The Toupee Fallacy is a logical fallacy in which one thinks something is of poor quality because they only notice poor quality instances of it. People can always detect a bad toupee, but good toupees are hard to pick out because they look like real hair.

I used to think all CW bugs and bug operators sent lousy code. They’re easy to identify on the air, often with something like a 10:1 dah to dit length, rather than the standard 3:1 ratio, and a dit speed seemingly 15 WPM or more faster than the operator can handle. Now that I’ve be playing and practicing with my Begali Intrepid bug, I’m convinced the good bug operators are hard to detect on the air because their code is so good it sounds like it’s coming from a CW keyer or a skilled straight key operator.

The Begali Intrepid is a little intimidating at first. It has almost as many adjustments as a color cathode ray TV from the 70s, but once you read the documentation and play around with it, it’s fairly easy to tune the instrument to your liking. With the dual pendulum weights, it’s easy to slow down the dit speed for new bug ops like me.

This article was originally posted on Radio Artisan.

If this kind of personal nostalgia article triggers you, consider watching some cat videos on Youtube instead.

If you were fortunate enough to attend college, think about what you were involved in while there. You could have been an athlete, but the sports team was likely already there when you got your uniform. You could have been a thespian, but the theater group was already performing plays when you arrived. You could have played in the college band, but it was already making music when you got there. I could continue but for the vast majority of my readers, you were likely participating in a group that existed perhaps long before your enrollment. Consider though something you may have organized or created during your college years.

Is it still there and a going concern?

If you’ll pardon my trip down memory lane in this column, I’ll tell you the story of what happened during my undergraduate years involving radio. It shaped the rest of my life. My picture during college is shown at left. I fit right into the style-of-the-day. I didn’t spend much on haircuts. I had two pair of blue jeans and a single pair of dress pants my junior year. Sears had a sale on “moon shoes” for $10. I bought two pair (or $5 per foot!). I was running on thin margins…

This experience helped me greatly during my career in securing grants and contracts, building teams and budgets to support them, and efficient spending to maximize the return on deliverables. But I had no idea back then. I was just trying to get by as a prospective first-generation college graduate.

During my freshman year at Georgia College (Milledgeville GA), I was at a dining table in the basement of Terrell Hall. It had a dungeon-like atmosphere with the carnival-like scene that the Viet Nam/Hippie era provided. It still does have the dungeon aura, I’m told by a current student, even after the massive renovation a few years ago. A conversation I had one evening with Keith Jones, a student a year ahead of me who would later become President of the College Government Association. GC had been an all-female school just six years earlier so the administration had a “college” rather than a “student” government association. They changed their mind a few years later. Over dinner, Keith and I were bemoaning that “suitcase college” meant little action on the weekends. What would liven things up? We need a college FM radio station to create a sense of community on campus! He laughed. I didn’t.

As I reflect, I think I was like a dog with its first bone, just not letting go of the idea even with some other students treating it like a light-hearted joke until it was actually on the air. I was fortunate that enough others did not. That was over 50 years ago now.

It wasn’t there before I arrived but the four years of developing WXGC-88 Rocks taught me so much more than I learned in the classroom. But I did put classroom learning to work. And I made lifelong friends along the way.

Getting Through by Working..and Working

I worked several jobs to pay my way through college, like running the John Milledge Motel during the overnight shift. It was then a notable 1950s and 60s style motel, even a landmark of sorts. I ran the desk from 10pm until 6am. That meant I ran the place as the only staff on duty. Yes, I seemed to always have an 8am class on the “quarter” system of scheduling. Like Professor Ed Dawson’s very challenging English Literature class. He pushed the hell out of me but only he saw what I was gaining at the time. I sure as hell didn’t, until later. He helped set a standard for excellence for my own activities…and those of my future students. He is one of my undergrad profs who still looms large in my mind but especially in my heart because he expected things of me I did not realize I could do. Professor Dawson was an indelible imprint for me later as a professor myself.

I did a lot of homework during the overnight, in between getting truckers back on the road at the odd hours they asked for a wake-up call and wives calling with a demand to know if their #$*) husband had a room there. I’d check-out the cash drawer to the manager at 6am, run back to my apartment right across the street from campus for about an hour’s shut-eye, then listened to the news from Radio Australia on a Hallicrafters S-108 shortwave radio while I got cleaned up to make it to my first class at 8am. Radio Australia always gave a fresh perspective on the world news, especially for stories covering the United States. I learned later that the propagation path from the States to AussieLand was best during that time of day. Milk and a warm donut (I favored the ones with shaved coconut, chocolate and nuts, still warm) were eaten in a brief pass through the dining hall. There are many stories from that job, few of which I can convey explicitly here and keep a family rating. But here’s the flavor of it.

The motel was featured in the novel Fatal Flowers by Rosemary Daniell. Her book was circa 1974. I could have rented her the room she describes in this excerpt but I do not remember her from that time. Besides, she wasn’t famous then, not that I would have known since that was far from my reading genre.

Somehow, the author’s rendition of the room she was staying in still rings a bell, as do the “eight-dollar an hour” rooms that I rented, located in the rear of the John Milledgeville Motel. The first name is an authentic metaphor for the — ahem — target market for that segment of the property. Getting cussed out by a trucker when I forgot his wake-up call helped fill out my vocabulary, so to say. If you’ve ever seen an old hotel clock with pegs to set alarms every fifteen-minutes, you know how I could occasionally screw this up. When you’re responsible for the schedule of others or the security of their hotel registration, you learn how to take better care of your own.

I also worked in the campus bookstore for Bob Thrower, one of General Patton’s jeep drivers during WWII. Patton went through jeep drivers like heavy smokers got through packs of cigarettes. But Mr. Thrower was kind, taking a liking to me. I learned a lot about the retail book business by ordering all of the textbooks for faculty courses. The used book market was just heating up with a new text being sold 3.5 times on average after the original sale. The profit margin was far higher for the used copies than the new ones since all of the initial cost-to-print had already been invested. Storage and resales labor were the main input costs. I knew the Follett Book Company’s regional rep by first name.

Little did I know then that I would later work as an editor for both the oldest academic publisher (Taylor & Francis; 1798 founding) and the largest scientific publisher (Springer Media). This retail experience kept me grounded in how the business side of publishing houses worked which fostered the editorial side’s ups and downs. While I had been writing for print since I was a teen, continuing until today, becoming an editor gave me a different perspective on the writing and publishing process. But Patton Jeep-Driver Bob Thrower, always with his pipe nearby, showed me what the boots-on-the-ground of book sales was like. The bookstore is now outsourced to Barnes & Noble.

There were a few other jobs along the way, like being a summertime factory floor fill-in at Lapp Insulator Company in Sandersville GA. They make those discs that are stacked together to provide insulation on high voltage power lines. For extra pay, I got to grind the spurs off of the rejected metal caps that are glued onto the top of the ceramic discs. (That’s helped me immensely today in working with steel and aluminum.) I got that job because the father of a long time friend was in management. The son, Dr. Phil Brantley, is now a professor at LSU. That very physically demanding work, and getting to know the guys whose lives were already molded around it, really taught me that geometry just wasn’t as hard as I was making it out to be. To boot, doing geometry was mostly done in doors where there’s air conditioning, unlike a factory floor where baking insulator caps in sub-floor rooms made steam a full-time environment.

Working at Johnson’s Texaco Station just down the street from the John Milledge Motel for a friend of my family gave me another molding work experience, ranging from changing truck tires and water pumps (with no experience to do either) to meeting the public’s request to “filler-up, please and could you wash my windows and check my tires?” No matter how hot and grimy I was, the most valuable lesson was to give customer service since they were ultimately why I had a job I needed at the time.

I periodically put up stock in the Piggly Wiggly grocery store next to campus, being recommended by my former manager at the store in Sandersville GA where I worked while in high school (now a Harvey’s Supermarket). I was on duty late one afternoon when I heard some murmuring on the aisle opposite the shelves I was replenishing with #8 cans of Margaret Holmes Peas. In a minute, I saw Cher and Gregg Allman pushing a cart down my aisle! Rumor had it that they were renting a house at nearby Lake Sinclair since he lived and recorded at Capricorn Records in Macon GA. I kept my cool and just watched music royalty out of the corner of my eye as they clearly didn’t want attention. The peas were produced in Sandersville at Holmes Canning Company before later being sold but the grandson of Margaret Holmes was my first Elmer (more on Mike Holmes here).

I’m not sure how I found the time and energy to focus on the campus radio station but I did. It was a passion. Moreover, I got my PhD in sociology and statistics so geometry — whether it’s on network centrality of social groups or spatial networks of transportation routes — became part of my professional life as a result, lol. I can thank the factory job making high voltage insulators for that. I also think that the various jobs I had gave me the desire to simply not take no for an answer when it came to getting a campus FM station in place. Just take the next step and get to tomorrow.

Getting WXGC-88 Rocks on the Air

With a lot of help from some other students, a couple of faculty members and two administrators, we got this across the goal line right after I had graduated. Here’s how it went.

The college administration’s Comptroller was against it because he thought it would lead to more financial requests. He who controls the purse strings…well, you know the rest of that story. That was the first hill to climb.

There was a big step each year, like my reconnecting with Roy Lane against whom I’d played basketball in high school. Roy and I became fast friends, him getting elected CGA President with me being highly involved in the CGA Senate. This strategy was all about our getting positions on the Student Activity Budget Committee where we could get money allocated to buy equipment for the FM station. The first strategy was to crack the voting block of an equal split between student and faculty/administration positions. Roy and I got two faculty to agree to block-vote with us, giving us the ability to force funding for the campus FM station on those in the administration who were largely negative on the idea. Bill Eddins, the Comptroller, was so tight he squeaked when he walked down the wooden floors in Parks Hall. (I’m sure they laughed, too, like Keith Jones did in the dining hall.)

However, the Dean of Students Office did back us after Roy and I gave them our pitch and what we thought it would do to create a better campus community. That is their business, right? Roy learned during his internship in D.C. to play to the interests of those whose vote you are courting. I traveled with Dean Carolyn Geddes to Valdosta GA to see WVVS at Valdosta State. The manager later became the voice of WTBS, Ted Turner’s Super Station, before James Earl Jones took over that work when it became CNN. Visiting WREK at Ga. Tech was another trip and one with a double entendre! I’ll leave it there but both college stations were really educational to see what motivated undergrads could do if allowed to. Unfortunately, WVVS was taken over by the school’s administration in 2010, moving the students out of the way for an affiliate of Georgia Public Broadcasting. Later, Assistant Dean of Students Bill Fogarty worked with Gregg Duckworth to get the final license in place to get on the air for good. This was after I left town to attend graduate school.

I now know what the Dean of Students was feeling by facilitating a motivated student who was not going to take no for an answer. I felt it later when I became a professor by opening doors for students hungry to achieve success. That dog bone was held onto even tighter afterwards because of the acknowledgement and endorsement of Dean Geddes. Another lesson learned outside the classroom.

Figuring out how to file a license application to the FCC for a 10-watt station at a higher education institution was the largest, multi-year “term paper” I wrote during college. Roy, who served under MS Congressman Trent Lott as an Intern in Washington DC, was able to get some key intel on the application process. Roy later became City Manager of Spartanburg SC, leading that city’s turnaround before rapidly succumbing to esophageal cancer. Another great friend, unfortunately lost far too soon at age 47. An accolade by the Mayor was true to form for Roy as he honed those skills while a student:

Lane, who was in his sixth year as city manager, was regarded by his colleagues as an innovative thinker who helped foster a new wave of development in the city. “He came to Spartanburg on a mission — to make Spartanburg the most livable city of its size,” Talley said. “He worked hard to make that vision come true. That’s the legacy he left here.”

Roy’s political savvy was a terrific role model for me early in life. His work ethic to never quit in the face of temporary setbacks was contagious. It stayed with me as I worked in Washington myself, lobbied my own congressional caucus, and worked with several congressional offices from around the U.S. As Roy used to say: Don’t let your politics get in the way of your politics.

Gregg Duckworth was my roommate and was a rock-and-roll music nut. Knew all the music, much better than I did. Still does. He became equally committed to getting this application filed, approved and the station built. He gained more of a responsibility than he may have been considering at the time but do it well, he did. I may have been the quarterback but it was Gregg who got the ball over the goal line. Always acknowledge the work of others and your team will likely win if you define the focus as the goal instead of what you accomplish as an individual. I learned that from Roy who practiced it in college and in his career.

Four years later, WXGC-88 Rocks signed on the air. I had left town for graduate school two weeks prior. My voice was never heard on the station I founded. Until recently. My roommate, Gregg Duckworth (picture left), became the first on-air General Manager of the college FM station with all of it’s mighty 10 watts of power after I left for graduate school.

The first music donated to WXGC came from a licensed amateur radio operator, recently becoming a Silent Key. Charles Pennington K4GK owned a bookstore with music in downtown Milledgeville. When I told him about the FM station just up the street from his shop, I told him that we could mention his shop if he donated albums. He thought about it and handed me this light brown album, saying: “Listen to this. He’s gonna make it in rock-and-roll.” It was Jackson Browne‘s first album. Charlie was indeed right with JB becoming one of my favorite musicians. Years later after I became licensed, I reconnected with Charlie, learning that he had moved to my hometown of Tennille GA. He and his wife lived on Main Street, just a couple of blocks north of where my grandparents lived, back when telephone numbers were simple, like “24”. He passed away in September 2024. RIP OM.

But First, Get a Commercial AM Station On the Air

During my senior year and for a few months after I completed my coursework, I helped three local businessmen—an attorney, a car dealer, and a laundry owner—build a commercial daytime AM station (WXLX-1060) on Lake Laurel Road, after which I was named News Director. My advice to the owners was that I should not be the Station Manager. I could help organize the building and licensing application but I suggested that a University of Georgia graduate in Broadcasting be hired as Manager since I didn’t know how to run a commercial station. And it was a lot of money involved, at the time.

I had just completed a successful license application for the college FM educational station. How hard could a commercial one be, I asked myself at the time. Young people have no fear! This is why as a professor, I never told undergraduates that anything was “hard” as they can instinctively swing well above their weight. Another lesson from outside the classroom but later taken directly to the classroom.

 I learned so much from Robbie Hattaway, the RF Engineer who worked for the station as Engineer. (Picture Mr. Rogers with a Simpson Voltmeter.) I had dumb questions. He smiled and had deep answers.

I received my Third Class FCC Commercial Broadcast License at the FCC office in Atlanta. I learned so much from Robbie Hattaway, the RF Engineer who worked for the station as Engineer. (Picture Mr. Rogers with a Simpson Voltmeter.) I had dumb questions. He smiled and had deep answers. I never knew how much copper mesh from the North Georgia copper mines it took to make an efficient ground plane for the AM tower antenna. Robbie also taught me how to make sure the 1KW Gates transmitter was operating within specifications. It was a pure thrill to “light the lamp,” as Robbie called it, when I hit the switch to start the broadcast day for this daytime-only AM station.

Don’t get me started on the care-and-feeding of a paper teletype machine that fed us the then-new AP Radio News feed. And to hell with anyone who forgot to add a new roll of paper to the bail the night before! I kept a roll of quarters in my desk in case that happened or the teletype just jammed, leaving me without any morning news feed. Before sign-on, I’d run downtown to the newspaper racks in front of the Post Office, buying copies of the three papers they sold in the racks there. I’d get back in time to sign-on with a literally rip-and-read newscast.

I became an AP Bureau Chief for the Central Georgia area very quickly, largely because AP had just moved into supplying radio news, competing with the well-established radio service, UPI. I suspect in hindsight it only took being a News Director and the ability to fog a mirror. I had clear plans to remain in the news business as I made the rounds of the Milledgeville Police Department, City Hall, local businesses, and broke stories like the state Women’s Prison takeover by the inmates or the bootlegging scandal at the VA Hospital. I received a regional award from the AP for that thirty-minute special report on the Women’s Prison. But, alas, the AP Editor in Atlanta “took” my story from the wire and it came out under his byline in the leading newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution. He did this again to the naive cub reporter that I was at the time, leading to my accepting a offer to attend graduate school out of state when the call came.

The 1060 News operation is long defunct now, after being sold a few times, but we stole the local market from the beginning by getting all of the surrounding county weekly newspaper editors to be stringers for me. I stumbled into that one but it worked brilliantly. I’ve had the good fortune to continue work with various news outlets, largely in “precision journalism,” including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It gave me a grounded start when I later taught a course on the sociology of news at TCU.

Back to the Future of WXGC

The campus FM station wouldn’t have happened without Gregg getting the ball over the goal line. But I’m not sure it would have happened without me being like a dog with a bone, not letting go of the idea. It was a team effort although I got the plaque as Father of the Radio Station from the school. The fact that we created something entirely from scratch, taking our full undergraduate tenure (and part of Gregg’s M.S. degree), that is still going after a half century now has been very meaningful for me. It’s been a keepsake that remains even after many other recognitions and achievements have faded away. Those who came afterwards have done more than Gregg and I did. Managing the ups-and-downs of student participation, collective engagement without too many splinters in the group hindering things, all contributed to the changing part that this FM radio station has played in a small college town but in a growing and vibrant University.

From the 1975 college Spectrum Yearbook, here is the first picture of the group that signed on to this “joke” of an idea that I had my freshman year in the basement of Terrell Hall. The Maxwell Student Union had opened by the time this photo was taken. We had “practice” to become DJs there by using a mixer board, mic, and news announcements with music over the PA system. Lame, by comparison, for sure but it was what we had so the “Maxwell Mouth” was heard throughout the Union. Oh yea, Gregg and I lived across the street in a roach palace apartment. It meant that the Union was our practical living room most days.

I had another part-time job on a couple of weekends a month working at the desk just on the other side of this brick wall we are standing in front of in the yearbook picture. Heck, I even got to play chess with the college chess team. The other three were nationally-ranked chess players. I checked-out the chess sets from the Student Union desk and just filled-in to have a fourth. We were coached by Ruben M. Shocren who had played Bobby Fischer to a draw in 1959 during a tournament in Buenos Aires. Mr. Shocren was in management for a local textile company, as I recall, and was a volunteer coach for the group. I learned a lot from him and the others but never became a good chess player myself. Everything that comes you way isn’t the path for you. Stay on building the FM station and keep focused. It has helped me say “no” to many opportunities over the years that were off the path I was following. I still follow this principle in amateur radio.

A Half Century Later…

After a few decades, WXGC shifted frequencies in 2012 and became WGUR 95.3-The Noise. Gregg and I were recently interviewed by Ansley Allen, the current GM of WGUR, about how this all started. The campus FM station has been going strong all these years with over 40 employees and volunteers! It wasn’t there before I arrived but the four years of developing it taught me so much more than I learned in the classroom but it gave credence to what I was getting in class for the real world, too. The added task of earning enough money to pay for college, at a time when a student could make enough at part-time jobs to do that, pushed me to be an effective goal-setter and time-manager even more.

Looking back, I wouldn’t do it again with a full-ride scholarship. I learned how to organize people, create a strategic plan to get the critical pieces together, put together ideas that leveraged the vested interests of two key administrators and, finally, get two faculty members on the Student Activity Budget Committee to always block-vote with the students against the administrators on the Committee. Neither were tenured so it was somewhat of a risk to their future to buck the administration, I learned later as a professor myself. They both were at GC a long time because they each cared about students, took time to know them, and put their interests at heart. This was something I carried with me on my journey as a college professor myself.

I couldn’t be prouder of those who came after Gregg and me during the next fifty years. We are both truly touched. I am certain that we will be for the rest of our lives. Here’s to the staff of WXGC/WGUR for all you have done over the years to … make some noise!

When the WGUR-95.3 The Noise management completes their article, I’ll put a link to it here.

Here’s the promo I produced for us for the 45th anniversary:

From the WGUR-95.3-The Noise website:

Today, more than 40 students make WGUR 95.3 possible. Students are given free rein to play a range of music, sports and news. The station now has an audio power of 100 watts and also streams live online.

WGUR believes in the power and voice of Georgia College students, the station itself is a testament to that. One student had an idea and that idea turned into a movement, a thriving organism, an outlet for freedom and creativity for generations of students that would come after him.