there was KOWL. Student radio at Rice seems to have begun in 1967 with a two-watt station, KHCR, broadcasting from the basement of Hanszen College. In 1968 it moved into the RMC and changed it’s name to KOWL. It was short lived–by the end of 1969 Rice had an fm station with the familiar call letters KTRU.
KOWL’s greatest moment probably came during the campus crisis that surrounded the appointment of William Masterson as Rice’s president in February of 1969. They did their best to cover the rapidly changing situation and stayed on the air throughout most of those tense five days. Reporters for the Houston news outlets, hungry for information about the dramatic events, were forced to sit in their cars in the Rice parking lot, the only place they could reliably pick up the station’s weak am signal.
The station was not well known even on campus so they stuck up flyers all over advertising their coverage of the crisis. Here’s one:
