BELLINGHAM, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – This year, Western Washington University (WWU)’s radio station 89.3 KUGS has been on the air for 50 whole years. 

For half a century, students at WWU have worked together to keep KUGS broadcasting across Bellingham.

KUGS was on the forefront of playing grunge music in the late 1980s and early 90s. It also gives other alternative genres exposure to a receptive audience. Some artists – such as alternative rock bands Sleater Kinney and Death Cab for Cutie – were played on KUGS in the bands’ early days. From the start, the non-commercial musical-educational station has been lauded as a spot for students to learn the ropes of radio and explore alternative music.

Promotional stickers for KUGS from past decades. Photo by Emma Toscani.

KUGS alumni include successful broadcast journalists and disk jockeys, record-label talent scouts and even rock stars. To General Manager Jamie Hoover’s knowledge, members of Death Cab for Cutie were volunteers or otherwise involved with KUGS and WWU’s Associated Students when they attended the university. 

Hoover has been the general manager since 2001 and coincidentally, her first day of the job was on 9/11. Hoover described trying to get the news out to students as the events unfolded without access to computers or a production studio because the station was housed in High Street Hall while the Viking Union was under construction. 

“It was kind of a big learning curve for all of us running around because no one expected something like that,” Hoover said. 

KUGS’s General Manager Jamie Hoover. Courtesy of Jamie Hoover.

Before the station was located in the Viking Union, KUGS first broadcasted from the first floor of the Ridgeway Commons.

The total space was less than 200 square feet, or a little larger than a janitor’s closet as multiple sources would describe it. 

Keith Shipman, one of the original DJs, says that the station originally was a “laboratory” for the now-defunct WWU broadcasting department. 

KUGS’s opening was delayed by over a week due to issues with gaining Federal Communication’s Commission (FCC) broadcasting permission. It finally went live at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 1974. 

According to a The Front (formerly The Western Front) article from Feb. 1, 1974, the first sounds aired were then-station manager Scott Johnson “opening” the station, followed by a taped news read and DJ Paul Van Dyke then played classical music. The Front reported KUGS’s signal ran on 10 watts and the station was designed to cover a six to eight-mile radius in Bellingham. But, according to Shipman, if the wind wasn’t right, you couldn’t pick up the signal outside of Ridgeway Commons parking lot. 

Shipman first heard about the station before it began, reading an article in the Bellingham Herald a few months prior when he was in eighth grade.

Shipman “fancied being an on-air personality” after getting his first taste of radio during a middle-school English project where he made a KUGS program in which he and classmates talked about what they were learning in school. With his two friends John Inge and Ted Askew, Shipman would later disk jockey shows on weekends throughout his high school freshman and sophomore years. 

“We just played everything under the sun for three hours on Saturday evening and cut our teeth on local radio,” Shipman said. Askew went on to be General Manager at KUGS for several years and currently remotely hosts on Classical KING FM in Seattle. Inge was a baseball coach at Squalicum High School for about 20 years. 

Keith Shipman when he was a DJ on KUGS in early high school. Shipman said with a laugh that if he managed to get inside the locked Ridgeway Commons, he would have to oftentimes break into the studio using a screwdriver unless someone was nice enough to leave the door unlocked. Courtesy of Keith Shipman.

Shipman – along with several others – used what he calls a pipeline, going from volunteering at KUGS to working at other stations around Bellingham such as KGMI, KISM and KPUG. All three are stations now in the Cascade Radio Group (CRG) family. Shipman worked at KPUG, then a Top-40 station, in his latter high school years. He would use his skills in broadcast to make a career out of it, eventually becoming Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters. Shipman is also Co-founder, President and CEO of the Horizon Broadcasting Group in Bend, Oregon. 

CRG’s KAFE Morning Host Dave Walker actually started his radio career at KGMI and KISM, running the two stations overnight on Fridays in the early 1980s. But he was hired on as News Director for KUGS starting about six months after beginning the job at CRG. 

Walker recalls the time that he first entered KUGS’s on-air studio, finding a male student playing two records – one was an instrumental track, the other was the sound of basketballs bouncing. The DJ was scratching the basketball record to the beat of the instrumental. 

“Remember, this was 1983. So scratching is still kind of a new thing,” Walker said. “So, he was keeping the beat with these basketballs. And I just remember thinking, okay, apparently anything goes. And that was kind of the atmosphere. I think it kind of still is, because I still tune in every so often.”

Select records housed inside the on-air studio. Employees and volunteers switch these out periodically. Photo by Emma Toscani.

Walker worked at all three stations for his junior year at WWU before quitting KUGS to focus on his broadcasting degree during his senior year. While he learned more about radio at KGMI and KISM, Walker’s time at KUGS gave him management experience and showed Walker how to put together a story for the radio. 

As Walker said, “anything goes” was the spirit of the station’s loose programming guidelines. This isn’t dissimilar to some current programming on KUGS as student volunteers can choose what to play and when to play it, given some parameters of course.

For example, the variety music block called Music for the Masses – named for the Depeche Mode album – requires DJs to play from select new music, with a few “backtracks” and free choice songs thrown in. But the selections span most if not all genres, and with specialty shows, DJs can have essentially free rein.

The listening lounge at the KUGS station on the seventh floor of WWU’s Viking Union. Both the lounge and the on-air studio overlook High Street, the Old Main lawn and WWU students going about their day. Photo by Emma Toscani.

Learning how the music industry works was another benefit for students still figuring out what they wanted to do in their career.

Sub-Pop Records’ Artists and Repertoire (A&R) Manager Nick Duncan says that, as KUGS Music Director in the early 2010s, the biggest things he learned during that time was how the music industry sees college radio and how to participate in the music industry as someone who maybe is not going to be a professional musician. 

Duncan says he received calls at KUGS from labels and promoters asking for the station to play their artists and charted songs.

“… the world of the music business is so much bigger than what’s going on in our individual communities, but also still accessible to someone at like a college radio station who’s trying to get a foot in the door,” Duncan said. 

Duncan’s connections to KUGS helped him get his internship at Sub-Pop Records that began his career mere months after graduation. Duncan often wonders if he never worked at KUGS, would he be working at Sub-Pop Records today.

This station, ran by college students for college students, is different than other college stations according to Hoover. Among other differences, it can only play records, CDs and mini-discs. She says that volunteers and employees have met lifelong friends or significant others at KUGS; some folks have even gotten married.

“There’s a kind of just kinship that happens [from] being involved,” Hoover said. 

Whether you’re a WWU student looking for a new pastime or a community member looking for out-of-the-ordinary music recommendations, KUGS provides. You can find community and connection in being a part of the station that calls WWU home.