Chamber will honor founder of Chapel Hill radio station WCHL

The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce will induct six business leaders and families into its Hall of Fame on Nov. 13. The Daily Tar Heel will feature each of its inductees. Sandy McClamroch will be among those inducted.

“Nonstop Chapel Hill” might have been the slogan for local radio station WCHL, but the phrase is also descriptive of the station’s founder, Sandy McClamroch.

McClamroch has been deeply involved in both the business and government communities in Chapel Hill.

“Sandy was primarily selected because of his starting WCHL, but he was also chosen because of his time as mayor during the civil rights era,” said Bob Woodruff, chairman of the selection committee.

In 1952, McClamroch founded WCHL, which would later become the flagship radio station for Chapel Hill.

The station began as a music station that gave advertising to local business owners, but grew over the years to include local news, said Jan Bolick, general manager of VilCom Interactive Media, which owns WCHL.

WCHL, which can be heard on the radio at 97.9 FM, started small but gradually grew along with the town.

“The station evolved to program an ‘adult pop’ format in the early ’70s that was wildly successful up through the mid-’80s,” Bolick said.

When McClamroch founded the station, he said he didn’t foresee the impact it would have on the town.

“I didn’t know anything about radio,” McClamroch said.

“I had a business degree from UNC, and I knew I had to get more money than I spent, but that’s about it.”

In order for the station to make money, WCHL had to give space to advertisers.

The station decided to give a large amount of its space to local businesses.

“I knew a lot of business people,” McClamroch said.

“I was a manager of an apartment house, so I got to know most of the business people in town in the business world.”

While McClamroch was running the station, he also decided he would run for town government.

McClamroch served two terms on the Chapel Hill Town Council and began serving as mayor in 1961.

He was a part of WCHL during his entire time in office, but he said he never gave the radio station any news stories from the town government.

“I just didn’t ever want to open that box. WCHL were probably the last to get the news from the government,” McClamroch said.

As mayor, McClamroch led Chapel Hill through the racial conflict that was also burning across the nation during the civil rights movement.

“There was racial conflict from the standpoint that the town wanted to pass a local accommodation clause,” he said. “The national goal was to use our accommodation clause as an example for the whole United States.”

A public accommodation clause prevents discrimination in public places on the basis of race, religion or national origin.

That clause was ultimately not passed in Chapel Hill because the town government expected that a national public accommodation clause would soon arrive.

“We had the spotlight in the whole country as the first southern town that had a possibility — because of its liberal leanings — to be the lead to have a public accommodation law passed,” McClamroch said.

While Chapel Hill was able to maintain a relatively civil atmosphere during the racial protests, the 1960s were still a difficult time for the town, he said.

McClamroch continued to work with WCHL after his terms as mayor ended. He sold his ownership in the business during the early 1990s.

McClamroch and Bolick both said that while the station itself has changed in the past 60 years, its goals have stayed mostly the same.

“The purpose of the station didn’t change, I got involved in every dadgum thing that was happening,” McClamroch said.

“WCHL bent over backwards to involve the community.”

Bolick said WCHL still provides the same Chapel Hill-tailored programming that it did in the 1950s.

“There are lots of radio stations in Durham, but only one local, full-service radio station in Chapel Hill,” Bolick said.

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