Walk into the WCWM 90.9 FM headquarters one day in early summer, and you might see station manager Varvara Troitski with a heaping binder, making her rounds, preserving station artifacts with historical significance — an early-2000s note from a prisoner expressing his fandom of the station, a tape demo of a Car Seat Headrest song from when the lead singer was still a student, and what appears to be an old telegram.
History is important to the student staff at WCWM. Not just scraps of paper and hand-written letters, but their immense vinyl collection, cultivated since the 1950s and one of the largest on the East Coast.
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“That [the vinyl collection] is something that each station manager has been told to treasure,” University of Houston professor and former station manager Anne Gessler said.
But during the hot, sticky summer of 2018, hardly a month into Troitski’s new gig as WCWM station manager, a disaster struck that threatened nearly every piece of history in that lively basement.
Troitski said — after not being down into the basement WCWM headquarters for some time — she paced down the stairs to find blobs of mold covering the chairs.
“I look around and there’s just mold on the vinyl, mold on the couches in that room,” she said, gesturing down the hallway.
Some say the culprit was the HVAC system, or maybe the ceiling tiles. Either way, the mold had spread to the wealth of posters covering the walls, little scraps of this and that — but most terrifyingly, the vinyl collection.
The vinyls and CDs and everything that could be saved was shipped off for cleaning while the rooms were sanitized and deep cleaned. It was a long road ahead, and the station wouldn’t be open until October.
“And so we walked in and it was empty,” Troitski said. “There was no music in here, no posters, no little novelty things that had been collected over the years.”
Troitski said one day, months later, she walked into the station to find the CDs and some of the vinyl back — all bagged up in plastic, boxed up and piled in a heap in the center of the room.
“I just walked in and I was like: ‘Oh! The CDs and vinyl are back,” she said. “And then it was like four or five waves of boxes being dropped in the middle of this room.”
With not enough manpower to effectively handle the task, there are still boxes in the WCWM meeting room stacked almost to the ceiling, and the station is planning on opening summer workshop hours for extra help. And with such a comically daunting task before them, they have to ask, or at least contemplate: why is this all worth it?
Any radio show in this day and age can be spun entirely digitally, by a phone or laptop and a simple auxiliary cord. So why do so many WCWM DJs choose to spin manually? It’s a hard question — when vinyl is no longer required from a technical standpoint, what is it? Spiritual?
“It’s a little less haphazard than putting up a Spotify playlist or an ITunes playlist,” Troitski said.
It’s like a ritual, and there are little joys and intricacies to it. For instance, many of the records in the collection have reviews from old DJs taped to them, dating as far back as the station has been broadcasting — you can see what a student in 1977 thought of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ or any number of other records, hits and underground, scrawled in pencil graphite and taped to the back of the cover.
Or sometimes Troitski will find an ‘In Memoriam’ note taped to a record, noting the music was from the collection of a DJ who has died. Softly, in that quiet dim room, she’ll say a couple quick words about the person, and over the airwaves, for just a moment or two, they’ll live on.
Maybe the records are a piece of what Troitski calls “the college radio ethos.”
Every day at WCWM, dozens of young adults with passions in technical engineering, business, planning, design, layout, art, writing, photography, all come together to pull off 12 hours of programming and a biannual print publication with the glossy sheen and quality content of something much more professional.
When asked to define “the college radio ethos,” Troitski stumbled for a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking up and gesturing around the room. “I’m surrounded by it.”
