WPIR - Primitive Inventory Control

 

I found a lot of 7-inches all marked with the letters WPIR on eBay [LINK] and it got me curious. I know that station. I have met some of their alumni over the years, memorably card-carrying record industry member Jean-Pierre Diaz, formerly at Arista and Kelly Wright formerly of Fox News.
MY mind kept coming back to the enormous collection of 7-inch records for $4.99 a pop. I made a back up copy of the sell list. [LINK] Everything in the pile was released between 1991 and 1995. There is one outlier from the 80s but it's clearly labeled 1992 in sharpie. I briefly wondered if the vinyl was stolen, gifted, purged or rescued and even which WPIR it was from. But the auction description made it very clear which one we were dealing with. It's the kids at WPIR at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

“College Radio station (WPIR Pratt Radio New York) promo 45 record lot - Most vinyls are in VG to NM condition. Many have "WPIR" written on the 45 cover and label (Primitive inventory control)”

There were other possibilities of course. But Pratt was always the most likely candidate. WPIR was reporting to Billboard's Campus News way back in 1973, they also were in the Broadcasting yearbook in 1975. But strangely the station and Pratt Institute do not appear in the seminal text The Gas Pipe Networks. That's because WPIR was founded later, in the 1960s. Jennifer Waits at Spinning Indie paid them a visit in 2023. [LINK] She dated the station back almost 60 years. 

"Originally an AM carrier current station dating back to 1966, WPIR broadcast nightly at 600kc on AM from the first floor of the Willoughby dorm at Pratt, according to a 1971 residence hall handbook. These transmissions could eventually be heard across multiple dorms on campus."

Their current website at wpirprattradio.cargo.site seems to date back to about 2023. No joy. I found an earlier version on Tumblr HERE which covers 2010 up to 2018. The first post is October 7th "a killer website coming soon."  There's a note in December about a program named "Across State Lines." I have a book from 1989 simply titled Gigging which lists off venues, and college radio stations by location. There's no separate listing for Brooklyn, and despite including hyper-local sticks like WCCR and WBAR; WPIR is mysteriously absent.

The 1979 IBS Journal of College Radio, annual directory issue lists them as a carrier current station with no other information. That much is true. But the lack of information also tells me they didn't respond to whatever letter IBS sent out to collate the issue. They knocked and no one was home. The very active radio staff of the early 1970s were gone. Their inclusion in the 1974 issue had been appropriately robust:

"Pratt Institute, WPIR, Brooklyn, 11205, (212) 759-4220. CC 600 KHz, CAFM 91.9 MHz, est. 1969. Member of Student Activities, House Coun. Progressive rock, network affil, IBS, Zodiac news, pot. aud, 2,000, on air 7 days per week, 18 hours per day, station free to estab. own policies and programming. FA Steve V. Nutt; GM, Joseph Gvisca; PD, Steve Smith; MD, Bruce Lisanti."

I've checked my CMJ issues and they appear to have only reported intermittently, but do appear in the 1999 college radio directory. But the data is bogus. It reports them broadcasting at 30 watts on 89.7 FM... [or perhaps the FCC story is true.]  They're also listed in the 2006 book Get Media Airplay by Rick Davis. I get the impression the station went into some dormant period in the late 1970s, are rebooted in the 1990s. My theory seems to beconfirmed by the 1994 issue of Prattonia [LINK]. It contained two mentions which are both relevant:

"On April first Dan Frieze, director of WPIR, received a letter for the FCC which demanded that WPIR turn off their illegal FM transmitter with the possibility of a $100,000 fine if the demand was not met. WPIR returned to it’s normal AM station."

It's the oldest legend in college radio it has to have been true at least once. Some 20 pages later we see the single sentence "WPIR began resurrection attempts under the direction of Glen Gollrad." It's in the section labeled "Pratt News 1992 - 1993." It seems highly improbable that a freshly re-launched college radio station would immediately begin broadcasting illegally, but kids will be kids. I have to point out that the timing correlates with the film debut of "Pump Up the Volume", released in 1990. Many old carrier current and class D stations rebooted in this era quite literally inspired by that film. The soundtrack [LINK] was an instant classic that you can get in a used bin for $1 today. Thank you Christian Slater.

My theory was complicated by the discovery of a WPIR chart in a February 1990 issue of CMJ. Sean Qualls is listed as the PM.  The station clearly exists at the start of the 1990s, they're even playing the Pump Up the Volume OST. Perhaps the reboot was fresh funding and hardware, perhaps it fell silent again sometime after 1990. Then I found another chart in 1995 from MD John Parkins. The MD in 1997 was listed as "Fuck Face". Good job kid. Charts were emailed and manually collated back then. This did not slip past. This was social commentary. There is a whole story there somewhere.

The longest dormant phase appears to have been in the 1980s, but there were probably several shorter ones. The truth is that the history of every carrier current station is complicated. It's because they do not broadcast, so in lacking those dry government records, the data is always fragmentary. I carefully dated more of the record list from eBay. The station is quite active today. It remains unclear if the records were purged recently or if they were liberated in a period of inactivity 20 years ago. The world may never know.