“Are you listening to this crazy station? They’re playing whatever they want, and people are listening.”

Tom Crawford is the station manager at WMSE, the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s campus radio station. He started as a community volunteer at the station in 1984, eventually working his way up to the position that he holds today. Passionate about the music and development of the station, Crawford joined other employees of the station as they greeted visitors for Doors Open Milwaukee.

Josh Skarda: How’d you initially get involved with the station?

Tom Crawford: I started off as a community volunteer, and I worked the midnight shift—or they call it the graveyard shift. I was on the air from midnight to three. And then when the trimester ended, when the spring quarter ended that summer, no one would be on from three to six. So the general manager extended my show from midnight to six in the morning. So I ended up doing midnight to six in the morning for about a year, and I ended up doing midnight to three for about eight years—nine years, actually. I started off as a community volunteer, worked my way up through the music department, and helped out with promotions. And in the late 80s, early 90s, I had a very bad accident at my job—a really bad industrial accident. And out of necessity from being broke and pretty much homeless, kind of sleeping on a couch in my parents’ basement, I started to, for boredom’s sake, raise money for the radio station. I did it through a series of benefit concerts and ended up primarily raising $12,000 one summer, and I really liked doing it. So I submitted a proposal to the school and said, “I’ll raise 40 grand—you pay me 20. It won’t cost you anything to employ me.” And through that, I eventually became station manager.

Q: So did you always have a passion for music?

A: Always, always. The family I grew up in, my mother was very conservative and entirely opposed to rock and roll. So she was playing the big band music—the male and female vocalists. She would play the comedy music, the novelty music of the era to make us laugh. I mean, when The Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show, we weren’t allowed to watch it. Then when my brother and I went into public school, all the kids would come out with transistor radios. And it just blew my brother’s mind and my mind. And then we had a babysitter, and I thank her to this day—Charmaine Meyer, she would come over to the house and she’d have The Animals, The Who, Bo Diddley and Howlin Wolf. And she would play this on a record player. And my brother and I were just—“oh my god, this is the greatest stuff I’ve ever heard.” And my mother knew it was inevitable. So she just let it go. And my brother and I—he is also a big influence too—we would sit at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Our favorite radio station would go through the top 40 of the year, and would play the number one song at midnight. My brother and I asked my mom, “please let us stay up.” And we listened to the whole show. And we would try and guess the next song—“I think it’s gonna be,” and the DJ would hit what the next one’s gonna be. That’s how much we were into music, and we’re talking like being 8, 9, 10 years old.

Q: How does your history with music play into what you try to do with the station today?

A: The philosophy of the radio station, when it first went live in 1981, was playing music no one else was playing. And you have to realize – when FM radio started in the 60s and 70s, a lot of what were called “commercial” FM stations were free format. You didn’t have programmer  people programming the stations heavily. And there were two freeform radio stations in Milwaukee: one was called WZMF, the other was called WQFM. So as little teenagers, we were listening to both these stations, and they both became corporate stations. And they went off the air, and WMSE came on board. This is like 1979, corporate radio was here, it literally infected the market here. So by 1981, this radio station gets the construction permit accepted, starts off at 1,000 watts at 91.7. And suddenly we all found the station, I found it as WSOE before it became WMSE. So I was already a fan, and it blew a lot of people’s minds. And the bumper sticker that they issued in 1981 said: “WMSE 91.7 FM, turn your radio on again.” And the other bumper sticker that they put out, it said: “WMSE, you know what? Milwaukee radio insults my intelligence.” And that’s in the first year. There was a morning paper and an evening paper, and both of those papers were constantly writing articles, because you had people writing into the TV and radio column going, “hey, you know, flush out your brain. Are you listening to this crazy station? They’re playing whatever they want, and people are listening to it.” We just came in, like we have a saying: “anti-established in 1981.”