I took these photos in the summer of 1980 at WILL Radio, Urbana, Illinois, where I was a master-control board operator from 1977 to 1980. The station was then located at 228 Gregory Hall at the southwest corner of the main campus quadrangle. It was then (and still is) a large professionally-staffed NPR station; there were very few student employees (and none ever went on the air except to broadcast an occasional tornado watch or warning).

Gregory Hall was built in 1939 and is still in use today as a classroom building. WILL Radio moved to Greg Hall in 1942 and took over part of a hallway (note the long narrow reception area shown in the photo below) and several former classrooms. The studios were extensively remodeled in the 60s and 70s as programming shifted from local origination (much of it live) to network-fed NPR programming. In 1998, WILL-AM and WILL-FM moved to a new building on Goodwin Avenue along with WILL-TV.

One feature of the station was that much of its equipment was homebrewed, including the MCR control board. During weekends and evenings, one operator had to control both AM and FM programming (not simulcast, but separate programming) out of the same board, monitoring AM on one loudspeaker and FM on the other. Not the most enjoyable experience.

These photos are bit-reduced 600 dpi scans from the original 120 roll-film negatives that I took with my Minolta Autocord. The better photos were time exposures; a few were done with a seriously under-powered strobe unit.