A man who was instrumental in building WMUB-FM radio and the former WMUB TV station has died. William "Bill" Utter helped as the public radio and television stations were getting underway at Miami University. He was 94.
Utter held several roles at WMUB and Miami, including station manager, director of broadcasting, and professor of communications. During an interview on WMUB in 2007, Utter recalled arriving at Miami University in 1957 and exploring what today is called "distance learning," which at the time was being tested using TV.
"When I came here to this campus, we were teaching by television with a huge grant from the Ford Foundation to find out whether or not students could learn by television — which was a brand new idea — as well as by face-to-face meeting and either a large group or small groups. ... We did this over in a barracks that had been brought down from Wright Patt Air Force Base right after the war; the acoustical treatment was egg cartons. It was a marvelous place."
A year later, speaking during a panel on WMUB history, he recounted watching as the WMUB tower arrived from a station in West Virginia.
"We bought a used tower and shipped it up here. These guys were the most daring people outside of a circus that I've ever seen. They had a rope that went straight up through the tower as they built it. These guys — couldn't have been much more than 18 — they'd get up two-hundred, two-hundred and fifty feet and they'd freefall down on this rope and somebody at the ground would suddenly stop the rope. They just thought that was more fun."
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Of the early days of programming on WMUB-FM, he said, "There was a lot of taped programming from an organization which was the predecessor of NPR called NAEB, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. There was a lot of free tape, UN tape, various organizations, the tourist agencies for various countries. We played a lot of tape, and we had some live shows. We did all the Miami sports, we did all the basketball games, and we did all the football games. In '57 when I got here, the station was on the air three days a week, daytime only, and no weekends and no summer. It wasn't until the intervening couple of years that the schedule began to fill out a little bit."
There was also a mission, he explained, to create a co-curricular experience for students to learn about broadcasting on radio and television. A scholarship was eventually endowed in Utter's name and is still awarded to this day.
In the mid-1970s Miami University got out of the television game and the station — Channel 14 — eventually ended up with ThinkTV out of Dayton, now jointly operated with CET-TV.
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Utter was born in Jefferson City, Mo., and majored in theater at Dennison University. After a stint in the Army and working as a cameraman, producer and director at TV stations in Denver, he landed at Miami in 1957, where he stayed until retirement in 1995, though he continued to serve as professor emeritus.
He and his wife of 70 years, Dixie, remained in Oxford until 2014.
Utter died Feb. 28, the 15th anniversary of WMUB "signing off" from Oxford. Operations were turned over to Cincinnati Public Radio on March 1, 2009.
A memorial is set for Saturday, March 9, in South Carolina.
