PROVINCETOWN – Starting a community radio station on the Outer Cape was an audacious idea that first appeared in 1976 as a spark inside the mind of Mark Primack, a “professional hippie” living in Provincetown at the time.
“I had never really accomplished anything,” said Primack, 74, who now lives in New Hampshire. “I was really just a dope-smoking hippie.”
But one day in 1976, he was reading Mother Jones magazine when, “I saw an article that said you could start your own radio station. Immediately, I thought, ah ha, this is it,” he said. Primack, in a speech he gave several years ago to a WOMR annual meeting, described reading the article as the moment when “the sparks started flying.”
Mother Jones 1976 article that inspired WOMR – COURTESY OF MARK PRIMACK
Shortly afterwards, with the help of a local office of a federal make-work program, a meeting was set up and held at the local community center/senior center for anyone interested in pursuing the idea of starting a radio station in Provincetown. About 10 people showed up.
Carol D’Amico, 80, now of Truro, whose voice was first to air on the new station, was one of the people at that initial meeting. “We were in a bare room, she recalled. “There was a long table with a lot of chairs around it…. Mark passed around a paper asking how interested you are. Next to if you are ‘very, very interested’ I put five stars.”
It was a small but passionate group.
Six years later, at 5 p.m. on March 21, 1982, WOMR went on the air.
Into a 1,000-watt broadcast signal that only reached as far as the Wellfleet Drive In, D’Amico’s voice said,“Hello Provincetown, this is your community radio station,” and a radio station was born.
That was 40 years ago. The original group and countless volunteers since then “took it from being a really shaky edifice, to be honest, to being something that you would call ‘institutional’ in a positive way,” said Primack.
D’Amico, said, “We created something out of nothing, and it took a whole bunch of us. It wasn’t just one of us. It’s been a wide community effort.”
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