Prepared for takeoff

Thank President Harry S. Truman in 1946 for giving TCU the chance at a national championship.

Not in football. In the sky.

Fresh off defeating the Axis in World War II and capitalizing on a surge of aviation-related nationalism, Truman signed Public Law 476, which incorporated the Civil Air Patrol as a nonprofit organization. It was an act of thanks to the group’s thousands of volunteers who had answered America’s call to national service by performing critical wartime missions in the days after Pearl Harbor, including more than 500,000 flying hours, sinking two enemy submarines and saving hundreds of crash victims. Not bad for a bunch of civilians.

When the war ended, the nation understood that these everyday aviators could continue to provide valuable services to local and national agencies, so Truman established the United States Air Force a year later. Soon after, the Civil Air Patrol became an official auxiliary of the military.

At TCU, patriotism was swelling, too. A local chapter of the American Legion had formed and veterans were arriving on campus — with them, the urge to fly.

In the spring of 1947, the university had an unofficial aviation “ground school” that taught basic cockpit controls in an old BT-13a training plane that wasn’t even flight-worthy. It was more a restoration project that class instructor Troy Stinson had taken on. But he had to abandon the effort after too many neighborhood boys pilfered the plane’s movable parts.

 The time had come to start something official.

In April, Stinson sent out inquiries to aviation companies about buying a plane at cost and then organized a student group — made up of Civil Air Patrol members and Army and Navy reservists — patterned after the National Intercollegiate Flying Club. He called it Flying Frogs.

Nineteen students signed up at the first meeting, appointed officers and formed a G.I. committee to seek government funding.

Two weeks later, a few of them rented a plane and competed for the first time at an air meet in Columbia, Mo., earning a second-place and a third-place finish in two events.

It was a start.

But the Flying Frogs were about to take off. Their next competition wouldn’t come until seven months later at the Intercollegiate Air Meet in Denver. This time, 17 students and Stinson hopped a Douglas C-47 Skytrain military transport at Fort Worth Army Air Field. The TCU Skiff ran a photo of the group at the top of the front page of its Nov. 7, 1947, edition.

Five universities competed in contests called bomb dropping, speed dash, spot landing and airplane scavenger hunt.

The Flying Frogs swept them all, led by sophomore Mary Helen Rattikin ’49 of the Civil Air Patrol, who was the flier of the meet, setting a national collegiate record in spot landing and taking third in speed dash.

The squad became the talk of the school, with the results of their meets covered in similar fashion as the football and baseball teams. Stinson led a drive for more members, advertising that students could acquire a pilot’s license and complete a 40-hour course for about 50 bucks, which was quite a bargain. Normally, lessons and airfield fees would cost about $300, but Stinson had arranged access to a Porterfield trainer for only $2.50 an hour. Stoney Henry, owner of Fort Worth’s Russell Field, reserved one of his own planes for team practice.

By January 1948, the Flying Frogs had grown to 21 members, each paying $2 in dues, but more important, the group had gained official recognition by the National Intercollegiate Flying Club and awarded the host site for the 1949 national meet. Newspaper advertisements bombarded students with calls to jet off to away football games or consider a future with the U.S. Army or U.S. Air Force, further evidence of the club’s popularity and the growing market for commercial aviation and leisure travel.

By May, the Flying Frogs were nearing the end of their maiden season. They  had swept another air meet and hosted their own competition at Eagle Mountain National Guard Air Base, which attracted a record 13 schools. With the sport’s national stage, TCU turned the whole affair into a party, including swimming, boating and free barbecue. Four P-51s from nearby Hensley Field in Grand Prairie performed an aerial show.

Best of all, the purple fliers won easily, taking first in three of the six events.

They were the favorites to win the national meet in Michigan in June, if they could afford the travel. Expenses from their own meet had depleted the club’s treasury, and unless a benefactor helped, the Flying Frogs were going to stay grounded.

It was a rescue mission for the Civil Air Patrol. Area fliers learned of the students’ woes and helped find enough money for six Flying Frogs to make the trip to Ann Arbor.

But the team suffered by not being at full strength. They managed a second-place finish overall, led by Royce Livingston ’49, who garnered third in spot landing, and Jim Bollinger ’50, who took third in bomb dropping. Rattikin placed sixth in spot landing and was honored as the top female pilot.

“Although we have no planes of our own with which to practice and no home field as many of the other schools have, it is clear that we do have some top fliers,” Stinson told the Skiff. “Our hopes are that we can do better next year.”

Still, the TCU contingent was instrumental in other ways, leading a charge to change the name of the national organization to National Intercollegiate Flying Association, a moniker that remains today, and organizing their own four-state district.

The next season, the club had grown to nearly 35 members and the Flying Frogs had swept through the regular season undefeated. Additionally, the U.S. Air Force engaged four fliers in a ferrying job, escorting a DC-3 from New York to Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. TCU also was selected to become home of the first Civil Air Patrol squadron on a college campus.

But the best news of all came in March 1949 when the group bought its own plane. Under a government war surplus program, the Air Force sold the group a single-engine, two-seat L-4 from San Marcos Air Base for $50, just to cover clearance charges. The craft, which students dubbed “Bucket of Bolts,” needed $400 worth of reconditioning, but it was theirs. Stinson believed that was all that stood between the Frogs and a national title.

Unfortunately, government bureaucracy kept “Bucket” earthbound until the spring of 1951. Because the plane was a part of the surplus program, no bill of sale was issued, and the Civil Aeronautics Board wouldn’t give clearance until TCU obtained one.

By then, the flying craze was waning. The sport was expensive and the club’s numbers were dwindling. The Flying Frogs also suffered a streak of bad luck at nationals. In 1949, the team hosted the title meet on its home runway but had an off day and finished a disappointing fourth. In 1950, at Oklahoma, the team managed only one point after “Bucket” nosed over while on the ground and cracked its propeller. Though a  national power, the team never did win a national title.

The club re-emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the tutelage of Serge Matulich, an associate professor of accounting. Besides flying, the group went on field trips to area airports, control towers and aircraft manufacturers, including General Dynamics.

“They say that race car drivers have gasoline in their blood,” then-sophomore Karen Campbell ’85, a one-time president of the club, told the Skiff in 1983. “Well, pilots have jet fuel in theirs.”

Catching air at KTCU

An enlarged yearbook photo hung for many years in the studios of KTCU. The young man in the frame was Luther Adkins ’49. The label under the portrait refers to him as the station’s founder.

The funny thing about the man they dubbed the founder is that his voice never graced the KTCU airwaves — at least not in his student days. There was that time in 1981, at the grand opening of KTCU’s new digs in the Moudy Building, when folks convinced Adkins to sit at the console and ham it up like a morning-show disc jockey.

But Adkins, who speaks even in casual conversation with the clarity and confidence of a broadcast professional, is not associated indelibly with TCU’s campus radio station for something he did on the station. It’s about what he did for the station. “I got them on the air,” Adkins says. “That’s why they call me that.”

Adkins could not have known what the station he helped launch in the fall of 1948 would become. FCC-licensed since 1964, KTCU 88.7 FM “The Choice” has helped kick-start the careers of scores of aspiring media professionals. The format has changed many times over the decades but not the mission: KTCU remains an outlet for students to hone their broadcasting skills in a setting that closely mirrors a major-market commercial radio station.

“I was able to do exactly what I wanted to do career-wise because of KTCU,” says Scott Blusiewicz ’08 (MS), who is part of the radio broadcast team for the Houston Astros’ Class A affiliate in Lancaster, Calif. “They have some really unique and creative on-air programs for college radio. It’s created a lot of opportunities for students.

Adkins is seated at a conference-room table in his Fort Worth Club office, thumbing through a thick file folder. “Now where did I put this?” the retired Carter Publications personnel manager asks himself. The “aha” moment comes soon enough and Adkins retrieves a 30-year-old newspaper clipping that references the founding of the station. He reads a sentence aloud about the role played by WBAP radio in KTCU’s inception.

 “They got the station wrong,” he says. “It was actually KCNC.”

It’s a forgivable mistake. Adkins spent much of his 50-year media career at WBAP-TV Channel 5 and its parent company, Carter Publications.  But KCNC is where it all began. Adkins, an announcer/DJ for the station, was one of just a handful of TCU students who had a paid radio gig.

The closest that members of the TCU Radio Club could get in the spring of 1948 to doing the real thing was practicing their craft over a public-address system that fed into a speaker in an adjoining room. Tired of simply playing radio, club members sought Adkins’ help in starting up an actual broadcast.

Adkins, who had been an active member of the club his sophomore year, hatched a plan to end his classmates’ frustration. He called in a favor from a KCNC engineer who liked to tinker with equipment in his spare time. Adkins recalls he was able to secure $500 from TCU to buy a turntable and pay for the supplies his engineer friend needed to construct a plywood console.

The equipment was ready by fall. Absent a transmitter, the engineer instead created a wired-wireless system that could be heard in most campus residence halls and academic buildings. The days of playing radio were over. KTCU was on the air.

It was something of a parting gift from Adkins, who graduated in the spring of 1949 as the first recipient of the newly created bachelor of fine arts in radio-television-film. Adkins returned to school briefly the following fall. He received a $50 stipend to teach a semester-long introduction-to-radio course. But he knew his path was as a practitioner, not a professor.

“It was a good time to be breaking in to radio,” says Adkins, who became program director and then commercial manager at KCNC before leaving in 1951 for WBAP-TV, where he started out as director of religious, public and educational programming. He later became WBAP-TV’s administrative manager.

As Adkins’ career was taking shape, KTCU was slowly forming into a bona fide radio station. KTCU relocated in 1949 from Building Two of the Barracks to the Fine Arts Building. In the mid-1950s, the station converted to closed-circuit radio transmission. The station purchased seven specially built transmitters, allowing students to hear hi-fi music by tuning to 1025 KC’s on any campus radio.

Eight months after the Beatles debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show, KTCU received an official FCC license. The station took the airwaves as 89.1 FM (It would be several years before it slid over to its more familiar spot on the dial). On Sept. 15, 1964, a TCU Daily Skiff story boasted that the station would have an “excellent signal” within a four-mile radius of campus and an “adequate signal” within a 15-mile area.

KTCU listeners in those early years would have tuned in to hear an opera, an orchestral arrangement, or a 30-minute news update. Sports programming included live play-by-play of varsity baseball and Wog (freshman-team) football games.

 Realizing that student DJs would rather spin Rolling Stones records than broadcast Beethoven sonatas, station manager Larry Lauer (today TCU’s vice chancellor for government affairs) in 1967 changed the set list to a heavy dose of rock ’n’ roll. But by the late 1970s, the station had once again shifted back to a jazz/classical music/public affairs format.

“We are primarily a training facility for students,” station manager Constantine Bernardez told the Skiff in 1984. “Our formats don’t have mass appeal, so obviously we’re not interested in numbers (of listeners).”

Turned out, there were tons of potential listeners around town — if they could be enticed to tune in. Station manager Andy Haskett proved that in 1994 when he gave the station an edge. Patterned after popular Dallas station “The Edge,” KTCU’s commercial-free, alternative-rock format generated a buzz among local fans of The Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam. In one year, the audience exploded from fewer than 4,000 listeners to more than 19,000.

These days, KTCU draws an impressive 25,000 unique listeners per week. Daytime music is geared toward reaching a wide cross-section of Fort Worth listeners, explains station manager Russell Scott. Scott has also beefed up coverage of TCU athletics to give would-be sports broadcasters more on-air opportunities than they had in the past. Scott’s philosophy includes letting students run the show after dark.

“We purposely leave our nighttime music selection up to the students in order to foster their creativity and give them a better sense of ownership over their specialty shows,” Scott says.

New technology is expanding the station’s reach. Online listeners around the world stream KTCU. The station is especially popular in Denmark. KTCU even joined the iPhone revolution in April 2010 with a free app — in the first 11 months, more than 5,000 people had downloaded it.

“Our website has provided us a way to get news and information out to listeners, but what’s a bigger story, I think, is our social media and our iPhone app,” Scott says. “Both have been very successful.”

KTCU is poised for many decades of continued success. And Adkins is glad to have played a role in laying its foundation.

“I’m lucky to have been a part of a lot of history,” Adkins says. “When you get this old, you are history.”