In early 1971, scientists in Georgetown's physics department began to notice irregularities in their experiments. The transmission from WGTB, they concluded, was causing an interference. University administrators, despite sustained protest from WGTB listeners, decided to shut the station down to eliminate the purported problem. WGTB partisans, however, believed that the shutdown had little to do with the physics department and much to do with its left-wing programming.

The university had another fortuitous occurrence on its side. The station's antenna, mounted on the roof of Copley Hall, "mysteriously" blew down one night, making it impossible for the station to transmit. Near the end of March of '71, WGTB went silent. For eight months, the campus station transmitted no sound.

"In all my time in radio," says Ken Sleeman, a listener who later became WGTB's general manager, "I never heard of a tower accidentally blowing down." Station staff suspected foul play but could never prove it.

Sleeman was a newlywed living a comfortable suburban life in Maryland and working at WETA-TV as an engineer, yet he was "bent" enough to be a WGTB listener. He saw the shutdown as an example of the Georgetown administration's intransigence. "The silencing of a public radio station smacks of censorship and political repression," he wrote in a protest letter to the university president, the Rev. Robert J. Henle (Healy's predecessor, who now lives in a Jesuit nursing home in St. Louis).

With WGTB silenced, broadcast consultants brought in by Georgetown were enlightening Henle as to the station's commodity value to the university. They also informed him that a licensed station that was nonoperational violated FCC regulations. FCC officials insisted that Henle either dump the license or take advantage of it. Hire a professional manager, the consultants suggested—who will no doubt clean up the place. Henle set up a review board to seek out a professional.

Sleeman, 10 months after he fired off his letter to Henle, managed to persuade the review board to hire him—at least on a trial basis—as the station manager. On the cold winter day he stepped into the basement of Copley Hall, Sleeman dug out a few electrical odds and ends. He climbed on the roof of the building and started tinkering with the damaged tower. The station was back on the air within two-and-a-half hours. Transmission was restored, powerful enough to reach the loyal audience within a 5-mile radius.

"WGTB is now operational," Sleeman wrote to the board. "I wish to reiterate that I will conscientiously adhere to the rulings of the trustees of WGTB." With his engineering background and extensive radio experience, Sleeman began to carry out the university's desire to remove "undesirable elements."

"I made the station a lot more professional-sounding," says Sleeman. "[Before my arrival] there was a very sloppy, amateurish sound....I got it legal with the FCC, and we started keeping logs and requiring announcers to get their FCC certification."

"Ken was pretty straight when he arrived," recalls Doherty, who is now an editor at WashingtonPost.com.

"He didn't seem like he was part of the counterculture," adds former WGTB volunteer Kurcias.

If the house band early on was Jefferson Airplane, then the house plant was cannabis. "People were openly smoking dope in the station," Sleeman recalls. Upon his arrival, he immediately restricted pot smoking to the back room that housed the transmitter. "The transmitter room had the best ventilation," says former Program Director Skip Pizzi. "If we wanted to smoke, 'transmitter maintenance' was the code word we'd use." If someone was asked to help with "transmitter maintenance," the usual response was "'Your tools or mine?'" says Pizzi with a laugh.

Though Sleeman recognized WGTB's value as an "alternative news source"—a clear contrast to the strait-laced commercial news—he cleaned up the newscasts. He eliminated rhetorical buzzwords and utterings of the "seven dirty words" that the FCC had officially banned from radio unless absolutely necessary in context. Still, he allowed the news collective to maintain its ultraleft perspective. "The idea was to make the news palatable, credible," he says, though the station reserved only two hours for news in its 24-hour cycle.

There was enough resistance to Sleeman's changes that, for a while, the station was filled with tension. "Ken was our enemy," recalls Pietrafesa, a politically radical member of the news collective.

"Sunny and I fought like cats," Sleeman adds. "She probably thought I was a fascist."