York College of Pennsylvania will welcome several generations of broadcasters to campus on Alumni Weekend, Oct. 2-4, to celebrate 50 years of its student-operated radio station.
For five decades, York College of Pennsylvania students have found their voice behind a microphone at WVYC. The student-run radio station has grown from using reel-to-reel tape decks to providing fully digital 24/7 broadcasting, from required AM band licenses and spinning turntables to podcasts and surround-sound production studios.
While the production facilities and systems have become high-tech, the culture at WVYC hasn’t changed much since 1976. It has always been a place where students from an array of backgrounds and interests have found a sense of connection.
While the actual anniversary of the station’s first broadcast is in November, the College celebrated 50 years of the station’s operation during Alumni Weekend from Oct. 2 through 4.
‘The island of misfit toys’
Long before podcasts or playout systems, there was Lauren Edelstein Henry ’89, a Radio/TV Communications major who joined WVYC shortly after she arrived on campus in the mid-1980s. Henry started her WVYC career on the AM station. Back then, going on the air for the FM station required a Federal Communications Commission license. Henry earned hers in November of her freshman year and spent the rest of her college career doing college rock and jazz shows on the FM station.
Before her first FM show, the station’s student engineer took her to tour a local FM radio station in York where the staff gave her the on-air name Ariel Armageddon. The moniker followed her back to WVYC, at 88.1 on the FM dial.
“WVYC was like the island of misfit toys,” says Henry, who served as the student station general manager during her junior and senior years. “There were punks and jocks and Greeks and metal heads and cool people and nerdy people. They were held together by their love of music.”
Henry’s time at the station included its move from the third floor of the Life Sciences Building to the Student Union space that WVYC still calls home. The transition meant months of operating out of a tiny makeshift studio near the Spart’s Den. Once in the new space, one of Henry‘s joys was piping music into the Student Union lobby during finals week, taking requests from students studying there.
The leadership experience she gained as station manager has benefited her throughout a career that has wound from FM radio to statistical programming to corporate training.
“The skills I learned at WVYC and York College allowed me the persuasiveness needed to get all those jobs,” she says.
In 2020, she began organizing WVYC alumni reunions.
“I think it created a real community and the different generations got to know each other,” she says. “We do well with fundraising for the station, and everyone is truly passionate about our little station-that-could. The alums are the station’s biggest fans and cheerleaders.”
From analog to digital
By the time Scott Ciaccia ’14, a Mass Communication major, arrived on campus in the early 2010s, WVYC had grown into something close to a campus institution. But at its core, it still was a community. Ciaccia started behind the scenes, helping produce a sports talk show called “The Sports Take” before becoming production director and eventually student station manager from 2013 to 2014.
“The station felt like family,” Ciaccia says. “If you had ideas or needed help, each person had your back. To this day, my closest friends are those that I met through WVYC.”
One of his favorite memories is of the station’s marathon volunteer efforts at Relay for Life in 2013 and 2014, when WVYC staff spent more than 24 hours providing music and equipment for the American Cancer Society fundraiser. For decades, the radio station has furnished support for campus and community events.
Ciaccia’s tenure coincided with a technological turning point for the station. In 2013, the College hired Jeff Schiffman as full-time faculty station manager. He had joined the faculty in 2006 as an adjunct instructor of radio production, then stepped into the role of faculty station manager when his predecessor, Tom Gibson, who had originally launched the station in 1976, retired.
Schiffman, who helped launch Gettysburg College’s radio station in 1977 and spent decades working at WSBA-AM and WGLD-AM in York County before coming to York College, oversaw a transformation at WVYC that modernized nearly every aspect of the station’s operation.
“When I came there, there was this big move to do a lot digitally,” Schiffman says.
At that time, the station’s operation was entirely analog, utilizing record turntables, reel-to-reel tape, and CD players. During his first summer on the job, that began to change.
“We made it a fully digital studio,” Schiffman says.
The College had an AM station that had previously broadcast only on campus, but by 2013, none of the AM transmitters around the campus worked, and few people listened to AM radio. The College was primarily using its FM signal.
The turntables and tape machines were removed. One of the station’s dormant AM production spaces was converted into a modern production studio. During the next two summers, the station added two more surround-sound studios, which have become essential not just to WVYC but to the Mass Communication and Film and Media Arts programs.
One of the biggest advancements came in November 2013, when WVYC adopted a computer playout system, allowing it to broadcast around the clock without a student in the booth. Where the station had gone dark at night and over the summer, it could now operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The programming evolved alongside the equipment. Music shows gave way to more talk and sports programming, especially after York College launched a Sport Media major in 2018 that drew more students to the station.
Through it all, Schiffman says, the common thread at WVYC has been loyalty. At the station’s 40th anniversary celebration, some 70 former staff members returned to campus.
“The connections they made at WVYC were some of the most important they made,” Schiffman says.
That loyalty extends to institutional support as well. WVYC continues to grow and has created an endowment from which a percentage of annual proceeds funds new equipment.
Finding a voice
Mass Communication alumna Clara Weber Hill ’23 had toured WVYC while visiting campus as a prospective student and knew immediately that she wanted to be part of it. She became involved with the station during her initial semester of fall 2020. She hosted a show as a first-year student, became music director as a sophomore, and served as student station manager during her junior year.
“I just remember feeling such a rush every time I got to use my own voice on the air,” Hill says. “The buildup of energy while waiting for a song to end was crazy because I was always so worried about tripping over my words.”
Mistakes happened, of course, and when they did, there was no escaping notice. The faculty station manager’s office sat right outside the recording booth, and Schiffman was often listening.
“Whenever I made a mistake, I would count to 10, and he was already in the room asking how I’d correct the error for next time,” Hill says. “It always cracked me up.”
The WVYC experience for Hill started as laid-back and fun, but grew more demanding once she took on staff responsibilities. For her, the benefits far outweighed the stress.
“My experience with WVYC helped me to gain so much confidence in myself and my work,” she says. “Not only do you really put yourself out there on the air, but working as a staff member requires quite a bit of patience, delegation, and planning.”
While she says it took time to come out of her shell and find her voice on air, once she did, that skill set translated to confidence in the classroom and in her interactions with others. Looking to WVYC’s 50th anniversary and beyond, Hill hopes future students will have the same opportunity she had to be creative on the air.
A new era
This fall, WVYC begins its next 50 years under new leadership. Brian Gregory, Ed.D., joined York College in August as Assistant Professor of Mass Communication and the station’s new director, stepping in after Schiffman’s retirement in May. A longtime New York-area educator and audio production specialist, Dr. Gregory looks forward to the future of WVYC.
“I’m really excited to work with a station that has been around since the 1970s,” he says. “I see such great connections with the community and alumni.”
Dr. Gregory, whose academic work has focused on researching the history of radio and sound media, says he’s still learning WVYC’s story, but his priorities for the station are already taking shape. He hopes to expand community partnerships and integrate local event coverage, including York College athletics, into student programming. He also plans to increase the station’s podcast offerings.
Above all, he wants to preserve what has always been at WVYC’s core.
“First and foremost, it’s a student organization,” he says. “They get to run it and determine the programming and content.”
That balance of legacy and reinvention, he believes, is exactly what will carry WVYC into its next half-century.
