Free Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan Page A

received their shipments in the morning and all copies were gone by afternoon.”

    Kenny Greenblatt with Jim Parry on Cambridge Common. Greenblatt worked the record labels for ’ BCN and found an enthusiastic source of income. Photo by Sam Kopper.
    Business was going so well at the end of 1968 that Ray Riepen managed to convince Mitch Hastings to give the DJS a raise, as Sam Kopper revealed: “We all started at $85 a week, and by early ’69 or so, all the jocks were making$125 a week!” Riepen also successfully pointed out the need to move into bigger digs. Jim Parry elaborated, “Mitch had this dream of having a real radio station on Newbury Street, with that prestigious address, but it wasn’t really viable as a station; we ran out of space.”
    â€œWe moved to 312 Stuart Street [which] was just above Flash’s Snack and Soda and down from Trinity Liquors,” Sam Kopper added. “Charles went to work just as we moved, right at the end of 1968.” The new location, nestled behind the bustling Greyhound Bus terminal, would be WBCN’S home until June 1973. Flimsy and cheap quarter-inch paneling notwithstanding, the layout was much more conducive to running a radio business, with accessible areas for reception, sales, and management; studios in the back; and the record library across the hall. Perhaps best of all, the DJS had escaped their claustrophobic Newbury Street attic; they wouldn’t freeze during the winter months or roast in their own sweat next to a loud and impotent air conditioner during the summer.
    As WBCN settled in on Stuart Street, some fresh voices appeared on the air. John Brodey, who would eventually become a radio star in his own right and a future music director, had listened to ’ BCN with great interest during his frequent visits home from the University of Wisconsin to see his parents in Boston. “I knew a girl who had gone out with Steven [Segal] for a while and I said, ‘If you can just give me an introduction, I’ll take it from there.’ Soon I was interning for Steven, weaseling my way in. I had to put away his records, get him stuff, and drive him home because he had a car but didn’t drive. We started talking, and soon it was: ‘Oh, you know something about music, man.’ It was a nice relationship and . . . I lasted!”
    Sam Kopper also hired Debbie Ullman to be WBCN’S first female jock after she had worked with the close-knit crew in the sales department for a time and also volunteered to helped transport the station’s voluminous record library from Newbury to Stuart Street. “I liked her voice, intelligence, and spirit,” Kopper mentioned. He was also impressed when she took the initiative to study for and pass the FCC exam for a radio license, not necessarily an easy thing to do, and unusual, at the time, for a female. “I was the only woman out of about forty taking the exam; afterwards the guy looked over my test and was startled.” So now she had the endorsement of Uncle Sam, but did she have the chutzpah to do a show? Kopper decided to find out. As Ullman worked in the sales area one afternoon, the jocks arrived for an airstaff meeting. “That usually meant that someone would play long tracks on the radio, like a Grateful Dead side, while they met,” Ullman remembered. “On this occasion someone came [to me] and said, ‘We’re going to have a meeting in ten minutes; if you can learn the [air studio] board, you’re on.” She wasn’t thrown by the challenge. “I’d already been watching [the other jocks use] the board . . . so that wasn’t hard. I went on while they had their staff meeting; apparently, I didn’t fumble things too badly!”
    Sam Kopper also hired Andy Beaubien, a recent University of Rhode Island grad who had begun working in local radio when he was only sixteen and did shifts at some small Rhode Island stations