AS NHPR celebrates its 37 anniversary, we thought we'd share with you 10 items from the station archives that you may not have known about. In no particular order:
1. NHPR, now a network of 14 transmitters and translators, began broadcasting on 4 August, 1981 as WEVO 89.1 FM in Concord.
2. New Hampshire Governor Hugh Gallen proclaimed the week of 1-7 August, 1982 “New Hampshire Public Radio Week” to celebrate WEVO’s first anniversary.
3. NHPR’s Rick Ganley once hosted a rock music show under the moniker Rick Andrews.
4. The signal strength of NHPR’s first transmitter, WEVO in Concord, was not as strong as expected in the planning. So in March, 1983, we doubled the height of the transmitter, significantly expanding the transmitter's broadcast radius.
5. New Hampshire and NHPR have twice played host to the StoryCorp Mobile Booth; in 2007 the booth set up on the sidewalk in front of the State House in Concord, and in 2009, the booth parked on Main Street in Berlin. Excerpts from more than 30 interviews were featured on NHPR.
6. Over the years, NHPR gradually added new transmitters to our state-wide network one at a time, but in August, 2011 two new transmitters went live, WEVQ in Littleton and WEVF in Colebrook.
7. NHPR had a cameo on the TV program The West Wing in 2003. In season five’s ‘Jefferson Lives’ episode, the Josh Lyman character can be seen holding an NHPR mug.
8. In July, 1989, NHPR begins broadcasting a new and minimally regarded program on Saturday mornings. Car Talk would quickly become a staple of weekend listening for more than 25 years!
9. The Grand Prize for NHPR’s inaugural Summer Car Raffle in 1992 was a Honda Civic.
10. In 2018, Outside/In won the Whitman Bassow Award for best international environmental reporting in any medium, for its series ‘Powerline,’ from the Overseas Press Club of America.
You are, no doubt, quite familiar with the fact that NHPR is made possible with the help and support of thousands of members and hundreds of businesses throughout the state. So on this, our aniversary, allow us to thank you for your support, and here's to another 37 years!
