Who would listen other than “cows and chipmunks”? asked a skeptical official up from Washington to talk about grant money to help get a public radio network going in Vermont half a century ago. He was told he just didn’t know Vermonters.
The meeting was in Brownsville, and a tiny group of advocates was hopeful that they could raise enough in local contributions to qualify for a grant of $82,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting plus a one-shot award from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to buy equipment.
Initially, the network was to consist of two transmitters that had the potential to reach all of Vermont, adjacent areas of New Hampshire and New York and into southern Quebec. One would be on Mount Mansfield and the other on Mount Ascutney in Windsor. It would be the Windsor station that would eventually be, after months of fundraising and clearing other hurdles, the first to make it onto the air.
A somewhat leery crowd gathered at the Inn at Mount Ascutney in early October 1976 to hear about how the Windsor station was expected to begin broadcasting the following spring. Station manager Raymond Dilly said he hoped to raise $125,000 in contributions and foundation grants and that $10,000 had already come in before an appeal had even been issued.
Dilly was peppered with questions. What about overlap with public radio stations already operating in western Massachusetts? How come nobody from southern Vermont was on the founding board of directors? Is there enough of a population base to make it all work? One by one the queries were addressed, and an account of the meeting at the time shows most attendees were satisfied with his answers.
Space was leased in the Windsor House, the town’s stately Greek Revival hotel, for studios and offices and Federal Communications Commission licensure was obtained to broadcast on FM frequency 89.5. The new station was assigned call letters WVPA, but an eventual swap was made with a station in South Carolina that made it WVPR, Windsor.
The new Windsor station joined National Public Radio, a nonprofit network of 175 stations at the time. This affiliation gave access to acclaimed news programming like All Things Considered, but the concept for the new Windsor station was skewed heavily toward classical music, jazz, folk and opera.
Dilly explained in an interview that the impetus for starting a public radio network for Vermont came from the switch by a Burlington station away from classical music to a “middle of the road” format. Outraged listeners talked of “storming the station” until word of the public radio initiative spread, he said.
It would take the better part of a year to get the Windsor station on the air. Obtaining equipment, building a staff, raising money, getting regulatory approvals and myriad other details kept Dilly and his team on the run. Donations of records were vital in the early days; people turned over their collections, RCA and Columbia chipped in, obscure outfits came forward with new works.
As the Aug. 13, 1977, on-air date closed in, a woman who would be a major part of public radio in Vermont for the ensuing 50 years was hired and given the title of project assistant, a role that soon morphed into program manager with responsibility for assembling the entire lineup of content from early morning sign-on to sign-off late at night.
Betty Smith Mastaler started out in radio with commercial stations in Burlington along with side hustles in singing and theater after study at UVM. But she was intrigued by the chance to get into public radio and migrated to the startup taking shape down in Windsor. It was a decision that led to her becoming what has often been termed the “Founding Mother of Vermont Public Radio” and Hall of Fame recognition by the Vermont broadcasting industry association.
“In those early days I wore all kinds of hats. I assembled the first program schedule, then there wasn’t much ready for the second week,” she recalls. “We used some old Monte Python and Lone Ranger tapes, and there was opera, which would run on the station for 30 years. It was keep pushing, pushing all the time.
“We had a microwave link from Boston and after a while we got a satellite dish. But it was pretty rudimentary in those early days. It took 10 years before we got full statewide coverage with transmitters and translators.”
Though her job could charitably be called a pressure cooker, today she looks back on those days with a touch of nostalgia. “I got into a good thing and I held onto it for dear life,” she muses.
As time went along, Smith Mastaler took on a greater on-air role. Blessed with a menthol-smooth voice, she can fit behind the mic in most any program slot. A notable gig was as host for a lively call-in show called Switchboard that ran for years and might have callers as diverse as a prominent politician and a dairy farmer opining from his milking parlor.
For 30 years she organized and produced a popular feature that presented speakers offering short essays on various topics delivered in their own voice. Notable among those were Will Curtis, the Woodstock bibliophile, and Willem Lange, Etna-based storyteller and newspaper columnist. Volunteers played a vital role in WVPR’s early days; among them was Ned Lamont, currently the governor of the state of Connecticut.
Thanks to its transmitter location on 3,144-foot-high Mount Ascutney, the station achieved a signal reach south to Brattleboro, west to Shaftsbury on the New York border and northward to Montpelier. In October 1980 the network finally brought its northern transmitter on Mount Mansfield into service and could claim reliable reception for 92% of the state’s population as well as overlap into parts of New Hampshire, New York and Quebec. The network’s headquarters shifted from Windsor to the Burlington area.
Programming in those early years was heavy on classical music along with BBC comedy, a children’s show and a smattering of public affairs shows coming off the National Public Radio feed. Smith Mastaler was quoted after the first weeks of operation that expansion into a stronger menu of locally focused programming was the goal, but that was dependent on success in fundraising. The network’s role as a force in news coverage would evolve very slowly.
Weathersfield resident Smith Mastaler would attain the affectionate title of “Founding Mother” of public radio in Vermont, but her involvement in the enterprise would be continuous down to today. Her voice is heard frequently on weekday afternoons, and she travels to gather stories and listener testimonials from all over the state.
News coverage would expand gradually through the 1980s and 90s, leading up to a major shift in the system’s structure. In 2004, classical music was moved to a second dedicated network, launched with a new station in Norwich, WNCH 88.1. With this split, the original network became primarily a news and public affairs enterprise.
Vermont Public Radio caught a wave of change that was bursting onto the state’s media landscape. Commercial radio stations that had long devoted abundant airtime and resources to coverage of state and local news were being bought up by chains and consolidated. Instead of locally produced shows, the stations were increasingly reliant on canned satellite feeds. The White River Junction area in the 1970s had head-to-head competition between stations, each staffed with fulltime news reporters; this began to erode in the next decade and would disappear by the early aughts. The last real hyperlocal radio station in the state, WDEV Waterbury, changed ownership recently and has become much like commercial stations everywhere.
Print journalism dominated the media landscape in the early years of Vermont Public Radio. The Rutland Herald and Burlington Free Press battled for primacy in statehouse coverage, each maintaining Montpelier bureaus staffed with two or three full-time reporters. Other papers around the state relied on the hard-charging Associated Press and United Press International Montpelier bureaus for comprehensive stories of Vermont news and current issues — today those wire service operations are extinct, and surviving print newspapers struggle to hang on in the face of the social media onslaught.
In this environment, the state’s public radio system would rise to preeminence alongside TV Channels 3, 5, 22 and 44 as sources of current broadcast news. VTDigger, a nonprofit digital service formed in 2009, has risen to claim “paper of record” status for major state news.
New Hampshire Public Radio has an Upper Valley presence with its transmitter in Hanover, WEVH broadcasting on frequency 91.3. Current listenership ratings can’t be located, but one three years ago by A.C. Nielsen had Vermont far ahead in audience share, no doubt because the Mount Ascutney signal is far stronger and it got a 13-year head start building an audience. The New Hampshire network, too, has become a major part of that state’s news media landscape.
In 2022, Vermont Public Radio merged with Vermont Public Television to form a new entity titled simply Vermont Public. For many listeners, though, it’s still hard for them not to say they listen to Vermont Public Radio. The marriage pulled together 57 employees from the radio network and 42 from the TV side and total assets valued at $90 million. It thus became the state’s largest news organization by far.
Vermont Public’s financial underpinnings were rocked in 2025 when the Trump Administration slashed federal support for public broadcasting nationwide. That has ratcheted up pressure to raise money locally from listeners, viewers, foundations and just about anywhere dollars can be shaken loose
Recently station breaks on the radio side include mention of “WVPS, 107.9, Burlington-Montreal” and announcers will include temperature readings from Montreal in degrees Celsius. There’s a solid audience for Vermont Public among Anglophones over the Quebec border, and they are being relied upon to donate heavily.
So, those Quebecois have been welcomed into the public radio community with all those Vermonters, neighbors in New York and New Hampshire, and probably those cows and chipmunks, too.
Steve Taylor has been a Vermont Public Radio listener since it went on the air in 1977. He resides in Meriden and contributes regularly to the Valley News.
