WGBH Radio | Lost and Found Sound

Lost & Found Sound was a special year long series airing on NPR's All Things Considered of richly layered stories that chronicle, reflect and celebrate the changing century through sound. Spearheaded by Executive Producers, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, The Kitchen Sisters and Jay Allison, Lost & Found Sound is a national collaboration of radio producers, artists, journalists, sound collectors, film sound designers, public radio stations and listeners.

Bill Chritton (age 33)
Vietnam, 1966
Twentieth Century Wars on Tape
Quest for Sound Curator Jay Allison guides us through a collection of voices of American servicemen. They come from the 1,500 callers who contacted us all this year to tell us about tapes and disks they have at home. Many were made at Christmas or during wartime; and there was an overlap of the two categories.

Their stories describe the fear, bravery, boredom, loneliness, camaraderie, and fatigue of those who serve their country in hostile action far from home and their families.

John Terry Smith
David Terrence Smith -- aka: Snuffy
(1949 - 1974)
We hear from a father in Vietnam corresponding by cassette with his family; a rare recording of the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, who lost their lives on the USS Juneau -- along with 700 other men -- in November 1942; the testimony by a former Korean War prisoner about the worms in the rice he was fed; a Gulf War conversation between brothers abroad and at home that's cut short by a Scud attack; and a veteran of the trenches of the First World War telling about surviving five days in No Man's Land with two legs and an arm shot up.

Ken Sleeman (seated at the mic) manager of WGTB-FM from 1971-1975.
Courtesy Ken Sleeman.
Radio Free Georgetown
Community radio stations, many run as radical, left-wing collectives, sprouted up across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among the most outrageous was WGTB-FM at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

The hippies, students, and activists who ran the station took on Georgetown's Jesuit administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and the power elite of Washington, DC. What started out as a low-power operation mushroomed into a station that broadcast at 6,700 watts and reached an audience of almost 100,000 people in the nation's capital.

In 1971 Georgetown tapped Ken Sleeman, a 25-year-old radio engineer, to manage the station, hoping he could eliminate the anti-war missives and left-wing rhetoric from the air. It only became worse.

Sleeman shares some moments from his time at WGTB.

To read more about the story of WGTB, click on the following link:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/archives/cover/1999/cover0129.html

The Dial Tone
Some sounds have come and gone in the 20th century. A prime example is the telephone rotary dial. This 1932 AT&T newsreel introduces the dial to novice subscribers.