At an inaugural dinner for the newly established University of the District of Columbia in March 1978, Georgetown University President the Rev. Timothy Healy rose to toast the institution. With a clink of his champagne glass, the Jesuit priest informed the trustees of UDC that within one year, the Georgetown-owned broadcast license for FM frequency 90.1, radio station WGTB, would be theirs. The trustees were pleasantly surprised: None of them had ever asked for the license. Healy offered it as a gift.

Privately, Healy was breathing a sigh of deep relief. What had become a source of much misery among Georgetown's Jesuit leaders—the university's out-of-control radio station—would soon be off their hands. No more nasty alumni letters, no more investigations by the Federal Communications Commission, no more hippie interlopers on campus, and, most important, no more radical left-wing rhetoric pumping out of Georgetown's pristine Copley Hall.

The "great animal that doesn't belong in the zoo," as Healy (now deceased) referred to WGTB at the time, was read its last rites, 18 years after the FCC handed the university one of the first FM licenses in the city.

When Georgetown first got its license for WGTB, in 1960, FM radio was still a relatively new medium—comparable to the Internet today. Until the mid-'70s, most cars didn't even include an FM receiver as standard equipment. The license gave the university a chance to experiment in virginal broadcast territory. WGTB-FM went on the air soon after receiving the license and operated as a sort of student sandbox through the decade, playing an array of harmless fare, from Tony Bennett (before he went retro-cool) to the king of schmaltz, Mantovani.

Campus Jesuits delighted in the station's regular religious programming, and the student DJs enjoyed the occasional chance to spin the latest contemporary sounds. When Martha and the Vandellas or Rick Nelson made the Top 40, you'd hear it on the campus radio station.

But by the early '70s, the station had become a much different beast. If you tuned into 90.1 25 years ago, chances were you'd hear Frank Zappa calling out for "the last mortal man," to stop "the senseless destruction of America." Maybe the news was on: If it was an update on the war in Vietnam, you'd probably find out what America's "imperialist pigs" were up to in their battle against the Communist North Vietnamese "liberators." WGTB-FM was pumping in high dudgeon at 6,700 watts—a 60-mile radius—and Washington was listening, as it would, aside from two bitter interruptions, until Jan. 29, 1979, when the administration pulled the plug for good.