If you lived in Burlington’s Hill Section (the UVM campus neighborhood) in the 1950s, you could listen to WRUV on the AM dial, broadcasting from a barn behind Pomeroy Hall, the second oldest building on campus. 

Today, the station is audible far beyond that – from the multi-colored tunnel that connects the east and west sides of Main Street to the area in and around Burlington, to anywhere in the world that can access the internet.  

Music has changed, and the ways it is made available to listeners have changed too. But at WRUV one very important thing absolutely hasn’t.  

As the station's current fundraising director, Lucy Simon says: “Alumni and donors really care about whether we’re still the quirky and kind of offbeat place they remember. We definitely are!” 

With just a slight caveat. 

“Maybe what’s different now is that the station is popular in a way that it wasn’t 70 years ago. And maybe it's a little weird for us to be so popular, but that’s really because of all the passion for music that’s just built over the years.” 

A Lineage of Music-Lovers 

The station’s first broadcast was in January 1955. Many hundreds of DJs, musicians, supporters and friends have spent time in its studio in its several locations, and thousands of alumni have become supporters over the years. 

To celebrate its birthday, Pete Davis ’80 joined current DJs and WRUV leaders Lucy Simon and Celeste Amstutz in the UVM Foundation studio for a conversation to talk about what makes the station still so important to UVM, and to trade stories from across the years. 

Below is that podcast conversation and a lightly edited transcript from November 2025: 

Celeste Amstutz: My name is Celeste. I am a junior here. I study art history and religion, and I've been a DJ at WRUV since my freshman year, so it's been two years, and I serve as the sub music director for electronic music. 

Lucy Simon: Nice. I'm Lucy. I am the fundraising director for WRUV, and this is my second year doing that. I'm also a junior and also a religion and math double major. I also started WRUV as a freshman. Celeste and I have had many classes together. 

Pete Davis: My name's Pete. I'm the former host of the WRUV show, The Friday Morning Funway, which was on the air from, I hate to say it, 1980 to 1986. And back then everything was more hands-on. We had vinyl and it was all, and some tapes actually. The band Phish were just starting out and they used to drop off little cassettes of their shows and we'd air those on the air and do a lot of interviews with some fascinating characters back in the day. And it was a really interesting jump off spot to some announcing that I've done since then. And WRUV has a very warm and dear place in my heart to say the least. 

Lucy: That is awesome. I guess jumping on the vinyl, we have the largest collection of vinyl in the state now, which is pretty awesome. And we've been doing a lot with it. I still play vinyl on my show when I can. My shows are on Sunday nights, which is pretty fun. It's late, and we put on vinyl and try and play what we can, mixed vinyl, CDs, and streaming essentially. It’s what we call freeform and you have three different things you can pull from at all times, which is really fun. Then you can have the two turntables going, the two CD players going, and then also your computer playing whatever you have on whatever you use to find your music, also really fun. 

Pete: That's killer, a mashup. That sounds really cool. I'm so happy to hear that the library survived because as things were going to digital, my biggest fear was like, okay, everybody's playing CDs. All of a sudden we're going to lose this incredible library. But that the 45s collection itself has still survived - because there were some incredible 45s that you can't find anywhere. So to hear that the library exists is really still existing .. 

Lucy: I think we've almost cataloged the whole thing. 

Celeste: Yeah, definitely. I think so.  

Lucy & Celeste: We’re almost there, at least! 

Lucy: The switch, the move from Billings to Davis really gave us a hit almost in organization of the, because also where to put that much vinyl, there's so much in there, and we have the whole cd, all the CDs too, and then the 45s. A lot of the conversation last year on the Executive Board was where do we put all these 45s? We have, I think there's some solutions being made. If you go in to the station and in the lounge area there's a brown shelf. And that's where some of them are. 

Pete: Wow. 

Lucy: Finding a place to even fit the 45s was hard. 

Pete: Yeah, I can imagine. The pressings to keep that archive is really important, so I encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and find homes for 'em.  If you need a barn, I can take care of you because they're priceless. 

Celeste: When I was shadowing to become a DJ, I had kind of a warped perception of the station because both of the people that I shadowed only did CDs and records, which was incredible to see that that was still something that was in their practice. But then when I talked with more DJs, it was kind of more of the norm to just play off of your computer. So I mean, don't worry: there's still people that only play records, or that only play CDs and never touch a computer, which I think is pretty sweet. 

Pete: It's fascinating to hear that the station has moved from Billings to Davis. I had no idea if somebody told me to go to campus and go to RUV, I'd be down on the bottom of Ira Allen. Now you're in Davis. That's exciting because you're getting closer to the roots, which were right up the road here on Main Street, behind Pomeroy Hall in an old barn, and that place was amazing. It was rickety as heck and very rootsy, but you could run cable out to Main Street and interview people on the street, which we did. That's awesome. Just to get man-on-the-street interviews. 

The best part about it was a good guy named Lincoln Mead had the morning delivery shift for the old bagel place down here, and he was a listener to the Friday Morning Funway, and every morning I'd come on the air and about 6:10, I'd hear the truck rumble in and he'd come in and just have a bagel for me. And I'm like, dude, wow. He was awesome and Lincoln Mead if you’re out there, thank you. 

And when we had the earthquake in 1983, and it happened to be on a Friday. And I want to say it was like a 4.2 and it was located over, I looked it up and they said it was a little bit, the location seemed a little different from what my memory served, but I understood it was in Plattsburgh. It was like a 4.2 and I happened to be on the air and I'm watching the whole station. I'm like, ‘oh, Lincoln messed up and he hit the station with his truck.’ The whole station was moving and the racks were moving and the turntable didn't skip. And I was like, whoa, that's so cool. The turntable didn't skip and we just got hit by a truck, but it wasn't a truck, it was an actual earthquake. So I got on the air and I said, did you guys just feel that? I just think we had an earthquake. And so the playlist went out the window and okay, I put on Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move,” to “Hot Lava” by the B-52s to just play some earthquake music. 

So that was a fun morning because everybody sent in their earthquake requests. That's awesome in such a fluid dynamic situation. I don’t know if you still have the AP machine that's kicking out news in the back room, so there's this constant ticker tape in the back in the background, that separate room. So, you couldn't hear it on air, but you'd literally go out there, tear off a sheet of paper and there's the news for the day according to the AP.  You just read it off the sheet - sports, news, whatever, everything came from the AP machine.  

Lucy: That's really interesting. (to Celeste) I know your slot has news and weather and so does mine at nine o'clock, and we normally just find a random news source we can online and call it in, maybe make it fun, maybe just read and call it. That is a very different system than we currently have. Yeah, I would love to see what that would be like. Now with that. Yeah, I usually try to look up odd news is my perfect thing. I don't want anything, I mean obviously, especially with everything happening in the news now, I don't want to read some depressing thing. I would like to read about a snake who was in an outline or something like that. 

Lucy: That was the one show I tuned into and you were like, there was a snake. I was like, I like (exhales, smiling) okay, Celeste! 

Celeste: What if I can bring some sort of weird story and happiness to anyone that's listening? I think I actually got a message for that being like, wow, I guess I'll get into account next time I'm in and out. You're welcome. You're welcome! The ins and outs of Vermont!  

Pete: That’s classic. It is funny when you look at the sources of news and can you verify that it's legitimate news. I mean, these days it's crazy. I mean, I'm getting most of my news from the Daily Show. I just find it's fun that they can poke fun and just bring hilarity to the depressing situation that we're in right now. But we had our challenges back in the eighties as well, and it was fascinating to see how the news was portrayed back then. 

And it was very hyperlocal as well. We tried to find as much local news as we could. It was an exciting time. These two guys were making ice cream in a gas station, the energy around Burlington with Bernie Sanders. It was just an insane time to be in Burlington. And it was so cool because Church Street had just gone from basically the Dukes of Milton ripping up and down Church Street in their cars to the bricked-in, kind of a replica of Pearl Street in Boulder. 

And that totally changed the whole dynamic of what Burlington was about and Bernie's influence on it was unimaginable. It was fascinating. And just the energy really emanated from places like WRUV and the Vanguard, which then became Seven Days. So there were really cool sources of news that you could tap into. Did that as well as our tickertape parade coming off the AP machine. It was fun, it was a fun place just to be. And back then I prided myself, we did hourly news reports on The Friday Morning Funway, we’d do news and we also had the Friday Morning Funway Mystery Musician contest. 

Lucy and Celeste: Ooh! That's cool. 

Wow. That actually happened. Wow. That's beautiful. Cheryl was there. That's so cool. That is really cool. The music scene back then was just amazing. And you had Phish coming up, you had the cuts, you had the Decentz, you had Pinhead. That Pinhead didn't make it onto the world stage. Blows my mind. The talent in that band and Dug Nap as lead singer was, it was an event that you just had to witness. There used to be Hunt’s, a club in a place that had been called RW Hunt's Mill and Mining Company that was down on Main St. I think it's a hotel now, but it was in this old building on Main Street and it was the music venue that you went to and they count how many people came through the turnstile and they set the record for a weekend's performance on a Friday night. So they performed Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and they blew the doors off attendance records like midway through the evening on Friday. People could not wait to see this band. 

They were off the charts. They'd show up and the whole band would be dressed as Hasidic Jews with the tallits and just like what? And the next night they'd come in and they'd have their head shaved and the next night they'd come in and they'd just be in duct tape. But the lyricism, the music, and it was all danceable. So the dancing was insane. 

​But yeah, there were some incredible bands that were in the area at that time and the energy around Burlington, as I said, with what Bernie was doing, and Ben and Jerry's were coming up. There were so many cool things that were happening back then. So it's kind of sad to see that the city's kind of, it's a different vibe when you go downtown. And I wish it was a little bit more positive. But it being said, a good friend of my son's who's a bartender down at one of the restaurants in town, I detected the love for the city that I had when I lived right in downtown.  I lived on Clarke Street so the broad side of the church was my front yard.  

And boy, you could just sit there and just look at what Abernathy’s and the Masonic Temple were and the brickwork. It was like, how did they do that? Just amazing. Absolutely mystifying. But yeah, WRUV was literally welded to my car and my home. We listened to it religiously all the time. It was so cool.  

And I think musicians really understood that that was how you tapped into the local culture from Bob Marley to Yellowman to some great country, Johnny Cash, Jonathan Richman, they all knew about that station and the fact that that's how if you wanted to tap into the kids and to tap into what was happening in town, you listen to WRUV and so they'd all come by the station and pay a visit, which was testament to the jocks and to the management of what was going on there.  

You have to tell me: how's the new Davis Center for you? The new studio? 

Lucy: I like it. And I like it being in the Davis Tunnel, which is the tunnel that runs underneath Main Street Athletic to Davis. 

Celeste: I like it too. I think it's, one thing I really love about it is since the Davis Center kind of serves as the living room for the campus and since it's really central to all the students there, you can hear in the hallways, it's played in Brennan's, played in the rec area with the tables and everything. So even if you aren't directly walking by it, you can kind of hear it. It's in the tunnel as well. They really made it a part of the first floor of being in the Davis Center. Awesome. 

Pete: I was wondering if the tunnel was still there. 

Lucy: It's still there. It's still there. Cool. And it plays there, and I think it's part of the tour groups is you could hear whales in moments, like the weird stuff, WRUV still plays 

Celeste: When my show used to be 10 to 12:00 a.m. on Thursdays. And I play, like I said, I'm the electronic music director, so I play a lot of electronic stuff and it would be late at night, I'd play more ambient stuff. And I remember my friends would text me walking home, they'd be like, was that you playing that really weird stuff in the tunnel? I was like, yes, that was me. Sorry. You heard those creepy children singing there, this song, by Boards of Canada that I really love. It’s a fun way to connect everyone together.  

And I love that this is a public place. One of my favorite things is when I have the curtain open and people walk by and are like, I love this, I love this. I had alumni come and he knocked on the window and then I was like, what are you trying to say to me? 

So, I opened the door and he was like, I used to have a radio show here 20 years ago. And I was like, oh my God, you should come in, come check it out. And he was there, I think with his daughter, I'm presuming, and we have right now, I don't know if they're still out, but the binders full of just archival stuff still. He was looking through them and it was just this beautiful moment that since he was walking through such an important part of UVM, which is the Davis Center, he was able to connect back with his past and students are just able to kind of say hi to their friends or whatever. So I really enjoy it. Yeah, 

Pete: That's great. I'm so psyched that access to the public is available to you now as regular broadcasters. 

Lucy: It’s awesome. I mean, when I first toured UVM as a high school senior, a big important thing for me was being on the radio station in college. That was actually a major thing I was looking at at all the schools I was considering). (Pete: Go Lucy!) 

My mom's from a lineage of DJs. So my mom was a college radio DJ when she was at Bowdoin and now she is a community DJ at Princeton University's radio station, WPRB. I grew up around radio and college radio and being on it. And I just came here and it being in the Davis Center in such a public place, and then you have this huge mural next to the station and then when you pass by it during the day, there are always people hanging out in the lounge. We now have two couches, we got a new one, which is very comfortable. Very comfortable.  

And we’re right next to The Cynic, so this is media hallway. (Pete: That's so cool.) It's all these people passing through all the time. 

Pete: That's great to hear because I wish there had been better synergies between the Cynic and WRUV when I was here because they were kind of apart. They got closer together when they were beneath Ira Allen, but having you in the same hall, that's brilliant. That's really good. 

Lucy: Yeah, and UVM-TV is another student club that’s very cool, and they've been filming our Exposure shows recently. Which is a pretty important part of WRUV right now. Every other Wednesday, from  eight, we have a live band in the station. 

Pete: I was just going to ask you if you had a studio for live performances. That’s really cool. 

Lucy: We have bands in live, interview them, ask them who they are, what they're doing, why they love music, what's going on, and then they have them play live on the air (Pete exclaims: That's so cool!) You have people mixing in the production room and people making sure it sounds good on air. And this is a huge event. I think one time they fit, it might've been Cows on the Moon and they fit six people in a band into this tiny, tiny, tiny space. And somehow – at the first one (in 2025) we had people all the way up to where a vinyl library is and the spaces you have, the studio, the lounge, the prod room, the office, and then the vinyl library is in the corner. It is a pretty cool part of the station still.  

Pete: I'm so glad to hear you're doing live music. That's phenomenal. You're reminding me of when Bob Marley was on the air, everybody wanted to see him being interviewed by Jay Strauser and they packed, everybody was in there. The interview came off great and I just heard a little station ID that Bob had done over the phone that Aaron run one of your reggae shows that was like, I called up Jay, he happened to be in Florida at the time, but he was like, oh yeah, I remember that. We recorded that. 

Coming up on this big anniversary, it's really cool to see that there's so much positive energy and youth and just cool new bands coming up there being recognized and you never know, you could pick something that's so bizarre, especially in electronica and you expose people to it and all of a sudden takes off from there. It's funny when you hear these stories like the Spin Doctors down in southern Vermont, this one jock loved the Spin Doctors and he knew that people from New York City were coming up to ski at Stratton and Bromley and Magic Mountain on the weekends. So he got on the local radio station and would heavily rotate Spin Doctors and that was literally their steppingstone because people from all over the northeast would hear his favorite band and all of a sudden it just spread like fire. (Lucy: wow, that's crazy!)  

Yeah, those days were pretty fun. Going back to the Friday Morning Funway Mystery Musician contest, one of the things I'd least love to do is get there wicked early and back then it was very hands-on. You'd take magnetic recording tape you'd see in a cassette, and record on that section of tape, but then take a razor, cut it, take scotch tape, put it there, and then you can tape stuff on. And so an example would be the song Summertime. So many people have covered it and so the contest could be okay, you got to name 'em in order and you hear Sam Cook into Janice Joplin and into Iggy Pop, and just like, okay, now that's the contest you put 'em in order. 

Pete: Okay, well so much now for things in my age! But coming up on an anniversary, this is pretty cool for the station to have been around that long and to keep evolving and moving in the right turn. I'm so psyched to hear that you guys are doing live studio, that the records survive … 

Lucy: Final story. They very much survive. 

Pete: I would love to do a deep dive and see some of the cuts that you can't find anywhere else. They just don't exist. 

Lucy: No, they do - come by. There's a lot in there. We actually made it a year ago for new trainees. They got priority if they trained with someone who had done vinyl. I think on Saturday the program directors running a vinyl teach how to do vinyl. One of our directors sat through the AWOLs and she's going to be like, here you go. Giving priority to physical media. I talk a lot about people are like, why does vinyl still exist? Why does your generation really like vinyl physical media? It's really interesting, especially the people here or especially at WRV but UVM as a whole, there's this love for physical media. So my generation, generation loves collecting vinyl. We all grew up on the internet and then we want something physical again. 

Pete: Good for you. I have to ask: what in your training was the most important thing that you learned from an old DJ? Or what was it that stuck with you? Okay, that guy taught me something valuable. Do you have any that jumps out? I know my personal one, John Matiz who was, I think he was the station manager at the time, he heard my first show and that he didn't come in and just punch me in the face is amazing because it was that bad. But he came in and he's like, okay, let's talk. And he taught me how to do radio and he sat down and one of the most important things that he ever taught me was keep your hand on your mic volume. 

I was like, that's genius. And it doesn't matter. You might not hear it feel that cough coming up, but if you have your hand on the mic volume, you just turn it down, cough, turn it back up, nobody knows. And just little tips like that. Did you have anybody who steered you in the direction that 

Celeste: The person I shadowed first, his name is Otis and show was The Otisphere. I a.m. really, really fortunate that I got to shadow him because he's kind of a legen. And there wasn't one specific thing that he said that really stuck with me, but he was playing a bunch of CDs that show and he was specifically playing Moondog. And I remember we kind of bonded over Moondog and who he is because Moondog is just this fantastic musician who was discovered on a sidewalk in New York. And I don't know, we were talking about physical media and it really just stuck with me. If I'm just sick of Spotify, I can always just put on a CD.  

We kind of kept in touch in a way. My show was after his, or no, it was before his, on Tuesdays my first semester. And I remember he would listen in, and then sometimes call me and be like, ‘I really liked that song that you just played.’  

And he also, funny enough, I work sometimes for this restaurant Copper at Dorset. I do catering and he's a chef there. So we just kept this amazing connection that it is not like he really necessarily taught me anying, but even that connection with the DJs who are community members, there's just such a strong, I don't know, sense of wanting to bond and just that nice stuff that he really taught me. You should be nice to the people that come in after your show. Always leave five minutes so they have time to clean up. Just stuff like that I think I always think about, because you never know. I've had DJs before me who go over time and it's like, ‘Guys! Got to get in here, got to set up, get my levels on and you're going over.’ So he really was like, you got to respect the people that come before you and after you. 

Pete: That’s great. Did you have anybody like that? 

Lucy: Mine was Chris. He was a station manager a couple of years ago and I accidentally shadowed all Executive Board members somehow and I had no idea – and then I shadowed all of 'em. They were like, you just shadowed everyone Exec. I was like, oh, oops. I was playing - he had us go into the stacks and pull out stuff we wanted to hear on air, and that was really cool. And the second show I shadowed, it was Elijah and I think he's still on campus. He graduated a couple years ago and he was a senior when I was a freshman and I just remember his first show. He was the person that fixes all of our stuff. He was the engineer and he was at the station all the time fixing everything because everything's breaking all the time. Yes, obviously because it's college radio 

I remember I shadowed him and it was just me and him. It's a Friday afternoon or something and he has this two hour show and the first hour he is doing his thing. It's very freeform, very fun. Second hour he's doing the educational piece and he's mixing live on air, not even mixing, creating a beat on air and teaching the people how to create this beat with his software system. He's like, make sure to drag this here. And I was like, that is so dope. I didn't know you could do that. Next semester, I'm kind of thinking of switching my show to be more like bake this thing with me and as we play this music for this amount of time, it should be in the oven and doing it that way. 

Celeste: I'm thinking the exact thing. I'm thinking about asking for a DJ board for the holidays and just transitioning into that realm of you playing something for the two hours rather than - which obviously you're still playing the music for however long your set is - but you're paying attention to every single little transition, not just letting it play on your computer or whatever. 

Lucy: It's so much more fun. 

Celeste: It is so fun. 

Lucy: I remember when I did my graveyards, which was really some of the, oh my god, most fun shows I had. (Pete: It’s a lot of pressure.) Oh my gosh, these 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. shows (Celeste: 4:00 – 6:00 for me!) Mine thankfully were a Friday into a Saturday morning, which was great, and I would play the most random things, but it was very loud. I would play really loud music and it's like 4:00 a.m. And if my dad's sometimes listening, or my partner, and they were like, what are you playing? I'm like, I need something. I need to stay awake. And I would blindly pick CDs from, we have this whole CD wall in the studio, and I would just blindly pick CDs and say, okay! Just throw them in. Sometimes they were a little rough, but sometimes it was like, this is a new favorite band. 

Pete: I totally agree. I picked out Yoshi Wada and the Lament of the Elephantine Serpent and it was a full side of an album and he was in the bottom of a swimming pool playing like a didgeridoo and I'd put it on just like, who's going to call that? The feedback was just immediate and awesome just to see what the heck was going on. 

Lucy: My favorite thing to play recently, I really like playing random children's music and I collect all this, like - I'm a math major, so I collect all these science records and science educational records. 

They're really funny and I love math rock. It makes sense for me in my brain and I'm like, look, math and music, oh my God! (Pete: Bingo!) I've been playing recently and I think it's the Isaac Newton theme song and I have it on vinyl and it's this whole thing about educational songs about space from the seventies or eighties and I used to open my shows with that. It gets feedback in a way that, when you play the Grateful Dead, you don't really get that feedback anymore because people know it. So it's like playing random stuff. 

Pete: No, it's great to tickle people's fancy and they just say, what was that? If you have them asking what was that? then you've succeeded. 

Back in the day, when she'd come to Burlington, I was always fascinated with Laurie Anderson. She'd perform on stage down at the Flynn and I was like, how is she doing that? She'd take magnetic tape and she'd put it on a bow and she might've said something like, it will rain today.  

But then she would play it across the playback head that was mounted into a violin at varying speeds or backwards, so it could be (distorts voice) rain (Lucy and Celeste: whoa!) or backwards or just at different speeds. And she'd play that one riff and then switch bows and it was something completely different and it was just - people didn't know what it was, but it was like they knew it was bizarre.  

And the stuff that would be back then, we'd just get records from different companies and it was so cool. Just be able to access that stuff and just to be able to get out there and get people thinking about what is that? If they're asking that question, you've succeeded. So it's such an experience and energy and excitement.  

What's the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you? 

Celeste: Probably I feel like there's been many PSAs I've had to read where my mouth is just not hooking up with my head and especially when I have shadowers. Oh my god, I remember there was one time specifically where I was saying to 'em before, I was like, Hey, it's like you're going to have to read through this before you do it. You should always read through it. And then obviously I didn't read through it because I was too distracted and that they should read through it. 

Lucy: I've never read through that Find on air when I have, sorry, to interrupt you. I'm like, do you want to be on air? Here you go. I have, because I remember someone let me be on air and I was like, oh my god. So then I let my trainees do it and they're like, what? 

Celeste: Yeah, no, it was just one of those PSAs that I don't know, talks about you should do (this)  because it will release endorphins or stuff like that. But the words were a little bit more complicated and I was just sitting there. 

Sometimes when I'm on air, I feel like the person that's listening is my friend and I'll be like, guys, I don't know how to say this word. And it was such an embarrassing moment because as I was telling these shadowers, oh, this is what you have to do, make sure to do this. Then I didn't do it. And then after I'm really sorry guys, I really should have looked through that and it was obviously fine and nothing bad, but safe to say that's happened more than once to me or I'm rushing the PSA at the end because my show maybe went over a little bit and then it's just like, what did I even say? So I think the PSAs are really what tripped me up.  

Pete: (to Lucy) What's your most embarrassing move?  

Lucy: So I currently share a show and we do kind of talk show-ish thing and then we obviously play music. And there was one day and for some reason just our brains were not working and we weren't syncing that specific day and we're on air and it was just silence and we're looking at each other waiting for us to talk and it was like, oh no. And it was just us sitting there being like, we are not (Pete: Dead air!) Dead air and we are trying to talk to each other.  

And then sometimes it's like I am filling in the air as he's trying to find something to play or he's filling in the air. I'm trying to find something to play that always, sometimes it's just a little bit, we have to be a little bit more locked in than we are right now because I think I got back on air, I was like, oh, my brain is not in on- air mode. 

Celeste: And that was rough. Or there's been, especially I know that you also have to do news and weather when I do news and weather and it's like, okay, so I had to do news weather at 5:00 because my show's from 4:00 to 6:00 actually right after this. And there have been so many times where I've been so into the music that I'm playing -  I play a lot of dancing music - so I would be dancing in the studio too and then it's like 4 55 and I'm like, oh my God, I haven't even opened the computer that takes a while to open and look up the stuff that I'm going to be saying. And then it's like, but I have to do it right now. So I kind of am like - hey and it just takes a really long time to do stuff as I'm scrambling. So I feel like there's some scrambling, but what about you? 

Pete: What was your most exciting thing that you did on the air? 

Celeste: My parents came and we did a joint show with my dad. My dad is kind of similar to Lucy's parents. He never actually had a radio show, but he's super in. My love for electronic music comes from him. He would be so proud of me if I just became a DJ for my career in life. He values that so much and he came in and he and I and my sister, we all joined in to do a show. We really focused on transitions and all of that and just to see him so excited to be on air and talking, and there was this one moment where the speed of the songs weren't going to match up, so very last minute we were like, okay, we have to change this. And I just saw him for a moment, close his eyes and just be like, okay, we have to play this song.  

And it was just like, you are so meant for this. And it was just so exciting to see the person that really taught me what I know about music and the music that I love to have on air. And he obviously was freaking out and had a moment when I was like, oh, you should read the PSA. And he was like, okay. And then he got on air and was like --- (pauses). And I was like, okay, so you’re actually supposed to speak now, but it was all fine and he was just so exciting.  

And I've also just had a lot of really great people chatting in, being like, oh, I loved this song when I was in college in the nineties and we're listening from Delaware. And I'm like, you're in Delaware and you're tuned in WRUV! And just all those sweet moments of people calling in from their cars. You can tell that they're driving and just being like, I just wanted to say I love this. I'm so glad people are still listening to this.  

And just all of those little moments are what are really most exciting because it's like this person took the time out of their day to call in and just tell this random DJ, thank you for playing in this song and just stuff like that. Yeah. Awesome. 

Pete: That's really cool. 

Lucy: I don't even know. That's such a great answer. I don't even know which ones I would say were my most exciting. I keep coming back to this one graveyard did and I played this electronic music this in the station somewhere. I forget the name of it, which is unfortunate. And it was so good. I'm just in there dancing by myself and I'm sleep-deprived and tired and I have a Red Bull in my system. I'm like, I'm not going to sleep. I think when my mom and I, we took over a sub show and we did a show together.  

Yeah, it was really, she's like, no, you’ve got to do this thing. You have to. She’s trying to teach me about radio in my station, which is cool. Like no, but you have to. I'm like, okay.  Or just her kind of teaching me the organized records or thinking freeform. One of the coolest things, and maybe this isn't exciting, but the coolest things that she's kind of told me, and I think Solomon is also on WPRB and he does this 24-hour Christmas show every Christmas. And we always tune in back home, but it's like the three-hour mark on radio is when the magic happens is her opinion.  

Once you hit three hours, you're kind of delirious and you've run out of music to play almost because it's really hard to pull together three hours worth of music. And then for me, around the 90 minute-mark is when I'm like, oh hey, yeah, we're just in it. We're just doing it. Find something else random, put it on. And that's always really exciting. And then when my friends come into the booth and hang out with us –  

Pete: Are these radio friends? Or just random friends? 

Lucy: Random. But when I I lived on campus a lot more friends – because I have a show with my partner, our friends were on campus more often when it was Sunday when we lived on campus. Now that we all live off-campus, it's a little bit different, but it would be really fun. We would just know that every Sunday, two or three people would show up and come be in the booth with us and hang out and we'd maybe be like, yo, you should go on the air. Oh, what do you want to play? And we would have this community of whatever our friends really wanted us to play, and then we would have them kind of like the show, a certain direction or another. 

Pete: I have to ask, did anybody that you were friends with ever springboard and take that bait and become a DJ? 

Lucy: One of my friends actually was training last year and it was really cool. He's a huge Phishhead. He loves Phish and if you ever met him you'd be like, oh my gosh. Because everything he does is Phish-related, which is very, very funny. 

He never finished the process, but it was really cool. He shadowed me and was just like, oh, he named himself like DJ YEM. It was like a lot of Phish-related things. 

Pete: I was going to say DJ Wilson? 

Lucy: No, but it was cool. And my partner does drums, so we're surrounded by all these music people all the time. So we’re like, yeah, let's see what the booth is like. I always find it really fun to have friends in the booth. 

Pete: Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. I would love to talk more and more, but we're getting the … 

Celeste: I’ve got my show to get to. 

Pete: You go, Celeste, 

Celeste: I should tune in. Absolutely. 

Pete: I've got my station welded in all the time. I don't get it that well out in Jericho, which is unfortunate, but whenever I get on the interstate and coming toward Burlington, it’s 90.1, 

Lucy: You can always play it. This is my favorite thing, because I have friends, I'll post it on my Instagram. Oh, I'm on the air. My friends are like, oh, I can't listen and I'm like, no, just go to wruv.org and you can stream it from wherever. 

It's really cool. So you can put it on your phone and then just link it to your car and then you can listen wherever.

Pete: See - you can teach an old dog new tricks! 

Back in the Studio

After we wrapped up in the studio, we walked over to WRUV’s new location in the Davis Center, where Pete got to pop into the studio with Lucy and Celeste just as Celeste’s show was starting for the day. 

As UVM’s Better Alternative begins its next 70 years, it was a fitting moment connecting just a few of the many who built its legacy, and are leading it into its future. 

After we wrapped up in the studio, we walked over to WRUV’s new location in the Davis Center, where Pete got to pop into the studio with Lucy and Celeste just as Celeste’s show was starting for the day. 

As UVM’s Better Alternative begins its next 70 years, it was a fitting moment connecting just a few of the many who built its legacy, and are leading it into its future. 

Explore More

More about WRUV at UVM:

• WRUV’s 70th Birthday: Here’s to Many More Years (Vermont Cynic, November 2025) 

• About WRUV 

• Donate to WRUV

• The Little Family’s Enduring Support for WRUV 

Meet More Alumni Staying Connected with their Favorite Parts of UVM: 

• Sixty years later, a scholarship still shapes a life 

• “We Lived It”: Frances Kidder Stiles '55 on Growing Up with UVM 

• Cami Davis '76 on Art, Ecology and UVM Campus Life in the 70s