Bob West was a tall, bespectacled, talented young writer who graduated from West Tech High School in Cleveland in 1944.

He loved to write and perform, and he was considering going to college when the draft intervened. He served in the Americal Division of the Army in the Philippines for almost two years.

When he was mustered out in late 1945, he wanted to pick up where he left off, to resume as normal a life as he could. He enrolled at Kent State for the winter quarter of 1946.
"I wanted to write and the only writing program I could find was in journalism," West said. "I was also interested in radio, so I entered the broadcast journalism sequence and was immediately accepted by the Stater crew, and I started writing."

If Forrest Gump could run, Bob West could write. For the next four years, West wrote, and then he wrote some more. He penned satire for the rejuvenated Duchess; scripts for the popular "No Time For Classes" theatrical series; record reviews, humor columns and poetry for the Stater.

Eventually, he was selected editor of the Summer Kent Stater, and he continued creating, "sometimes writing under the name Dave Davis to avoid using my name too much in the Stater."

And, he wrote for Kent State radio, turning out 15-minute comedies, parodies and dramas that were broadcast on WAKR on Saturday mornings. He hosted music programs, usually about his favorite form, jazz, but not excluding a forerunner of rock 'n roll called "bop."

West was typical of the students flooding America's campuses after the war. They were older, more mature and experienced, and they wanted to make up for lost time. They took their studies seriously, but they also found time to participate in extra-curricular activities. The returning vets altered American higher education for the next five years.

Veterans flood campuses after war

The impact of the veterans on the journalism and radio programs was immediate. In fall 1945, the School of Journalism had 58 majors. A year later, journalism classes were crammed, as more than 320 students flooded the classrooms. The freshman-level Survey of Journalism, alone, had 105 students enrolled. In fall 1946, some 32 students were enrolled in Radio Speaking; a year later, 77. By 1949, almost 100 students were enrolled in several radio classes. Radio was ready to go on a roll.

That roll--started in 1935 by Harry Wright and nurtured since 1940 through the popular Radio Workshop--got its biggest boost because new KSU President George Bowman recognized the importance and potential of broadcasting and approved the hiring of a full-time, tenure-track faculty member and the establishment of an academic Division of Radio within the School of Speech. Timing of both was propitious. The radio courses were increasingly popular and the Radio Workshop had more members than it could handle.

A full-time, tenure track faculty member would be able to devote more time to the academic program than Wright (for all his contributions) or temporary instructors such as Howard Hanson or Opal Boffo.

Kent State was ready to realign the burgeoning school of Speech. There were too many students; too many subject areas; too much confusion. Stump, head of the School of Speech and longtime radio supporter, asked the university to consider an academic restructuring and was granted permission to do so. The speech school, therefore, was di-vided into General Speech, Public Address, Theater, Radio, and Speech and Hearing Therapy. Each division had a coordinator. By 1948, the model was in place.

Walt Clarke comes aboard

Stump had one person in mind for the full-time faculty opening in the new academic division of Radio-Speech: Walton D. Clarke.

Walt Clarke

In 1944, Stump had contacted the Placement Office at the University of Wisconsin as he prepared to find someone to head the new Radio Division, and Clarke had been recommended highly. He had been working at radio station KWTO in Springfield, Mo. for just a short time when Stump called him about the opening, and while Clarke

thought the offer of a position at Kent was tempting, he and his wife decided to stay put while he gained more professional experience.

Over the next two years, Clarke and Stump corresponded and the two had even agreed on the outline of a radio curriculum at Kent. Stump hired Opal Boffo to run the Radio Workshop and teach the Radio Speaking class for the 1944-1945 academic year. When Clarke still wasn't ready to come to Kent in 1945, Stump offered Opal Boffo another one-year contract

Out in Missouri, Clarke was enjoying considerable success as a radio announcer/newscaster. "My speaking rate of two hundred words per minute set me apart from other local newscasters," Clarke said.

He was adding to his background as a high school and college teacher. By mid-1945, he had worked for almost three years in radio. He also had given considerable thought to the notion of teaching radio at the university level.

Trip to Kent is all that's needed

A trip to Kent where he met Stump and President Bowman--and felt eminently convertible with both--convinced Clarke that it was time to change careers again. In 1946, Clarke was hired as an assistant professor of speech to teach radio courses and to direct the Radio Workshop at $2,600 for 10 months.

A 6 foot-2 inch, thin, dapper 36-year-old man with a pencil thin mustache and brown hair receding at the temples, Clarke was to Kent State broadcasting what Bill Taylor was to Kent State journalism.

He would remain at Kent for almost 30 years. To keep his professional skills sharp, Clarke worked part-time over the years at WAKR, at one point being a colleague of Alan Freed. He even spent a summer at WEWS-TV in Cleveland in 1959.

John Weiser

When John Weiser joined the radio faculty in 1949, he began announcing for WCUE in Akron. That was important to the program, Clarke said. "The fact that both radio instructors were also working professionally gave our program a real boost," he said. "Students were impressed and commercial broadcasters throughout the area respected our program."

West, now a retired professor from the RTV sequence of the School, had taken Clarke for classes and remembers him well. He had a "gentlemanly demeanor," West says. Clarke also apparently had the radio announcer's habit of constantly clearing his throat as though ready to go on the air. When West graduated and went to work at WERE, he arranged for Clarke to work news on the weekends.

Clarke had a clear and specific agenda, one he had discussed with Stump prior to taking the Kent State job. One of Clarke's first moves was to continue the arrangement with Akron's WAKR for a wire to be run from Kent State to the station. That was of fundamental importance because it allowed programs prepared at Kent to be broadcast from Kent. There was renewed discussion, and hope, among students, faculty and administrators about the day when Kent State would have its own transmitter and its own radio station.

Clarke inspecting antenna before station went on air.

The second item on Clarke's agenda was the curriculum. In a 1944 letter to Stump, he had outlined what he envisioned as the model radio production curriculum. Students were to study seven areas: radio diction, writing, news, programming and production, history and law, economics, education, topped off by an internship. With the post-war increase in university enrollment paralleling the rapid expansion of commercial radio broadcasting, it wasn't long before student demand for instruction in radio spurred expansion of the curriculum. Absent, though, was a course on radio news. Clarke said he felt that that was in the field of journalism, though he did teach newscasting. This is an interesting situation, and presents an example of, if not friction, at least some minor chafing between the men heading the two major academic communication departments on campus, Clarke and Taylor. In the academy, one always is concerned about "turf." It's much like political power: if you have it, you fight to keep it; if you don't, you fight to get it. The issue of which academic unit would own the "turf" of radio (and later television) news continued until 1987 when the two academic units merged.

The point is, Clark's model curriculum contained a radio news course. His actual 1948 KSU radio curriculum didn't. Taylor had laid claim to any course dealing with gathering and writing news, print or broadcast. Thus, in the fall of 1947, it was the School of Journalism that inaugurated a sequence in Radio Journalism that contained coursework on the gathering and writing of radio (and, later, TV) news.

That Taylor wielded considerable political power on campus was evidenced by the fact that the University Committee on Radio Activities, founded in 1937 with Taylor as a member, now had Taylor as chairman. Clarke and Harry Wright were members.

Clarke said his relationship with Taylor was friendly and professional. "He and I were good friends and there was no animosity toward either, but we each pretty much went out own way," he said. "There were one or two attempts to develop something of a 'working' relationship that did not work out."

Bob West (top left) was editor of the Summer Stater in 1950. A veteran of World War II, he was typical of the students entering the program in the mid and late 1940s. Seated next to him is Paul Haney, who became the voice of the astronauts in the Sixties and Seventies. At right, Bob sits among hundreds of video tapes and records in his office in Taylor Hall. Now retired, he still teaches several workshops on movies. For a special multimedia feature on Bob, click here.

Weiser, who worked with Clarke from 1949-1975, and who also knew Taylor, was perturbed when the School of Journalism started its radio news sequence and required only two courses from the Division of Radio. Taylor, he says, "saw little value in writing, producing or programming for the electronic media. He viewed the matter much in the same fashion of early reporters on radio, e.g., Boak Carter, Lowell Thomas, H.V. Kaltenborn, etc., all newspapermen who did little to change their style of writing just because of a change in the medium."

Clarke also gave attention to the Radio Workshop. It kept turning out quality 15-minute Saturday morning programs quarter after quarter. The opening line, "From the campus on the hilltop, Kent State University Radio Workshop presents...." became familiar to thousands of listeners in the Akron area. For all its success, however, the Radio Workshop was not without problems.

Handwriting on wall for Radio Workshop

Eventually, the handwriting was on the wall for the Radio Workshop. A campus coverage radio station was coming soon and it wouldn't be long before an FM operation was in place. The Radio Workshop continued producing and performing Saturday morning broadcasts over WAKR, but the workshop clearly was more closely related to the past than it was to the future of Kent State broadcasting.

Clarke and Stump's dreams of having a "real" radio station already were on their way to coming true. The two men agreed that the program needed a radio station. And Stump, an aggressive radio proponent, had taken the case,

Aggressive reporting. Stater reporters Ken Goldstein and Bob Blumer use typewriters in a rubber raft to cover the Rowboat Regatta festivities in the late Forties.

successfully, to the Bowman administration in early 1948. By October of that year, Clarke was telling the Kent Stater that an AM radio station, limited to campus, was in the works. A transmitter was being installed and wires were being laid to campus dormitories. Clarke estimated the station would be on the air by December.

This "campus coverage" through a "wired-wireless" station would be broadcast at 560 kilocycles on the radio dial. It would not be heard very far away, but it was going to be heard. And that was big news in the young life of radio broadcasting at Kent State.

Stump went so far as to predict that construction of the new transmitter was only the first step in the long-range development of radio at Kent. He said he also could envision creation of a low-power community FM station at Kent; perhaps within a year, he suggested. Beyond that, Stump saw installation of a regional FM station at the university, one that would broadcast to all of northeast Ohio.

Radio station progress is slow

Eventually, Stump said, Kent State would become an affiliate in a statewide network of university radio stations.
As usually happens, projections often don't square with reality, and that was true in radio's case. Radio developed, but not quite as quickly as desired by Clarke or Stump. December came and went, and no broadcasts were being made (other than the ongoing weekly efforts of the Radio Workshop).

By April 5, 1949, however, the Stater was announcing that a one-hour broadcast test of WKSU-AM a day earlier had been successful. Most campus buildings and even a few nearby rooming houses had picked up the signal.

On April 6, WKSU-AM was on the air again. Bob West did a 15-minute program of jazz recordings. Clem Scerback headed up a 15-minute news show. The programming was student written and student performed "through the auspices of the radio division of the School of Speech." State and national news was presented through an arrange-ment with the School of Journalism's class in radio news, and campus news was provided by the Kent Stater. Not a bad first collaborative effort.

Students then, as students in the past and in the future, worked in more than one medium. Radio majors took journalism classes and wrote for the Stater or Burr, and Stater reporters and editors performed on the radio station.

As fast and as far as broadcasting at Kent had come in just a short time, there was more. In September 1949, the Radio-Speech faculty was increased to two. And, in December, Clarke made a significant announcement: the Federal Communications Commission had agreed to consider the university's request for a non-commercial, educational, community FM radio station. The FCC would make a decision in early 1950.

Post-war journalism in Merrill Hall

The post-war news out of Merrill Hall and the Journalism program, as everywhere, was expansion: in enrollment, staff, facilities and curriculum.

A few months after Taylor's return to the faculty in the spring of 1946, The Burr claimed that Kent State had the eighteenth largest journalism program in the country. The number of students taking journalism courses in the fall rose to more than 320, including 35 majors in the "outstanding" photography program. That placed the Kent journalism program as the "fastest growing" in the country, The Burr claimed, without citing any sources.

Working with Taylor on the faculty shortly after the war were Al Crowell, who had been serving as acting director since 1944; Mike Radock, who came in 1945 to teach news and publicity; Jim Fosdick, a press photographer brought in to take over the classroom and Photo Short Course duties. Among the part-timers on the journalism faculty was Beacon Journal managing editor Murray Powers, who had arrived in 1940 to teach one editing course, and who stayed for more than 30 years. Robert Stopher, editorial page editor of the Beacon Journal and later a University Trustee, also taught part time for years.

In 1947, the teaching staff again was expanded. Signing on were Henry Beck, a graduate of the program, to teach photography; and Carleton J. Smyth, a 1931 graduate of Columbia, to teach print and broadcast news.

The journalism curriculum also began to expand and diversify. By 1949, a 6-course Newspaper Management sequence had been removed from the business college and placed under journalism. The "business" side of advertising still was taught in that college, but the School of Journalism also was offering coursework, especially on the creative side. Some of the biggest news, however, was the launching of coursework in radio newsgathering and writing. Taylor's claim to any professional coursework having to do with the gathering and writing of news was being honored by the university administration.

Francie Waterbury and Duff Baldwin of The Duchess.

Walt Clarke was teaching survey of radio, radio speaking and radio writing, but Taylor made sure that if you wanted to learn how to gather and write the news, you had to go to Merrill Hall. By the end of the decade, journalism was offering six sequences: news, newspaper management, news photography, public relations, business and

industrial publications, and radio journalism. The school even had added a course in the 1949-1950 Bulletin on television news, long before other schools of journalism, let alone the School of Speech, did so.

Elsewhere across the School of Journalism and student print media, all was well. The Kent Stater, initially weekly, then semi- and tri-weekly, had gone daily before the war. Within two years after the war's end, the Stater was daily again. The Duchess resumed publication in the fall of 1946. The Chestnut Burr was looking at becoming the largest in history to that point. Editor Al Geitgey reported that the book would run 288 pages with a revised and expanded postwar sports section. Some 5,700 copies were to be printed.

Still, if to do nothing more than to serve as a reminder of the serious times just past, publications sometimes had trouble locating supplies. Geitgey of the Burr:

"Work on the '47 Burr was slowed up many times during
the year, as the business staff met difficulties in purchasing supplies and equipment." It was obvious to Business Manager, Clarence Tonka, that although the war abroad was over, the war of supply and demand on the production market was still being waged. Scarcities in all fields threatened to delay production.

Progress, tempered by occasional reminders of the arduous times just past. Probably as apt an ending as any for a discussion of the 1940s. And a good launching pad for the extraordinary growth of the Fifties. Read more

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