From the Director

News for Members

Welcome to our double issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Many thanks to Academy members for their continued support as our staff strives to maintain a safe work environment while continuing to publish the magazine and develop other Academy programming.

ENVIRONMENTAL BREAKFAST SERIES

Join us this fall for our virtual Environmental Breakfast Series as we explore how Wisconsin leaders are moving beyond incrementalism to transformational action at the intersections of climate, public health, and environmental justice. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/EBS to register for this free series or to view archived programs.

CALL FOR CREATIVE WRITERS

Our annual Fiction & Poetry Contests will begin accepting submissions on January 15, 2021. For more details and to read the 2020 contest-winning submissions, visit wisconsinacademy.org/ contests. Join us for a weekly live video reading series on Facebook that features winners from our annual contests. Be sure to follow Facebook.com/ WisconsinAcademy to receive notifications of these live readings.

U.S. POET LAUREATE EVENT POSTPONED

We were scheduled to welcome U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo to Madison in conjunction with the 2020 Wisconsin Book Festival in October. Due to the Covid-19-related closure of Overture Center, her visit has been postponed until October 21, 2021. More details about our event with Joy Harjo can be found at wisconsinacademy.

org/JoytoWI.

NEED A GIFT IDEA?

With the holiday season right around the corner, share your love of Wisconsin with a Wisconsin Academy gift membership—which includes a one-year subscription to of Wisconsin People & Ideas. Visit wisconsinacademy.org/membership to learn how you can give the gift of Academy membership.

A Facebook message from Robert Albee, one of the early founders and organizers of WOJB–FM, brought to our attention a few errors and some elements of the radio station’s history that were missing from our feature article by Jude Genereaux, “A Different Drum,” in the Spring 2020 issue. While this isn’t the whole story of WOJB, with Albee’s help we are pleased to shed more light on those early days of the station.

The story of how WOJB came to be began with a 1977 Federal stimulus package initiated by then-President Jimmy Carter. Robert Albee, who had founded Minnesota radio stations KFAI and KMOJ, was working at Twin Cities Public Television when he saw in these federal funds an opportunity to establish a new radio station from scratch. While searching for possible projects, Albee received a phone call from Larry Leventhal, a renowned attorney working on tribal issues who was also the attorney for the Lac Courte Oreilles (LCO) Tribe in northern Wisconsin. Leventhal asked Albee if he would like to help bring radio to the LCO reservation, whose residents had no telephone service and mainly communicated via CB (citizens band) radio.

Leventhal connected Albee with LCO leadership—Gordon Thayer, Richard St. Germaine, and James Schlender Sr.—to lay the groundwork for a radio station they hoped would connect not just members of the tribe but the entire Northcentral Wisconsin community. Albee and Thayer wrote and received a federal grant to develop a media program for student tribal members at LCO High School and for a follow-up program at UW–Stevens Point for documentary video as well as radio. The idea was to create a new generation of media-savvy LCO youth.

However, as Albee worked to plan and build the station, he and the LCO leaders quickly realized they would need some immediate help to get it off the ground. They approached local anti-mining activist and community organizer Sandy Lyon to develop a volunteer corp. Lyon would go on to be WOJB’s first program director. Walter Bresette, a Red Cliff member doing radio broadcasts for other stations at the time, became the first news director. Before station manager Dick Brooks, there was David McKay, whom the station had recruited prior to Brooks to train tribal high school members, as well as Catherine Joy (Bresette’s wife), who through her work doing economic development for the state helped raise funds and attention for the station. Gren Hall was the first station manager at WOJB, and a host of other volunteers filled in other functions at the fledgling station well before the days of Brooks, Paul DeMain, and Eric Schubring. The station went on air on March 1, 1982.

Albee says that the station didn’t come about in response to the conflicts over hunting and fishing treaty rights, as the article suggests. But, rather, the conflict brought their mission as a bridge between the tribal and non-tribal communities into sharper relief. He recalls how even though Larry Leventhal and the two spearfishers who were arrested for exercising their treaty rights on tribal land took their case to the U.S. Supreme court and won, many white protestors were still outraged. Albee says WOJB created a place for “dialog rather than a fistfight.” That was—and is today—the genius of WOJB. “When we let the bigots speak, they dig their own holes.”