One Wikipedia mistake that really bothers me is that Ray Green is credited with being the founder of WFLN. He wasn’t, and the Broadcast Pioneers bio of Green correctly notes that he was appointed GM in 1949 and made co-owner in the 1950’s. But that bio never mentions the real founders of WFLN, not even the only one of them who persevered (and hired Green). Here’s the story:
I was only eleven years old in 1949 when a group of Philadelphia civic leaders started radio station WFLN-FM, which for nearly five decades would provide classical music to the region from a height in Roxborough where Benjamin Franklin had once conducted his experiments with lightening. The civic leaders, many of whom had worked together in Americans for Democratic Action, included Joseph Clark, [who was elected mayor in 1951 and then] later [in 1956] a U.S. senator, and my father, who organized the effort. The others soon got distracted by politics and other things, leaving my father with an ill-formed dream on his hands.
That’s from
The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith:
http://prorev.com/mmbecoming.htm
Now who was this Sam Smith’s father? Lawrence M. C. Smith—who for some unknown reason was also known as “Sam” to his friends, according to the late Frank Kastner—was a third generation Penn-educated Philadelphia lawyer. The younger Sam’s mother, who was born Eleanor Houston, came from an even more prominent family. She was the daughter of Samuel F. Houston, a leading developer of Chestnut Hill in the early twentieth century, and the granddaughter of Henry H. Houston, a Pennsylvania Railroad executive who had been an important developer of Chestnut Hill and Germantown in the late nineteenth century.
Just how socially prominent were those Houstons? Well, they had the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania officiate at the Houston-Smith wedding in February, 1933!
Soon after their honeymoon, the Smiths moved to Washington, where “Sam” became an active New Dealer, working in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the National Recovery Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and finally the Neutrality Laws Unit of the Justice Department in the Roosevelt Administration. After FDR’s death, the Smiths bought the mansion at 3460 School House Lane from former U. S. Attorney-General Francis B. Biddle, and moved back to Philadelphia.
The ADA people who first came together to start an FM station devoted to classical music here were rich, but they were also enlightened liberals who were proud of their New Deal connections, and they believed that the best of Western culture should be available to everyone.
I hope this book tells the real story of WFLN’s origins.
