Theodore Mitchell Hastings Jr. was the extremely eccentric engineering genius who sparked up WBCN’s transmitter on April 24, 1958, becoming owner and president of what was originally a classical music station. A Harvard graduate, he was a pioneer in FM technology, a fearless entrepreneur who took risks most people wouldn’t even consider and his legacy spans far beyond Boston.
Born on April 24, 1910, Hastings became fascinated with the largely untapped commercial possibilities of FM radio following World War II. He invented an FM radio for automobiles and an early pocket FM transistor radio before jumping into the world of station ownership himself, forming the General Broadcasting Corporation, later known as Concert Network Inc. Hastings went on to acquire a number of radio stations, including WNCN New York City WHCN in Hartford, WXCN in Providence, WRCN on Long Island and WBCN in Boston.
Clairvoyant consultations, Station sell off, 1979 union strike
Hastings possessed personality quirks that often challenged those around him. “[He] was a whack job, and I don’t mean that meanly, but he was just a very strange guy,” WBCN Program Director Sam Kopper once said. Hastings and his wife Margot were regular acquaintances of famed clairvoyant Edgar Cayce and sat with him regularly to see what they fully believed were glimpses into the future. Some of these predictions formed the basis of Hastings’ actual business decisions.
Eventually, a financial crisis at Concert Network forced the owner to sell off his radio properties until only WBCN remained. After the famous March 1968 radio experiment ushered the counterculture in at the station, Hastings remained general manager and owner.
After a brain operation, Hastings still proved to be as unpredictable as ever, moving WBCN to the top of the Prudential Tower in 1973 and designing state-of-the-art studios with five layers of soundproof glass and springs to “float” the floors. He sold the station to Hemisphere Broadcasting in 1979, sparking the infamous union strike at WBCN in February of that year. T. Mitchell Hastings died on September 27,1994 at age 84.
(by Carter Alan)
Carter Alan is a former WBCN deejay now heard on WZLX-FM in Boston. He is the author of Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN (University Press of New England, 2013).
