HBCU Radio Preservation Project: Les Gilford
Les Gilford discusses social justice, community service, the importance of problem-solving in radio, his experience at different stations, and more.
Looking for your evening entertainment? Check out this week’s edition of the HBCU Radio Preservation Project! As a collaborator in the project, the Margaret Walker Center serves as a repository for the oral histories of HBCU stations and the community members who have been a part of them.
This week, the spotlight falls on Les Gilford, who worked for WCSU in the 1980s as Operations Manager. Les was born in Bluffton, Indiana, but his family moved around a lot due to his father’s role as a Methodist minister. He spent many of his formative years in Lima, Ohio. There, the family lived in a majority-Black area, while Les recalls much of the rest of Lima being conservative, a dynamic that led to his early concern with social justice issues. His father focused heavily on community service, and his mother helped develop the ministry and conducted much work with the community as well. Growing up, Les was often looped in to help with their projects, becoming more involved with activities such as tutoring than with school activities. He even worked as a booking agent for a neighborhood band, the “Soul Strugglers.”
“[WCSU] was a wonderful learning experience for me as well, making do with little or nothing, and trying to put a product—and you couldn’t tell that when you listened. I mean, it sounded pretty good.”
Les traces his interest in radio to the “eclectic” variety of music played by the CKLW station—which, he recalls, everyone listened to rather than the local stations in Lima. Les attended Antioch College; he remembers being there during student strikes and other turbulent events. Les majored in communications and business administration, and he worked with the campus station, WYSO. Though radio did not become a lifelong career for him, he worked at several stations, including WCSU, WLX, and WHBM. He discusses what he calls the “shoestring operation” at WCSU at the time, noting how they often had to problem solve and creatively utilize resources. He laughs at himself while reflecting on his early experiences with interviewing people. Overall, Les feels that it was a wonderful learning experience for both himself and the students that did work-study at the station.
There’s much more to hear, so click on the video below!
About the Project
Each Wednesday, tune into our YouTube channel, @mwalkercenter, to catch a new oral history from the HBCU Radio Preservation Project!
We are proud to partner with several organizations for the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, which is dedicated to honoring and preserving the rich history and cultural resource of HBCU radio.
Here’s some more info from their website:
Much of the material created at these stations is at risk of being lost, though they document the rich history and diversity of the Black experience through the Civil Rights era and beyond. The goals are to preserve the stations’ audio collections and to foster a community of sustainability for the stations and institutional archives on campus.
The project provides preservation training and workshops for campus stations, archivists and community members, recruiting HBCU graduates as interns and fellows.
Field archivists will collaborate with stations and campus archivists on collections assessments and follow-up field services such as inventories, reformatting, rehousing, and other preservation activities.
Oral historians will interview a range of community members to document the history of the stations. Training in gathering oral histories and using historical audio in content creation will also be offered. Other goals include launching an interactive website, a podcast series, and annual symposia.
