station. It was excellent practice for students in its broadcast reporting courses.

That the two "sides" were warming to each other was evi-denced during the 1952 election between Eisenhower and Stevenson when WKSU-FM announced that it had "made arrangements" to stay on the air all night to present local, state and national election returns.

Also planned for that night was a election party in 109 Merrill--Kent Stater turf--sponsored by the Stater, the Burr, the journalism school and the "radio station." The television set in the journalism lounge and the teletype in the wire booth would be on all night and refreshments would be served. A fragile relationship, but a relationship.

WKSU broadcasts live musical programs

Over the years, there was a great deal of creative experimentation and expansion at WKSU-FM. In January 1951, the university had purchased a Steinway studio grand piano for the station; within a month live musical programs were emanating from the studio. Shortly afterward, the station bought a "complete Lang-Worth Transcription Li-brary, consisting of approximately 6,000 individual musical selections of a variety of types." Recorded music would not be a problem for a long time.

WKSU-FM (sometimes apparently called "Wicksue Foom") continued its aggressive development of programming. In February 1953, the station announced plans to broadcast 39 area basketball games in 13 nights. A year later, the station introduced one of its most popular and long-lasting programs, "KSU Quiz," in which representatives of two students groups (dorms, Greeks, etc.) competed in answering questions on current events, history and geography. A studio audience even was on hand on some nights for the program that anticipated television's "College Bowl."

In May 1954, the Stater reported that WKSU-FM would undertake "its biggest remote coverage in history tomorrow (a Saturday, normally a non-broadcast day) as it airs the complete proceedings of Campus Day." The station went on live from noon to 6 p.m. that Saturday. A team of 15 students handled the broadcast, including Tom Colson, news director, and Myron Grossman and Russi, program directors. Jim Ferris provided recorded music

WKSU does a remote broadcast of a KSU baseball game in 1957.

from the studios between events. The next year, the station broadcast live from a car in the parade using portable military transmitting/receiving equipment.

By early 1955, the station was planning a big five-year anniversary party and a concurrent 20-year celebration of Harry Wright's Radio Speaking class. The station now was on from 4-10 p.m. five days a week. That same year, new engineering equipment was added and the walls were painted aquamarine (some wags said it made the large studio look as though it were under water).

As each year went by, WKSU-FM was pushing the envelope, taking risks, improving its product. In November 1955, for example, it broadcast an away football game for the first time. With Ken Speck, sports director, Bob Hagen, chief announcer, and Claude Anderson, chief operator, WKSU-FM was the only local station to broadcast Kent's game at the University of Toledo.

New building for broadcast

The Fifties ended on the upbeat. The Division of Radio was moving into a new, spacious facility. The School of Journalism was developing new sequences such as public relations and industrial editing, and student professional organizations were attaining national affiliations and reputations.

And, both academic units were going to be drawn a bit more closely together, at least bureaucratically. In 1959, the university created a new college, Fine and Professional Arts, ostensibly to house those academic units that shared common missions in the areas of the arts and some professions.

The schools of speech (and division of radio), journalism, music, home economics and technology were the first five tenants of the new college.

The relative serenity of the Fifties soon would be replaced, however, with the sound and fury of the Sixties. Read more

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