Ever True
From the Archives: Calling All Housing and Dormitories
BAM’s October 1981 article on the ‘Gas Pipe Networks’
By Louise M. Bloch, Jr. ’40
October 1st, 2025
All of the 1,000 or more college radio stations in operation today trace their roots to Brown, where in the late 1930s some enterprising students strung wires through the campus heating tunnels and founded the Brown Network. That humble beginning, and the eventful years of expansion that followed, are chronicled in The Gas Pipe Networks: A History of College Radio 1936–1946, written and published by Louis M. Bloch, Jr. ’40. Bloch, who was a participant in the first Brown Network and who served as business manager for the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System from 1940–46, believes his personal scrapbooks and photographs from that era form a unique record.
“I felt strongly that the story of one of the most important developments in radio had to be told,” Bloch says. A former rare-book dealer who now publishes primary source materials for schools, Bloch published The Gas Pipe Networks in 1980. The book has attracted wide attention in the communications community, receiving favorable reviews in Billboard, Choice, and several major daily newspapers, and getting Bloch on a number of radio and TV talk shows this past year.
The early campus radio technology Bloch describes—with students hooking up radio receivers to a nearby gas pipe, electric line, or other conductor to receive broadcasts—is a far cry from the present sophistication of college radio. WBRU, successor to the original Brown Network, for example, is a full-fledged commercial FM station with a powerful signal reaching much of southeastern New England. But, as Billboard’s reviewer suggested, today’s college broadcasters might not only “get a kick” out of Bloch’s book, they also might “find themselves drawing an idea or two from their predecessors.”
The excerpts from The Gas Pipe Networks on these pages are reprinted with the author’s permission. Photographs are from the collections of Bloch and David Borst ’40.
I had obtained my amateur radio license the year before, during my senior year at Cleveland Heights High School. Although radio was one of my interests and although I had constructed my receiver and transmitter, I never was an expert in electronics. I learned that George Abraham ’40 and David Borst ’40, both freshmen, had linked their rooms in Caswell and Littlefield Halls, two dormitories about a quarter of a mile apart, by wire and had set up an intercommunication system between them. It was at this point that I contacted them and was invited to participate in the Net. Dave Borst ran a line to my room in Hegeman Hall and connected it to my radio receiver. Also, he connected a microphone that I could use for intercommunication.
That small Net continued and very soon in the first semester of our freshman year we had many outlets all over the campus. Not only was I able to communicate with other participating freshmen, but soon George and Dave added a second line so that the Net could also operate as a broadcasting system. On special occasions programs were broadcast from the master control in George Abraham’s room. We had special music programs and occasional interviews. The most important “first” of college radio occurred at that time. Henry Merritt Wriston was to be inaugurated as president of the University, but the hall that was to be used on campus was too small to accommodate the students. George obtained permission to broadcast that event, and that broadcast turned out to be the first major broadcast of college radio. Our audience was large and interested.
At first the Brown broadcasting and communication systems consisted of wire lines connected to the radios of participating students on campus, and this complicated arrangement required a crew to string the lines, make the connections, and maintain the system. As more and more students became interested, lines were strung to all parts of the campus. Dave was in charge of everything involved in engineering and in the installation and maintenance of the lines and soon had a crew of forty students helping him. Truly this was a network of lines tying the campus together, and the press referred to our station as “The Brown Network.” It was difficult for the college administration to comprehend what was going on and they had only a vague idea of what George and Dave were up to. And so it was, back in my freshman year, that college radio got its start.
In those days it was the custom for the sophomores to form a vigilance committee, a self-appointed and unauthorized committee to keep the freshmen in their place. In past years this had been done by hazing, but in the year 1936 at Brown little did the sophomores know that the freshmen had their own communication system between most of the dormitories. They did know of our broadcasting to the campus but Line One, a line for communications, was reserved only for freshmen, and for some reason the sophomores involved in the vigilance committee never knew about Line One. As the vigilance committee moved from room to room and from building to building they were bombarded with water bombs, balloons filled with water thrown from the rooms of the freshmen, down the stairwells, and also from the roofs of the buildings. Their every movement about campus was reported and after that disaster the vigilance committee was never heard from again.
