With its centennial approaching in just days, WWL Radio is looking all the way back to its earliest days.
Tania Tetlow, president of Loyola University in New Orleans, joined Tommy Tucker on Monday morning to discuss some of that history, when the station’s iconic call-letters stood for “World Wide Loyola.”
“Our physics department in the 1910s was big into teaching radio. We had a radio school that taught a lot of soldiers going into World War I how to be radio operators. And this week, 100 years ago in 1922, they set up the first transmitter to broadcast from the deep south, and that first broadcast was March 31.”
Tetlow noted that the first piece of audio ever broadcast on WWL was her predecessor as Loyola’s president, Fr. Edward Cummings, playing the piano and asking for donations to the university. But eventually, the station grew from sporadic broadcasts to become both a constant presence and a trusted voice in the Crescent City community and beyond.
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“We built WWL into this incredible powerhouse that can be heard all the way into Canada and Mexico,” Tetlow said.
The station proved to be a moneymaker for Loyola until the university finally sold it near the end of the 20th century.
“At one time, WWL Radio and later the TV station produced half of the operating revenue for the university,” Tetlow said. “And what was great about that was that that revenue helped make Loyola affordable for generations of families… so they could go to college for the first time and really launch into the middle class and use all of their gifts.”
Tetlow said it’s an incredible legacy for the station.
“WWL’s been a part of creating opportunity in this city, through Loyola, for a century,” she said.
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