The founders of WWOZ were brothers Walter and Jerry Brock, from
Texas, who thought New Orleans needed a
community radio station and began organizing it in the mid-1970s. Jerry is also the co-founder of the
Louisiana Music Factory and a record producer engaged in the works of various local artists. The Nora Blatch Educational Foundation (named after radio pioneer Nora Blatch, wife of
Lee De Forest) was established as a
non-profit organization to hold the
station license. The
call letters WWOZ were chosen as a reference to
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and specifically the line, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", meaning that attention should be given to the program content rather than the personalities of the
disc jockeys. Conditions at WWOZ in the early 1980s were spartan. The studio and office had no
air conditioning, and for a time just before moving out of the Tipitina's site, the only running water to the tiny bathroom was from a neighbor's garden hose run in through a window. Everyone who did a show volunteered hours of time on other tasks to keep the station going, from addressing envelopes to sweeping the floor. When artists performing live downstairs at Tipitina's gave their permission, their performances were broadcast via a microphone lowered through a hole in the floor. In the storm the WWOZ studio suffered minor damage but the Park's power system was wiped out and not a repair priority in the big picture, while the WWOZ staff, like the rest of the New Orleans population, was scattered to shelter in several states. But the station's
transmitter atop the
Tidewater Building on
Canal Street in downtown New Orleans was found to be intact and serviceable, given a studio source. Within a week WWOZ initiated a
webcast as "WWOZ in Exile" via Internet servers at
WFMU in
New Jersey. Many long term listeners from around the country donated tapes of WWOZ broadcasts from years gone by, some of which were rebroadcast in part or whole. On October 18, 2005, WWOZ resumed limited hours of broadcasting over the air in New Orleans, via studio space provided by
Louisiana Public Broadcasting in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The station returned a physical studio to New Orleans in December 2005, using temporary office and studio space at the
French Market office building, returning to its airwaves on 15 December. Pre-Katrina, thousands of hours of New Orleans music performances on tape via WWOZ were stored in a non-descript storage site. The floodwaters stopped at the storage container's loading dock and were not lost. The tapes were later shipped to the
Library of Congress, which had previously named the WWOZ collection to its
National Recording Registry. The Library agreed to store, catalog, and digitize the collection, a process which was expected to take many years to complete. By April 2016, the collection of over 2,000 recordings was made available to the public via walk-in listening in the Library's Recorded Sound Research Center in the Madison Building on Capitol Hill. ==Translator==