In 1979, when Lois Reitzes first came to WABE, the National Public Radio station in Atlanta, most of the programming during the day was broadcast for Atlanta’s public schools.
The station, which was owned by the Atlanta school board, was less interested in what its adult listeners wanted to hear than in how the station could be used to provide supplementary instruction for children in such subjects as mathematics or reading.
Reitzes would wake up early and sign the station on in the morning for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” a national news program, which had just debuted.
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“I would arrive at 5:30 a.m. and get us on the air. ‘Morning Edition’ was on from 7 a.m. until 9 a.m. In those early days at 9 a.m., we would monitor the instructional programs that were going out of the air, and that’s when I would go to work on music programing.”
Lois Reitzes spent long hours in the files of WABE’s record collection programming classical music.
In the afternoon, at 3 p.m., there would be a couple of hours of classical music, then the station broadcast another hour and a half of news from NPR, and it was back to more classical music until midnight, when the station went off the air.
The programming schedule, in those first years was simple, predictable, and not very challenging, but that began to change in 1982 when the educational programming was moved to a sub-carrier on the FM dial that freed up the station for programming throughout the day.
That’s when Reitzes’ trips to the station’s record library, with its large files of long-playing recordings, became more important. Before moving to Atlanta in 1978, she did graduate study in music history at Indiana University. Her only radio experience was a short stint at the university’s radio station, but she knew music.
Newly married to a husband who had just received a PhD in sociology and was starting a career at Georgia…
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