WFIL made a grant of fifty-thousand dollars to Temple University to start a radio curriculum. I was here at the time, and the only radio man here, and in a sense I started the curriculum. From this, we began to hire other faculty members, and so the department grew. But this is how it started. Once the curriculum was started, we built studios, which were regular broadcast studios, to teach in. Then_, I thought it was not enough just to sit in class, we have to practice, we have to keep the students practicing and doing this. So we began to think how we could have a station of our own. There were no A.M. channels available, you couldn't go on A.M. radio; at that time F.M. was not very well developed, hardly heard of... as a matter of fact, there were no listeners to F.M. So where could we get a radio station that students could broadcast on? And I finally hit upon the idea of the "wired-wireless." This is ideal in many ways. It is ideal because not too many people hear it. That's a great asset because you can make mistakes, you can afford to be an amateur, you can afford to learn.

The first day of broadcasting for the little wired-wireless WRTI was an exciting one. Professor Roberts describes the events of that day.

At the University of Pennsylvania, they had more students in the dorm than we did. At Swarthmore, they have a campus which is out in the country, they have a "campus." They have more audience than we do.

So the thought occurred to us, suppose we linked all of these just like a network, and we broadcast from Temple and they can hear us at Penn and hear us at Swarthmore, and as you know, a network is simply a connection of telephone lines, linking the respective transmitters together. So, I got in touch with the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore and they expressed an interest, but we had to get the money to get a line, so we invited our old friend Roger Clipp down for lunch.

He thought it was a nice idea, so he agreed to underwrite it. So we linked the stations together...our students are here during the day, so we took over all the daytime broadcasting. The University of Pennsylvania took over in the early evening and the Swarthmore students took over at night. And all of us carried everybody's broadcasts.

And so, the Philadelphia Inquirer, since the money came from the Inquirer (Triangle Publications), network was born, and since these were not educational stations, they could even have commercials on this type of thing.

Although established primarily as a student experience, WRTI also served the campus as a source of entertainment. Professor Roberts...

FM's programming remains widely varied. Each day sees segments of Popular music, Broadway and classical music, and even special interest music, like jazz, blues, country and western, and even psychedelic. WRTI-FM is not all music, though. It's quite "liberal."

And when you get people from the faculty to come in and talk about their own research (which we did).

Of course, you can go on and on, there's story after story of the funny things that have happened.

Visitors and guest celebrities have always been part and parcel of WRTI's programs, as well.

But anyway, I took a break and rushed around to Studio A and I asked Mr. Malden, I said, "Would you mind, I know you're on a busy schedule (and his press representative was there to take him right into town) do you suppose that you could just come over and say hello to these youngsters?" 'Well, you would think I had brought Santa Claus into the studio, because there was Malden, and they sang to him, while he just sat down for the next 15 to 20 minutes. He and these youngsters just conversed back and forth.

I don't think we had that same rapport when Jimmy Hoffa was in the next studio.

And we did many programs live from the dressing rooms of the theaters downtown.

So, we had a very distinguished list, as a matter of fact, in any one year, the list you would have would compare favorably with the finest television stations in Philadelphia.

For example, this year when Mr. Kassi took over, I thought the best thing I could do, the biggest favor I could do for him was to make myself scarce... which I have done.

The WRTI studios, whose initial cost alone was two-hundred thousand dollars, occupy one entire wing of Annenberg Hall.

Annenberg Hall signals in a new era in WRTI's history. It is to be an era of greater professionalism and more involvement with the student, with the industry, and with the community.

The new faculty advisor, Robert Kassi explains the scope of this new era.

Part of this new involvement is embodied in our slogan, "At WRTI, there is a definite difference."

We wish to acknowledge the gracious cooperation of the following, in making this program possible:

Professors John Roberts, Delwin Dusenbury and Laurence Blenheim. Also Mr. Robert Kassi, and the School of Communications and Theater of Temple University.

The Definite Difference was written for WRTI by Gerhart Klein.

This is _______________ speaking.