When I first arrived on the ERAU
campus, I was astonished to discover that the University had a radio
station,... WERU. The primary reason for my surprise was the fact that
although the radio station existed, almost no one heard it! WERU, in
the late 1970s was broadcast from a trailer located behind the dormitory
and transmitted its signal through a wire that was stretched out near
the dorm. Thus, only a few selected students who happened to live on
the same side of the building as the broadcast wire, and also happened
to be tuned in to the station, could hear WERU. Oddly, however, this
radio station had a very fat budget. This was due to the fact that the
person who was in charge of the station also happened to be the S.G.A.
[Student Government Association] president, and it was the S.G.A. that
allocated the funding for student organizations such as WERU. Additionally,
it was leaked to me that persons involved in WERU as well as S.G.A.
were in the habit of giving themselves “gifts” which were also taken
from the school’s money. Unfortunately, there was a new sheriff in town
and the little cartoon ant was soon to target WERU.
Composing a series of cartoons
designed to shed light on this dark little undercurrent of funding,
I first brought the point forward that WERU was un-listened to and useless,
then I put forward the fact that student tuition money was being used
to run this radio station in which no one other than those who were
on the staff had any interest. If you focus a spot light on a rotten
apple, soon someone in administration is gonna point to it and say “Hey,
that one’s rotten.” so it was with WERU. After just a few cartoons the
connection between S.G.A. and the radio station became as apparent as
the uselessness of the station itself. Scams such as this can tolerate
very little pressure, and soon the budget makers were slashing at WERU’s
funding. This did not endear me to the members of the WERU staff. In
fact, one morning on the bus to campus one individual vocally threatened
to “...take that cartoonist out in the street and kick his ass...” He
didn’t know that the cartoonist, fresh out of the Michigan junior hockey
psycho ranks and about a foot taller than him, was sitting right behind
him.
By the time that the next budget
cycle came around, WERU was a very hot potato, and the word was that
they were to be issued a doomsday budget for the next year that would
effectively shut them down. So hot was the issue that the budget meeting,
which was to be held on its normal Monday evening appointment, was to
be “closed-door” and the Avion staff representative was not allowed
in the room. You see, Monday night was lay-out night for the newspaper,
and the objective was to pass the budget, but not announce it until
the following Wednesday when the paper came out. A closed door Monday
meeting would certainly keep that cartoonist guy from getting hold of
the budget figures for at least a week and using them to make people
look bad. A week would allow the hot potato to cool off and all would
be well. Still, they were going to give WERU a budget, and any budget
was too much... as far as Klyde Morris was concerned. What the budget
voters and bean counters did not know, was that I had a source in the
meeting among their ranks. It had been pre-arranged for the WERU budget
to be telephoned up to the newspaper office as soon as it was passed.
I was waiting in the Avion office having left the middle strip of that
week’s cartoon blank, and would take the budget, quickly cartoon it
and inset the strip in time to come out in Wednesday’s paper... the
same day as the “secret” figures were to be made public. On Wednesday,
the cartoon shown here actually appeared on campus BEFORE the budget
was officially announced, and if you did the simple math in the strip,
[considering that I wrote the strip, the math had to be simple] you
would get the confidential WERU budget to the penny! This really pissed
them off at S.G.A., WERU and the university administration.
As often happens the reaction
to this stunt was unexpected. The administration demanded to know how
I had gotten the figures, and were appropriately told to pound sand
up their collective rectal passages. WERU died in short order,
and that guy on the bus put on another show the following morning standing
up and asking all aboard, “...where does he get his figures, that cartoon
is all wrong!” My buddy Dan “the man”, then introduced him to me, and
I told him how I had gotten the figures and that they were correct to
the penny. Lastly, the whole event set in place an aura around the Klyde
Morris cartoon that lingers to this day. That is the perception that
no matter what the blow-hards do on campus, no matter what closed doors
are hidden behind, that cartoonist guy will find out about it and stuff
it right in your face.
Today, the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical
university supports two excellent and fully legitimate student radio
stations, one on Prescott and one in Daytona. These stations actually
broadcast and lots of folks actually listen. The Daytona campus station
which carries the call letters WERU, and is at 97.3 on the FM dial was
voted the best campus radio station of 1995 by Florida Leader Magazine.
My only regret is that the stigma of the old WERU caused delay in the
establishment of these new stations. Many of those in administration
were reluctant to fund the start-up of these stations, in part due to
the abuses that I uncovered more than a decade earlier. For that reason,
enthusiastic students who came to campus long after Klyde Morris had
been retired were troubled in their efforts to establish a true campus
radio station. In truth, the people who scammed through WERU are responsible,
but I still feel as if I owe something to those who worked so hard to
establish the new stations.
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